A Western Kid Living in Communist Poland (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/a-western-kid-living-in-communist-poland/ <comment><USER3> Growing up with my grandparents in the 80s in Moscow, I remember standing in line in front of a place literally called 'Store' for hours. Nobody knew what the line was for or what it was the store was getting in that day. Some people spend the night waiting just to be in front. After standing in line all day, finally by dusk a truck pulls up. Everybody looking in anxiety and worried about not being enough merchandise, still not knowing what was inside. A few men start unloading the boxes inside the store. All of a sudden people at the front of the line start spreading the rumors, "it's bananas!", "what is a banana?" I thought to myself. I was 5 years old and had no idea what it was. We made our way from outside, into the store. The store was full of empty shelves, there was literally no inventory. Finally we got the cashier, it was our turn and my grandpa got handed a big box and he handed the clerk money. "Hurry" my grandpa said, we rushed out of the store and started walking back home. "There's no more!" I heard somebody shout out of the store. There were still at least a hundred people in line. We kept walking, not looking back. We got home and opened the box. It was full of green bananas. We tried to eat them, I loved it. Only later in life I found out bananas supposed to be yellow and not bitter :)

<comment><USER4> Yes, indeed, the "магазин" or the "гастраном" :) I also still remember the experience of having to bring a 3 liter pickle jar to buy milk from a barrel on wheels. It's funny because sometime we would see the barrel pull up, but we wouldn't know what they were selling. Could be mil, could be beer, could be kvas (not sure how to translate). We would rush in, because what ever it was, it's better than nothing ;)

I also remember a really funny story from my friends dead about his visit to Cuba. He went there in the early 80s, I am guessing. He went there with a delegation on some kind of diplomatic mission. Up on arrival he bent over to pick up his bag, and, as luck would have it, ripped his pants. Now, as you might imagine, being a proper Soviet and all, he was only traveling with that one pair of dress pants. So he asked their translator if there is any way they could go to a store of some kind to purchase another pair, before his fancy diplomatic meeting.

So they went to the store, supposedly the main fashion store in the center of the city. When asked, the clerk told them: "Oh, no, we haven't had dress pants in for at least 3 weeks." My friends dead, desperate, asked: "Well, what about just needle and some thread?" Clerk: "Well, we have thread, but needle? Hmm, we haven't had those in years now." Eventually they ended up finding a seamstress who fixed the pants, but it was all very hush hush, because it was a crime for her to offer a private service, or for them to solicit it.

Yeah, so communism rocks indeed :)

<comment><USER5> It's called "Гастроном" not "Гастраном"

<comment><USER4> Thanks, yeah, no Russian spellcheck here, and it's been so long, not that I was ever good at spelling :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The bit about getting a work permit is a little weird. At that time average monthly salary was ~$5. His Dutch parents could literally just send him lunch money, and it would be enough to for an upper class lifestyle at the time.

Flower/grape/whatever picking for a month in the west was enough to finance rest of the year.

It was as bad as in Greece right now, everything worth something got sold to multinationals for pennies on the dollar. All the famous polish brands absorbed into mcdonalds/cocacolas/pepsis of the world.

<comment><USER7> > The bit about getting a work permit is a little weird. At that time average > monthly salary was ~$5. His Dutch parents could literally just send him > lunch money, and it would be enough to for an upper class lifestyle at the > time.

I've never depended on anybody for my living expenses after I turned 17 and to ask my parents for money simply never even occurred to me.

Also, once you were legally employed you could drop the exchange requirement (which in terms of western money was substantial, you are looking at the $5 as the black market exchange rate, unfortunately for westerners living in Poland the exchange rate was _substantially_ worse which meant that doing this legally would cost many 100's of $ per month).

> Flower/grape/whatever picking for a month in the west was enough to finance > rest of the year.

Yes, because the money brought in from the west was exchange piecemeal on the black market.

> It was as bad as in Greece right now, everything worth something got sold to > multinationals for pennies on the dollar.

The rape of Poland by the Western countries was - and is - an absolutely horrific crime. Not that anybody will ever by punished for it but it is incredibly bitter that the first contact between Eastern and Western economies led to yet another round of those people being taken advantage of. The damage from this lasts to this day. If that story interests you research 'polinvest' and several other nasty schemes that were pulled off just after the change.

> All the famous polish brands absorbed into mcdonalds/cocacolas/pepsis of the > world.

And the Philipses, Volkswagens and Siemenses...

<comment><USER8> What made me curious in this story is the fact that you and your wife decided to move to Poland. I thought life in Netherlands would be much better. You must have had a strong reason to want to live in Poland.

<comment><USER7> G. did not like living in NL all that much so we decided to move to Poland. I sold my company, packed all our stuff into/onto an old trailer that we bought, hooked it up to the car and drove to Poznan.

<comment><USER9> My girlfriend is Polish and, to my own surprise, I don't think I dislike Poland that much right now. Why are you in Romania?

<comment><USER7> I was in Romania, now back in NL. I was there for a job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I was just a couple months into being a teenager, I went to Russia in 1993. We were the first group of Americans allowed into the Udmurt region, and we traveled from Saint Petersburg to Izhevsk to meet our host families for a short stay, and then to Moscow before leaving the country. It was the first time in my life when I saw anything like that. I remember a few times when I said things that I still cringe at saying to this day. Prior to entering Russia, we stayed in Stockholm. Stockholm was a shining jewel compared to Saint Petersburg, which itself was a shining jewel compared to Izhevsk. I remember I asked out loud if a hotel was going to "be like Sweden", completely oblivious that I was embarrassing the Americans and Russians around me. Things like this that still make me cringe today. The city of Izhevsk was famous for being the home of the inventor of the AK-47, as well as the Baikal munitions plant, which supplied a lot of the world's Soviet ammunition. I remember seeing a group of children, perhaps six or seven years old, running through the street and drinking from a bottle of vodka. A few months later, our Russian host-family counterparts came to stay with us in the States for about as long as we were in Russia. My grandmother gave me a hundred dollars (kind of a big deal in '93 heh) to take my counterpart shopping. When we were at the store, I remember talking about buying some toys and taking my counterpart to the toy section at Walmart. You know what he did instead? He bought Levis and cans of coffee for his family. I still cringe every time I think about how I behaved back then, but for sure it taught me an enormous amount about the world in a very short time.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm from Poland, born in 74, so I remember that time well.

1987 was 3 years before bankruptcy of the communist government and fall of iron curtain. It was still bad as author described. I remember the long lines to bakeries, I remember the grey block of flats (these are still there, and even though painted in other colors are dull as hell!).

But... we, children, did not know there is a "better life" out there. Sure, everybody had someone in the West (mostly in US), we got an occasional package for Xmas with chocolate and some clothes.

But we, children, did not care for the West that much. We were outside playing stupid games like hanging out on carpet hanger next to block of flats (and screaming "cinema!" when one of the girls revealed her underwear while doing some risque maneuver). We jumped rope and "rubber". We played war (zee Germans vs us). I would come out in the morning or right after school and stay until dark, at which time my mom would call "comeeee baaaaaack!" from the window.

So yes, it was dark middle ages, but somehow simple and pleasant. This is in contrast to my children today rarely venturing outside and playing some phone crap all day long.

For adults that might have been whole another story. The promise of the West likely has been large. But I still want to bet guys were busy chasing the ladies, the family was the focus, and people who wanted to be happy were happy.

So not romanticizing the system too much - I am a successful software engineer working all other the World for "the man" and like it - it was not that bad as people might think. Some of us were quite happy, despite system's shortcomings.

Strange for sure, but not hopeless.

<comment><USER12> Your description of life for kids in Poland reminds me a lot of my own childhood in Finland -- except that I was on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and there were no bread lines. (Quite few grey blocks of flats though...) I also remember driving through East Germany and visiting East Berlin in the mid-1980s and getting thoroughly freaked out by what a even child could recognize as a monochrome totalitarian dystopia.

It's the US, with its pervasive fear that kids must be supervised at all times or they'll immediately be kidnapped and sold into sex slavery or something, that's the real outlier here. See [http://www.freerangekids.com/](http://www.freerangekids.com/) for a movement that's trying to roll this back, with some success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For as long as I can remember I've had an interest in going to live in another country. But the older I get and the more I get to understand people and the more I travel, the more I start to hold myself back from actually moving to another country. Even if just for a year or two. I think I realise more and more that cultures really are different, vastly more than I once thought. It has me wonder what I would actually end up gaining from such a move, countries with language barriers even more so. Yet, I cannot stop thinking that by NOT doing it, I'm missing out greatly...

<comment><USER14> We're on our fourth country, and we've traveled to many more. I think what you learn is that there are many ways to do different things. Other cultures get some things very right that your home culture gets wrong. Your home culture gets some things right that other cultures get wrong. But overall, the main takeaway is that it broadens your view of the world and it opens your eyes to possibilities that you would not otherwise see. You get some of this from travelling, but not nearly as much as what you get when you go and live in another place with a different culture.

<comment><USER15> Could you elaborate on some positive differences where witnessing a different culture improved your outlook towards life in a meaningful way?

<comment><USER16> I would like to add here a bit if I can.

I'm from Western country and I was/am living in Eastern culture (China)

I'm still learning about Chinese concepts of family and "filial piety". Thanks to long (and sometimes hot) discussions with gf, I feel now that my behaviour towards family and close friends have changed in better way - <USER2> understand/feel without thinking that there are situations where my concept of being adult and self sustainable person with own opinions should give way to another person even if I'm right (and they are wrong) because they are elders in the conversation. I understand in better way that there are social constructs that even if not best, they keep people close to you (that's important part) in greater mood than if you constantly try to set your opinions on them.

