Google App Engine and Cloud Datastore Outages - <AUTHOR> https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/appengine/19013 <comment><USER2> Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. We're currently investigating this incident and hope to have it resolved soon. Check the status dashboard for more information ([https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- datastore/190...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- datastore/19006)), and I'll try to answer questions on this thread when I'm off mobile this morning.

<comment><USER3> So I should be expecting Cloud Storage to not be working right now?

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately yes. Most products are currently affected and may experience partially degraded service. See [https://status.cloud.google.com/](https://status.cloud.google.com/) for the full impact matrix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://status.cloud.google.com/summary](https://status.cloud.google.com/summary)

Google App Engine seems to be a very fragile service. From Sept. 2019 It's going down every month. 10 hour+ outage in July, Sept. and Oct.

For the premium they charge for App Engine, one would expect the service to be more reliable.

<comment><USER5> Google App Engine doesn't have many users, and isn't a focus for future engineering effort.

Either people need to start using it for serious projects (rather than just demo guestbook projects), or it'll be shut down in a future round of closures.

<comment><USER2> This is fundamentally incorrect. GAE has many users and is actively being developed.

<comment><USER6> Would you choose GAE or GKE for a new project?

<comment><USER2> That's a big question :). I don't think they're mutually exclusive. GKE provides more flexibility but requires more configuration. GAE is less flexible but more "serverless". GKE is probably more expensive for a single app, so I'd probably pick GAE for a single app. For a _project_, I'd have to understand more about what I'm building and what I need.

I'd also probably use Cloud Run over GAE, but that's a personal preference because I've been working closely with that product lately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Our app is down. I can't even access any pages in Google Cloud Console. Timing out. Sometimes it completes showing all our clusters gone, then a timeout error. This is brutal. This isn't just GKE either...

Edit: Things are working for us now

Edit: Still getting timeouts and service unavailable

Edit: I'm getting 503 (service unavailable) from buckets, but nothing on the status page indicating there's any issue.

Edit: Seems our Cloud SQL instance was restarted as well

Edit: Multiple restarts of our production database

Edit: Dashboard finally updated to reflect growing # of services effected

Edit: This wasn't an "App Engine" incident. It was a very wide-ranging incident. Just change the title to "Google Cloud Incident" and be done with it

Edit: Things have seemed to stabilize for us

Was supposed to have today off with my family (Remembrance Day in Canada), but now I have to deal with support issues all day. Thanks Google!

<comment><USER3> I have been fucking with this all morning thinking it was something we did (we actually were changing some permissions last night / today), how about an email? There was no push of this info, I shouldn't have to opt in to that.

<comment><USER8> (Google Customer, not Employee)

We have two slack channels here. One is where our internal monitoring agents post, as well as an RSS subscription to the GCP status board. We have a separate channel for less critical things (like GitHub).

Unfortunately, it does depend on GCP updating their dashboard. However, to date, we've only been impacted by one of these major outages. This morning, I saw the alert in our channel, but all our things were still operating (fortunately!).

YMMV, but I've found this very helpful.

<comment><USER2> FWIW, we're exploring ways to make this better. We know it's a point of pain for customers. One of the challenges is that the "project owner" isn't always the right person to receive these kinds of alerts, since often that's someone in the finance department or central IT team. There are a few ideas being thrown around about more proactive notification right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ouch when something as basic as this fails:

11:17 $ gcloud container clusters list WARNING: The following zones did not respond: us-east1, us-east1-b, us-east1-d, us-east1-c, us-east1-a. List results may be incomplete.

GCP Web Console is also really struggling - e.g. the homepage for our view of 'Cloud Functions' spins for a minute and tells the API is not enabled (it sure is).

Ah there it is... [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- datastore/190...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- datastore/19006)

</comment><comment><USER10> One of our GKE clusters suddenly went missing today (from the console as well as kubectl) and we were scared for some time, panicking how the cluster got deleted.

Google should have put up some kind of alert dialog in the console, saying that some services are experiencing a downtime of some kind.

<comment><USER3> or how about an email? I've been trying to solve a non-existent problem for a few hours before seeing this on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm also seeing issues with GCE and GCS. Getting permissions errors and timeouts.

GKE cluster API endpoints have high error rates or timeouts too.

"Multiple services reporting issues" on [https://status.cloud.google.com/](https://status.cloud.google.com/) now. Can we update the title?

</comment><comment><USER12> This is pretty bad - on a regional cluster:

$ kubectl get nodes The connection to the server XXX was refused - did you specify the right host or port?

BigTable is also not responding for some time now.

EDIT: This is us-east1. Responding again now.

<comment><USER13> What region is this? GCP Console doesn't function properly (api errors) but kubectl and all apps work. (europe-north1)

<comment><USER12> us-east1. Our cluster in europe-west1 seems unaffected.

<comment><USER2> Correct, this outages is affecting a few (but not all) regions.

<comment><USER14> Will Google please consider explaining to us why we continue to experience multi-region failures and what will be done so that we can build reliable systems on top of GCP?

I have been taught by AWS that we should expect occasional cross-AZ failures and almost no cross-region failures. This does not appear to be the case at GCP. I would like to have GCP as a cloud option - some of your tech is very impressive - but I have no idea how to design infrastructure on GCP so that I can be confident it won't fail due to a GCP problem that I cannot fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Aside from GKE, the chat.google.com and calendar.google.com are acting weird, with hangouts.google.com working just fine here. What's also interesting, the GCP Dashboard shows this issue being few days long now.

EDIT: now the dashboard shows multiple services having issues, across the board.

<comment><USER15> youtube has had some issues too for a dozen so minutes, seems fine now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately I feel like google has one of these every 6 months, I really hope they resolve it. I've been an app engine user since 2008 and there are many mission-critical apps that are heavily impacted by any downtime. It usually ends up being networking configuration on their end in the US East region? A strange repeating pattern.

<comment><USER17> If the Google pattern holds they will decide that users are the problem because they are using GCP incorrectly and then start cutting the support budget to show how much contempt they have for all these misbehaving users and then eventually cancel the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't tell if it's coincidence but I've had all of our GCE pull-queues failing with "transient failures" for pretty much the entire time GKE has been reporting this issue.

Have they only _just_realised_ this is affecting GCE after all this time or has it only _just_started_ to affect GCE?

<comment><USER2> GKE runs on GCE. It's affecting both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> [edit] Incident logged on GAE [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/appengine/19013](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/appengine/19013)

Our Google App Engine Flex app is not working (. We are just getting 502 error. Locally Everything is working fine. But the service is not working. However the instance of the service stays in restarting mode and shows message "This VM is being restarted".

As per this status the issues was supposed to be resolved on 1st Nov: [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/appengine/19012](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/appengine/19012)

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm really waiting for the postmortem. The first services down were networking/datastore, and some minutes later all the others started to fail. My hypothesis is that network failures prevented Paxos, a CP algorithm, to go forward, blocking writes.

<comment><USER21> The root cause for the outage in June was bad configuration in the network control plane: [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud- networking/19009)

<comment><USER14> The real root cause was building redundant systems that share a single point of automated failure, creating a massive blast radius.

> Thirdly, the software initiating maintenance events had a specific bug, > allowing it to deschedule multiple independent software clusters at once, > crucially even if those clusters were in different physical locations

<comment><USER22> The idea of a single root cause is of course fiction in most failures in complex / redundant systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It feels like GCP has not done a very good job of reducing blast radius in its services. Each time there is an outage there are so many downstream Google services affected.

It's unbelievable that this is the second multi-region outage this year.

<comment><USER23> It's a function of dependencies. Things are so complex with so many inter- dependent services that it's not humanly possible to understand the consequences of a single failure, let alone a cascading failure.

This is a really tough problem at scale, and it's made worse by every layer of the stack trying to become smarter, scale further, and still be simpler to manage, by simply "reusing" some other smartness elsewhere in the stack. But surprise, every single one of those moving parts is moving faster and faster, as churn and software fads and a hundred thousand SWEs need something to do. Disrupt!

<comment><USER14> But it is possible and AWS has both proven that and demonstrated strategies that work well. The strong separation of regions (i.e. no automated system that manage multiple regions) is a simple technique that is very effective at reducing blast radius. There are other high availability tricks like shuffle sharding that I assume/hope GCP is already using heavily. AWS also has different tiers of services with different uptime expectations and their Tier 1 services have generally had exceptional uptime whereas the last two major GCP outages seem to have been problems in their Tier 1 services (too early to say for sure on this outage, but the widespread downstream effects make it seem likely that the failure occurred in a foundation-level service).

Although I am loathe to judge technical quality/decisions from the outside, it feels like there might be a deeper problem at play here. AWS does an excellent job of aligning development priorities with business requirements by watching availability metrics religiously (the CEO looks at availability metrics every single week) and having a pager culture where if you built it you maintain it so you're properly incentivized to build fundamentally reliable services/features. My understanding is that GCP relies on the SRE model and I question whether that is as effective as the incentive structure is far more complex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very unlikley GKE is the root cause if Google Calendar is also affected.

Google isn't using GKE internally for much.

<comment><USER2> As reflected on the status dashboard, we believe a primary cause is related to datastore. Our SREs continue to investigate and attempt mitigation.

Also, we do use GKE internally :)

<comment><USER24> For which services? Why aren't you talking more about this?

