Apple adds a tracker blocker to desktop Safari - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/apple-adds-a-tracker-blocker-to-desktop-safari/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like this is more in line with what they did with ApplePay vs traditional credit cards--I.e. They give you randomized IDs each time so the other party can't track you from transaction to transaction. Adds can still appear but they won't know who you are, so it's a direct shot at Google and others looking to give people "targeted" adds based on user behavior. I agree it's an issue that needs addressed. Just because I searched for X two days ago doesn't mean i want to see adverts on X for the next two months.

<comment><USER3> That's actually not how ApplePay works. You get a new randomized credit card number, but only once. Shops can still track you by checking for the number. You can check that yourself by looking at receipts when you pay with ApplePay - each receipt features the same numbers (most receipt only show the last 4 digits, but they are always the same when you pay with ApplePay).

<comment><USER4> Is it a randomized number per card per merchant, or just a randomized number per card?

<comment><USER3> It's a randomized number per original card. Every merchant sees the same number. According to some other poster, if you have several devices (like an iPhone and an Apple Watch), then you get a new number for each device.

So, not only can a single merchant track you, but all merchants can cross- reference the data they have about you and track your whereabouts, purchasing habits etc. They just don't know who you are anymore, because that information is not transmitted. Unless one merchant asks for your email or home address, and this merchant then adds that email to a shared database, at which point we're back to step 1 and the merchants know everything about you.

<comment><USER5> Or you just use any kind of loyalty card/ account when making a payment using apple pay even once. :( I didn't realize it only randomized once and am now disappointed in the way apple marketed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thumbs up for Apple distinguishing themselves by their pro-privacy stance, as opposed to MS, who don't have anything to win by Win10's excessive "telemetry" IMHO.

<comment><USER7> It's also a real shame they're doing this before Mozilla. Mozilla already has Tracking Protection but only for Private Windows.

It's like Mozilla can't even embrace its privacy stance fully.

<comment><USER8> You can enable Tracking Protection in Firefox for normal browsing windows in the settings->privacy tab

<comment><USER9> Does not appear for me. It's only for the private windows.

<comment><USER8> Oh. I am sorry. True, it doesn't appear for normal windows. Anyway, as some other user suggested, visit "about:config" and change the privacy settings there.

<comment><USER10> What key?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's the official blog post explaining the feature in depth: [https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking- prevention...](https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention/)

<comment><USER12> This suggests that Google/Facebook/Twitter will still be able to track you, assuming you use their websites regularly, but advertising companies that don't have pages frequented by the average internet user won't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great, but unfortunately, until Apple ups its browser security game, Safari is a non-starter. On macOS, switching from any other browser to Chrome is in the top 3 things you can do to materially improve your security in ways that actually matter in the real world.

<comment><USER14> Just to add some context, on macOS you can look at the seat-belt policy as a rough analog of for basic sandboxing guarantees, where the fewer exceptions you have the stronger your sandbox is. From that perspective, Chrome's policy has around 1/10th the exceptions of Safari.

* Safari SB policy: [https://trac.webkit.org/browser/webkit/trunk/Source/WebKit2/...](https://trac.webkit.org/browser/webkit/trunk/Source/WebKit2/WebProcess/com.apple.WebProcess.sb.in)

* Chrome SB policy: [https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/renderer/render...](https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/renderer/renderer.sb?q=file:%5C.sb$+package:%5Echromium$&dr)

And of course, that's before we get into more complex forms of isolation that Chrome implements, such as the sandboxed GPU process, or ongoing work into things like network sandboxing, the macOS bootstrap sandbox, and site isolation (origin-bound renderer sandboxing).

<comment><USER15> The question is a bit complex than a simple reading of these files. Mac OS sandboxing allows dynamic extension of the sandbox, which would not be reflected in the profile (I'd bet Safari does more of this than Blink though). Also, as you mentioned, it's relevant to look at what's factored into separate processes, and how those processes are sandboxed. Safari's Network process has been networked since 2013, so I don't think you can count Chrome's ongoing work to do so as a Chrome advantage.

If you add these things up, the difference in practical effectiveness is not as wide as one might think.

<comment><USER14> I don't keep up too much on Safari these days, so congrats on moving the network stack out of the content process. But looking at the current WebProcess seat-belt policy and what gets initialized, it looks like there's still far too much attack surface relative to Chrome. Things like audio/video capture and other permissioned Web APIs appear to be permitted directly inside the sandbox. And the GPU attack surface alone is a giant vector for escape-- plus all the other potential escape vectors posed by that very long list of mach services.

So yeah, the seat belt policies alone aren't determinative, which is why I called them "a rough analog". And it's hard to say what gets pulled in through warmup (which is why we'll be eliminating it with our v2 bootstrap sandbox). Accepting that, it's pretty clear that there's just dramatically less attack surface exposed from inside Chrome's sandbox versus Safari's.

<comment><USER15> The network stack has been out of the content process for a super long time, it is not a new thing. (Ironically, Chrome engineers argued strenuously against doing it when we first started).

You're right that separate GPU process is a huge advantage for Chrome. Kudos on that, and we'll likely have to move in the same direction sooner or later.

Audio/video capture is temporary and not in currently shipping Safari. It was just the simplest path to getting WebRTC up and running. We plan to fix it before we ship. I agree with you that it's risky attack surface.

Also agree with you that we expose more mach services and for lots of them it would be better not to expose them. A tradeoff here is that Chrome (as I understand it) provides most of those facilities via brokers that are often not sandboxed themselves. It used to be many of those things were just done by the application process.

I suspect over time we'll see our respective sandbox models become more similar over time, especially on macOS.

<comment><USER14> > The network stack has been out of the content process for a super long time, > it is not a new thing.

FWIW, Chrome's network stack doesn't live in the content process either. It's not currently sandboxed, but it's in a process that has no scripting runtime or other dynamic content, so it's still pretty high bar for exploit. The exact reasons for the current situation have to do with some legacy Windows support that has since been removed, which is why the sandboxing work is now moving forward. So, I definitely appreciate your situation with adding some sandbox exceptions for WebRTC.

> I suspect over time we'll see our respective sandbox models become more > similar over time, especially on macOS.

Fair. But I will say that Chrome being cross-platform tends to naturally push us in the direction of eliminating sandbox attack surface. Our supported platforms just differ so much that it's easiest to lock down the OS as much as possible and implement narrower, origin-bound capability brokers inside Chrome. If I were more tightly bound to a given OS implementation, I expect I'd have a lot more fights about sandboxing, because it's easier for devs to just standardize on what the OS gives you.

<comment><USER15> It does seem like being cross-platform makes it more natural for Chrome to lock down the content process very tightly, and provides a strong incentive to do so. On the other hand, it may make it more difficult or less natural to lock down some of the other processes.

On our end, it's natural to sandbox every new process we introduce, but also easy to fudge what is allowed in sandbox profiles. Sometimes we have a choice of accessing a service through a separate process, or working to make sure that service itself is more secure (sandboxed itself, offers thinner and properly validated IPC interface, etc). In many cases, the real right choice may be to do both. As well as fuzzing the heck out of every IPC boundary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >"It's not about blocking ads, the web behaves as it always did, but your privacy is protected," he added.

Does this mean browser fingerprint is somehow scrambled before it is sent to the tracker instead of blocking?

<comment><USER17> > Does this mean browser fingerprint is somehow scrambled before it is sent to > the tracker instead of blocking?

It might be homogenized instead of scrambled. Every iOS device could be given (barring IP etc.) the same fingerprint.

<comment><USER18> I don't think that's even theoretically possible. How do you block JS font enumeration without crippling the browser font API?

<comment><USER19> Offer the same basic set to every site. Why does a website need to know the fonts you've installed?

<comment><USER20> No user installed fonts on iOS. So that's already effectively the case there.

<comment><USER21> You can install fonts on iOS with MDM or configuration profiles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks like this will stop (after 24 hours) some companies from doing an initial redirection to set cookies for tracking purposes... Example:

1\. Search Google for hockey sticks

2\. Click on search result hockeystick.com

3\. hockeystick.com issues a 302 to adcompany.com which then issues a 302 back to hockeystick.com

Why the 302? Because in Safari, you could only access cookies in a 3rd party context if you've seen a domain in a 1st party context. Setting a cookie in adcompany.com in a 1st party context gives you the ability to read that cookie in a 3rd party context which could be used for tracking purposes.

<comment><USER23> Won't the browser show an error about a circular redirect? Or does that take a few bounces?