Sometimes you don't want to tell people close to you that your tooth hurst so they are not worried.

Even though there's a lot of wrong with social behaviours in China on a greater scale (look up problems with "good Samaritans" for simplest examples), the family scale I feel is much better and greater than what I learned/grow up with in West. I feel that if we could learn from Chinese concepts of family, we would be much better in West.

While saying above, I have to think that it still can be coming from my raising and history and I'm still learning about historical/philosophical entires in our social life, so I hope I didn't offend anyone with above.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for sharing your personal experiences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> V-2 > The Polish secret police (the UB or MBP) was quite active and if you didn't > know someone personally you could not trust them

I don't mean to nitpick, but UB was renamed to SB in 1956. MBP ceased to exist in 1954.

And by the way, knowing someone personally didn't mean you could trust them, either.

Pretty much everyone could be a police informant, especially if you were a person of interest : your husband, or your doctor...

The number of informal collaborators approached 100 thousand people in the 80s, which means about 0.5% of the nation (only counting adults).

<comment><USER17> Perhaps Jacques was actually there 30 plus years earlier than he claims :-)

Maybe that Citroën has a flux capacitor!

<comment><USER7> It had a ton of hydraulics but I never noticed anything like that. Even so the DS was way ahead of its time and in many ways still is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've read this before. Has this already been posted to HN?

I am trying to convince my native born Polish girlfriend to move back for a year to live/work/travel. I figure I will pick up the language far quicker than my current pace.

She's a little apprehensive about our earning potential there. The Polish Zloty does not appear to be the strongest currency and the average wage is half of some of it's other EU cousins.

<comment><USER11> Poland is still very closed society. You will be fine in large cities (Wroclaw, Krakow, Poznan, Warszawa, Gdansk), but unlikely to do well in small and medium cities.

Wages are way smaller than in EU countries, prices are pretty much the same. Real estate might be the only exception, but not by much.

Polish is a very hard language to pick up. Not only tongue twister, but full of exceptions and mind twisting rules. A pretty good example is counting objects, e.g. apples: 1-4 jablka, 5-21 jablek, 22-24 jablka, 25.. jablek. Yes, good luck with that!

The good news is most young and some mid-age people speak English, large cities welcome foreigners, and - if you have decent profession - you will do ok.

<comment><USER19> Actually, 1 - jabłko, 5-21 jabłek, 22-24 jabłka, 25-31 jabłek, 32-34 jabłka and so on and so forth.

<comment><USER18> I was discussing this with my partner last night trying to understand the pattern/logic behind it. Would you see this similar pattern when counting oranges or coffee cups?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Jacques, may I ask what brought you to Romania (are you still there)?

<comment><USER7> A contract job. I'm back in NL right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A repost, but a charming story.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great story, Jacques.

</comment><comment><USER22> ouch... I must have something in my eye...

</comment><comment><USER23> Sweet story.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think its important for Hacker News readers to read this because techno- communism is becoming a very serious force in western politics. It needs to be tempered with a historical context.

The problem we should focus on is over-centralization, which comes easily out of a competitive OR cooperative society.

Yes to holistic measurements, efficiency and equality. But do that on a meta, protocol level that allows for diverse decentralized systems to evolve while still integrating information.

<comment><USER25> > _think its important for Hacker News readers to read this because techno- > communism is becoming a very serious force in western politics. It needs to > be tempered with a historical context._

Tempered why? The worst thing he could say about Poland was a corrupt police. Constrast with the hundrends of innocent police killings in the US, or the hundrens of thousands incarcerated for BS charges (like drug pocession or three-strikes) and it's not that different. Widespread surveillance? Check, and even more detailed.

Of course there are differences too. E.g. now nobody is guaranteed to have a job or a home, and inequality can be much higher than in those old times (where a party functionary just made something like a few times more, not several orders of magnitude more, like a CEO does).

<comment><USER4> Come on! Did you live through Soviet style communism? Please don't glorify that BS unless you have. A party functionary would be entitled to free servants to help them move, clean there garden, do all kinds of physical labor for them. Those servants were called enlisted soldiers. A party functionary would be entitled to a yearly, 3 month vacation on the black sea, where they would live, in a palace by the sea. And when I say a palace, I mean literally a fucking palace. There were very privileged people in the Soviet union. Now it's true that even those people would constantly live in fear, because on minute you could be on top, and the next you are dragged off by the secret police.

And guaranteed house? Like the house that my best friend grew up, with his mom, his dead, and his sister, all sleeping in the same bed in their 250 sqft studio.

<comment><USER25> > _Did you live through Soviet style communism?_

No, but I lived through a military dictatorship sponsored by the US (though, admittedly, 30+ years later Clinton on an official visit did say the US was sorry for its support of it) imposed on my country so that a large percentage of my countrymen who preferred socialism wouldn't attempt to try it.

Oh, and it was preceded by a prolonged civil war (provoked by the UK, and with the right-wing side given arms and support by the UK and US in a typical Cold War scenario), followed by 15+ years of imprisonment, exile and even torture for tens of thousands of the most prominent left sympathizers, among them war heroes who had just before fought heroically against the nazis, like this guy:

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

So, yeah, there was that side too.

> _And guaranteed house? Like the house that my best friend grew up, with his > mom, his dead, and his sister, all sleeping in the same bed in their 250 > sqft studio._

And in our modern day and age, in advanced countries, there are tons of people living all 4-5 of them on the same trailer house. Or even worse, being homeless. And that's in a place like the US. In Mexico, Latin America, Africa, Asia etc it can be much worse.

So, while bad in itself, I'd say a guaranteed 250 sq ft studio for 4 people, plus a job for all of them, plus the basics, plus education, etc, sure beats people living in the slums in 1/3 of the modern world, e.g. as in:

[http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/19/shopping.societ...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/19/shopping.society)

<comment><USER4> So you lived through a military dictatorship sponsored by US and UK, and during that time tens of thousands of your countryman died due to the government. So obviously the Soviet system, which under the rule of Stalin killed millions of people (as in close to 50 million) during that same time is much better. Yes a job for everyone, even if that job is digging up ice dirt in the Siberian Gulag until you die from exhaustion. Come on, have some perspective, both systems are totalitarian regimes with horrible outcomes for the populations. In your case they were killing, torturing, and exterminating the left leaning intelligentsia. In the Soviet Union they did exactly the same thing to all the right leaning intelligentsia, actually all intelligentsia, because smart and educated people might see through all the bull shit the party was shoveling down people's throats. At the end of the day, in both cases a ton of people died horrible deaths simply because of what they believed in. How is one system better then the other? Well, other then in absolute terms, because at least in your case they didn't manage to killing quite so many people, but the outcome is the same. I am amazed that someone who lived through one totalitarian regime would be so in favor of another! Any system that subverts the rights of an individual under some bullshit pretense that it's for the "good of the nation" is absolutely wrong!

<comment><USER25> > _So you lived through a military dictatorship sponsored by US and UK, and > during that time tens of thousands of your countryman died due to the > government. So obviously the Soviet system, which under the rule of Stalin > killed millions of people (as in close to 50 million) during that same time > is much better._

As an aside, the oft quoted "50 million" number is BS. It counts famines, deaths in the war, etc. That said, the regime did execute a million or so directly. OTOH, it was a period of revolution and turmoil (even if it was skewed by the rise of bureacrats, etc). Death toll should be compared to things like the Civil War, not to peacetime statistics.

That said, I never mentioned USSR, and the "soviet system" (or rather "socialism" is not a single thing, nor where the conditions the same in every place. Poland was different, Czechoslovakia was different, East Germany was different etc.

> _Yes a job for everyone, even if that job is digging up ice dirt in the > Siberian Gulag until you die from exhaustion._

Are you really familiar with the history of those states, or just repeat what you've read or seen in movies about very specific periods and very specific countries? Because that reflects a tiny percentage of the Eastern Europe population, and for a specific period of time. If we're allowed to cherry pick periods, we can say "yeah, land of the free, unless your job is picking cotton under Jim Crow laws", etc.

> _In the Soviet Union they did exactly the same thing to all the right > leaning intelligentsia_

Actually they did it more to the left leaning intelligentsia there too. Because the problem with USSR wasn't that it was "too left" and thus despotic, but that it wasn't left enough (e.g. the revolution turned right into a self- preserving regime). Those who were in the right (mostly wealthy families etc) had mostly immigrated to the west early on. It was the "more leftists" that got the shaft from Stalin and co (of course usually undersevedly labeled as "right").

> _At the end of the day, in both cases a ton of people died horrible deaths > simply because of what they believed in. How is one system better then the > other?_

Well, with that metric no system is good. Capitalistic colonial powers, for example, have enslaved 2/3 of the world, hundreds of countries and billions of people, and have caused more deaths than Hitler and Stalin combined (including the genocide of native americans).

> _Any system that subverts the rights of an individual under some bullshit > pretense that it's for the "good of the nation" is absolutely wrong!_

Well, and what about individuals in other countries, bombed, killed, having dictatorships imposed upon them by the same government?