I'd really like to know what Google is using Kubernetes for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> App Engine Flex, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Networking seem okay in Europe (west-1).

Our app is still up.

</comment><comment><USER26> calendar.google.com is down for Google for Business customers. I am wondering how Google will compensate their paying customers?

<comment><USER27> Is this worldwide? Seeing it okay in Australia.

<comment><USER28> I am in Europe and hosting here and I see failed requests on the calendar API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's days like this I miss having data centers to manage. At least it was my fault the service went down. Nowadays I have to create redundancy across two different cloud providers to keep my business running. Thanks Google!

For the record the price was appealing for us to start moving to GCP, but an outage like this is giving me seines thoughts.

Am I right when I hear my other sys admin friends say GCP is like Gmail back in the day; still in beta?

<comment><USER30> Well it wasn't Google first to introduce, you may want to blame Amazon with AWS. Proper marketing made people believe in benefits of building applications this way and here we are now.

I am scared to think traditional VPS/VDS and leased servers will cease to exist and we all will have to deal with GCP/AWS/Whatever.

Hope this won't happen during my lifetime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I know this is no way related, but there was this other submission which I found excellent, "Taking too much slack out of the rubber band" [0], and it just made me wonder...

[0]:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502292)

</comment><comment><USER32> We are still having issues with Google Cloud print. Anyone still having ongoing issues?

</comment><comment><USER33> Really wonder what it's like being in Google teams when this happens. Must be pretty intense

Also - karma gods reward Google for manifests 3 :p

<comment><USER34> That's why there's SRE and on calls. Well in those big event, there likely will be a war room with hundreds of on-calls checking in either remotely or onsite. There could be an "oncall leader" as well or Speical OP team. Bad days for oncalls.

Honestly SDEs from google are quite lucky since they got SREs to back them. Elsewhere it might go to the dev team directly

EDIT: if you know any big company pays oncalls more, let me know and I'll seriously consider join!

<comment><USER35> > Bad days for oncalls

It sounds snarky, but it's honestly very hard to have sympathy with people who earn what these oncalls earn.

<comment><USER34> Hmm which ones of FAANG pays oncall extra? At least not A.

Oncall normally means common Engineer who's on oncall rotation. You can reimburse the dinner I think at least

<comment><USER2> Google pays on-call engineers extra. Other companies often pay ENOCs in time off. I know a few only compensate IF you're paged off-hours (e.g. paged at 3am, incident resolves at 6am, you get 3 hours of vacation time).

<comment><USER36> > I know a few only compensate IF you're paged off-hours

Yeah, that seems like it would lead to misaligned incentives (as well as under-price the opportunity costs of being on-call).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Hangouts was also affected. Seems ok now. Our business is in Europe.

<comment><USER38> There were problems in MS's infrastructure too about the same time (where I sit it manifested as failures with OneDrive sync and TFS access). Perhaps there was a more general routing or DDoS issue in Europe that affected both (and, if so, presumably many other services)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Analytics was down for around 15-20 mins too it seems.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think my single droplet has better uptime than GAE

</comment><comment><USER41> billing is down, making almost any operations in GCP dasboard fail :|

</comment><comment><USER42> > Incident began at 2019-11-04 11:46

google can't fix something in 7 days

Oh my~

<comment><USER43> This is an unrelated incident.

> Mitigation work is currently underway by our engineering team and is > expected to be complete by Wednesday, 2019-11-13.

The fix/mitigation is being rolled out.

> Workaround: Users seeing this issue can downgrade to a previous release (not > listed in the affected versions above).

There's a workaround for end-users (downgrading to a version which is not affected),

Also:

> the number of projects actually affected is very low.

(disclamer: I'm SRE at Google)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Hmmm, this will be expensive.

I wonder what the 'lost revenue' costs will add up to. Also, I surely hope there aren't any medical/transportation/other critical things depending on this.</comment>


Computational Graphs for Backprop - <AUTHOR> https://shuby.de/blog/scitech/comp_graphs/ <comment><AUTHOR> Short post on using computational graphs to derive update rules for backpropagation, illustrated using a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Questions, feedback, corrections? Do reach out! :)</comment>


List of Discontinued Google Products and Services - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services#Discontinued_products_and_services <comment><USER2> Or can also be seen here:

[https://gcemetery.co/](https://gcemetery.co/)</comment>


Disabling Google Buzz: How to purge your profile - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10451703-2.html

<comment><USER2> So, does this prevent people from following me after I go through these steps? Or will I have to periodically purge everything again?

On a side note, as I was purging my lists today, I found that Picasa had magically been re-added to the list of my shared sites after I explicitly removed it yesterday morning. What is going on here?

<comment><USER3> What seems to be going on is that Google was never trustworthy and is being considerate enough to finally broadcast that fact. Too bad they have 10 years of query data on me tied to my email account. [EDIT: Capitalization and verb congruence]

<comment><USER4> Friends don't let friends browse while logged in to google/gmail.

<comment><USER3> And it's not like they're clever enough to track ip addresses and cookies or anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait...you mean 'Turn Off Buzz', doesn't really turn off Buzz!

Aaarrrgh!

That's the last time I 'try out' a Google product. From now on I test their crap on a junk account that I'll create in GMail.

Thanks a lot Google...

No...not really.

Jack@$$es!

<comment><USER6> In the future, you can simply wait a few days for feedback/reviews. Not that complicated.

<comment><USER7> Actually, I didn't get a choice. On logging into GMail yesterday, it asked me whether I wanted to to try Buzz. I picked 'no' so it went ahead and enabled it anyway. I am _not_ impressed. Now looking at my options for moving away from GMail if they keep messing with it.

<comment><USER8> Don't let the FUD fool you. It's "active" in that you can see other people's buzz posts and you get a buzz item on the left menu, but until you create a public profile none of your information (such as follower/followee lists) has been made public.

For you (and others like you and I who picked 'no'), clicking 'turn off buzz' does seem to actually turn off the service for all intents and purposes. No info is made public. Sure, some people 'auto-follow' me, but only those who already had your email address. No real harm done.

<comment><USER9> It's not FUD. I don't have a Google Profile, but Buzz was automatically activated (even though I clicked the no/cancel/whatever-it-said-because-it- totally-ignored-me-anyway button) when I logged into GMail.

I don't care if it was made public. If I had a profile, and it was made public, that would not have made things better. That would be worse. I should not need to understand the subtle privacy interplay of several different and seemingly unrelated Google products just because I use one of them (Gmail).

<comment><USER8> _I should not need to understand the subtle privacy interplay of several different and seemingly unrelated Google products just because I use one of them (Gmail)._

I entirely agree with this, although I'll point out that IIRC Google Chat did the same thing in terms of modifying gmail but no-one seemed to really object to that. Buzz seems to be different because of the privacy issues, i.e. Google didn't communicate well what would happen (specifically a public profile that included your follower/followee lists) if you clicked "yes". That there's a new link on the left-hand menu can't really be the main issue, is it?

As far as FUD, I'm specifically referring to comments like this:

 _There is absolutely no way to opt out of Buzz._

<http://twitter.com/etherial/status/9023625277>

It IS possible to opt out of Buzz, ~ its just that its counter-intuitive and once you've hit the "Yes" button, somewhat difficult to undo.

<comment><USER10> I've been wondering the same thing: why does it bother me so much that Buzz auto-follows frequently-emailed contacts, but it doesn't bother me that gchat automatically adds frequently-emailed contacts? I think it might be because having contacts added in gchat doesn't mean I'll actually be communicating with them, whereas auto-follow does mean that some communication will take place... I'm not sure though. Also, I guess that having a strictly professional contact's name sitting in my gchat contacts list is different than that person being notified that I'm following them.

<comment><USER11> _why does it bother me so much that Buzz auto-follows frequently-emailed contacts_

Because in combination with the default of having your follow list public, that exposes who you've been emailing to the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a Google fan boy, this pains me to say this. I had to turn it off :( After everyone connected their twitter, blog, google reader feeds it became the same useless jargon as everywhere else. I'll come back around to it after they change things up.

<comment><USER13> Why not just unfollow people who's content you already get elsewhere? What's the obligation to follow?

<comment><USER14> (Maybe) he wants to send a clear message to Google: Buzz is crap.

<comment><USER4> The problem is not that it's crap, but that it's trap.

[ crap = something that just lies there and the reasonably alert can choose to step over ]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This Buzz things gives me some insight what it must feel like to be an average user; I have NFI (still!) what my Buzz status is. Is it on or off? Do I have followers? etc

I'm even more confused as I read more, because it's inconsistent with what I'm seeing, and the reports from other people are inconsistent with each other, making me think there's perhaps some A/B testing going on

[Edit: figured it out. Buzz was enabled for both myself and my wife. I'm pretty cross about this. To me it's a flagrant breach of trust. Imagine what would happen if Apple or Microsoft pulled a stunt like this]

</comment><comment><USER16> One good thing came out of this mess. I went through all the various Google products I've used in the past and deleted as much of me as I could.

</comment><comment><USER17> This whole debacle is completely ridiculous, mainly because it's so confusing. I won't go into all the inconsistencies and weird privacy policy interplay issues that are going on, as others have, but I'll say this:

If I can't pound ten beers in an hour and still understand your privacy policy, it's too complicated.