<comment><USER22> The URLS would be different. Companies also rewrite internal links as you're navigating a site to accomplish the same thing. Example: [https://baycloud.com/thirdparty-redirect](https://baycloud.com/thirdparty- redirect)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I read [https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking- prevention...](https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention/) which details this.

They're just being a little sophisticated in how they block third-party cookies. This will hardly stop other tracking scripts, tracking images, widely-used fingerprinting techniques and related js calls. So nothing remotely close to even Brave let alone a TOR or the Epic Privacy Browser.

<comment><USER15> We're trying to do the most extreme thing we can do short of blocking ads. To be more effective, you end up blocking ads, whether intentionally or as a side effect.

This blocks more than just cookies by the way, it affects all client-side state. And client-side state is still the primary and most reliable tool used for tracking, even though other methods exist, such as browser fingerprinting, behavioral fingerprinting, and IP-based tracking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The big question to me is whether it's enabled by default, and whether it blocks requests to Google Analytics. If so, that's an interesting shot across the bow.

<comment><USER26> This is actually really concerning to me. If they blocked Google Analytics, it would severely damage that data. It'd be bad news for site owners who just want to quantify their traffic.

<comment><USER27> ....so? Site owners are not guaranteed this access; their script runs on the client computer.

I say this as someone who does a lot of analytical research and re-targeting and would be hurt if this was rolled out on a larger scale; I just don't think I have a right to the data.

<comment><USER28> Well, if don't care about things that prevent you from doing your job, then what exactly is the point of working in that field?

<comment><USER29> Imagine you were a police officer with this mentality.

"As someone who investigates lots of crimes, it's totally fine if someone invokes the fifth amendment, I don't have the right to compel them to answer."

"I mean if you don't care about something prevents you from doing your job, why even join the force?"

<comment><USER28> I don't have to "imagine" anything. Let me invite you to consider the context of my original comment before coming up with ridiculous comparisons.

<comment><USER30> Doesn't seem that ridiculous a comparison to me. You don't have a right to compel something from someone else, but that doesn't meant you just have to give up at whatever task you are trying to accomplish

<comment><USER28> When I read a comment, the first thing I do is read the ones above it so I understand the limited scope of the comment. I don't immediately rub my hands with glee and go about compiling a list of situations to which the comment doesn't apply. I guess that sort of thing appeals to some.

Complaining about losing data is in no way the same as assuming entitlement status or forcing someone to do something. The job of a police officer is to enforce laws, and exercise human judgement. The issue with the fifth amendment would be handled by lawyers in courts, not by the officers on the ground. IT jobs have completely different parameters. The comparison with police officer is entirely irrelevant and as such I don't want to continue that discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The cynic in me sees this as cutting off Google, and then tracking within the browser so they become the source of cross-internet tracking. I'd be on the lookout for any new 'personalization' feature that comes in to the browser. E.g. WWDC 2018: 'Today we're happy to announce Siri integration with safari! She will provide personalized recommendations and results by applying machine learning to your documents and data!'

<comment><USER32> They showed this on iOS Safari today:

> Siri now suggests searches in Safari based on what you were just reading. > And when you confirm an appointment or a flight on a travel website, Siri > asks if you want to add it to your calendar.

Search for "Smarter about you." on this page: [https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-11-preview/](https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-11-preview/) Looks like it's done on the device though, End-to-end encrypted with your other devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Firefox (Nightly at least, I don't follow stable :D) also has built-in tracking protection, only in Private Browsing by default (about:config to enable everywhere).

</comment><comment><USER34> It says a lot about the state of the web that both Apple and Google are looking at publishers and saying "Look, if you won't fix your websites, we'll fix them for you" (Google in the form of AMP on mobile devices). However, as one of those who subscribes to the opinion that AMP breaks the web, I greatly prefer Apple's approach.

It makes me wonder how many publishers at national newspapers and magazines are even aware of what's going on.

</comment><comment><USER35> It is well-known that Apple uses Omniture (acquired by Adobe, aka SiteCatalyst, aka 2o7.net, etc.).

As in 192.168.0.2o7.net. Remember, "SWF" stands for Small Web File. Yes, they actually tried to get users to swallow this when Shockwave Flash started to be used in devious ways, such as to track users.

Omniture's business is third party tracking cookies similar to Google Analytics or KISSmetrics. Not sure and don't care whether Flash is used so much anymore. If too young to rememeber search and ye shall find information about "permanent, Flash cookies" that could not be removed.

Apple is not saying "We will not engage with companies selling third party tracking cookie services." Clearly they are not opposed to third party tracking cookies in principle.

Instead they are announcing some change to their browser. Wow, exciting. It is not clear what exactly this announcement accomplishes for users. Probably nothing. If you are trying to avoid ads and tracking, popular browsers (without extensions, etc.) are not your friends.

</comment><comment><USER23> Advertisers will finally move their tracking behind their CDN's, which was always the end goal for them and why they were free in the first place.

Then we have a problem where the industry is reliant enough on CDN's that browsers can't simply block access.

<comment><USER36> [https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes](https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes)

<comment><USER37> Not available for Safari though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Finally, I hope this becomes a common practice from other vendors as well.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's unclear to me how these "trackers" work? How do they track you, is it cookies, or what?

<comment><USER40> A decent overview: [https://panopticlick.eff.org/about](https://panopticlick.eff.org/about)

Test your browser: [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

<comment><USER39> That site is interesting, and it shows you that 1 of X browsers resemble a particular fingerprint ingredient.

I found this one rather interesting, it was the most unique of the ones listed:

HTTP_ACCEPT Headers

One in several thousand have the same headers as me. But the headers themselves are quite a small little string, I'm surprised it is that unique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> For those who are technically inclined: [https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts)

</comment><comment><USER42> Yes, and in the same keynote, they let Siri track stuff down you 'might' be interested in based on patch searching.

</comment><comment><USER43> Thank you Apple for taking a stand for user's privacy.

</comment><comment><USER44> I wonder if this could be good for Google because it has the money and expertise to counter this move by Apple, while smaller ad networks do not.

</comment><comment><USER45> Does Apple have access the data? Because that wouldn't be any better.

<comment><USER46> Almost everything in the keynote happens on device (deep learning, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Glad to see a player big enough to cause some damage taking this up. At this point, anything that harms Facebook/Google and those trying to mimic their data collection tactics should be considered good for the web and internet.

</comment><comment><USER48> Later they demoed they can track your interests in what you've read on the web to show you personalized news on their news app and keyboard autocompletion.

<comment><USER49> Which would be super creepy if they were a company which is beholden to advertisers for their revenue. But alas, they are not.

<comment><USER50> neither is MS but every thread about them seems to have a top comment crying about telemetry

<comment><USER51> Microsoft themselves put ads in their OS... I think that's pretty telling of the kind of company they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Do you want crappy ads? Then go ahead, make tracking more difficult. Tracking _helps_ you see ads for things you actually want to see. It's not some kind of grand conspiracy.

<comment><USER53> I have yet to see the supposedly relevant ads that all this targeting is supposed to get me. The closest to targeted I've gotten is seeing stuff I already just bought on Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> "the web behaves as it always did"

Uhhh, not really. Even if the behavior is unwanted, the web will not "behave" the same - otherwise the feature does nothing.

<comment><USER17> They pretty clearly mean that the web behaves the same from the user's perspective.

<comment><USER54> For example: The user will no longer see the ads for items they may have previously searched for (even if this is unwanted/unpopular) - that's a a change. Sorry to be so pedantic but it's not accurate to say nothing behaves differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Meanwhile Apple is tracking users 24/7.

There is no option to turn off phoning home to Apple in Apple's pre-installed operating systems. Every user of iOS is constantly pinging Apple servers _all day every day_.

Connect an iOS device to the internet and watch the network. The user is given no control over this. _All_ users are assumed to _need_ Apple's help setting the system time.

The networking functionality of NeXT/Apple's operating systems is based on open source BSD operating system code.

But BSD does not phone home to some organization when you install it. Why not? Surely Apple's approach is the best one for _all_ users, right?

It is amusing to watch these companies proclaim they will block others from tracking and serving ads while continuing to siphon user data themselves, often in ways that are all but transparent to users. Apple can block everyone else, then I can block Apple. OK by me.

Someone in this thread made some comment about Microsoft Edge not tracking users. Do people seriously believe nonsense like that? MS was dumping debug output via DrWatson to the network long before collecting user data for profit was even a strategy.

Connect a Windows computer to the internet and watch the network. All on by default. Unlike Apple, they have no prepared explanation/justification why they need to do this.