Just a case (there are countless others, in Latin America and elsewhere): [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits- role...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits- role-1953-iranian-coup)

Or are only citizens "individuals" and foreign people don't matter? Even so there are a million black people in jail in the US, aren't they individuals or don't they have rights? Or its that they are disproportionally criminal to the white population (which again has a disproportionate incarceration rate compared to the rest of the world). I won't even mention the death penalty, which the civilised Europe has left behind.

Maybe we should chalk that system as "absolutely wrong" too?

<comment><USER4> > As an aside, the oft quoted "50 million" number is BS. It counts famines, > deaths in the war, etc.

The number I quoted is adjusted for the war related deaths. As for the famines engineered and caused by the Soviet Government, please do not minimize those deaths by saying they do not matter. Members of my grandfathers family died during that time because of the famines and because of how the Soviet government was literally stealing the food from Ukraine.

> Poland was different, Czechoslovakia was different, East Germany was > different etc.

I did not live in Communist East Germany, Poland, or Czechoslovakia, but I am sure many people on this board have. And I am sure that most of them have stories to tell about how terrible those governments were. You haven't lived though any of those regimes either, so please do not pretend like you know best.

> Are you really familiar with the history of those states, or just repeat > what you've read or seen in movies about very specific periods and very > specific countries?

I was borne in Ukraine in 1984. I lived through the tail end of it, but my Mom and Dad, as well as my grand parents, lived through the thick of it. Not every one was send to Siberia, but many people were. My grandfather was a Ukrainian military doctor, so he was part of the "party," but he was a very conscientious man, and his hart would bleed for the poor conscripted soldiers he was treating. The Soviet government would literally use them as slave labor. When Chernobyl meltdown happen, my grandfather was sent to triage the injured. He was stationed miles away from the reactor, treating the injured soldiers coming back from the power plant. They were dying from radiation poisoning, and the Soviet government would just send new once in there, to die.

You see, in the communist country, a human life is worth nothing. If it's easier to send a 1,000 soldiers to die, they will do that, no questions asked. I know, soldiers are sent to die all the time, but these poor guys didn't have a chance, not a chance. I realize that US did the same in Vietnam, and it's wrong. But 2 wrongs don't make a right.

> Or are only citizens "individuals" and foreign people don't matter? Even so > there are a million black people in jail in the US, aren't they individuals > or don't they have rights?

Again, you can't argue that because US has it's problems, and is doing a lot of really wrong things, now and in the past, that somehow this makes all the horrible things that the Soviet government did just pitchy. I lived through the tail end of communism, my parents lived through a lot of it. We moved to US as soon as we could. And with all it's problems, I would take US over USSR any day of the week.

I understand that you lived through a dictatorship, that Greece is right now in a complete financial ruin, in large part due to the idiotic way the EU is setup, and that you probably want to blame EU and US for all of it. But don't look to Russia and the olds style USSR for answers, the answers they have are the wrong answers. My fear is that if Greece does not recover from it's problems soon, they will be tempted to do a deal with Russia and Putin. Your opinions are not unique in Greece, I believe. I really hope that doesn't happen.

In any case, you are not going to see it my way, and I am not going to see it your way. So let's part here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/google-ends-forced-arbitration-for-employees/ <comment><USER2> Wow, you mean collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors? Who knew? :-)

I'm really glad to hear that Google made this step, now if they would drop the overly expansive ownership claim in their employment agreement and the right to surveillance on personal property it would be a much more employee friendly place.

I also hope that it gives them an edge in hiring which would encourage other employers to follow suit in order to be competitive.

<comment><USER3> >> overly expansive ownership claim

Yeah, that particular clause gave me a looong pause before signing their contract, in fact I even seriously considered taking one of the other offers I had. This is why you see all those "happens to be owned by Google" disclaimers on open source projects. This means the person wrote this code on their own time, yet it's owned by Google anyway, which IMO is total employee-hostile bullshit.

I would not sign something like that contract today. At the time, though, the money differential and the allure of having Google on my resume outweighed the concerns. I have since discovered other companies can be a lot less possessive of the stuff I build on my own time and dime.

<comment><USER4> I agreed to that contract and open sourced many thousands of lines of code owned by Google, but still available to me and the rest of the world via github. I don't see the problem. If you could demonstrate your project didn't overlap google business then you could do your own project.

<comment><USER3> People seem to not quite get this, so I'll try to be as clear as I can.

Google should not have the ability to claim ownership on unrelated work that does not use company time or resources unless _I_ _voluntarily_ relinquish such ownership. Google should have no business whatsoever interfering with what I do on my own personal time. Nor should I have to make anything open source. Nor should I need to ask anyone's _permission_ to utilize my own time as I see fit. You can get these terms with other companies, if you ask for them.

The only exception I think is reasonable is if my project discloses Google proprietary information in any way, or directly competes with Google, in which case Google should be able to terminate my employment.

This would be fair. What Google is doing now is slimy AF.

<comment><USER5> The key point is "if you can demonstrate that your project doesn't compete with Google's business" IARC is really easy. I was approved for a couple projects, including one that absolutely could be considered to be competing with Google's business if they wanted, in like a week.

You aren't actually legally required to go through IARC. The contract isn't enforcible in CA if you really don't compete, but I have prewritten verification of that now, and it was painless.

IME, Google's earned the benefit of the doubt in this context.

<comment><USER6> If it's not enforceable, why is it in the contract? They obviously intend to try to enforce it in cases where they can, which makes claims about "don't worry about it, its not enforceable" even more shady.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why isn't forced arbitration illegal?

You're effectively agreeing to renounce to your rights to sue a company. Seems odd that US laws allows that.

Or, is the clause only that arbitration has to be attempted but not binding to the fact that an agreement may be reached?

This case would seem far less evil.

<comment><USER8> > You're effectively agreeing..

You are agreeing. As an adult, the choice to agree or not agree to conditions of a private transaction seem to be a fundamental liberty. If people didn't agree and it affected recruitment, then companies would respond accordingly. Also, without arbitration, conceivably that could result in a lower offered salary to offset the risk of litigation. Given that the vast majority of employees never care about suing, the higher salary is a better outcome most of the time. Banning forced arbitration is necessarily going to increase employee costs to a company, which means less money to pay people much in the same way higher health costs affect salaries as well. I don't agree with forced arbitration, but making it illegal disrupts the freedom of employees and employers to engage in agreements how they see fit. Without arbitration, you get a lower salary, all else being equal, which is essentially a form of insurance against the possibility that you might sue. Some people might be ok with that, but that choice should be between the employee and the employer; it isn't government's place to get involved.

<comment><USER9> > You are agreeing. As an adult, the choice to agree or not agree to > conditions of a private transaction seem to be a fundamental liberty.

1\. There's already plenty of stuff you're not allowed to sign away, no matter how much more "free" being able to do so might make you. I certainly bristle daily at how un-free I am not being able to sign myself into slavery.

2\. OK fine. So we ban corporations from entering into forced arbitration contracts with individuals. _You_ still can. With your neighbor or whoever. You can try with a corporation, but will find that _they_ aren't permitted to. Since we collectively via the power of government conjure corporations from the aether, eff 'em.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would be perfectly fine with forced arbitration that was perfectly fair and not skewed towards the employer. The problem with forced arbitration is that it's completely skewed towards the employers. Being able to have a fairly arbitrated conflict that was inexpensive and had looser rules than a formal lawsuit would be a benefit to all. Look at how small claims court is so much more efficient and fair than a regular lawsuit.

<comment><USER11> There's no scenario where a legal proceeding between employee and a large company is fair. The main advantage of court is the ability to appeal and the public nature of the proceedings.

The only fair fight is if you have a competent union. That comes with its own problems.

<comment><USER12> What if, instead of aiming at "fair", we instead aim at "Just"?

Edit: if there is a difference, that is. If there isn't, then nvm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like a stunning victory for (unorganized) labor—almost too good to believe! Does anyone with more details know if there are caveats or exemptions (other than the mentioned contractors)?

<comment><USER14> I don't know the details, but I do believe that high-skilled labor like Google employees likely have more bargaining power than your local pizza delivery driver. It wouldn't surprise me if we see these kinds of victories in other tech companies.

<comment><USER13> If I were other companies, I'd be scrambling to prevent this from happening with my employees. Can't assume it'll spread without organized effort (hint, the U word).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This has low key been a big year for labor in tech. First we have Amazon backing out of NYC partly due to political pressure from the unions and wins like this vs. Google. Full blown unionization may never happen but the forces of labor are definitely starting to affect tech giants.

<comment><USER16> > _This has low key been a big year for labor in tech._

Honestly, I am having my suspicions whether or not that "low key" aspect isn't artificially maintained by the media somewhow. I had heard about the scandals and such last year, but somehow I missed:

> _Following the massive, 20,000-person walkout at Google in November, Google > got rid of forced arbitration for sexual harassment and sexual assault > claims, offering more transparency around those investigations and more._

And I would say that 20,000 people walking out on Google should have been hard to miss.

<comment><USER17> Indeed, it _was_ hard to miss. There was tons of coverage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Someone please explain to me the benefits of having forced arbitration at all; what's the benefit of having disputes (including sexual harassment disputes) resolved behind closed doors without any possibility of appeal?

<comment><USER13> Much cheaper, faster, and more private for all parties, plus I believe it prevents class action lawsuits. And don't forget the possibility that the arbitrators (who are paid by the company) favor their benefactor…

For example, you mention sexual harassment; the victim (and certainly the accused) might not want all those details in the public record.

<comment> vertex-four The thing is, if the employer and the employee both wanted arbitration, neither would need to be forced into it - something along the lines of "arbitration is always available as an option with consent of all parties" written into the contract would be perfectly fine.