</comment><comment><USER18> The smart thing to do would be to save off the pages of your followers, grep out the identifiers and then replay the unfollow action through a fuzzer.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't really see what the big deal is.

I'm going to leave it enabled. I'm aware that it's public, and I'll just make sure to treat it as such. It seems unlikely that I'll publish any content other than syndicating my Twitter feed (much like LinkedIn), and all of that information is public already.

My life on the web is open to everyone, and that paradigm isn't going anywhere.

<comment><USER10> _My life on the web is open to everyone, and that paradigm isn't going anywhere._

I think the problem that most people are having is that Google is blurring the line between our lives on the web and our lives in our inboxes. Specifically, it seems that auto-follow is particularly offensive because who we frequently email might not be who we want to include in our social networking sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thank you, I've been looking for that all day. When they work out their privacy issues maybe I'll turn it back on, but for now I'm good.

</comment><comment><USER21> Can anyone confirm that blocking everybody like the article advises can be done, erm, subtly? I'd rather not have my mom, sister, and best friend get a message saying I blocked them. OTOH I am supremely annoyed that suddenly I'm part of Google's dumb social network (I am one of those avoid-Facebook- Myspace-etc.-at-all-costs people.)

</comment><comment> brown9-2 It might not be obvious but I found that even though my profile is not "public", visitors who stumbled upon my Google Profile page could see who I was following / who was following me.

In the Edit Profile section, looks like "Display the list of people I'm following and people following me" is enabled by default.

</comment><comment><USER22> Holy shit. I can't believe Buzz is on for me. I've explicitly declined activating it when asked. Now I'm seeing people following me. WTF, Google, can you take NO for answer?

</comment><comment><USER23> I won't be disconnecting Google Buzz. I think it's great -- it's all the benefits of FriendFeed + all the users of gmail.

</comment><comment><USER24> Silly article, IMHO. Main reason: if you are really caught up in the privacy issue, don't use Google (signed in), Facebook, etc. Also, strongly control what cookies you want to allow.

To me it is a value proposition: what are the advantages of a service vs. disadvantages like privacy issues. I choose to use most of Google's services, occasionally use Facebook, and I am sort-of addicted to following people who I consider to be "thought leaders" on Twitter.

Also, my early take on Buzz: it is OK, but I have an attitude that I don't have to read everything that shows up on my Buzz list. Same as Twitter.

I have also started to sometimes do short tweets on Twitter, and maybe following up with something more detailed on Buzz.

<comment><USER25> It really is ridiculous. Seems Facebook is much worse when it comes to doing things you don't ask it to.

There are two things I see people getting frustrated about with Buzz.

1\. It makes your name public and therefore allows people to search for you.

2\. It's an unnecessary distraction.

If you are bothered by (1), then you are little out of the loop with regards to the state of privacy on the Internet in general. Basically, you need to get used to having your name out there. If you are bothered by (2) then you can turn it off.

<comment><USER26> How about:

1) It is opt-out rather than opt-in.

2) It automatically decides to auto-follow people for you.

3) Many people are complaining about privacy settings not 'sticking' (i.e. disabling things only for the to end up as re-enabled later)

Personally, if I use Gmail as my email client, why am I all of the sudden _forced_ to be a member of Buzz?

The worst part? Google is touting that 'millions of people have signed into Buzz' as some sort of 'See? People like the service!' response to the criticisms. But _THE SERVICE IS OPT-OUT_! So when I sign into Gmail and it prompts me with "Learn more about Buzz/No thanks, go to inbox," _neither of those options disables Buzz._ So Google has forced millions of people to log into Buzz, then used the fact that millions of people have logged into Buzz as validation for forcing them to log into Buzz.

{edit} I don't usually post 'people are excusing X company' crap, but in this case I really feel that people are excusing Google from this behavior. It's the same crap that people rail against Microsoft for: leveraging your current userbase to gain a foothold in another market. What is the difference between forcing all Gmail users to become GoogleBuzz members/users and forcing all Windows users to become Internet Explorer users?

It just seems like there are a lot of people saying, "Hey! I find this interesting, so I'll ignore anything negative associated with it!"

<comment><USER25> You totally disregarded the main points I made.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Bayes Impact is reducing fraud for microfinance nonprofit Zidisha - <AUTHOR> http://www.bayesimpact.org/blog/defending-microfinance-with-data-science.html <comment><USER2> Cool post. I thought this was the most interesting point:

"As an outside agency, we can't (and shouldn't) make this decision for Zidisha. However, it IS our job to inform them well enough to make it. The ROC curve is abstract and hard to interpret for this purpose, so we translated its information into a plot that directly measures the trade-off at every possible threshold value."

So many of the standard techniques in machine learning assume an objective function that's different from what the end-user actually cares about. Good practitioners like Everett know to translate between the algorithm's loss function (e.g., squared error) and the end goal. I'm surprised there's not more research to let ML algorithms optimize the ultimate loss function directly!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm the founder of Zidisha, and I can't thank the Bayes Impact team enough for this project. Like most small nonprofits, we don't have the resources to hire in-house data scientists. Bayes Impact brought data science expertise within our reach for the first time, and they've had a transformative impact on Zidisha.

<comment><USER4> I was really surprised to see that you're actually disintermediating microfinance. Other crowdfunded/donor-choice orgs create profiles after a borrower has received a loan, and pay any loans made to that profile into a pool for future borrowers. I thought this was a scammy but necessary part of the business model until I saw your new loan growth - very exciting development in microfinance.

I'd be curious to see how BI can inform your strategy in areas like market selection, which can be especially crucial in microfinance. Which region should you enter next, and what type of borrower should you focus on first? There's plenty of data out there for analysis, but maybe others' repayment rates for models like lending circles may not correlate too closely with yours.

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting question. Thus far our market selection has been driven more by practical constraints than sophisticated analysis. We've focused on countries that have well-developed electronic payment systems (such as M-PESA in Kenya). We also try to target places where average incomes are low enough that loan amounts that seem small in wealthy countries can have life-changing impact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great job with Bayes Impact and thanks for the interesting post.

"So moving from a 20% fraud reduction to 50% will block about 200 additional fraudulent loans and also 200 honest loans. Is that okay?"

From the accompanying chart it looks more like ~700 additional honest loans blocked?

Any information about which threshold they picked? Looks like a difficult decision for a non-profit, from the chart it looks like about 15% of applications have been fraudsters but model accuracy is obviously limited given the available features.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great overview, and I for one would love to see code snippets interpolated between the outcomes.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a fan of what Bayes Impact, but the article opening seems really naive about what the financial situation is for a pretty big chunk of US residents.

>> _As a Westerner, getting a credit card is only slightly more complicated than tying my shoes. My world is raining with opportunities to borrow money to go to school, open a store, consolidate loans, or buy an iPhone 6._

A little under 10% in the US are without a bank. And the "Underbanked", people have some type of banking but still use Money Orders and stuff like Payday loans, is over 20%. I wouldn't say "Raining with opportunities" lines up too closely with those people.

Like I said, it's great to see what Bayes Impact is trying to help, but just needed to clarify a bit about the US.

[https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/2012_unbankedreport.pdf](https://www.fdic.gov/householdsurvey/2012_unbankedreport.pdf)

Edit: Updated to clarify that this was directed to the tone of the article opening, not the author. I had previously used the word "author" instead of "article"

<comment><AUTHOR> It is true financial access is a problem even in developed countries like the US -- though it is nothing compared to the situation of people in developing countries (and I would say calling the author naive is an unnecessary stretch), you are right in that it's important to raise awareness about the underbanked in the US as well.

You'd be glad to hear we are actually working with other financial institutions in the US like Opportunity Fund that provides microloans to Californians. At Bayes Impact, we have a commitment to building repeatable processes -- the good thing with using data to tackle problems is that it allows us to benefit from economies of scale when working with different actors that are facing similar problems.

<comment><USER7> I didn't mean to come across as saying the author was unaware, partly because I'm positive the author is extremely well versed in the financial industries within the US. I meant to relay that it "seemed" that way from what was written to open that article.

I should have clarified more explicitly that I was discussing the way the article appeared and not trying to make a statement about the authors aptitude or understanding of the US situation. My apologies to the author.</comment></comment></comment>


Github service outage - <AUTHOR> https://status.github.com/#content

<comment><USER3> I posted this as a separate thread but maybe I'll ask here. We're dead in the water due to this latest outage. They seem to hit weekly now. I'm considering switching to another provider today.

How does Bitbucket stack up in terms of reliability? Features are sort of irrelevant compared to recurring downtime.

<comment><USER4> Weekly? My experience must be different. This is definitely the worst one I've noticed in two years of use.. but I think I've maybe noticed issues once every 6-8 months or so. Not weekly.

<comment><USER5> It's closer to weekly than biennial. At GitHub's size, there are minor hiccups that affect a small number of users more often than any one user will see.

My company (<https://circleci.com>) uses GitHub OAuth and checks out code as its core functionality. Believe me, I get emails _every_ time GitHub has an issue for 30 seconds.

<comment> mh- we're currently evaluating CI solutions and I've been meaning to give Circle a look.

Am I overlooking a tour (or just a single screenshot?) on your website?