And even if they did, who cares? Users prefer not to be tracked. Companies are admitting they know this.

Users could opt-in to tracking if they believed they were getting some benefit.

But that is not how this game works. There is no "opt-in". It is on by default. There was no intention to make tracking a "choice".

Probably because companies know what the choice of users would be and it would not be favorable to the company.

But that is not something we are allowed to discuss.

<comment><USER55> "But that is not something we are allowed to discuss"

I suspect you'd have fewer down votes (and thus perhaps some discussion) without this. Congratulations on the self-fulfilling prophecy.</comment></comment>


Co-creator of 'Warcraft,' 'Diablo,' and 'StarCraft' is retiring at age 42 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/blizzard-senior-vp-chris-metzen-is-retiring-2016-9 <comment><AUTHOR> Canonical source: [http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20749157269](http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20749157269)

BI is linked instead because battle.net is a banned domain.

<comment><USER2> Why on earth is battle.net banned, but business insider not? I simply do not understand these silicon valley types.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good question. Most of the submissions from battle.net are about video games and not spammy. [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=battle.net](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=battle.net)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A well-deserved retirement -- this man created a large portion of my teenage fun!</comment>


Wuala: Willful ignorance, or fraud? - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-10-21-wuala-willful-ignorance.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is more or less a response to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70757> \-- I started writing it there, but ended up deciding that it made more sense as a separate blog piece.</comment>


Floating +Pool would let New Yorkers swim in the river - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/plus-floating-swimming-pool-in-nyc-river/19010/

<comment><USER2> I saw this on Kickstarter the other day. Looks great, I hope something comes from it. They raised the first level of $25K, but need $500K to do all the research. It would be great if something like this was inexpensive enough for cities to buy to pull into rivers/lakes near poorer neighborhoods where people don't have as many opportunities to swim in hot months. Could be a great community building tool as a side effect.

</comment><comment> X-Istence This is an absolutely brilliant idea. I'm from The Netherlands, I've swam in all kinds of waters, and if I ever had the chance I would probably go swimming in the Hudson because I really just don't care, and it can't be all bad, it is a flowing river.

But if this allows a community to be built around it, and brings people together I am all for it, I love swimming and the more people that know how to swim the better =)

<comment><USER3> It can be all that bad, many rivers are basically sewers.</comment></comment>


You should be amazed - <AUTHOR> http://oliveremberton.com/2014/you-should-be-amazed/ <comment><USER2> I thought about a similar thing recently; and I concluded that what most people make (in money) is completely undeserved in terms of work they do. (At least, in my case, I am SW developer and I am sure I wouldn't myself pay for the amount of work I do - there is like 3 orders of magnitude difference of what I would be willing to pay for a feature and what a feature costs to develop.)

The point is, we should stop thinking in terms what we deserve; if we truly were making what we deserve (for our work), most of us couldn't live.

This idea is related to labor theory of value, which is simply wrong. Currently, thanks to organization and machinery, the vast amount of work needed to sustain our lifestyle is not done by human beings, but it's simply granted to us.

That's one of the reasons why I am against libertarianism. Strict meritocracy, while nice in theory, would mean utter poverty for most people.

<comment><USER3> I'm confused. What do you mean by deserve? If you reject the labor theory of value, then on what do you base that amount?

And whether a meritocracy would lead people to poverty depends on what you consider meritorious. People have widely different ideas of such, which means that no such evaluation can be made.

<comment><USER2> On the amount of work I put in compared to amount of work I get back in my salary (or the amount of work necessary to have my living standard). The latter is much higher. So either (a) I exploit other people or (b) the extra work comes from machinery and organization (productivity). But although my salary is above average, it doesn't explain the difference, so (a) is probably not such a big factor.

I consider merit based on amount of work you do, disregarding the productivity. I am not my own cause of high productivity, I was simply born to that world. In capitalism, why should I? The productivity can be (and often is) ascribed to capital, which is owned by somebody else.

As you correctly say, people have different ideas about this. But the point is, someone has to _own_ the capital and the productivity gains (it may be the collective ownership, though). Just saying you don't care who owns it (because you believe in value of your work alone) will make you poor, because you will in essence give up those enormous gains.

<comment><USER4> There's a third explanation: c) you're capturing some of the value put in by a lot of dead and some not-quite-dead people.

The value of a computer running your software is tremendous. The delta in value between a computer that runs your software and one that doesn't is pretty miniscule in comparison. The value you're delivering is due in part to people like Archimedes through Von Neumann and Linus Torvalds and millions of others. Does that mean you owe part of your salary to Archimedes' descendants? We're all Archimedes descendants.

"We stand on the shoulders of giants" \-- Chartres

This is partly a different way of expressing your (b), but I prefer this framing.

<comment><USER2> The question then is, is this (c) a part of the merit? It seems to me that not entirely so. If this is part of merit then inheriting a factory is also merit of the person who inherited it, which contradicts my intuition.

Of course, knowledge as such is in public domain, which is a state of affairs I am perfectly happy with. But I guess I can imagine a system where it isn't (just like factories of dead owners are not becoming public domain), so I cannot be completely ignorant to the issue of who owns that knowledge (unless I want to be really poor).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think about these ideas quite often, and someone who has put this idea out there with much more eloquence and humility than I am capable of is Louis C.K - [http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aba_1332656862](http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aba_1332656862) \- Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

</comment><comment><USER6> When the history of the last 20 years is written, most of what happened in the developed world will be relegated to the footnotes, or compressed into slogans like "technology advanced rapidly."

Here's what really matters: according to the UN, nearly a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the last 20 years. Further gains are feasible and expected.

[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion- people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim)

<comment><USER7> The question is this - is this due to capitalism, or if we'd moved past capitalism, would this have happened far far sooner?

<comment><USER8> Sure, if we had moved past capitalism, we could have eliminated poverty by now. And if we had moved past the light-speed limitation, we'd be traveling amongst the stars by now. So why don't we just do that?

As is often said, capitalism is the worst economic system we've come up with . . . except for all the others. The trick to moving past capitalism is not regressing backward from it.

Some big regressions famously happened in recent centuries with our big experiments in public ownership. Unfortunately, large scale public ownership has some complications that tend to result in large scale death.

What new system would you propose that is better?

<comment><USER9> Curious, what do you consider the next 'leap' from capitalism? Something completely new, or some socialist/capitalist hybrid?

Or something like the Incans(? - correct me if I'm wrong) - one of the Ancient indians had a system where there was no money, people took what they needed/wanted, and everyone contributed to the whole of society.. There was no such thing as currency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I could describe the medieval age same way: "Gee guys, we have stuff made of iron - so sturdy.". This is not to lessen the achievements, I just want my mind to be safely backed up among several planets before I die.

Also there is an implicit assumption that certain countries are rich based on their merits and not based on geo-political manipulation.

</comment><comment><USER11> I _am_ amazed. This _is_ the best of all possible worlds.

That's the good news. It's also the bad news.

The capabilities we have are, largely, drawn from that finite stock of petrol Emberton mentions in passing, as well as larger stocks of coal, and somewhat smaller ones of natural gas (though we've been using less of those to date).

When they're gone, there's going to be a hell of a bill for the piper.

This isn't a new revelation. William Stanley Jevons, no raving left-wing radical himself (he's a father of the "marginal revolution" of economics on which much of neoclassical economics is based) wrote of this in 1865 in a book called _The Coal Question_ , asking what would happen when Britain exhausted its admittedly considerable stores of coal. It begins:

 _DAY by day it becomes more evident that the Coal we happily possess in excellent quality and abundance is the mainspring of modern material civilization. As the source of fire, it is the source at once of mechanical motion and of chemical change. Accordingly it is the chief agent in almost every improvement or discovery in the arts which the present age brings forth. It is to us indispensable for domestic purposes, and it has of late years been found to yield a series of organic substances, which puzzle us by their complexity, please us by their beautiful colours, and serve us by their various utility._

[http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnCQ1.html#C...](http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnCQ1.html#Chapter) 1

Jevons notes that he's hardly the first to raise the spectre of coal exhaustion -- barely 13 years after Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ was published, mineral surveyor John Williams asked the question in _The Limited Quantity of Coal of Britain._

It's one thing to admire the pleasing vista in the rearview mirror. Another to ignore the rapidly approaching cliff's edge.