<comment><USER18> It wouldn't even need to be in the contract would it? They'd just both agree at the time of the dispute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can tell you with a high level of confidence that this is a Google PR stunt. Google executives conjured up a protest to force their hand acting against the interests of the board of directors and shareholders. Without a forced hand, executives would have been sued by shareholders for breaching fiduciary duties and terminated from their positions. The former executives would also forfeit their compensation packages because of acting so "unreasonably".

Executives wanted to end forced arbitration because it was unethical. They agreed that compelled arbitration was wrong. At the same time, no one was justifiably willing to give up a hard-earned career of a lifetime. Capitalism is not gentle to those who defy it.

This protest reads like a Pepsi commercial. They should win an Oscar this Sunday.

<comment><USER20> This post was flagged. I thought it was interesting and civilly stated. It may well be baseless or untrue but I think the readers can take it for whatever its worth to them.

If this change were 'orchestrated' to push through an ethical change that otherwise would have been hard to sell then I think that would also have been a laudable act just as well. Executives are also employees and should be free to collaborate with their colleagues for the benefit of all employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It may also be because forced arbitration backfired on Google when they went after Anthony Levandowski. They claimed he took Waymo's trade secrets and went to Uber. But they can't sue him. They can only go to arbitration. And that's over and settled. They can only sue Uber.

</comment><comment><USER22> That's a great start. Now if only everyone else would do the same.

</comment><comment><USER23> Curious if any company offers a bonus for voluntary arbitration agreements? Pay out 1/2 their insurance costs saved. Fully market solution where everyone is acting of free will.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hahahahaha :) Imbalance when signing an employment agreement.

Of course, you want to have a job so you agree to things that are not in your favor LOL.

</comment><comment><USER25> Binding arbitration is a good way to limit liability and bad PR; take it away, and the company will be looking for something else to de-risk them.

I expect the outcome will be more contractors, since those companies that employ the contractors do not have to abide by this.

</comment><comment><USER26> Whatever your thoughts about arbitration there is no denying that it's the quicker and cheaper method, what this unfortunate development accomplishes is enlarging the pool of well to do clients and plaintiffs for the lawyers to exploit.

In a related note: organized labor almost killed the US car industry, when economical foreign cars got popular, domestic car companies couldn't quickly make the necessary adjustments to compete with the foreign product largely because of the inertia of union agreements.

Labor unions are adversarial to change and innovation and especially in this era there is no place for them and hopefully automation will eradicate them completely, it's disheartening that many HN commenters would support such antiquated and inefficient agreements.

<comment><USER15> This is a strange comment and something I see a lot in online forums, I guess you could characterize this as the "slippery slope" or "worst case scenario" argument. Unions have no power in big tech right now, none of the top tech companies have something resembling a union -- and yet even the discussion of unionization within the tech industry, despite some really terrible working conditions for "auxiliary" tech workers (ride share drivers, fulfillment center workers, delivery app drivers) and "core" workers (ageism anyone?) the slight mention of unionization and/or collective bargaining brings up these types of scenarios. Unionization in tech is not going to look like it does in other industries, I can't help but wonder why some folks shoot it discussions so quickly with this type of argument.

<comment><USER26> The reason "auxiliary" workers get a raw deal in this country is that health insurance is dealt through employers via a terrible WW2 era tax incentive.

If companies didn't get on the hook for providing health insurance they would directly employ more people instead of using contractors.

So this is why I'm worried about labor unions in tech and the private sector in general; they are never the solution, and their lack isn't the cause to any of the described problems.

<comment><USER27> The point of unions is to get workers a better deal through collective bargaining. In a company that's growing rapidly, it doesn't make sense for either the employees or the owners / management to worry too much about how the pie is getting divided up. As companies mature and growth slows, employees who aren't unionized are inevitably going to get screwed. In an industry where corporate profits can exceed $1000000 per employee, I'd say we need more unionization.

<comment><USER26> So they can kill these companies faster?

<comment><USER28> Hahahahaha, I don't think half these startups need any help grinding themselves into the dirt any faster, nor do I think that unions would contribute meaningfully to extinguishing something that wasn't already in process of that.

And honestly, if some hotshot startup dies because it's treating its workers like trash then good riddance. In this day and age we ought to do better than exploiting workers to the bone just because we can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> an opportune time to unionize, if you ask me...

<comment><USER30> Yes, in states without "right to work" (for less) and other union-busting laws. More importantly would be for workers to quit en masse and start their own employee-owned co-op so they're not cheated out of profits they helped create but rarely see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Very encouraging.

</comment><comment><USER32> in the end, that's probably a bad thing because Google might get better employees</comment>


Auth0 announces a $120M Series F round led by Salesforce Ventures - <AUTHOR> https://auth0.com/blog/auth0-helping-navigate-through-times-of-transformation/ <comment><USER2> Handing over all of your user details and auth management to a VC-funded company with 1000x exit pressure from investors... what could go wrong.</comment>


WSJ: Young Entrepreneurs Face Higher Hurdles - <AUTHOR> http://www.business-opportunities.biz/2007/03/21/young-entrepreneurs-face-higher-hurdles/ <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.startupjournal.com/howto/soundadvice/20070228-garton.html?mod=RSS_Startup_Journal&sjrss;=frontpage](http://www.startupjournal.com/howto/soundadvice/20070228-garton.html?mod=RSS_Startup_Journal&sjrss=frontpage)

Sorry, I meant to link the actual article, above.</comment>


Stuff that was Cool -- You Have Died of Dysentery: The Oregon Trail - <AUTHOR> http://www.stuffthatwascool.com/2009/03/you-have-died-of-dysentery-the-oregon-trail/

<comment><USER2> I tried to ford the river twice and didn't make it either time. Bankers just aren't cut out for making the trek, even with their wads of cash.

</comment><comment><USER3> When will this be in the app store? I saw an article that said yesterday, but I've yet to see it.</comment>


Bitcoinfs: A minimal full Bitcoin node in F# - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bitcoinfs/bitcoinfs

<comment><USER2> i believe that there is also a full node in Erlang, so it's not the first functional language client per the blog post. still, very cool!

<comment><USER3> Also in Haskell: [https://github.com/haskoin/haskoin](https://github.com/haskoin/haskoin)

<comment><USER4> From their README:

       Features:
       * [...]
       * Headerchain implementation (Blockchain with headers only)
       * [...]

This makes Haskoin more of an SPV client rather than a full-node client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good to see F# on hackernews.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, it'd be nicer if it wasn't a spammer though (and a pretty prolific one at that):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=homeroot](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=homeroot)

<comment><USER7> Shouldn't submissions and comments stand on their own merit? What does it matter who submitted it?

<comment><USER6> That the 'new' page is only so long and if people flood the new page with links hoping to gain traction with one of them then it will cause a lot of good stuff to be lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the github: "I didn't want any wallet spending functionality"

Sure wish it did everything. This could be a pretty great educational project, or a nice start to building your own altchain.

</comment><comment><USER9> Url changed from [http://talkera.org/crypto/a-minimal-full-bitcoin-node- in-f/](http://talkera.org/crypto/a-minimal-full-bitcoin-node-in-f/), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER10> But... but... if its minimal, it can't be full.

<comment><USER11> "Full node" has a specific meaning in Bitcoin. It's a node that validates the entire blockchain and all incoming transactions, and relays transactions to peers. This is different than a "light" node or just a wallet, neither of which relay transactions, for example</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on MVP - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone, I'm an Australian entrepreneur launching a viral marketing tool at http://www.viralmage.com and would really appreciate some feedback on the MVP.
The value proposition is: "ViralMage is a viral marketing tool that helps businesses cheaply build a pre-launch mailing list".
How it works: 1. Use the tool to easily create a simple landing page for your product launch with an email signup field. 2. Add rewards to the campaign. Users whose friends sign up using their referral link can get free products, with increasingly valuable products for increasing shares. E.g. 10 friends, a free basic model of your product; 20 friends, a free premium model of your product. 3. Share your landing page with your seed list (friends and family, for instance) and ask them to share with others. 4. Track how many people have signed up for your launch and then export their emails when you're ready to contact them.
The questions I would like to ask are: - Is the value proposition clear? - Are there any areas that you think need improvement/clarifying? - If you find the idea compelling, but wouldn't use the service, why not?
Thanks, Percy <comment><USER2> nice, but im not sure what kind of rewards i would setup for my company..or if i can afford them (cost-effective)

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it really comes down to how valuable each lead is to your company. On average, how much money can you make from one person on your mailing list? How about 10? It's not an easy question to answer if you don't have the data.

Is your company planning to launch a new product? Has your company done email marketing in the past?</comment></comment>


Princeton University - BOMB THREAT ON CAMPUS; evacuate immediately - <AUTHOR> http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S37/09/60K78/index.xml?section=topstories <comment><USER2> It will be OK, the NSA has all the phone records, they can find whoever called it in easily.

just like they did in Bost... uhh... in Pittsb... uhh... Louisi... Tex...

How about all that security we get for trading our liberties!