Based on skimming your docs it seems like this could be a much more approachable solution than your competitors.. and based on the care taken in the designing your website/brand I'm guessing you invested in making a good UI. show it off! :)

edit: before someone suggests 'just sign up for the trial and look' -- as mentioned, Circle's authentication is (understandably) via GitHub -- that means authorizing them to _write to my private repositories_ without seeing anything about the product.

<comment><USER6> Hey mh-, I'm the other founder. You're not overlooking a tour, there isn't one at the moment.

Currently, our UI is boring. We (and most CI services) do a basic list-of- builds UI. I don't think that's good enough, but we've been short staffed until recently due to fund-raising, but now we're finally getting a chance to think about how best to provide the best user experience around that.

The things that are amazing about Circle now are outside the UI. For example, we can auto-parallelize long builds to run in a fraction of the time. Your tests run blazingly fast on our boxes (we've spent months ensuring we're the fastest service by a long way). We do personalized notifications of failures (cause you don't care what your colleague does on his branch). So please don't judge us on how pretty our pictures are :)

FYI: we hate the "write to my private repos" thing too, but with GitHub's permissions model there isn't a better alternative (there are alternatives, they're all bad).

<comment> mh- Hi Paul, thanks for the reply!

I wasn't judging you guys on the 'pictures' at all. :) Was just giving some candid feedback from my experience. I actually signed up write after I wrote that, and was going to post again once I'd had a chance to try it.

I did get to try it briefly and I actually think the UI, while simple, is better than the other (albeit much more complex) solutions I've been looking at.

>FYI: we hate the "write to my private repos" thing too, but with GitHub's permissions model there isn't a better alternative (there are alternatives, they're all bad).

IMO, this would be a big improvement and is doable: let me sign up (still via GitHub auth) without asking for the repo or user scopes. Then have a call-to- action that upgrades the token, as part of the guided welcome into Manage Repos. _[I realize this could hurt your funnel, perhaps offer this path buried in the FAQ somewhere if that's a concern]_

If you pass nothing for the _scope_ param to the GitHub API, that gives you the authentication piece with read-only access to the user's public stuff. Then just add a "Hey, we can only see your public repos by default - <USER2> here [..]" that sends them into the web flow again with the additional scopes, to upgrade your auth token.

Also, while I'm giving unsolicited advice :) - it may be obvious, but letting the user know that when they follow a repo (and just doing this on the first repo they use would be fine) that you're going to add an SSH key would probably be a good addition. Since adding a deploy key sends an email to all admins of the organization, some users might want to give people a heads-up they're trying out Circle.

. . .

Anyway, Circle looks great already and I'm eager to see what other stuff you guys have in store. I'll certainly be using it for some of my projects.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the feedback! There's definitely a lot of ways we can do this, and each has tradeoffs. One tradeoff that came up when we tried to switch to public-only authentication first is that the login button needed to have different scopes - and apparently a lot of people try to sign up via that button.

I agree that we need more warning with the SSH keys. I'll try to figure out where to put that - we used to warn in a previous iteration, but we're moving very quickly and some things get lost sometimes (especially with A/B tests). We're doing a lot of work to provide user education around what they should expect from Circle, so that's definitely a must-have. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> GitHub seems to go down way too often nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER8> Working on a school project with a friend, and we've been unable to push for several hours.

Funny part is, we were configuring his MacBook with his GitHub credentials, and initially thought we had some sort of error uploading his SSH keys. Turns out it was a service outage.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is unfortunate. I realize that it is distributed, but when you're in a major push it really sucks to have to scramble around to setup another host to get working again.

I love their service, but they really need to get their reliability issues figured out.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have bad luck, this happens every time I want to note an idea into a task...</comment>


More than half of 18 to 29-year-olds in the US are living with parents - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/more-than-half-of-18-to-29-year-olds-in-the-us-are-living-with-parents/ar-BB18Khdk?li=BBnb7Kz <comment><USER2> 18 year olds and 29 year olds are worlds apart. Does anyone have these numbers broken down by smaller age groups?

Given that universities are largely online only and dorms are closed, it's not surprising that large numbers of college age students would be moving home. Including them with people in their late 20s muddies the waters.

<comment><USER3> How many 18 year olds graduate from high school and immediately get jobs which allow them to move out on their own? Even though 30% of high school grads don't go to college, I imagine very few of those move out of their parents house until at least a few years later.

<comment><USER4> That's new, though. It used to be that kids got out of high school and moved into their own houses right away. Only about half of the people from my high school class went to college. The other half went out and got jobs as oil field welders or whatever and had bought houses by the age of 20.

I think it's a real problem for our future that there are now lots of adults who have never lived to see a functioning housing market with plentiful supply. Everyone under 30 thinks its normal that you have to save your salary for 25 years to afford a down payment on a home. It isn't.

<comment><USER5> That functioning housing market might have been an anomaly, only lasting a generation or two. Through history it may have been much more common for most people to never be able to afford to own a home.

Anyway, growth is unsustainable: if housing keeps being a good investment for long enough, sooner or later it becomes unaffordable.

I agree it's a real problem, and we may have to get creative looking for solutions.

<comment><USER6> The cost of housing is only closely coupled to the cost of land to the extent you haven't the technology to fit more units on the same lot. The value of land should continue increasing indefinitely as it's a function of local amenity. Who benefits from the value of land is a deep question.

<comment><USER7> > The value of land should continue increasing indefinitely as it's a function > of local amenity.

Decrease in buying population and/or decrease in incomes of the buying population would result in lower prices.

<comment><USER6> High local incomes are an amenity included in the price of land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just to add another data point: I am currently working as a SWE at a large bay area software company and I recently moved home with my parents to a low COL area.

Not everybody is living with their parents due to economic hardship. I _could_ pay rent pretty much anywhere but chose to move in with my parents because I saw an opportunity (from WFH) to spend time with them + my dad is sick. And it's also nice that I'll save about $20-30k a year in living expenses, live in a less dysfunctional region than the Bay Area (though with different problems for sure), and have way more living space. I am pretty happy to not be beholden to the racket that is renting in a hot metro area.

Yes, it's only possible because of Covid, but it's not forced or a negative like these articles can make it seem. Anecdotally I know many other bay area/large metro area software people who have done the same thing.

<comment><USER9> I happily lived with my parents while I worked a tech job from 18-21. I'm almost 40 now, own a house, and am married. I won't "live with" my parents by any real definition, but with more WFH flexibility, I will absolutely be making the 7 hour drive to spend a week with them more often than I was able to before.

My parents are awesome! And you only have so much time with them in this world -- they're in their 70s and 80s and I'm happy to have the flexibility to spend more time with them. I do make sure to get a covid test each time I visit, though. (currently visiting an aunt and uncle out-of-state, after a covid test and a 16 hour drive).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> No problem until kids get married. Till then whats wrong with them staying with the family? They can pay rent (less than the market rate) to parents and manage expenses on their own. Its a total win-win situation. Stop shaming kids or parents who do that.

<comment><USER11> The problem with allowing children at home forever is a lack of forced maturity. Why bother figuring out life as an adult when instead you can continue to live carefree as a child? That is problematic in that it continues to reinforce entitlements and expectations that are associated with dependence and risk aversion without consideration for the costs and consequences therein.

As somebody with a high school senior I am ready for my kid to enter the world. It's not that I want to get rid of her but instead as a responsible parent I want to push in the controlled direction of accepting greater independence and responsibility. In putting that stress upon my child, which was a normal expectation 20 years ago, I am helping my child develop continued maturity well beyond her peers.

<comment><USER12> I don't see kids moving out at 18 and live in dorms become mature. Family is the first classroom for real life. Perhaps there was a time when leaving home meant getting real life experiences, but in this day and age...from school to college to work, everyone is infantalised. Take for example, FAANG employees who expect to be fed, clothed and expect to be 'taken care' of...this generation is a complete failure. We are seeing it plainly during this covid crisis. Absolutely helpless and have burnt bridges with family and community in favour of cubicles. I am disappointed. All my tax dollars and hopes wasted on an infant generation.

<comment><USER13> I've heard American universities do a lot more hand holding than their European counterparts (not sure how this manifests). When I went to uni (and left home) it definitely helped me mature - I had to worry about cleaning, buying groceries, feeding myself, doing laundry, etc.

I also had the freedom of nobody knowing or caring where I went and how late I came home (=greater responsibility for planning my time).

But I understand what you mean - i had a childhood friend who went to a 2 years vocational school after highschool (during which he lived at home) and then enlisted in the army for 4-5 years (in a non-combat technical role). I suspect the army basically takes care of you when you live on base because afterwards he moved back home & I got the feeling he pretty much stayed stuck in a child role for years later (may be complicated by mental health issues).

I think never having had to really be completely responsible for himself held him back.

<comment><USER12> Military breaks one down and the. rebuilds the person acc to specs. Very few people have a self determined life after military service. It is sad.

Many in industry and service sector who are 'company men' and never quit their first job until retirement also face the same problem. Double edged sword.

<comment><USER11> As a military person myself this description does not apply to anyone I have ever met.

<comment><USER12> That makes you an unreliable narrator to opine on it.

<comment><USER11> Then who is a reliable narrator?

<comment><USER12> Someone who has married or has lived with or has employed or is an employee of someone who was in the military etc. AND who hasn't been in the military themselves.

in other words, the objectivity has to come from someone who has been on the receiving end without having been part of the system.