</comment><comment><USER12> The most powerful tool on the web is still words... And if your words are good, people will read them. [1]

There's something incredibly powerful about this piece of work and about the world in which we live. That's why Justin's single web page was translated in to 20 languages and shared over 8,000 times in just a few hours. [2]

[1] [http://justinjackson.ca/words.html](http://justinjackson.ca/words.html)

[2] HN Submission & Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5913381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5913381)

</comment><comment><USER13> Reminded me of the famous sketch Everything's Amazing & Nobody's Happy: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E)

</comment><comment><USER14> While i sympathize in some ways, i.e. looking back things are quite something to compare with the past, the reason we aren't happy yet is that things are also still kind of shitty.

Cars are still a brilliant way to get killed; cars are extremely inefficient. Oil is going to run out at some point. Traffic monitoring works only in some places. Internet via cellphones is generally prohibitively expensive, and quite laggy compared to wired internet. Cellphone UI and especially data input is still an order of magnitude slower than mouse and keyboard. Smartphones, if used with some regularity, do need a recharge once every two days at least. I don't even want to think how ineffecient they are. Humanity's knowledge in the internet is difficult to access and only really accessible to those who spent a lot of time learning how to search it. I write software for a living too, but i've no idea if it'll ever benefit anyone. Sometimes i spend more time on a software solution to a problem that could be solved faster with less time in a manual way. I enjoy all the fruit in the supermarket, but i don't like to think about which elements along that supply chain live a life that's much worse than mine and don't get even remotely adequate compensation. etc.

I hold both of these truths in my mind: Things are amazing. Things aren't nearly as amazing as they were thought to be.

</comment><comment><USER15> People will not be amazed, at least for more than a day, by anything that's widely shared. Never had, never will. Human beings, being what they are, a few enlightened souls excluded, derive happiness by the advantages they enjoy and the power they hold __over other people__. Henry VIII lived in an age before anesthesia, dentistry, where bathrooms were appalling by today's standards, where palaces where rat-infested and where life could be cut short in often agonizing ways. Yet, I am sure he would trade all the advances of the last 400 years for being able to sent men to their deaths for no reason other than angering him and being able to have any woman that attracted his gaze. Most of us would.

</comment><comment><USER16> > The entirety of humanity's knowledge is – of course – free

Really? Isn't most of the important, peer-reviewed, scientific stuff behind academic paywalls?

> you live in the most amazing time imaginable

Sorry to put a downer, but mankind has been marvelling at their own progress since the dawn of time. In 100 years people will look back at the primitive beginnings of the information age and marvel how much better things are in their current time.

There's plenty wrong with our current world and societies. I can easily imagine a world where technology benefits us better, solves more problems, societies become more equal, etc. etc.

<comment><USER17> Author of the piece here.

> The entirety of humanity's knowledge is – of course – free

I was using a degree of hyperbole for the benefit of word economy. It's like when Louis CK remarked "Everything is amazing, no-one is happy". It's obvious he doesn't mean "everything" or "no-one", but a more factually precise "Most of our first-world lives are remarkably great, yet most of us complain disproportionately about them" isn't quite so catchy. I was aiming to write a commentary, not a white paper.

As for your second point, I think we're in agreement. I agree it's likely that in 100 years our current best will look like crap. That's a _good thing_. It seems that mankind is on a permanent positive trajectory – a realisation that seems to elude most people, sadly – and that by itself is pretty damn amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> if all these things were interesting to people and they couldn't get used to it, we wouldn't be able to function as a society.

<comment><USER19> Exactly.

Not being content with what we have and not being endlessly amazed by it is what propels us to drive for even greater advancements instead of standing around like remnants from an ancient society completely gobsmacked by a guy making a quarter appear out of our ear.

Yes, we live in the most advanced times ever and there's lots of awesome stuff. Let's go make more awesome stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd be amazed too if I could buy 12 pence bananas.

<comment><USER17> Where do you live? I imagine price varies hugely depending on demand/transport distance, but 12p is about right for the UK: [http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/grocery- categories/bananas_in...](http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/grocery- categories/bananas_in_tesco.html)</comment></comment>


The Real Reason ARM Will Menace Intel in the Data Center - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/05/hp-arm-memcached-chip-paper/

<comment><USER2> "but then you would add hardware that could help Memcached zip information across a data center network."

Useless description....</comment>


Apple Software Chief Refused to Sign Maps Apology - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204840504578087192497916304.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection

<comment><USER3> Hmm, sounds like the Apple variation of the 3 envelopes joke. I expect the Scott is going take a lot of the heat here as the designated person but with most things I expect the story is more nuanced.

This account is written to portray Scott as the bad guy, one could speculate that perhaps he had been arguing all along that there needed to be a different option, which no one accepted, and when the choice to ship turned out to be a poor one and he was asked to take the blame for it, he might have said "No way, I told you we shouldn't ship it, you overrode me, you sign it."

The version with Scott as the hero, refusing to compromise his principles, also fits all the 'known' facts (maps kinda sucks, Tim signed the apology) and might be communicated by nameless "people familiar with the matter" who liked Scott.

But we won't know. Some folks will know, and some folks will think they know, but having been high enough in the food chain to directly witness some executive shifts like this first hand, and to see how they got spun to the public and to others. the one thing I know is that those of us out here in the peanut gallery, we don't have an ice cube's chance in hell of knowing the 'real' story.

<comment><USER4> The other evidence though is that Forstall has been depicted as "the bad guy" for a long time. Well before he was expected to be departing.

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the- sorc...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorcerers- apprentice-at-apple-10122011.html)

He was even described as CEO-in-Waiting. Even then, the same things were said about his personality conflicts with others:

[http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/17/scott-forstall-is- app...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/17/scott-forstall-is-apples-ceo- in-waiting-says-new-book/)

<comment><USER5> > Forstall has been depicted as "the bad guy" for a long time.

> personality conflicts with others:

The same things have been said about Steve Jobs over and over.

<comment><USER4> Yes, and Steve Jobs was also ousted from Apple for (in part) that reason. One of the articles even described Forstall as "mini-Steve".

I'm just pointing out that "Forstall was a problem" isn't a new narrative that is being spun due to his departure, but one that has been around for some time.

<comment><USER6> So, what I'm hearing is that in about 10 years, Forstall will be brought to "save" apple again?

<comment><USER7> Forstall is no Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER8> Steve Jobs was no Steve Jobs... until later anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Mr. Forstall also recently sent some members of Apple's iOS software team an > email saying he felt the group wasn't working on enough big ideas in mobile > software

He had that right.

<comment><USER10> But whose fault would that be, if not his? Wouldn't it be the job of the head of iOS development to identify the ideas worth pursuing and setting the teams/projects/schedules accordingly?

If the guy ostensibly setting the feature list sends out an email saying "you guys aren't making the right stuff" ... how can you parse that in a way _other_ than "asshole"/"not taking responsibility"?

Or does Apple have an internal project structure more along the lines of Valve?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have no doubt in my mind that Apple itself leaked this info to WSJ. What is surprising is how willing they were to throw him under the bus. Would be interesting to find out what was behind all this. Maybe to pre-empt anything Forstall could say against Apple/Cook or other Apple Execs in future interviews?

<comment><USER12> Count this towards my ignorance towards the business world, but are executives of large companies really that petty and childish?

<comment><USER13> It's not so much as petty as it is a need to control the direction of the conversation. By placing a stake in the ground, the conversation will stay in the general area that the company (and I'm not including only Apple here) wants it to. Part of the field called "public relations".

<comment><USER14> ^ a phenomenon known as "anchoring", for anyone interested.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like a good move. It's important to signal to the entire Apple organization that nobody is untouchable if they screw up. Apple's culture is generally pretty tolerant of mistakes as long as people fix them quickly. I think in this instance, the problem was that 1) He didn't publicly accept responsibility for the problem. and 2) He couldn't fix the problems fast enough.

I know that right after the maps issues came to light, I suddenly got a bunch of recruiting emails from the Apple mapping team. Sounds like the team was caught flat-footed and didn't really have a solid plan to immediately fix things. When you have a pressing and urgent systems engineering problem, I definitely think it's a bad idea to suddenly distract your team with tons of recruiting interviews. Building a good team takes a lot of time and focus. I would normally assume that Apple would transfer their best engineers from other teams to fix the maps app, but maybe Scott didn't have enough goodwill built up within the organization to make that happen.

</comment><comment><USER16> I feel it's important to emphasise this: we have nothing to suggest whether it was because the software team was forced to ship early, because Forstall didn't agree it was so far behind Maps, or other disagreements.

Don't blame Forstall for not signing the letter if you don't know the cockup was his fault.