<comment><USER3> I don't think that comment added anything. If you could please keep any NSA related conversations in threads actually about the NSA, it would be greatly appreciated.</comment></comment>


San Francisco Stays BioCurious - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/14/san-francisco-stays-biocurious/

<comment><USER2> I think it will be difficult for groups like this to maintain funding over time. Lab work is expensive!</comment>


Ask HN: What can we do to stop the rich from getting richer? - <AUTHOR> The current political developments indicate that the Anacyclosis [0] theory is true, the political caste is closely engaged with big business and the small voter has almost no influence in changing this development . Same is true for the media, which are with a few exceptions by globalists, so the fourth estate is, to check those in power. Morover, in germany - as an example - flat market prices are dictated by a few coorps too [1].<p>Are we doomed to watch the system evolve into an oligarchie/dictatorship or are there some bottom-up approaches to stop it?<p>[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nachdenkseiten.de%2F%3Fp%3D46219%23h18&edit-text=&act=url <comment><USER3> What can we do to stop the healthy from getting healthier?

What can we do to stop the smart from getting smarter?

I've heard that 99% of the gallery paintings were created by 1% of the painters, and 99% of the best-selling books were created by 1% of the writers, and 99% of inventions were invented by 1% of the scientists. If we don't stop this, there'll be no paintings/books/inventions left for us regular folk, and then what will we do oh god what will we do.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't care if the rich get richer, provided that the quality of life for the rest of us keeps going up too.

<comment><USER5> Wealth isn't just about purchasing power, but about control. A small class of people controlling most of the wealth means that they can manipulate/buy the government and make our lives worse in ways that "quality of life" measured in something like the CPI can't fully capture.

<comment><USER6> It seems to me that we would should focus on is how to break the link between wealth and political power. If we could do that than a) we wouldn't care if some people were wealthier if we were all better off and b) the wealth couldn't make themselves wealthier by changing the rules of the game in their favor.

<comment><USER7> By what means? Money easily gets around law.

<comment><USER6> I don't know. Maybe there is no way. But if you can't do that, all other potential reforms are irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In America, you would first need to improve the political system (ie: ranked choice voting, no more gerrymandering or disenfranchisement, prohibitions on lobbyists), and improve K-12 education.

To accomplish that, you would need to exert more pressure on politicians than the lobbyists, who fight against such things, do. Since the lobbyists have more money, it would have to be social and peer pressure. Also, you would have to pressure individuals (ie: influential people, not their companies. Influential politicians, not their entire party).

With that done, the obvious is possible. Raise taxes on the rich, crack down on tax havens, gut military spending, expand public heathcare, improve infrastructure, etc.

<comment><USER9> at the end of the day, even if you fixed voting, gerrymandering and lobbying, as long as people can own newspapers/radio/tv, and amplify their voice; they will always be able to control: who is on the ballot, and who people vote for. MOST people dont have a substantial time invested in nuanced policy stance, they form an opinion based on what the tv or paper (or friends) says, and vote accordingly.

democracy will always reduce itself to who can yell the loudest, who can create the most fear, who can be the most persuasive to the mass (even if not a sound factual argument.)

and then every blue moon you will have a Trump, that finds a way to amplify their image on the cheap, by getting everyone to talk ABOUT them. all press being good press, and the bad press is free.

<comment><USER8> There's a lot of truth to your comment. My hunch is that with less corruption, and better education, America would lessen inequality considerably. But catch me on a pessimistic day, I might say otherwise. As you suggest, just because something is a majority opinion, doesn't mean it's a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Trying to effect large-scale changes without rectifying fundamental issues is futile. We all want to change the system, but the system is only a large-scale reflection of individuals constituting the system.

</comment><comment><USER11> Developing a society where the _accumulation_ of wealth is anathema would be good. Could be accomplished by low taxes on income and high taxes on net worth, encouraging lots of spending but not much hoarding.

But you might actually be more concerned with accumulation of _power_ , in which case let's address that directly.

<comment><USER6> That would be terrible: it would encourage everyone to operate entirely on short term thinking rather than long term thinking which we already don't do enough of.

<comment><USER11> It would put rich people in the same long-term position as poor people, so _everyone_ would have an incentive to create a robust societal safety net.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You already know, what you personally can do - nothing.

Imagine asking what you can do, to stop the sun from rising tomorrow. Your question is not too far off.

The world is going to go, the way it's going to go. If you've ever tried to get a relative or friend, or _gasp_ yourself, to cease a harmful habit or pick up a good habit (getting in good shape, quitting smoking, etc) - you'll know how much or how little you can do to stop anyone, from doing anything.

So really, the answer to your question is - pick something you know you should do, but aren't doing, and go do that with any consistency. Something that is unquestionably positive - not something along the lines of changing others. If you can stick with it, do one more, or do one less of what you know you shouldn't do. Repeat.

If you can do that with any consistency - you'll quickly become a role model to some, and have a positive impact on society as a whole, which's what you seem to really be after.

There's a path of violence - that appeals largely to young people, and then the path of peace, that one gets around to, usually when there's no more you can accomplish with violence, and lots to fix. Path of violence is thinking if only others were more like me, the world would be a better place. The path of peace is realizing that's a delusional thought, and that if you want to get along with others, that's a counter-productive way of living your life. Everyone wants to get along with others - not everyone is smart/wise/whatever enough to realize the place (violence) their attempts are coming from, is at least half the problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> Stop buying their products.

It's that simple. The rich are rich because you give them money. If you and everyone else makes it a point to try out startups rather than always buying from the established company, buy from local businesses instead of big chains, buy fresh local produce instead of processed foods, rent from individual families instead of big corporate apartment complexes, invest your money yourself or stick it in Vanguard instead of paying a fund manager, and so on, the rich will become less rich.

New people will become rich instead, but you don't expect to eliminate the whole concept of wealth, right? (The corollary is that if _you_ want to become rich yourself, don't spend money and invest your time in activities that will cause other people to give you money.)

<comment><USER14> _It 's that simple._

That's fine for things like food and drink, but for everything else there's a huge amount of "stealth consolidation" over the past few decades. For example, if you want a pair of glasses there is literally _one_ company that make them - EssilorLuxottica[1]. They own _everything_ around glasses. All the differentiation is false - they're just brands owned by two mega-corporations. The same is true of cars (14 giant corporations owning 60+ brands), food and drink (a few hundred giant corporations owning thousands of brands), etc.

[1] A good read about them [https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/10/the- invisible-p...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/10/the-invisible- power-of-big-glasses-eyewear-industry-essilor-luxottica)

<comment><USER15> Although they are massive, they don't own literally everything, at least internationally. At least here in Germany I think avoiding them wouldn't be hard, but of course there's other large companies owning many of the other players, so leaving them != supporting small companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You use the phrase "fourth estate", but do you know where it comes from? Look up "third estate" and you'll see the previous solution.

</comment><comment><USER17> Personally probably not much. But I was thinking: What if there was a upper cap on an individual wealth. For instance, 1 million dollars? And everything over that cap should go to "the community" (to be defined, maybe fix poverty, put it into scientific research, something to save our earth).

Probably very short-sighted, but interesting topic nevertheless.

<comment><USER18> Just realise that the 'money game' is rigged, the deck is stacked and the house will win no matter what you do. That leaves but one way to 'win' this game and that is by not playing it. Yes, you need money but you do not need limitless amounts of it. You most certainly don't _need_ many of the products peddled by 'the rich' so that part of the game is easily avoided - just don't buy 'm. Use your money to become more independent of future money by buying land in an area which can support you and your family, either by producing stuff yourself or by buying it from people close-by - thereby avoiding giving money to 'the rich'. Don't buy into dependency through all sorts of long-term contracts, loans, credit cards, needless insurances and other such things. Given that you probably live in the USA I assume you need a car, what you do not need is the latest and greatest and certainly not a new one every other year. The same goes for all those electronic doodads which try to lure you into spending more and more of your waking hours staring at their mesmerising animations, all the while doing their best to serve their true masters. Home speakers which always listen to every conversation in your house was used as a dire prediction of times to come in novels like 1984, now it is supposed to the 'the thing to have for smart people'. Well, I'll just flick that light switch myself, thank you Alexa and Google and Siri. Mobile tracking beacons which communicate with billboards to show you tailored advertising, it might sound like something out of The Diamond Age but it happens right here, right now. To get rid of intrusive nonsense like that you need to take a good, deep look at that mobile device in your pocket and ask yourself how much of the software running on it is serving you, how much of it serves someone else. I could go on but I guess the gist of what I'm saying is clear: put your money where your mouth and thoughts are. That way you do not need to resort to such means as you suggest, you do not need to implement the next 'utopia' which is doomed to fail - viz. Venezuela for the last example of where such ideas lead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is the only way:

[https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based- economy/](https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based-economy/)

This utopian idea from Jacque Fresco is practically impossible to implement unless an all-powerful benevolant dictator type AI is in charge of everything.

</comment><comment><USER20> One of the few uncontroversial results of theoretical economics is that in bigger markets, money ends up in fewer hands, because concentration of power is inevitable.

So what can we do ? Roll back globalization. Heavily tax or outright prevent international movement of goods and people.

</comment><comment><USER21> The elephant in the room is to focus on what motivates people to work, once they have enough wealth to address their existential needs. When we look closely, we notice that people desire wealth for social/psychological signalling. This explains phenomena like: * why one billion people volunteer their time to generate over a trillion USD/year in value, while not caring for an economic reward, * why many extremely wealthy people live frugal lives (Buffett, Ingvar Kamprad,...), * why many wealthy people give away (most of) "their" fortune (Carnegy, Gates,...),

Another fact to note is, that economic inequality is a relatively recent phenomenon. The hunter-gatherer system - where people shared equally all economic "product", but exceptional contributors were rewarded with regard (social signal) - lasted for tens of thousands of years.