For example: If I am Indian and I have an accent. Whether it's understandable to Americans should be deemed by Americans. Not Indians.

<comment><USER14> Are you arguing that being in the military not only robs one of the ability to live a "self-directed life", but also the ability to even recognize what that is?

<comment><USER12> I am saying that conformity And obeying orders is an essential attribute of military training.

<comment><USER11> That is a false stereotype attributed by people who have no access to the military and no experience with it. In what job do you not follow orders?

If anything I am decidedly (perhaps obcessively) less conformist than most developers I have worked with BECAUSE of my military experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My best friend lived with her parents until she got married. She went to a no- name college and became a teacher. I, along with my parents, spent 5 figures on a prestigious university and PhD, and I now work in Silicon Valley. With the money she saved on room and board she was able to put down a large down payment on a 0.5-acre house with her husband in New England. Meanwhile I am paying 5% interest on a jumbo loan. Who is the dummy here?

<comment><USER16> I spoke to someone who started working in sheet piling when he was 16. This is in the Netherlands, so plenty of that to go around. He stayed with his parents and saved until he could buy a house out of pocket at 25. He was 30, said he was saving to retire at 35. It blew my 'educated' mind.

<comment><USER17> I'm not quite sure how you can save enough money in 9 years (including 2 when you need to go to high school) to save enough money to buy a house out of pocket, even when you assume you don't buy anything for those years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The problem is the previous generation ruined the housing market by building rentals and McMansions. Typical sized families are most happy when they have 2400 - 2600 sq. feet of house, but most apartments on the market are less than 1,300 and most houses on the market are over 3,000.

<comment><USER19> This is a side-effect of the wealth inequity (re: mass closing of small businesses) from almost 30 days ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24126128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24126128)

My sentiment has not changed.

<comment><USER20> I tend to agree, the cultural observations usually gloss over the more impactful economic and geopolitical trends. Human behavior seems to be a reflection of these larger forces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have had this doubt for a very long time and I feel HN is the right place to possibly get some non-defensive / non-trolls response to it.

I am an Indian and here (I'd say most of Asia) we have a very strong culture of staying with parents, living together and everything. I mean unless absolutely required , kids do not live separately.

What are your views on it, as a westerner? Except the financial angle.

<comment><USER22> One thing I noticed when hanging around Indian friends in the past is that a lot of what they described as Indian culture has more to do with where a country is in terms of development. A lot of things they called "Indian" is often just what it was in my country "Norway" during my grand parents generation or earlier.

Staying with parents would be common here too in earlier times. A lot of western individualism grew as society transformed economically and technologically.

As people got a lot fewer children, and children perhaps had to move further for work. Government had to start building out retirement homes as not all old people would have children who could take care of them.

With more prosperity people also often want more independence and over time welfare services get better built out to help both the young and old.

Over time your culture adapts to it. My mom would definitely not want to have me hanging around for long periods of time. But she likes that I bring the family over and stay in weekends and holidays.

I know from Indian friends that you seem way more comfortable about being around a lot of people. As a Norwegian I hate being around too much people for a long time. I need plenty of alone time to feel well.

But it can be too much. This COVID19 pandemic has been hard. I miss people from work. My family. Just walking in a crowded street.

<comment><USER7> > With more prosperity people also often want more independence and over time > welfare services get better built out to help both the young and old.

Yes, people will almost always choose freedom if they can afford it (including parents who can take of themselves). Few would willingly choose to compromise unless they have to, which is shown in data. The super rich Indian kids I know live in flats in big cities by themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> All I want to do is live with my parents in my hometown. That defines success for me. I worked from home for 3.5 years in a previous job and because of Covid I am getting to live with them again for last 6 months.

It could be a cultural thing but I don't think anybody in the world can love me as much as they do (possibly my wife and my sisters). Of course we fight at times but that's just like any other relationship.

I feel pity and anger when I hear of abusive parents here. If you didn't want a kid you shouldn't have had one.

</comment><comment><USER24> Would be more interesting if they broke it down from 18-22 (college age) and 23-29 (working age). Not everyone goes to college but it seems like a lot of this could be explained by kids living at home when their schools shut down in-person classes. The way they present the data it is impossible to tell.

</comment><comment><USER25> _Brent Cohen, executive director of Generation Progress, a research and advocacy center for young people, believes working remotely was the main cause._

 _' For those who were working remotely, this was likely a short-term move so that they weren't alone in their apartments when social distancing measures were put in place,' Cohen said. _

_' But, what was expected by many to last two to four weeks, has now extended for nearly six months.'_

</comment><comment><USER26> I have 5 18-29 year olds living with me. Here's what we've learned.

Few companies will talk to you without a job history. Of those, ~0 will hire you, if you lack average-to-above-average interview talent.

For the vast bulk of entry level jobs, hiring is done via web portal. Once you've applied, you've applied. Try again a year later and they'll tell you that you've already applied[1].

In most of the US, you can't reliably get to work without a vehicle. You can't afford a vehicle (+ $300/mo insurance) without saving up months worth of income.

If you have any physical limitation of any kind, just keep multipling the above difficulties, until you reach your actual reality.

If you have a family member with limitations (eg: mental illness), you probably ought to multiply as well.

[1] This held solid from well before 2010 until a few years ago. I've heard some portals now allow reapplying, eventually. I haven't confirmed that tho.

</comment><comment><USER27> My wife and have two of our children in the early 30s living with us. We're still in the house they were raised in. It's really pretty nice. It's not like we have to "parent" them, and we all know each other about a well as possible.

We're still in the house they grew up in so it's really so familiar that it's not something my wife and I even think as being out of normal. It really doesn't make any sense for them to be paying rent and we've got a pretty sweet setup for hunkering down during this pandemic. We're surrounded by hard core "preppers" here.

But really, it was pretty easy to see this kind of thing coming. It's not like we're in a full blown disaster of epic movie proportions but I think it's fair to say that it's been a lot easier on rural areas and families like where we live than most cities.

We still can't know for sure but things might get tighter before they loosen up and that is when "family" becomes important. It nice to have a "family home" that we can all count on.

<comment><USER28> Until recently normal people in their 30s owned a housing unit and had a family of their own. That this seems difficult today says really bad things about our society and the public policy influencing society. I'd put housing policy at the top of the "bad public policy" list [https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a- fut...](https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-future-in- seattle-do-millennials-have-a-future-in-any-superstar-cities/) but there are other reasonable candidates as well.

<comment><USER27> I agree. From the 80s on the focus on housing has been on "McMansions" and we've ignored how that's really pretty wasteful and silly. We can do a lot better than that.

We've seen a surge in "tiny homes" being designed but still not built at a rate that's made a dent. And what we really need are smaller family homes that are efficient and comfortable.

There are a lot of "Pre-fab" homes here where we live. Those are pretty cost effective but they still don't have the appeal of craftsmen built home.

There are some really cool old homes built out of rock here (Ozark Giraffe House). Most are pretty small by today's standards but they're great starter homes for young couples.

<comment><USER29> I don't think size of homes is the issue. Land is really expensive in the areas that young people need to be in to get jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Apparently this isn't a huge recent change —- it was at 47% of young adults at the same time last year (now it's 52%).

Source: [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact- tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact- tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-live-with-their-parents- for-the-first-time-since-the-great- depression/ft_2020-09-04_livingwithparents_03/)

</comment><comment><USER31> When I got married (me 26, spouse 23) my in laws assumed we would move in with them and had been putting together plans to remodel the house to adapt it. Her brother lived there until he married at 30, his wife with her parents until same. This was Western Europe.

Many of my own relatives in India considered it sad that I had moved out before marriage and that We didn't get a home in the same neighbourhood as my parents after marrying.

These kinds of arrangements would have driven me bananas (and would if me own kid had to do it) but it's pretty common.

</comment><comment><USER32> well, I'm 35, do own my own apartment and I'm living with my parents. I don't know if it's a south american thing but we're a very close with our families over here. specially in this pandemic time it felt very natural to me to be here with them. I do have a room seoarated from the main house, so its quite good

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm ~40 and my wife and three kids are living with my parents. With the pandemic it was very isolated to be by ourselves and we could WFH anywhere so are moving between my parents and my in-laws every few months. Kids are getting lots of grandparent time and lots of unauthorized screen time.

<comment><USER34> In a time where more and more older people are feeling isolated, and kids are cut off as well that's wonderful to give them an opportunity to enjoy spending time with loved ones. Good for you guys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> There is a housing crisis. Birth rates will eventually go down. The real estate market is ready to be disruptet with new walkable cities. Based on modern human centered design on walkability, mixed use for businesses and housibg, bike friendly cities.

<comment><USER36> Birth rates will go up because they are inheritable and because exponential growth always wins. The USA will be Amish.

It's only a change in environment that can knock that down a bit, but exponential growth still wins. Birth control cut the birth rate for most people, but not for all. The resistant sub-populations are still on exponential growth even as the other sub-populations go through a population crash.

It's as certain as math. Exponential growth wins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I couch surfed for a couple summers in college and my wife full on lived in a car for a while before we met. We never thought of moving back in with our parents as an option. heh as soon as my little sister moved out my parents moved into a very small house, there would have been no where to sleep anyway.

(I was born in '76 so sorta gen-x)

</comment><comment><USER38> I know an ex-Google ex-Facebook TechLead who will be nodding approvingly.