<comment><USER17> It's been quoted to death, but I feel Jobs was right on the money when he said that at the executive level, there's no "it's not my fault."

It was at the very least his _responsibility_ , and this story paints him as not accepting that responsibility. That doesn't look good. If the story is true, I'd consider it a big enough disagreement to remove someone over.

<comment><USER18> You can be an executive and still be in a situation where a higher ranking executive can override you even when you are the domain expert and they aren't. I don't know if that's what happened here or not, but if it did, then there is in fact such thing as "it's not my fault."

If Steve Jobs was talking about himself when he made that statement, then it's spot on. He micromanaged the shit out of that company and nearly always got his way. Fortunately, he did a hell of a job. If he screwed up though, he would have had not a single person to blame but himself, because he personally called most of the shots.

While I haven't been an executive at a billion dollar company, I have a good amount of leadership experience from my time in the military. I always try to be blatantly honest with myself and others. If I personally fuck something up, I tend to immediately own up to it and propose a solution. However, there have been a few very rare occasions where I've either had myself and my team thrown under the bus for something that was beyond our control, or failed to complete a task because it was simply impossible to achieve under the given deadline. Only a coward would let someone place undeserved blame on himself or his subordinates.

<comment><USER19> _You can be an executive and still be in a situation where a higher ranking executive can override you even when you are the domain expert and they aren't._

Then you quit.

<comment><USER20> _Then you quit._

Better would be to make sure that you have good documentation of the event in the case of the shit hitting the fan.

<comment><USER21> As said by other posts before, that is completely irrelevant in executive level. No one would or should care about your documentation at that point, as it might be for rank-and-file workers.

Get convinced of the CEO strategy and execute it, or stay convinced, convince the board and do your way - and in either case, take responsibility for whatever happens to the company in the whole, there is no such thing as "your separate area" or "only your direct actions/subordinates" at that level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hope I'm reading the situation incorrectly, but all I get out of this is that Forstall has an epic ego.

He is asked to sign an apology letter for the short comings of an app that he was in charge of and was at least confident enough in to present to the world. When it was time to pay the piper and accept responsibility for the app he told the world was great, he shirks all responsibility.

I fully support the decision to remove him from his position.

<comment><USER23> Well sure if you believe that's how it happened.

Or, he was against releasing, but was overridden (by Cook perhaps), then refused to apologise because it wasn't his mistake...

The reality is, we don't, and probably won't know. Seems strange though, that Forestall did exceptionally good releases [1] up until iOS 6 and then all of a sudden he just dropped the ball with maps...

[1] Excluding the fact that new iOSes generally suck for older iPhones, and force a hardware upgrade.

<comment><USER24> iOS is behind Apple's present riches and Forstall is the hard ass visionary genius that made that happen. Before that, he was a primary architect on OS X before it was even called OS X. He's the single most important engineer at Apple (since Bertrand Serlet was tossed out last year). To pooh pooh this guy's contributions as many are doing, while celebrating Cook as some great visionary genius is totally absurd.

Cook is a bean counter with no vision. He is very good at bean counting and has a lot of success at it. He is not appropriate as anything more than transitionary CEO for a visionary company.

Replace visionaries with bean counters that have allegiance to the established hierarchical order of bean counters? This works well for commodity companies that sell fizzy sugar water. Will it work for Apple this time around? Last time they went this route with Sculley there were some problems.

<comment><USER25> > This works well for commodity companies that sell fizzy sugar water.

Why can't you just say soda, pop or whatever regional dialect you prefer? I don't understand why any time anyone ever says this it has to phrased in the most condescending way possible.

<comment><USER24> Because it's highly relevant to the story I was discussing. Jobs had asked Sculley, head of PepsiCo at the time, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?" Sculley then ran Apple from the perspective if his experience at a commodity company, driving the company to the edge of bankruptcy and irrelevance. It worked out well for me, I bought a lot of Apple stock at around $5 a share. But it almost destroyed Apple.

This quote has since been simplified to asking people in technical fields if they want to make fizzy sugar water. Familiarity with this story is widespread in the industry and not an obscure reference, and in this case I wanted to discuss both Jobs, Sculley, Apple, and the result of having a bean counter type person who is excellent at reducing manufacturing costs within a commodity company be in charge of a company whose entire value is based on not being a commodity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Lopping off a senior exec over the mapping fiasco is completely warranted, but here's the next problem: The exec had several people feeding him information that the mapping app was somehow acceptable.

If Tim Cook does his job right: There will be several of those underling heads rolling, either by Tim himself or some one who takes over Forstall's area. (And which one of those two possibilities will tell us a lot about Tim Cook.)

<comment><USER27> > The exec had several people feeding him information that the mapping app was > somehow acceptable.

That might be an excuse Tim Cook himself can reasonably use, but not the exec directly responsible for the development of the new Maps app. He simply can't say he was getting information from a small number of direct underlings - <USER2> should have been in the trenches talking to the developers, testers and beta users and getting feedback directly.

He was putting his reputation on the line by being the original public presenter for the new Maps, and if he was prepared to stand up in front of the world and say "this is great" he should have first been prepared to dig a little deeper into the true nature of the new app.

<comment><USER26> > _He simply can't say he was getting information from a small number of > direct underlings - he should have been in the trenches talking to the > developers, testers and beta users and getting feedback directly._

True enough, but my point is that there is a bigger problem: He ran an org in which nobody tackled him in the hallway and said "WTF This is a piece of crap! We can't release such a POS, and if you do I quit!"

An organization is not fixed by chopping only one head, there are no doubt lieutenants that need to be axed.

<comment><USER13> _He ran an org in which nobody tackled him in the hallway_

Do you know that they didn't? And there is a lot of gray area between tackling and release that a good manager should be able to dive into.

<comment><USER26> > _Do you know that they didn't?_

I know that they either didn't tell him, or didn't tell him in a manner that he listened.

It's really not rocket science: An organization is not fixed by chopping only one head.

<comment><USER28> Clearly, removing everyone involved in failure is the route to success.

<comment><USER26> Try seeing at least one shade of gray, you'll go farther.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maps are really freaking hard to make. I wouldn't of signed it either. There was no need apologize in the first place. Jobs wouldn't of apologized either; I think we are starting to see the downturn in apple. We all make mistakes but its better to look strong instead of weak in business.

<comment><USER30> Operating systems are just as hard, yet they are routinely released, patched, upgraded and they usually work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel like this is the sort of situation that shouldn't even be featured in the discussion. Who else signed the press report? It's totally irrelevant.

<comment><USER32> According to this article, Scott refusing to sign the apology is the reason he was fired. How is that irrelevant?

<comment><USER31> _Apple Inc. executive Scott Forstall was asked to leave the company after he refused to sign his name to a letter apologizing for shortcomings in Apple's new mapping service, according to people familiar with the matter._

That's their justification. I'm still skeptical. No offense, but an apology not signed by Cook isn't an Apple apology. Tim was gonna' sign it no matter what I believe.

<comment><USER33> My gut says that it would have been signed by both.

<comment><USER34> I'm guessing it wasn't a literal "signing", but rather he refused to put his name on it, probably because he disagreed with it in principle.

It would have been signed by Tim Cook on behalf of everyone at Apple, but my guess is that Forstall wasn't on board, regardless of whether his name appeared on the public announcement or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think this is about more than the signing of the apology letter, it's also about the way that Forstall presented Apple Maps to the world as a perfect _finished_ product even as he reportedly knew that there were serious flaws in the data. That's what made the apology necessary.

Apple Maps should have been presented as a first step in a great solution and the issues acknowledged (with promised improvements) far earlier.

Forstall has been a wonderful engineer and manager at Apple and he is largely responsible for the success of iOS, but letting him avoid taking responsibility for this might've been poisonous to Apple in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER36> Funny thing is that if this leaked out before he got fired, I think it would have been seen as a positive thing for Forstall. That he stood up for the Apple Maps just like a lot of Apple fans, and that it was just the press making a big deal out of nothing.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like a typical dictatorship changeover. Leaders forced to sign statements they don't agree with, then removed when they don't. Failures blamed on sabotage. Everyone chanting the new tune... while the economy fails.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't think this has anything to do with Scott's departure. He sold most of his shares 6 months ago.. It's time for him to leave and build his own company.

</comment><comment><USER39> > The 43-year-old Mr. Forstall recently told people that there is no "decider" > now that Mr. Jobs is gone

I guess they just made room for one.