These observations suggest how a system can be built bottom-up, that can topple capitalism. It will look like the HG system, but will be held together by apps running on personal computing devices to simulate the economic transparency necessary for the system to work. Crypto currencies are a caricature of such a system (the important parts are in place, but the proportions are way off).

<comment><USER22> I do not think that "social/psychological signalling" has a good meaningful interpretation along the lines that you are using it.

That is, many people seek wealth, and signal it through a lack of frugality. Look at the number of owners of super and mega yachts, and tell me how they are frugal. There are a lot of such yachts, yes?

(You could say that they are frugal because they live well within their means, but that's not what you meant when you singled out Buffett and Kamprad.)

Look at billionaries like the Koch brothers, or the DeVos family. Money gives political power, and both of those families have used their wealth to push their respective political agendas.

Thing is, that can _also_ be interpreted as "social/psychological signalling", could it not?

So it seems like anything that a rich person does can be interpreted as "social/psychological signalling".

I don't know what you refer to when you say "one billion people ... a trillion USD/year in value." Does that include all of the people who sing for free in their church choir, or who volunteer to organize a race, etc? Again, if you say those are all examples of "social/psychological signalling", then I think that definition is so broad as to be meaningless.

Much has been written about Carnegie's philantropy. Quoting Wikipedia, '"Maybe with the giving away of his money," commented biographer Joseph Wall, "he would justify what he had done to get that money."' Isn't that a rather different interpretation than yours?

Note too that Carnegie was far from frugal.

Finally, you reference to hunter-gatherer systems (excepting the settled hunter-gatherers) in what seems which reminds me of Marx's description of "primitive communism." If I continue with a Marxian analysis, those hunter- gatherer systems had no mechanism for capital accumulation, and it's that accumulation which contributes to the social power imbalance we see now.

How does "economic transparency", much less "apps running on personal computing devices" , result in a major equalization of social power gained from capital accumulation?

<comment><USER21> > Look at the number of owners of super and mega yachts, and tell me how they > are frugal...

I mentioned frugality only to hint that these folks must have non-economic motives for working. I claim that the motive is signaling. And the megayacht owners - what else might they do with their Veblen goods than signal their status? Does Paul Allen need 50 bathrooms on Octopus (just guessing here, not sure about the exact number) to address his physiological needs?

> Look at billionaries like the Koch brothers, or the DeVos family..

In my opinion signaling is a manifestation of a deeper motivational mechanism that I call the modeling instinct. Basically we have instinct to build perfect world model in our brains and one of the way we test its quality is by creating goods and services. The difference between the Koch brothers and - say - Buffet is that they test different aspects of the world models - <USER2> part, which is interesting for them the most. We all carry unique, but incomplete and distorted world representations and therefore tend to test our model-building effort in various domains. Signaling plays however an important role - it is a measure of how successful is our modeling effort.

> I don't know what you refer to when you say "one billion people ... a > trillion USD/year in value

There is actually a research done in this field. See for example Salamon, L.M., Sokolowski, S.W., Haddock, M., 2011. Measuring the Economic Value of Volunteer Work Globally - Concepts, Estimates, and a Roadmap to the Future (2011). Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 82, 217–252. [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8292.2011.00437.x](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8292.2011.00437.x)

In personal communication one of the authors confirmed that also FOSS development has been included in the estimates.

> Re Carnegy.

Let's not focus on frugality. hopefully what I write above elucidates this point sufficiently.

> Re hunters - gatherers.

The takeaway from this should be the fact, that a stable human society can exist that is economically equal, if it maintains potentially unequal "merit" signaling. This by the way nicely fits to the idea of how a just society should look like according to Rawls.

> How does "economic transparency"...

The HG economic system fell apart once people lost ability to see what material goods their neighbors acquired - simply put. This transparency must be restored in order to build economically equal society. I believe technology will play central role in re-instituting a HG-like economic system. The loss of privacy in social networks, the (wiki)leaks of confidential information, the cameras in our cities - that is a part of the pendulum swing toward a more transparent society - which is a prerequisite to a more fair world.

Maybe I should conclude the main point of what I am trying to communicate here - people can be completely happy (and economically productive) even if they are economically equal, if their ability to signal their naturally unequal abilities is unrestricted.

Thank you for the comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Start here at 1:30:30 [https://youtu.be/6G59zsjM2UI?t=1h30m25s](https://youtu.be/6G59zsjM2UI?t=1h30m25s)

and see all of nature follows a law of square roots. If you have 10,000 people, 100 will have all the money. If you have 10,000 music artist, only 100 will be getting their songs heard. This is a law of nature. Stop fighting against it and spend some time understanding it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Start a better business and defeat all of theirs! But then you would end up rich! Ahhhhh!

</comment><comment><USER25> Capitalism will keep small players comfortable because if most people are comfortable with their existence there will not be a critical mass for a change. We will be fed and entertained.

The equilibrium may shift due to individual greed of capitalists. If it gets bad enough something may change for a generation or two.

</comment><comment><USER26> You're asking the rich how to stop themselves, I don't think that's going to go the way you want it to.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wrong question.

We should be asking "What can we do to make becoming wealthy easier for everyone?"

</comment><comment><USER28> Convert some of your wealth to community cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero...)

</comment><comment><USER29> Persuade the Bill Gates, Warren Buffets, Mark Zuckerburgs to become the anti- Koch brothers by supporting left-wing politicians.

Support the land value tax (Georgism). Much of rich people's wealth is tied up in the land value of big cities.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think a good starting point is "Capital in the 21st century" by Piketty.

<comment><USER22> FWIW, Piketty's proposal is a "progressive annual global wealth tax of up to 2%, combined with a progressive income tax reaching as high as 80%.

I'm fine with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution)

<comment><USER31> That did not end well.

The October revolution also didn't end well.

<comment><USER16> It _went_ poorly, hello Terror, but the only sense in which it didn't _end_ well is that the French realized that they actually did want an empire- building monarch after all, goodbye First Republic, hello Napoleon.

<comment><USER31> Did they? It's not like there was a referendum on whether to have an emperor, and then an election for who should be the emperor, and then periodic successive elections.

It was all a disaster through and through. From La Terreur to Napoleon and his wars, it was a disaster.

Worse than that, La Terreur set a pattern that has been repeated (and, sadly, "improved") in the many years since.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There's nothing beings flawed in the ways that lead to this state of affairs (generally subsets of selfishness) can do but become the kind of beings that aren't flawed in those ways.

So get busy changing yourself and raising new instantiations not thusly flawed.</comment>


A New Publishing Platform - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/

<comment><USER2> Tabs don't work. Couldn't figure out what to do AFTER I typed in some text. No instructions, or other information as far as I could see...and I couldn't get the 'm' in the box to DO anything.

So if you were asking for reviews...I'd say...needs more work?

<comment><USER2> To add to this, I now see the Done button. And them 'M' is a logo I take it? Still, you might want to make it stand out more?</comment></comment>


A Web Crawler with Asyncio Coroutines - <AUTHOR> http://aosabook.org/en/500L/a-web-crawler-with-asyncio-coroutines.html <comment><USER2> Great tutorial, I would love to see this rewritten with the new async / await syntax in python 3.5

<comment><USER3> I've created a similar example in order to try out the new Python 3.5 async syntax. While the async function bodies themselves do not change, there is some boilerplate necessary in order to call async functions.

You can check it out right here [https://github.com/justuswilhelm/kata/blob/master/python/cor...](https://github.com/justuswilhelm/kata/blob/master/python/coroutine.py#L35)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One question I have about this - and I might have missed in article is - I'm all for using asyncio to make HTTP requests. But I see they apparently also use asyncio for "parse_links". Since parselinks should be CPU op, would it make sense to use fibers to download links and pass them into a thread pool to actually parse them//add to queue?

I'm messing around with some of the ParallelUniverse Java fiber implementation and what I do is spam fibers to download pages and send the String response over to another fiber over a channel that maintains a thread pool to parse response body as they come in//create new fibers to read these links.

I'm really just doing this to get more familiar with async programming and specifically the paralleluniverse Java libs but one thing I'm struggling a bit with is how to best make it well behaved (e.g right now there's no bound on number of outstanding HTPT requests).

</comment><comment><USER5> This article is way more important than the web crawler example used to motivate it. It's easily the single best thing I've ever read on asyncio, and I've been using it in anger for a year now. I've passed it around my team, and will be recommending it far and wide!

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm working on a project that involves lot's of web crawling. I'm not technical at all (I'm hiring freelancers).

While I do have access to great general technology related advice, this post is bound to bring people well versed in crawling.

My question is: in terms of crawling speed (and I know this is dependent of several factors) what's a decent amount of pages a good crawler could do per day?

The crawler I built is doing about 120K pages per day which to our initial needs is not bad at all, but wonder if in the crawling world this is peanuts or a decent chunk of pages?

<comment><USER7> It doesn't make much sense to give a number for speed without some specifics about the crawler environment, such as:

      - How many servers (if distributed)?
      - How many cores/server?
      - What kind of processing takes place for each page?
        Does it just download and save the pages somewhere (local filesystem, cloud storage, database) or it extracts (semi) structured data? And so on.