</comment><comment><USER39> Why is this surprising? Many colleges are online only or getting there after COVID spikes post re-opening. Those students have nowhere else to go.

</comment><comment><USER40> How are these stats compared to the rest of the developed world? If I'm not mistaken, this is quite normal for Italy and Greece.

</comment><comment><USER41> Serious question. Why does America have a fixation with moving out of your parents home? Why does this headline make it sound like some bad thing. Oh god!

<comment><USER42> Completely honest, naive question. How do you have any type of real sex life living at home and single? I moved out as soon as I graduated college because I had a job four hours away.

<comment><USER34> I think it depends on whether you're living with them because of choice or necessity.

If you're staying with them because of choice and you have a good job, just get a hotel room or go stay at a B&B for the weekend or something.

If you're staying with them because you're broke, you just don't have sex, unless you're the type who can sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo.

<comment><USER43> Does that imply couples are only having a sex a few times a year on special occasions? In American culture that's more of a hallmark of "well into marriage" \- young couples are going at it all the time.

<comment><USER34> I worded it maybe a little weird in retrospect.

The implication was that if you have a decent job and live at home you will generally be able to arrange something because of your access to cash. So you can bankroll whatever solution will work with your s/o or casual encounter.

If you're broke and living at home, it may be more difficult to enter a relationship or have a more casual encounter to begin with, let alone pay for a bunch of hotel rooms or whatever.

So the first person can go at it all the time like you said, but the second person is more limited.

<comment><USER29> > The implication was that if you have a decent job and live at home you will > generally be able to arrange something because of your access to cash. So > you can bankroll whatever solution will work with your s/o or casual > encounter.

I think this answer still implies you're having sex maybe once or twice a month. Hotels aren't cheap and if you're paying for them more than a few times a month, why even live at home?

For many American couples - having sex anywhere from once a week to multiple times a day are all fairly common.

<comment><USER34> This is an interesting question. What is the point at which it's cheaper to get horizontal in hotels (and save money by living with parents) versus renting an apartment? Let's do some back-of-the-envelope.

From this Huffpo article they're throwing out $1,234.43 as the median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in a selection of American cities (kid gloves to begin with - let's tackle SF rent later).

[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/heres-what-an-average- apa_b_1...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/heres-what-an-average- apa_b_10346298)

So what are hotel rooms going to run you? I just grabbed something off of Expedia in SF for Wednesday night. Hotel Abri in Union Square $106. Seems not too sketchy, and not too pricey. If your s/o is a little adventurous there's always $60/night Motel 6 (bedbugs notwithstanding).

So, say you're having sex two nights per week (sure, not all the time, but you're living with your parents so you're going to have to dial that libido back a little bit - listening to them bug you about grandkids should do the trick).

Let's estimate that with tax and everything you're blowing $250/week on hotel rooms. That's $1,000/month.

Honestly you're right on that one. Cheaper to just get an apartment.

But wait! What if you're in SF? Median rent even with the 'rona is $3,280. $3,280/$110 ~ 30x/month.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/01/san-francisco-one-bedroom- re...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/01/san-francisco-one-bedroom-rent-price- drops-11point8percent-in-june-zumper.html)

So, that's motel sex like 30 times per month. If you're under that, it's just money in the bank. So, maybe you and your s/o could think of it as every time you don't have sex you're putting money away for a down payment? I'm sure that won't have any weird long-term repercussions for your relationship.

That's one-sided savings. Say your s/o is pooling cash as well with a similar fixed cost structure. Multiply savings by two.

<comment><USER29> You're only looking at very cheap places though and I'd argue it's not going to be a very exciting lifestyle. Those rates seem a bit low - to me. I'm used to places charging $200+/night in the bay area. I'd hate to have to go through a check-in process and what not just to sleep with someone! I'd not bother. You're also not accounting for the fact that the children are "renting" a room from their parents - not an apartment. So, you need to look up the median cost of a room in SF. It's closer to $1200-2000/month. Back in the not worth living with your parents money.

I think people who live with their parents probably just aren't having much sex unless their respective partners don't live with their parents. And - honestly - that's about what I've heard from people I know who live with their parents. They might get laid but it's not happening at their parent's place much at all.

Btw, there is no cost saving in this equation - the children are merely taking advantage of their parent's wealth. Seems the privileged and celibate will reap some weird financial rewards at some point... at the cost of not getting laid and having a limited set of partners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> All that said it's not that bad 5% increase considering we're in the worst depression since the Great Depression.

</comment><comment><USER45> The government printed massive amounts of money over the last 15 years, which inflated financial assets. Now everyone who is younger cannot afford any of those assets, housing included. The boomers risked the economy in the early 2000s, caused the crash in 2008, and then printed money to save themselves. This has pushed younger generations into what is essentially financial slavery.

<comment><USER46> Hey, whatever you need to tell yourself to feel better. Yet somehow the several generation between you and the boomers managed to make a go of it; how did that happen? I employ a number of these new grads and pay a salary that will more than pay for them to own a home in our market; how is this possible in your alternative universe? Maybe before you throw the word slavery around you should give some thought to what that actually means. HINT: it's a little more harsh than living with your parents.

<comment><USER45> I work as a software engineer at FAANG, I will retire young. Basically anyone who is young that doesnt work as an engineer or didnt go to a top school is completely shut out of decent housing near decent cities.

"Yet somehow the several generation between you and the boomers managed to make a go of it; how did that happen?"

This argument makes zero sense. Was going to make a reply, but forget it

<comment><USER42> There are a lot of "decent cities" where you can afford a decent apartment working making $40K a year. Apartments in the burbs of Atlanta are around $700-$800 a month.

<comment><USER47> The thing is - those wages only give you a meagre living. You cannot enjoy the finer things in life on a 40k salary.

The young people have been advertised to all their lives, and what would be considered luxury goods (like an iphone X) is no longer considered luxury, but a required accessory. What was considered, in the last half-century, a luxury food is no longer considered luxury today. Just having bread and staples isn't enough. And i don't blame them - being bombarded from a young age with advertising and media messages telling you that your life "should" have such and such, is making it harder and harder to live frugally.

<comment><USER42> According to paycheckcity.com. $40K a year in Georgia is a monthly take home of $2666 month single. I happen to know what living expenses are for a young single person because of my older son.

His rent, utilities, car note and car insurance is around $1800 all in. At least until he is 26 and can stay on my insurance.

The median household income in the US is only around $63000.

[https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income- percen...](https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percentiles/)

<comment><USER7> The median US household will never save enough to be able to comfortably retire, nor will they have sufficient savings or insurance to be able to deal with health issues or loss of income.

<comment><USER42> Yet and still millions of ordinary Americans are retired today and living off of mostly social security and not living on the street.

That average is a static snapshot. You would assume that as a person or especially a couple get older, they would move up the income ladder.

<comment><USER45> "Yet and still millions of ordinary Americans are retired today"

The whole point of the conversation is that younger generations will not be like the ones retiring now

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is wrong with this? Multi generational households function better than nuclear families.

Disclosure : I grew up in a multi generational joint family with grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts and cousins.

<comment><USER48> > I grew up in a multi generational joint family with grandparents, parents, > uncles, aunts and cousins.

That sounds miserable, TBH

<comment><USER13> Why, assuming there's enough space for all of them? My grandparents lived 5 minutes walk from my parents when I was a kid & my uncle lived nearby with his family as well.

Altogether 6 adults and 7 kids. It was fine and if we lived in 3 adjacent houses that would have probably only been better IMO.

<comment><USER12> Multi generational family units that are also homesteads will be the future. Probably with robots and hydroponics rather than goats and hand weeding between turnips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Isn't this the norm in Asia and other parts of the world? Why is there such a stigma in the US?

Doesn't it help people save money?

<comment><USER34> It's an American thing.

Our national identity revolves around the idea of liberty and freedom, and we mythologize the self-made person.

See the current debate over firearms. Same deal. Individual liberty versus the good of the group.

It's not rational, but it is who we are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The combination of world class military apartus/nuclear power, not being able to collectively care for each other plus the feeling that parts of the nation are on the brink of a civil war is really keeping my gears grinding.

Compared to pre-Trump times talking to an US citizen feels either like to talking to someone in a delusional cult or like talking to someone who realized the american dream they told themselves existed is utter nonsense with no bearing in reality whatsoever.

<comment><USER51> You seem to be leaving out the group of Americans who worked hard, succeeded, and improved their situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Failure to Launch premiered 6 months before Idiocracy.</comment>


Show HN: My ios game for WC 2014 - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/vn/app/flappy-champion/id885015567?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><USER2> That is a pretty funny spin. I would hope you have a metric in there to show who is the current leader and what team they are on.</comment>


Hong Kong will now be treated the same as mainland China - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53412598 <comment><USER2> I've been to HK several times for business, always had great conversations with people of HK and enjoyed their vigor for life, freedom and resiliency. They fought hard for a year. I would say the same for China as well, except when I asked people about what they feel about not being able to vote, not being able to criticize the government, I always got "That's something that we don't usually discuss." I asked anyways despite of the taboo, for personal curiosity and understanding China. Probably was rude of me, but I never pressed on.