</comment><comment><USER40> Who knows what the previous history is, but given the way maps rolled out, maybe Forstall could have simply given credence to the notion that maps was just a beginning instead of giving in to the blowhard sales pitches of apple keynotes. Apple says that Apple TV is just a hobby, maybe he should have said that Maps is just the beginning of a new road.</comment>


Great Entrepreneurs' Secret: Smarts, Guts, and Luck - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/tjan/2009/03/great-entrepreneurs-secret-sma.html <comment><USER2> This is quite well-written. I like his quoted description of the entrepreneur as "not worrying about the resources they lack, but about the resourcefulness required to get the big idea done." Seductively complimentary.

That said, I'm skeptical the first-order problem is really keeping a sense of the "big idea". Grand ambition is not uncommon - look at the amount of armchair quarterbacking that happens on this site alone. I think most organizations have a definite sense of possibility and fail more from an inability to either manage change, or to connect their ambitions to the more prosaic reality of the paying market.</comment>


Teaching physics to neural networks removes 'chaos blindness' - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-06-physics-neural-networks-chaos.html <comment><USER2> I believe this refers to work presented in this journal article. [https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.101.0...](https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.101.062207)

Abstract: Artificial neural networks are universal function approximators. They can forecast dynamics, but they may need impractically many neurons to do so, especially if the dynamics is chaotic. We use neural networks that incorporate Hamiltonian dynamics to efficiently learn phase space orbits even as nonlinear systems transition from order to chaos. We demonstrate Hamiltonian neural networks on a widely used dynamics benchmark, the Hénon- Heiles potential, and on nonperturbative dynamical billiards. We introspect to elucidate the Hamiltonian neural network forecasting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Brings to mind this classic from the Jargon File:

[http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/koans.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/koans.html)

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

<comment><USER4> I don't get it :(

<comment><USER5> I _think_ it means - just as closing your eyes doesn't mean the room becomes empty, wiring the learning network randomly doesn't mean you'll end up with no pre-conceptions (e.g. the rule system at least will need to be programmed in).

<comment><USER6> It also doesn't avoid preconceptions directly. It just initializes random ones.

<comment><USER7> Aren't preconceptions not random by definition?

<comment><USER8> I think he's suggesting that any given random set of preconceptions will itself be a 'sample' from the entire preconception-space, and therefor itself a preconception - just one that you didn't involve yourself in choosing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've said this before, but I think that a lack of physical modeling might be the key barrier for AV technology. Human drivers have a mental model of physics that they've honed for 17-18 hours a day since they were born.

<comment><USER10> Vehicle dynamics is a fairly accurate science these days (50/50 for the tires)

<comment><USER11> I'm working on autonomous off-road vehicles, and while this is (probably) true for autonomous cars, dynamics modeling for wheeled robots on rough terrain is another beast where these approaches could very much help.

<comment><USER10> Is the issue in the surface modelling? I don't think I've ever seen a physical tire model for loose terrain

<comment><USER11> People in space robotics have been working on that (moon and mars rovers need to deal with this). Perception is also a bottleneck; you have to see rocks, root, grass, mud and predict the effects on the dynamics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why do you need a neural network when you have the Hamiltonian mechanics of the system modeled? I've always understood Langrangian/Hamiltonian mechanics to be methods of modeling the behavior of a system through the decomposition of the external constraints and forces acting on a body. In other words you can understand a complex model by doing some calculus on the less complex constituents of the model.

I'm probably misunderstanding what the accomplished, but it sounds like they've increased the accuracy of a neural network model of a system, notably for edge cases, by training it on complete a complete model of said system.

<comment><USER13> For some systems even with the Lagrangian/Hamiltonian setup your solving differential equations with numerical techniques that has error. It might be that the neural networks has less error than the standard techniques. This is a guess.

<comment><USER14> Hamiltonian NNs are not a new thing. There was a NIPS 2019 paper [0] that attempted to do that same for some toy problems.

In general the idea of including model or context-based information into neural networks goes along the line of Kahneman's System I and System II of the human mind. System I is the "emotional" brain that is fast and makes decisions quickly while System II is the "rational" brain that is slow and expensive and takes time to compute a response. Researchers have been trying to develop ML models that utilize this dichotomy by building corresponding dual modules but the major challenge remains in efficiently embedding the assumptions of the world dynamics into the models.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01563](https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01563) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py > the NAIL team incorporated Hamiltonian structure into neural networks

ML non-expert here. Is this the same as having an extra column of your input data that's a hamiltonian of the raw input? Or a kind of neuron that can compute a hamiltonian on an observation? Or something more complicated.

is this like a specialized 'functional region' in a biological brain? (broca's area, cerebellum)

<comment><USER15> Also ML non-expert here. I think this is about a different kind of neuron(your 2nd suggestion). The paper another commenter linked says:

Hamiltonian neural network (HNN) intakes position and momenta {q,p}, outputs the scalar function H, takes its gradient to find its position and momentum rates of change, and minimizes the loss

<latex equation for a modified loss function that differs from traditional NN>

which enforces Hamilton's equations of motion.

[https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.101.0...](https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.101.062207#fulltext)

<comment><USER16> I haven't used HNNs in practice but it seems that the main difference from common NNs is that the loss function incorporates gradients. It's not a new type of a neuron.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why not shamelessly plug my work here? I see no reason not to.

So, here it is: [https://github.com/thesz/nn/tree/master/series](https://github.com/thesz/nn/tree/master/series)

A proof of concept implementation of training neural networks process where loss function is a potential energy in Lagrangian function and I even incorporated "speed of light" \- the "mass" of particle gets corrected using Lorenz multiplier m=m0/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2).

Everything is done using ideas from quite interesting paper about power of lazy semantics: [https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.32....](https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.32.4535)

PS Proof-of-concept here means it is grossly inefficient, mainly due to amount of symbolic computation. Yet it works. In some cases. ;)

</comment><comment><USER18> This sounds like the opposite of what Richard Sutton seemed to advocate for in his "Bitter Lesson"[0]. I don't know nearly enough to advocate for one thing or the other, but it is fascinating to see that those approaches seem to compete as we venture into the unknown.

[0] [http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html](http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html)

<comment><USER19> They're not the opposite, and both are correct.

Sutton is saying 'over a slightly longer time'.

You can wait 20 more years and super-duper-deep-NN-on-steroids, and hardware a million times as big and powerful, would rediscover all of theoretical physics.

Or you could inject some theoretical physics acquired by humans and make DNNs smarter today.

<comment><USER18> I assume your 20 years is a guesstimate, and I do think it misses the point of what Sutton's writing is. The trap here is that there's always to be more computing in the future, so where do we draw the line? The idea is to think differently now, for the pursuit of actual progress down the road. Which, by the way, is exactly what people were doing about 40 years ago and what put down more than the foundations for all the tricks we're pulling these days.

<comment><USER19> I see what Sutton said as a "statistical learning and artificial intelligence" researcher in line with what the authors of the physics paper presented as "an application of learning research to computational science and engineering, CSE, surrounding physics".

CSE researchers did not sit down and wait for AI researchers to learn the bitter lesson before they resumed their work.

CSE research goes on independent of whether AI/GOFAI/ML has a winter, a summer, an ice age, or a global warming.

It just so happens that in light of the recent progress of AI/ML, specifically 2012 to 2019, they see the utility of incorporating a tiny bit of ML to their vast array of methods.

The paper shared in this thread is merely another attempt to advance such an incorporation. If it doesn't pan out, they go back to doing CSE on physics without any AI or ML.

<comment><USER18> That makes sense. As you said, those two sources don't have to be contradicting each other if they complement instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone with AI knowledge please clarify - does this mean we can build 'rules based systems' into AI to synthesise intelligence from both domains?

If so, this would be dramatic, no?

If you could teach a translation service 'grammar' and then also leverage the pattern matching, could this be a 'fundamental' new idea in AI application?

Or is this just something specific?

<comment><USER21> They model a system which they know to be constrained by a closed-form equation called the Hamiltonian. They (cleverly, IMO) force the network's predictions to be constrained by the Hamiltonian, by choosing the right output and loss function.

I don't see a way to generalize this to the procedural rule-based systems you describe, unless they too are governed by a fairly simple continuous function Like the Hamiltonian.

I don't know if it was "dramatic", but it made me really happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So can you teach a NN an equation of motion, and if so would it execute faster than numerically integrating said equation? Could have impacts in physics simulations although the accuracy might not be as good

</comment><comment><USER23> This sounds pretty terrifying.