Specifics aside, these days it's not hard to crawl millions of pages/day on commodity servers. Some related posts:

[http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-to-crawl-a-quarter- bil...](http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-to-crawl-a-quarter-billion- webpages-in-40-hours/)

[http://blog.semantics3.com/how-we-built-our-almost- distribut...](http://blog.semantics3.com/how-we-built-our-almost-distributed- web-crawler/)

[http://engineering.bloomreach.com/crawling-billions-of- pages...](http://engineering.bloomreach.com/crawling-billions-of-pages- building-large-scale-crawling-cluster-part-1/)

[http://engineering.bloomreach.com/crawling-billions-of- pages...](http://engineering.bloomreach.com/crawling-billions-of-pages- building-large-scale-crawling-cluster-part-2/)

<comment><USER6> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be interesting to compare this Python approach with a Go goroutine approach. The main question is whether Go's libraries handle massive numbers of connections well. Since Google wrote Go to be used internally, they probably do.

<comment><USER9> Or Erlang, or rust

<comment><USER10> Or Java. Right now I have a web driver that uses standard Java classes for requests but I wonder if NIO would offer significantly better performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Node is well-suited for this type of thing and there are numerous libraries to help.

</comment><comment><USER12> Appreciate the in-depth description. Look forward to working through this in detail.</comment>


BASH autocomplete for SSH - <AUTHOR> http://b.sricola.com/post/16174981053/bash-autocomplete-for-ssh <comment><USER2> Two more places to extract hostnames for ssh auto completion are .ssh/known_hosts and the .ssh/config.

Or give zsh a try, simply autoload compinit and it will do ssh/sftp auto completions along with a boatload more out of the box.

<comment><USER3> I usually set up my SSH autocompletes to read from known_hosts. The problem is that on some systems, like say Debian, the hostnames are hashed for security reasons. So you have to add the following line to your .ssh/config to get the hostnames back into a readable form.

        HashKnownHosts no

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Zsh.

It absolutely mystifies me when people get all excited about trivial enhancements to Bash, when Zsh has had those features for a decade.

<comment><USER5> Bash has had this for ages too. Debian comes with it in the "bash-completion" package, for example. People get all excited about trivial enhancements for Bash for the same reasons they don't know about Zsh: The pain isn't great enough for them to actively seek out alternatives.

<comment><USER6> So why aren't they on by default? Why is the latest Ubunbtu (styled as a user friendly Linux not a purist Linux) still making the clueless "HUH?" noise at me during tab completion because it doesn't have completion-ignore-case on by default? Or automatically showing a list of clashes or cycling through clashes instead of sitting there like a lemon? Both also one line of config somewhere.

<comment><USER5> Because not enough people care enough to push hard enough for it to change - presumably most of the people who do care don't find having to do apt-get install bash-completion onerous enough to matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On the flip side a similar script to use a similar technique in .profile to strip out all SSH lines in your history would be a good security measure. That account gets compromised and you wouldn't have a road map of other hosts to connect to. Could remove known_hosts on systems that don't hash the hostnames too. Maybe I really am turning into a grumpy Sa if these are my first thoughts on reading things like this.

<comment><USER8> HISTIGNORE=ssh

It won't strip existing lines, but will prevent them from being recorded in the future.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, should be

        HISTIGNORE=ssh*

(the pattern has to match the entire line.)

Like many shell variables, this one is a colon-separated list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been using this trick for a while. It is annoying in two ways: first, it includes misspelled hosts. Second, it does not work for scp and sftp. Otherwise, it may save you time.

<comment><USER10> > it does not work for scp and sftp

The .ssh/config tip does work though. I'd rather have them there anyway since I can give the host an alias.

      Host myproxy
      HostName xxxxxxx.xxx
      User xxxx
      Port xxxx

and ssh will autocomplete on my<Tab>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> bash_completion does this for most systems. Its also available in mac ports

<comment><USER12> Also, `brew install bash-completion` with Homebrew.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Remote host path completion when scp'ing or rsync'ing would be great

<comment><USER13> Actually 'ssh shared connections' does the trick and enables that feature

<comment><USER13> [http://blogs.perl.org/users/smylers/2011/08/ssh- productivity...](http://blogs.perl.org/users/smylers/2011/08/ssh-productivity- tips.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> you can also use ctrl+R

<comment><USER15> You'd be surprised how little some people know about bash ctrl commands.

<comment><USER16> Honestly, simply reading `man bash` from start to finish was one of the best things I ever did. I started doing it with all sorts of stuff. May I suggest you start with `man man`?

Then someone told me about `apropos` which is summarized in it's man page as "search the whatis database for strings". Sooo useful. Not nearly as useful as simply reading man pages from start to finish, but I've only got so much spare time.

<comment><USER17> Reading `man` is the kind of thing you understand after years of hitting hard walls. Even now I still despise it even though I know most of the answers are in it. I think I want something less linear to search into, oh and I'm surely a lazy P*S too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> complete -W "$(awk '/^#|^ _$/{next}{print tolower($2)}' /etc/hosts) $(awk '/ ^#|^_ $/{next}{gsub(/,/," ",$1); print $1}' $HOME/.ssh/known_hosts)" ssh telnet ping</comment>


The Man Who Studies the Spread of Ignorance - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance?ocid=fbfut&utm_content=buffered2c3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> This is a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856554](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856554).

(Yes, we're working on a better dupe detector.)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for working on dupe detection.

Dupes of 'reaction' and/or controversial news posts have been pretty common lately. Ex 'Dear GitHub' 'Dear Dear GitHub'.

One pattern I've noticed is there's almost always a comment with a link to the previous post.

A shortcut solution could be to encourage users to use a common convention. Ex 'Dupe: [link-to-dupe]'. That way it would be especially easy to pattern match and list dupes for moderation.

To prevent dupe creation to begin with might involve some creativity. Such as checking the post link against existing links and notifying the user of an existing post. Similar to what Stack Overflow's 'related posts' listing in the question creation page.

<comment><USER2> Follow-up posts like the example you mention aren't strictly dupes. Some of them are good submissions in their own right, others (probably most) are a bit lame.

A similar category that's a lot more problematic for HN is the spate of me-too stories that inevitably pop up as every website in the business publishes its copycat article about story Foo. Again, those aren't not strictly dupes, but morally they are.

> A shortcut solution could be to encourage users to use a common convention

Too much like cat herding to succeed. But some kind of software support for reporting dupes is on the agenda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I confess I am ignorant about how this second submission of an article recently discussed here[1] got through the duplicate submission filter. I do enjoy the article, as it illustrates a point I have often observed as a teacher: learners don't start out with blank slates in their minds, but often have all kinds of preexisting misconceptions that have to be actively undone in any educational process.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856554](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856554)

<comment><AUTHOR> I found the reason, I found the article on LinkedIn, if you compare both links you'll see that mine is different because linkedIn added some stuff at the end of the url.

<comment><USER5> Of course, but that doesn't make checking _before_ submitting difficult at all: bottom search box, enter a relevant keyword (e.g. "ignorance"), then sort by date. You'd see that it was posted twice before with the first getting 104 comments.

      linkedIn added some stuff at the end of the url

Yes, many sites (e.g. medium, signalvnoise) add phony fragment identifiers to URLs now; I can't think of a reason to do so other than to _evade_ dupe detection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recently read a statistics books by Charles Wheelman in which he covers the topic of using statistics to manipulate facts. I have always taken statistical facts with a grain of salt, but when you understand the methods of manipulation and then review papers debating climate change for example, its mind blowing to see the manipulation of facts...by both sides of the argument.

<comment><USER7> Any pointers to good examples on both sides for the less knowledgeable (me)? Something I assume is happening in any argument, but I'd love to see exactly what you're talking about.

<comment><USER6> Naked Statistics is the book I read a while back on the topic. There are two particularly interesting chapters, one on Descriptive Description and one on Statistical biases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is one of my favorites: 'Microwave Ovens Cause Cancer':

[http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/why-you- sh...](http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/why-you-should-never- microwave-your-food/)

I mean, look at all the acronyms after this doctor's name. Clearly he is expert. And his argument seems plausible to anyone who has not studied physics.

Here's another one that is not quite as clear-cut: 'Anti-perspirants Cause Cancer'.

[http://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and- treatments/features/a...](http://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and- treatments/features/antiperspirant-facts-safety?page=2)

""There is no convincing evidence that antiperspirant or deodorant use increases cancer risk," Ted S. Gansler, MD, MBA, director of medical content for the American Cancer Society"

Ah. Good. The American Cancer Society says anti-perspirants don't cause cancer. To be safe, let's check one more...

"Because studies of antiperspirants and deodorants and breast cancer have provided conflicting results, additional research is needed to investigate this relationship and other factors that may be involved."

[http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes- prevention/risk/my...](http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes- prevention/risk/myths/antiperspirants-fact-sheet)

oh... but a US government site says it is unclear. Better dig a little more...

"Clinical studies ... provide supporting evidence for a role for locally applied cosmetic chemicals in the development of breast cancer."

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16045991](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16045991)

Shit. The NIH says it does?

Better check Snopes before throwing away the Right Guard...

[http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/antiperspirant.asp](http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/antiperspirant.asp)

FALSE. 'Nuff said.

/s/

<comment><USER9> Your analysis of antiperspirants and cancer is completely wrong, and you've likely fooled several people because you claim to have analyzed it correctly. The fourth link isn't the NIH's official position — it's just a paper hosted on an NIH paper-hosting service (PubMed). The Snopes link doesn't say that antiperspirants don't cause cancer — it merely states that they aren't the _leading_ cause of _breast_ cancer. The real takeaway is that the studies are inconclusive and more research is needed before you can state that they are or are not carcinogenic with any degree of confidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Trump is a very good example of his hypothesis on the Republican side but he left an impression of bias by not balancing that with an example from the other side of which there are also plenty.