It is even more chilling to look at the timeline of the fall of HK. In one year, HK changed from caution to complete dismantling of the law. It happened in 1 year long slow motion picture of protests, black umbrellas and tear gas dispersions. Surreal. If someone asked me about the future of HK in 2017, I would have said it is going to take 20 years from now, nothing to worry about it. They've got time.

Taiwan should be extremely cautious and start to prepare for defenses, war and stronger alliedship with its neighbors. Before you know, Taiwan will need to surrender to China in 2023.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of last year's protest was this: a government can lose all credibility and social support, and still use law and civil institutions to prop up the hated regime. Isn't this proof that democracy has a huge Achilles' heel?

The way modern democracy works is ultimately easy to corrupt:

\- People's power is only exercised once every few years at election time. Weaknesses: Hacking the election process, stacking the field, disqualification of candidates, using the media to spread disinformation.

\- Power is concentrated at the top. Once the election is stolen, the "representatives" in parliament and chief executive office can carry out bad agendas to pass evil laws and steal national reserves. There is no longer any effective people's power to restrain them.

\- The expression of people's disagreement with the government is normally through free press, arts, civil society interaction, protests, strikes, and petitions. A bad government willing to use police force and ignore international questions can crush dissent.

\- Even when the bad government went too far, like in HK, and caused thousands of political victims, it can hide behind the grand facade of "internal affairs". This is a loincloth that no longer has any effective meaning in today's connected, borderless world.

\- finally, why are the citizens of a bad country not allowed to obtain help from a third country? The UN's mandate is to set up orderly diplomacy between states, but increasing non-state players also need a voice to be heard at the UN.

<comment><USER4> Your points are all well and good, but given HK has never been a proper democracy it's hardly an appropriate example. This mixup, willful or not, makes your post come off really weird in my eyes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Terrifying time to be a Hong Kong resident.

Hopefully they can afford to leave for the UK.

<comment><USER6> Or Australia. Which just announced new visa rules and pathways to residency for Hong Kong people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gotta wonder how this would have played out if they had an equivalent to the 2nd amendment. HK citizens found in possession of a gun without a license (very difficult to get) could be fined HKD$100,000 and imprisoned for up to 14 years[1].

[1] [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-gun-laws-in-Hong- Kong?sha...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-gun-laws-in-Hong-Kong?share=1)

<comment><USER8> I really don't see armed revolt going well in any scenario.

<comment><USER2> Yea it failed spectacularly with Indian independence from the british and Gandhi's way of peaceful protests prevailed to the point where he became a role model for many others (Mandela, MLK, etc). There was an alternative violent mob in India seeking independence from the British which was unsuccessful: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagat_Singh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagat_Singh)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The HN headline for a BBC link excludes the key nation; this is about a change in U.S. trade policy towards Hong Kong:

> US President Donald Trump has signed an order to end preferential economic > treatment for Hong Kong, after China enacted a new security law there.</comment>


Russian Smokejumpers - <AUTHOR> http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/natural-disasters/russian-smokejumpers/#page=1

<comment><USER2> The photo in the article shows a jumper dropping out of an AN-2. That is a very interesting aircraft, as it has a very low stall speed. Here is a video where you can see it fly extremely slow without stalling:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mipf4nqrR74](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mipf4nqrR74)

From the pilot handbook, this gem:

"If the engine quits in instrument conditions (blind flying when you can't see the ground) or at night, the pilot should pull the control column full aft (it won't stall) and keep the wings level. The leading-edge slats will snap out at about 40mph (64km/h), and when the airplane slows to a forward speed of about 25mph [40km/h], the airplane will sink at about a parachute descent rate until the aircraft hits the ground."

[http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/antonov-2-colt](http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/antonov-2-colt)

I've read accounts of people jumping out of the AN-2 at low speeds, without a parachute, and without injury.

<comment><USER3> Alaskan bush planes already have very low stall speeds (contests are impressive, they take off in under the length of the plane itself, and the best pilots barely get any roll landing) but that's a whole new level of crazy.

It's a pretty big plane too.

<comment><USER4> Flying like what you describe generally has a fairly significant headwind component.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm an experienced skydiver, this is the first time I hear about smokejumpers and I am absolutely amazed by what these people do.

Here is a raw footage from a helmet mounted camera of a smokejumper. You can see his entire team jump, then see himself jump, experience the quietness under canopy and realize the technicality of maneuvering such a canopy with many pounds of equipment on you. Really incredible stuff: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz_6cq7dfVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz_6cq7dfVc)

<comment><USER6> Those guys should use big grab toggles, none of that "my rig needs to look small and slick so I make my toggles hard to grab"-stuff.

<comment><USER7> Check these out: [https://www.apexbase.com/accessories/ez-grab- toggles](https://www.apexbase.com/accessories/ez-grab-toggles)

<comment><USER6> Thanks, but I already hav'em :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some times simpler is better ... After it reminds me that life doesn't have the same value in russia.

And as a french thanks they have this kind of abnegation : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidator_%28Chernobyl%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidator_%28Chernobyl%29)

<comment><USER9> > _life doesn 't have the same value in russia_

I was going to comment how this wasn't an accurate statement, but in reflection it actually is. It's not that the powers that be are negligent with dispensing their citizens' lives, it's that people themselves are more willing to risk their lives, both heroically altruistically and sometimes without due need at all. Buckling up is indeed for wussies, but then you do in fact have the acts of extreme heroism like in Chernobyl. It's an interesting cultural trait.

<comment><USER10> Chernobyl wasn't heroism, it was slave labor. The people that were made to work there were gathered all over Soviet Union with no choice in the matter and no knowledge about where they were being taken, what happened, and what dangers they faced.

<comment><USER9> If you say so.

<comment><USER11> We Russians are all about slavery, as everyone knows, yeah! Not even a bit of heroism :)

<comment><USER12> The first response to Chernobyl was heroic. Fire fighters later died from acute radiation poisoning.

But would it really surprise you if the Soviet leaders did as "pilsetnieks" wrote and forced people to get high radiation doses without telling them?

Russia have outstanding traditions in e.g. math, literature, art and engineering. That is not diminished by Russian leaders' traditions of enslaving Russians (and others).

<comment><USER11> Kind thanks, but regardless of who's meant by the "others", I feel obliged to point that our leaders' "Western partners" did quite a stellar job in that department, too.

Speaking of the Ch. episode, while there were definitely criminal decisions involved (local people not being told what exactly happened, and thus exposed to huge risks), what "pilsetnieks" does is spreading "клюква", I believe.

<comment><USER12> > [Western world enslaved countries]

Ah, that is why USA had to build a wall to stop people fleeing to the freedom of East Europe? :-)

Edit: On the other subject -- I can't find much on Wikipedia at all about the construction of the sarcophagus.

<comment><USER11> You would not find any "slaves" to the the east of that wall, still -- but look at the pre-60-ies Africa, for example, that was much closer.

Speaking of the sarcophagus, I'd start looking into the memoirs of both those in charge back then, and those in actual action down there (both kinds of sources will likely be not available in translation though).

<comment><USER12> I am sorry, but your description of East Europe is complete bullshit.

I assume you're Russian? Only Germans seem to learn about their own country's atrocities in school/media. (I'll add Russia to the list of Turkey, Pakistan, Japan, ...)

A brutal dictatorship, as Putin seem to work towards, means that the controlling junta can treat the people as their own property.

As I wrote: If you have to lock people up to stop them from fleeing -- and the guards even shoot on sight! -- it shows the relationship; leaving is theft of valuable property, i.e. a slavery situation.

I have worked in Romania and have read/heard about how the spine of the people were broken and how they were controlled.

For example: There were some German speaking people since the Middle Ages in Transylvania. The adults were sent to Siberia. The broken survivors did get home, years later... Another example: Political prisoners (but at least not "criminals" which had just refused to sign over their land to the Party), were just not going to survive prison.

And so on.

(Pre-60s Africa, during colonialism? Well, that is at least different compared to the usual Soviet argument of blacks in USA. :-) )

<comment><USER11> You're beating the African card, or what? (Then, we could proceed to whether the landlords should own the land in a rural underdeveloped country, whether it really was "the party" it went to, if the Romanian government was responsible for some indeed disgusting things going on there, or their Moscow patrons, whether it is always "from slavery" or rather plain "into better life" people are fleeing across the borders, and to the Transylvanian events)

My best commie cheers from the land of Brutal Dictatorship!

P.S. If your second line is indeed about Hitler regime being on-par (or "better") than the pre- / or post-war Soviet one (despite declared political goals, documented doings, and victim counts), just say so :)

<comment><USER12> Oh please, realize that almost directly it was clear that Soviet divisions wouldn't again "visit" as an answer to democratization in East Europe, the juntas were gone.

And Putin isn't brutal inside the borders, yet. The tendency seems clear. I really wish the best for the Russian people, they if anyone on the planet deserves better after the history. (It is not easy to go democratic for a country with big income from natural resources, see "the oil curse".)

(I didn't compare with the German nazis, I noted that citizens are generally not enlightened about atrocities done by their own country, but I'd guess Soviet did have them beaten in absolute numbers. Number of millions, that is.)

<comment><USER11> That guess would be wrong by a decimal order of magnitude then :)

<comment><USER12> Hardly a factor ten.