<comment><USER24> Careful there, athesyn. No need to offend our computer overlords.</comment></comment>


MIT develops Sun-less solar cells that uses heat to generate electricity - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/08/01/mit-develops-sun-less-solar-cells-that-uses-heat-to-generate-electricity/

<comment><USER2> They were studying these sorts of devices at Western Washington University when I was there back in the late 90's. They were using simple black-body radiators and the efficiency was pretty poor, even with a recuperator pre- heating the combustion air. They also had to run coolant behind the solar cells to keep them operating, so some of the energy was lost through that route.

One thing I was never able to quite pin down is what the theoretical efficiency limit would be for a device like this, specifically whether it was analogous to a heat engine or could do better than the Carnot limit. Any physicists/physical chemists care to chime in?

EDIT: Wikipedia says they're limited to Carnot efficiency.

<comment><USER3> Apparently, these panels work on the thermoelectric effect (different from the photoelectric effect), they're Peltier piles working in reverse. Thermoelectrics are Carnot-limited, but photovoltaics are not.

<comment><USER4> The article suffers a bit from the fog that covers most popular science articles but I think I get the picture. As others have said this particular technology is based on photovoltaics, in particular narrow-bandgap photovoltaics typically referred to as Thermophotovoltaics [1][2].

Bad news first, unfortunately the Carnot limit to efficiency still applies [3] and as an aside the limit for simple, single-junction photovoltaics under one sun illumination is about 31%. Since we're not dealing with either the sun nor necessarily single junction TPVs there's more to say on the topic.

The scheme proposed here seems to be very similar to a design proposed by one of the awards of the DARPA RIMS [4] (later MIPS [5]) program. Specifically they're proposing a combustion cell for the butane, a tungsten photonic crystal [6] emitter to reduce long wavelength "waste" emissions and THEN a TPV. A TPV consists of one or more pn junctions consisting of narrow bandgap semiconductors, typically horrendously complicated structures of ternary or quaternary materials like InGaAsP. [8] Please note that they don't even try to address the structure of the TPV in the article.

Some practical engineering difficulties include the fact that the nanosctructured tungsten emitter is quite reactive in oxygen at elevated temperatures (probably still true for their proposed structure). I should know, I reduced an incredibly expensive photonic crystal emitter to a very pretty layer of rust while trying to measure its emission spectrum while it was under argon. It turns out that it's incredibly difficult to purge oxygen from this structure after it's been exposed even ONCE. If you're using this as a battery replacement for soldiers you have to ensure that it can really take a beating and since the TPV is quite brittle (yep, killed a few of those too) you have to have an enclosing structure that is quite rigid, adding to your weight. The combustion cell is also going to be an engineering challenge since you have to maintain pretty good temperature control to keep your conversion efficiency up. How do you control your fuel-air mixture? What happens at high altitudes? How are you minimizing parasitic heat loss?

The reason I think a lot of people are enamored with this fairly niche piece of engineering is due to an erroneous Sandia Labs announcement that they had excess emission in a particularly favorable wavelength region. [7] That and the fact that DARPA is throwing an increasing quantity of money at a problem space with relatively few solutions.

Despite all the problems I listed this sort of TPV structure is still a very attractive option in at least one market namely powering deep space missions like JUNO or New Horizons [9]. Currently these are powered by something called an RTG [10] using thermoelectrics, but more on thermoelectrics another day. Below I have linked to a very good article on the subject of TPVs for space written by some of my former co-workers. [11]

Sorry for the lengthy reply I got excited that I have something to contribute to one of these discussions!

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophotovoltaic> [2] [http://gcep.stanford.edu/research/factsheets/ultrahigh_therm...](http://gcep.stanford.edu/research/factsheets/ultrahigh_thermosolar.html) [3] eprints.soton.ac.uk/69617/1/chapter_2_with_header.pdf [4] [https://www.fbo.gov/index?id=c57c017b04923ce367344c9fdd369ee...](https://www.fbo.gov/index?id=c57c017b04923ce367344c9fdd369ee1) [5] [http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/MTO/Programs/Micro_Isotope_Pow...](http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/MTO/Programs/Micro_Isotope_Power_Sources_%28MIPS%29.aspx) [6] [http://lib.semi.ac.cn:8080/tsh/dzzy/wsqk/Nature/nature417-05...](http://lib.semi.ac.cn:8080/tsh/dzzy/wsqk/Nature/nature417-052.pdf) [7][http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news- releases/2003/other/p...](http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news- releases/2003/other/planck-lin.html) [8] <http://iopscience.iop.org/0268-1242/18/5/309> [9] <http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/> [10] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator) [11] [http://lib.semi.ac.cn:8080/tsh/dzzy/wsqk/selected%20papers/j...](http://lib.semi.ac.cn:8080/tsh/dzzy/wsqk/selected%20papers/journal%20of%20physical%20chemistry%20c/112-7841.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This could be used like a turbocharger for your electronics: Scavenge heat energy that would normally be wasted in order to perform additional work.

</comment><comment><USER6> The wikipedia article (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophotovoltaic>) has some excellent applications for this technology including off-the-grid power generation from camp fires or earthen heat stores.

</comment><comment><USER7> How much battery power is lost to heat?

Imagine a CPU which integrated this technology into the package so that it could re-capture a portion of its generated heat as power. Current designs could be made more efficient, and lower battery usage.

</comment><comment><USER8> original article link: [http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/sun-free- photovoltaics-07...](http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/sun-free- photovoltaics-0728.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Then they're not really solar cells anymore. "Thermal cells?"

<comment><USER10> My impression is that they utilize a second conversion stage that is essentially a conventional solar cell. So the sequence is: heat => light => electricity. The novelty is the design of the first conversion stage, which is specifically tuned to produce wavelengths that can be efficiently converted by the second stage solar cell. As opposed to just burning the butane and running a solar panel off of the firelight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> from the article: "Imagine using the heat generated from your laptop to charge it as well? Or charging your car's hybrid battery by using the heat off of the engine?"

Wish the author had rephrased these in view of The Law of Conservation of Energy. Don't want to give the impression of developing a perpetual motion machine.

<comment><USER11> hey protomyth, author here. Haha, I see your point abt the conservation of energy. I assumed that everyone would know that law, so I didn't address it specifically. Obviously, the return energy would be less than the expended.

I guess to assume really does make an ass out of u and me.

<comment><USER8> It's not so much for the HN audience, but the next generation of article down the chain will use that paragraph as a basis for their headline. It is by far the catchiest and I don't think they will be explicit about conservation of energy with their readers.

Nice article though.

<comment><USER11> great point about the generation of articles down the chain. I will be more mindful of that in the future. thanks for reading

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sunless solar cells? Can we think of some other term for this? Thermal cells? Heat Cells? Something that makes sense?

<comment><USER13> Did you read the article? How about "thermal photovoltaics".</comment></comment>


Tellina: Translate natural language into bash commands (built with TensorFlow) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tellina.rocks <comment><USER2> Interesting idea. But as of right now, the recently submitted queries shown on the right almost all have wrong answers. For instance:

> Change jdk default version

        cd $( which oracle | xargs -I {} dirname {} )

> change the first character of every filename in this directory to "z"

        find z -type d -exec chown z {} \;

> count number of lines in a file

        wc -l $( wc -l )

> ping google.com every 5 seconds

        find . -name "*.com" | xargs -I {} tar -c -v -f google.com {}

<comment><USER3> Doesn't seem to work at all, just some random potentially dangerous guessing:

> what the day it is?

      find /home -type d -name "apt" -exec rm -f {} \;

<comment><USER4> Just out of curiosity, what were you expecting as output to that string of words? I think Tellina is only targeting natural sentences where the structure makes sense. Even I, a human being, have no clue what the response is supposed to be

<comment><USER5>
      date +%D

... or at least ... nothing involving rm -f at all

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Natural language + bash is truly a cursed combination.

<comment><USER7> agreed. can't wait until I accidentally rm -rf * because I hit an edge case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great work! Just wanted to note that sql or input sanitizing is missing:

[http://kirin.cs.washington.edu:8000/translate?request_str=fi...](http://kirin.cs.washington.edu:8000/translate?request_str=find%20%E2%80%9Cx%E2%80%9D%20and%20run%20it)

Also looks like it isn't forwarding http to https? Eitherway great work! This was a lot of fun to play with.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've also been experimenting[1] in the natural language <-> code world and the two publications based on Tellina have been really helpful. I know how hard it is to get sensible results when mixing natural language and code, and even though Tellina is a bit rough around the edges it is an awesome effort!