<comment><USER11> I see Trump's rhetoric as so detached from reality, that I can't think of any current, relevant people on "the other side" that would come close. Who do you have in mind, exactly?

<comment><USER12> Seriously? You can't think of one person on the Democratic side who is "suggesting easy solutions to followers that are either unworkable or unconstitutional"?

<comment><USER13> Yeah, seriously. Please tell us all who you are conflating with the outright stupidity, jingoism, and racism that is Trump.

<comment><USER14> Rightfully, Hillary and Sanders

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

<comment><USER15> This is just manipulation of decent people. You can always get some percentage of people to agree with something you've propositioned with a camera and mic in their face and when they don't really understand what you mean (and then edit out all the people that didn't). Basic psychology phenom.

Repealing the bill of rights is obviously not something Clinton or Sanders have ever proposed and certainly have not been screaming it on national television like Trump

This is absurdity of the tribe of Alex Jones

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it really ironic that he feels the need to make contentless jabs at current political candidates in an effort to show how those candidates "spread ignorance".

<comment><USER17> Is your concern that there are an unnecessarily large number of references to political candidates, or that there are references at all? While I am tired of the constant jockeying for position and tribalism of politics, I also wonder what would have been said of the most horrific leaders of the past during their rise to power. Without totally diverting this discussion or fulfilling Godwin's Law, there is a genuine fear among some US citizens that certain candidates could be horrific in this manner.

<comment><USER18> As a someone outside the US, his policies would likely make more difference to us than US citizens. And we don't get a vote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting read, but not very much information underneath the fluff -- the definition of "demagogue" combined with a cursory knowledge of common logical fallacies covers pretty much everything here. It's also interesting that an article like this is being published by an organization like the BBC; punditry is (I think) one of the most common examples of the phenomenon of obfuscation through constructed debate.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looking at the dozens of "chewing gum for the mind" links surrounding the story, before I even read the article I wonder:

1) Is it possible to have real content on a clickbait site? Is this story, any story, worth an exception on the "no platform for clickbait" standard?

2) When did the BBC go full on tabloid clickbait? And on the tech side of clickbait, Ghostery only blocked ten trackers, and of course I block flash. BBC had (had!) an amazing reputation, but that was the BBC worldwide shortwave service in 1975, etc, but this is an internet clickbait site in 2016... what in the world happened?</comment>


Taiwan sets gold standard on epidemic response to keep infection rates low - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/06/taiwan-sets-gold-standard-epidemic-response-keep-infection-rates/ <comment><USER2> It should be noted that the cases of Coronavirus in mainland China are mostly in Wuhan/Hubei.

Most provinces have recorded less than 1000 confirmed cases and have fared better than the current situation of European countries, for example.

Taiwan is in range and did fare very well compared to its population.

For reference, the WHO COVID-19 dashboard also lists the number of cases by Chinese provinces, which includes Taiwan because of UN formal position.</comment>


The last velvet merchant of Venice - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/gallery/20181113-the-last-velvet-merchant-of-venice <comment><USER3> Note the specific date is 1499, so only just 1400s!

Nearly as good are Balsons Butchers in Bridport, UK who have been operating since 1515.

[http://rjbalson.co.uk/](http://rjbalson.co.uk/)

<comment><USER4> I'm in Bridport at least twice a year and I _still_ haven't paid a visit yet. Will have to rectify that next time and get myself a string of sausages - <USER2> possibly a dog to run off with them down the street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why I love my Country. Italy I love you :-)

<comment><USER6> I'm Italian, too, and of course I love Italy so much.

It hurts to see how Italy's current decline is ruining so many beautiful things that bright, smart and hard-working people have built over the course of many centuries.

<comment><USER7> Can you speak of this a little more? I have a number of Italian expat friends, but their complaints about Italy's decline are all over the map.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Weavers begin by hand-drawing the design on a millimetre grid. Every half- millimetre of the grid represents a cardboard Jacquard card that is punched through with a hammer, and every punched hole in the cards corresponds to a thread. If a design has a repeat of 1.5m, it requires 3,000 cards. After weavers tie the cards together one by one and hoist them atop the loom, the real work begins._

Did any other industry use cards in this way prior to the punched card era of computers?

<comment><USER9> The Jacquard loom is what started [1] the punched card era. Check out this episode [2] of the podcast 99 Percent Invisible for an accessible explanation.

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

[2] [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/kids-clothes- articles...](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/kids-clothes-articles-of- interest-1/transcript/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hat's off to the weavers, seems like they have infinitely larger intention- span than me.

</comment><comment><USER11> The end of the article has me confused, they say modern machines can't match these old ones. But then say most of their ancient designs are now done on the mainland with modern machines.

Which is it?

</comment><comment><USER12> Argh, such attempt at fancy presentation, but so annoying in practice, why overlay text on top of beautiful pictures and be so slow to nagivate?!

</comment><comment><USER13> Article seems fascinating. Format seems (is) unbearable.

<comment><USER14> Textbook example of form over function</comment></comment>


Turn any application that uses STDIN/STDOUT into an IRC bot - <AUTHOR> https://gitorious.org/irctk/

<comment><AUTHOR> The README file has many example of usage. See [https://gitorious.org/irctk/irctk/source/HEAD:README](https://gitorious.org/irctk/irctk/source/HEAD:README)</comment>


Show HN: Conway's Game of Life in Javascript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rrhvella/js-conways-game-of-life

<comment><USER2> The first thing I check on any Life simulation is how they handle the edges. There are three easy ways: edges wrap, just off screen is permanently dead, and just off screen is permanently alive. This sim uses wrap. That's how I've always done it too.

The real way is to allow for an arbitrarily large grid off s screen. In fact, a true implementation _requires_ that. But I can see how you might overload the machine pretty quick when you're implementing in Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER3> The ability to place pre-defined patterns with a mouse click is pretty neat. I haven't seen many of these patterns, and have no idea what they're called.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I actually took all of the patterns from the wikipedia page. You can find the patterns and their names in the article: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conways_Game_of_Life#Examples_o...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conways_Game_of_Life#Examples_of_patterns)

<comment><USER3> I don't understand the five on the right hand side, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> The fifth one from the right is a spaceship and works the same way as a glider does -- it moves to the right, instead of diagonally.

The last four are Methuselahs. They take a very long time to stabilise, and their subsequent generations tend to cover a large area: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_(cellular_automata)></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"The Interview" Now Available on Google Play and YouTube Movies - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-interview-now-available-on-google.html <comment><USER2> (Applause)

I wonder if Netflix was considered, or if the lack of PPV revenue disqualified the most popular streaming service in the country.

<comment><USER3> Scuttlebutt is they're still in talks with them.

What's really weird to me is that it isn't on iTunes.

<comment><USER4> [http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/12/24/sony-wanted-the- in...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/12/24/sony-wanted-the-interview-on- itunes-for-christmas-but-apple-rejected-fast-timetable)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> and what a mistake it is to only release it in the US... lets keep building walls on the internet... sigh

<comment><USER6> I'm in Canada right now and was puzzled why I couldn't find it. Shesh ... this sucks.

<comment><USER5> It's the same story every time. If Sony doesn't want my money I'll be more than happy to continue paying my private BT tracker to watch it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome! Although I am not currently in the US, I am able to watch the movie. Perhaps maybe because my account was previously established in the US.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. I guess YT and Google Play don't geolocate the IP each time. Every other video streaming provider I've checked denied me on my recent trip to Europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The post also mentions seetheinterview.com and xbox videos, perhaps the title can be amended to add those?

</comment><comment><USER10> seetheinterview.com redirects to kernel.com for me--is that intentional?

<comment><USER3> Blank here. Looks like it's going through the motions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So made a huge mistake limiting this to the US.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it possible that this whole thing has been a publicity stunt by Sony?

Fake a threat, pretend to withdraw the film, wait for public uproar, release on a pay per view platform to massive sales.

Before the story broke I didn't know anything about this film.

Real case of cyberwar? Or PR master stroke?

<comment><USER13> Don't know why you're being downvoted, it really feels that way to me as well. Lot of people with _strong opinions_ must not appreciate that they've been played.

<comment><USER14> Think about it: Sony _intentionally leaked_ its own employee records and emails just to boost publicity of a movie that's bound to be popular on its own right. How plausible is that theory?

The hack was in all likelihood real, (but probably not North Korean). Sony made the best of a bad situation.

<comment><USER13> I don't think the hack was fake, I think that pulling the interview smells highly contrived. Just to be clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Flagged.

Seriously, this is a publicity stunt (this article at least).

This is _literally_ a non-tech consumer product advertisement being put on the front page of Hacker News. It should be treated as such.

<comment><AUTHOR> While I kind of understand - at the same time I don't see it violating the Guidelines.

Though it admittedly skirts the line between on-topic and off-topic

<comment><USER15> The "new" section is literally full of "Go check out the Interview here!" links.

Links which contain nothing more than "Here's where you can watch the Interview". A film nobody cared about, seemingly, until the alleged NK hack. And the look at how fast some of the upvotes have happened on those stories.

At the very least, we should be treating and flagging these things the same way we do any other stupid "Buy our product" submissions that creep onto the new section.

EDIT:

And so many downvotes today for questioning the obvious. Thanks folks!</comment></comment></comment>