Holodomor, the great purge, the red terror, forced resettlements, Gulag... Values between 8 and 61 millions, depending on if the starving are part of that.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_r...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes#Soviet_Union)

<comment><USER11> Now, that (and specifically, 50+ M starved to death by the "regime") is a what I'd call a BS view :)

But merely the count of those executed during the "repressions" era / total count of Soviet civilian losses during WWII is less than 0.1 (and USSR was not the only side that has suffered from Hitler).

<comment><USER12> Bring your claims to the academic authors -- I quoted 8-61 million from the wikipedia page, which quoted the researchers.

The researchers seem to differ in, amongst other points, how much of the hunger was planned.

Quotes from the wikipedia page I referenced, with different researchers:

" _Some historians attempt to make separate estimates for different periods of the Soviet history, with casualties for the Stalinist period varying from 8 to 61 million._ "

" _Several scholars [...] put the death toll at about 20 million._ "

" _no fewer than 15 million deaths_ "

" _Wheatcroft excludes all famine deaths as "purposive deaths," and claims those that do qualify fit more closely the category of "execution" rather than "murder."[4] However, some of the actions of Stalin's regime, not only those during the Holodomor but also Dekulakization and targeted campaigns against particular ethnic groups, can be considered as genocide_"

(About the last quote -- I don't get the difference of execution and murder, when it comes to farmers whose only crime were to have been born.)

<comment><USER12> Addendum to the last paragraph: I think the last researcher thought the ones killed through hunger were more random -- take most food from a population and you don't know exactly _which ones_ will die. With murder, you are more specific. At least, I can't find any other way of reading that.

Again -- argue what your schools taught you (or whatever source you have for your claims) with the researchers on the subject, not with me. (Or go the popular way and claim that Wikipedia and/or all the academic research are in a conspiracy... :-) )

Edit: Anyway, as I wrote, the original point is that you can define living in the Eastern Bloc as slavery. The slave owners did whatever they felt like to anyone -- e.g. if individuals or groups complained about the situation or tried to leave. Torture, murder, genocide and throwing complainers into prison or a mental hospital. See Pussy Riot.

<comment><USER11> That was no more slavery than what was happening in the West in the same time (protesters being fired at, i.e.).

On the last phrase: have you _seen_ Pussy Riot yourself? :) (not even asking if you've ever listened to them -- as no one did)

Regarding school knowledge -- I'll claim that the sources listed on that page are BS w/o even looking (although going one-by-one could by a truly fruitful exercise in myth-debunking, probably) -- you may compare the then population count to the figures you mentioned to get some initial suspicions.

<comment><USER12> >>That was no more slavery than what was happening in the West in the same time

Oh, please... Extraordinary claims need extraordinary support. Post a careful comparison.

We are back to the original point -- people had to be put in prison (with guards that shot people fleeing!) to keep them in. The borders _and_ information were open in the West.

>>have you seen Pussy Riot yourself?

I've seen that in civilized countries, we don't throw people in jail for being blasphemous. (And what in H-ll has artistic quality have to do with that?!)

>> I'll claim that the sources listed on that page are BS w/o even looking

As I guessed: "Or go the popular way and claim that Wikipedia and/or all the academic research are in a conspiracy..."

Well, I have better things to do than argue with people claiming Wikipedia is a conspiracy which misrepresent the present state of research -- without knowing the subject enough to recognize the sources!!

That is a basic test for non serious debaters, sorry.

So bye.

<comment><USER11> >> Extraordinary claims need extraordinary support. Then just do it yourself regarding the "Eastern Europeans _enslaved_ by Soviet leaders" one then! As illegally crossing a border will get you detained or fired at in almost any place now and ever, just as politically-motivated oppression is not a Soviet invention (i. e. McCarthyism, for ex.). Regarding the emigration-preventing regulations, that may be a perfectly understandable brain-drain prevention practice stemming from the difference in income equalities between the blocks (a qualified worker would sometimes earn more than the factory's manager to the East of the curtain, a scientist with a well-established career earned enough, too, but less than his colleague on the other side, most probably, and a humble cleaning lady was a complete different story, I'm sure).

Speaking of _seeing_ PR, and the civilized practice: the folks in question are not "a rock band who dared to say no to the dictator from a Cathedral stage (in music!) and were imprisoned", but rather a group of political hooligans, known initially for a group sex orgy in a museum (and an another alike event, which I'll not describe here), who then performed several rush-into-cathedral- and-start-cursing-and-jumping-around-with-a-guitar (sound to be overlayed later) acts, until finally getting whoever saw this pissed off enough for the freaks to be handled to the police (and then, the infamous trial happened). (coming from your original "See PR" \-- you may indeed go and _see_ the pictures).

Regarding renowned Wikipedia researchers in question -- you don't have to be one to highly doubt their claims: with nearly every family in ex-USSR losing members during what is called The Great Patriotic War here (the total losses are officially > 20 M), both the collective consciousness of the nation, the witnesses still alive, and their families share the memories of the losses' severity. Same applies to the 1936-39 repression era (< 2 M executed being the official figure), the ratio of "official figure" / "perceived impact", most importantly, seeming to be close to that in the case of the War. Now, the events costing 60 M in human lives would have roughly x3 the impact of the War, and still there's nothing like that -- which brings to a conclusion of roughly a 60/20 * 20/2 == 30x hoax!

And don't you dare to say that living here, we "don't know the subject enough" :)

<comment><USER12> >>illegally crossing a border will get you detained or fired at in almost any place now and ever,

 _Leaving_ a border will generally not make soldiers shoot at you from the country you leave.

Being that locked in only happens to slaves and other prisoners.

And I think you know that.

>>Regarding renowned Wikipedia researchers

(I already noted that you learn differently in your schools, like most all other countries with recent atrocities in their history.)

Sorry, if you argue against wikipedia without even looking at research references I can't take you seriously.

I didn't read the rest.

<comment><USER11> >> Leaving a border will generally not make soldiers shoot at you from the country you leave. Is it really so? Which countries can be left safely this way, in view of the border patrols? :)

>> I didn't read the rest. Arguing through not listening may indeed be an effective (albeit a solipsistic) strategy, but not in a public discussion :)

"Your schools covering up recent atrocities!", and Russian leaders historically outperforming the West in enslaving nations -- is that really what you've been taught?

Again, what cover up are we talking of? You very much cannot sell a 60 M dead from famine story to anyone here, due to presence of alive witnesses -- but it obviously flies much better over the curtain and far away. What _is_ taught builds on information declassified during the 90-ies, when "dozens of millions dead" claim was fashionable, but found no supporting ground, to quite a surprise of those insisting on access to relevant documents and their publication.

<comment><USER12> >> Which countries can be left safely this way, in view of the border patrols? :)

You knowingly misrepresent my point. That is the only argument you have left. Sad.:-(

People couldn't leave East Europe freely, unlike the democratic world. (Hell, Romania _charged_ Germany/Israel to let German speaking and Jewish Romanians leave.) And if they tried anyway, they were shot down.

Again -- I stopped reading after the first paragraph. If you hand wave at references with links to real research, you're just not serious.

<comment><USER11> Well, in all seriousness, I cannot see what was misinterpreted; may be not reading after the first paragraph could shed some light? Your real research smells hoax, and one obviously needs to be on the other side of the ocean to not notice that. Continue not reading :)

<comment><USER12> >>Your real research smells hoax

Discuss that on the wikipedia page, by presenting other research.

Oh wait, you don't know any.

Bye.

<comment><USER11> Farewell discovering more shocking (but well-researched) truth on Wikipedia, keep up the good job believing in a cover-up of 50 M deaths from a 200 M population :)

<comment><USER12> Yet another misrepresentation of what I wrote.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372340)

Original link: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_r...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes#Soviet_Union)

<comment><USER11> Subtract 8 from 61 (best combined with trying to force yourself to read what you claim to not have had read above).

Good luck promoting your very own criteria for people being "slaves in a prison country", may be one day the meaning of terms will change enough for your original post (the one on the nations "enslaved" by Russian Leaders) to make sense :)

<comment><USER12> As you know: In my references, most researchers seems to be between 15-20 millions.

My definition of slave:

Someone living with no rule of law. No human rights. E.g. their property and _live_ s can be taken on a whim by their rulers. They are not allowed to leave, or there are violent repercussions.

A typical communist state. And slavery.

What is unique with those criteria?

<comment><USER11> Ok, so we are down from the sensational 60+ M figures to 3-4 times less now, that's progress (still questionable figures though) :)

A "typical" communist state from 50 years may not give its people what a pedantic contemporary person would call a full set of "human rights", but would provide free education, medicine, and so on (not to mention lesser level of violent crimes often), how's that slavery?

[as regarding not being able to leave -- you can make an attempt and force yourself to read above on that -- difference in income equalities, forming a nice "brain drain potential" is a pragmatic reason to constrain emigration, not some mysterious appetite of "party leader" for eating their own people alive]

You know absolutely nothing about communism, so to say :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always have mixed feelings when it comes to Russian "freedom." On one hand it looks like a libertarian's dream where freedom (to not wear a seatbelt...) is plentiful. On the other hand, it also reminds me of this: [http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/19/anarchi...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/19/anarchist- cookbook-author-william-powell-out-of-print)

There's a fine balance between freedom and recklessness but I'm glad Russia has smokejumpers and the like so we can see another way than that of most of the western nations.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for generalizing. I assume everyone in USA owns a shotgun and a trailer?</comment></comment>