[1] [https://codesnippetsearch.net](https://codesnippetsearch.net)

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting idea but when I try submitting commands to translate it doesn't seem to work? It simply refreshes the page but my question disappears

<comment><USER3> Looks like it's down currently [https://github.com/TellinaTool/tellina/issues/9](https://github.com/TellinaTool/tellina/issues/9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If curious see also

2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17844670](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17844670)

</comment><comment><USER12> Didn't work for my query, "rename files to their name and file size"

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow. Impressive work

</comment><comment><USER14> That one guy in Germany has some shame issues.</comment>


Tell HN: Submissions about Oracle's position on reverse engineering - <AUTHOR>

So this has getting a lot of discussion, unsurprisingly, but the discussion is split across several submissions, each with its own slant.  Here are the submissions I've found:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039202
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040428
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10041960
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043030
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043326
 In a comment I'll put clickable links, with current counts. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links, with domain name and comment counts:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039202) (oracle.com) 517 pts, 277 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040428](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040428) (archive.org) 338 pts, 107 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10041960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10041960) (seclists.org) 1 pt, no comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043030](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043030) (archive.org) 7 pts, 3 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043326) (zdnet.com) 1 pt, no comments

The "archive.org" submission is there because the original blog post has been removed.

</comment><comment><USER2> They keep coming in:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043718), (archive.org) 1 pt 2 comments {Deleted}

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And, as someone else has said, still they come:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10044665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10044665)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why didn't a single one of these hit the front? Is someone messing with them? I only found out about this because other sites were reporting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> At least two of them hit the front page, one of them staying there for quite some time:

[http://hnrankings.info/10043718,10043326,10043030,10041960,1...](http://hnrankings.info/10043718,10043326,10043030,10041960,10040428,10039202/)</comment></comment>


Fork() Considered Harmful [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.pdf <comment><USER2> Finally, an interesting paper on why fork() isn't so great. There've been many of these over they years, most of them incoherent.

Unfortunately, this is also one of those "X is bad" things, for an important X (creating new processes) that doesn't offer an alternative. I quote: "in our opinion, most uses of fork andexec would be best served by a spawn API." The authors do not go on to offer specifics. The best CS minds of the last 30 years have often said the same thing, but when pressed, offer a "spawn" that doesn't really do all that much, is flag-heavy, and causes some use cases to be difficult or impossible.

I'm going to have to write this paper off as just another rant about fork().

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't take that at all from the paper. I think they've provided valid reasons for fork bring harmful, which is that the original spec required that the child process is exactly the same as the parent in all ways modulo its pid, and that this became bad due to the "all ways" qualifier. However, I think the difficulty in having better alternative is addressed in the paper. They suggest relaxing the "in all ways" requirement as a key to a replacement. In that context, the caller would have to understand what exactly they need behind the spawning, which makes sense. So I think they're encouraging systems developers to a.) use these existing alternatives so that b.) we can deprecate the too coursely grained fork() and eventually c.) remove it usage entirely with some future breaking change. C seems like a pipe dream, but i think they argue quite clearly that A is actually already happening. Maybe B will come up not too long in the distant future.</comment></comment>


San Francisco's Fog Over Growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-11/san-francisco-can-t-stand-how-much-it-wants-to-grow <comment><USER2> The point about people in rent controlled apartments having very little incentive to favor increased density is a different one than I've heard, and a telling one. If between owners and rent-controlled apartments you have a large voting majority, you end up with a large voting majority that has no interest in making the city more welcoming to newcomers.

People often talk about middle class people being driven out of SF, I think it's actually dangerous that even people making well above average wages have trouble affording housing alone. Many tech workers I know earn a decent living but having an apartment to themselves is simply unaffordable.

Yes, yes #richpeopleproblems, and of course we should worry about people further down the income scale, but it's indicative of just how pathological the situation has become that even people who are well off can't afford the city comfortably.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree that part of the motivation for people supporting zoning is to preserve or increase their property values. But I think that people that spend a huge chunk of change on a house should care about preserving the neighborhood they bought into. As an extreme case, without zoning, what if each home lot on your street were turned into a high rise residential or commercial building? I don't think any homeowner expects nothing to change, but they bought a house hoping that it continues to have a similar quality of life going forward. It's not all about money. Peace and quiet is important to people, for example. Lack of traffic is important to people. Having one neighbor on each side rather than 100 is important to people.

<comment><USER4> Does it even really make sense to "own" land?

One alternative is "Georgism", which is the idea that land is a resource collectively owned by society, but people can temporarily monopolize a piece of land by renting it from society. The rents thus collected go into the society's general fund to pay for public goods like fire stations, healthcare, universal basic income, etc.

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

<comment><USER5> The problem with that scheme is that a reasonable implementation of it will still greatly resemble land ownership.

Say I rent a parcel of land from society and pay money each month to do so. I build a building on top and use it.

Under what conditions can I keep using this land, besides paying the rent? Do I lease the land from society for a fixed term, after which the land may be freely rented to someone else? In that case what happens to the building on it that I've invested my own money into?

The problem here is that land by itself is not useful but improvements in combination with the land is, but said improvements are almost always not portable. I can pack up my furniture and move out of my apartment, I can't pack up a building.

So naturally we'll want some way to ensure people who have improved the land can continue using the land - which really starts resembling ownership + property tax at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash It's a shame that when people focus on the bay area's ludicrous housing costs, they tend to speak exclusively of San Francisco and ignore the opportunity to develop Oakland, which has a lot of flat land that is easier to build tall buildings on top of, instead of trying to densify San Francisco's endless peaks and twists.

The author said a potential future for San Francisco is as a "gated community for the rich." That may be the case, perhaps already having been so for a long time. It's unfortunate that an economic juggernaut heralded as the shining center of modern American capitalism is also so inaccessible, but that does not mean the overall solution is by making that place accessible at the expense of more realistic options.

The author compares the density of SF to NYC's Brooklyn. Like Manhattan, San Francisco is owned by the rich and their rules, yet Brooklyn is big and booming. Oakland is prime to take up the role of the Bay's Brooklyn.

Side note: if people want to return to the halcyon days of San Francisco when the wealthy and the workers could live atop the same rock, it will cost a ton of money. Hairdressers, grocery clerks, teachers, and the like will either need massive housing subsidies or comparable salaries to tech workers. That possibility could exist too, if the well-heeled agree to let go of a big chunk of change.

<comment><USER6> I get the sense Manhattan was established, and then tapped out, hence Brooklyn. Whereas San Francisco is neither of those. San Francisco is the hip place to be (for tech) and Oakland is perceived as the fallback for companies that can't afford to host. Which really surmounts to: I would much rather work in SF than Oakland (I really base my decision on what food & bar options I have around me, though).

<comment><USER7> Parts of Manhattan which are popular with the very wealthy are certainly pretty well tapped out (the West Village comes to mind as a neighborhood with well-protected zoning regulations and lots of low to mid-rise buildings similar to many San Francisco neighborhoods). In other parts of Manhattan though new neighborhoods are being created from underused space (look at the Hudson Yards project, creating thousands of housing and commercial units on top of an active rail yard on the west side of midtown). Dozens of new towers are currently under construction in Manhattan.

I've lived in both SF and NYC and feel like Oakland has much more of a stigma than Brooklyn does simply because of transit access. You can live in SF and enjoy walkable local communities. You can live in Oakland and enjoy walkable local communities. But getting between the two can be a much more arduous process via Bart or bus than the many plentiful subway connections between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Visiting friends, of even the prospect of a commute, between SF and Oakland would have given me much more pause than getting over to Brooklyn. BART and the transbay buses are woefully inadequate for an area which is trying to pitch itself as a region rather than two distinct cities with a bridge between.

<comment><USER8> I really don't understand the entire BART tube fear. You can get from fidi to downtown oakland in 12 minutes on a consistent schedule. I think it's more the bridge with it's horrible 1 hour traffic and how most of the bay area is a very car dependent place.

<comment><USER9> "You can get from fidi to downtown oakland in 12 minutes on a consistent schedule."

Yes, but that's _all_ you can do. If you're in pac heights or the presidio or ... anywhere west ... you're going nowhere.

<comment><USER8> That is a failure of SF transit. It takes 30m to get from the west to the east side of SF already. 20m to get to the mission from pac heights with an uber, 45m with muni! For east side SF friends in the mission, oakland is closer than ocean beach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting that SF can be so pro-immigration on the national level, but so anti-immigration on the municipal level.

<comment><USER11> Because it's somehow become socially acceptable to hate on whites and Asians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Being a Bay Area native, my opinion is that the push back to increased growth is due to the horrible traffic situation. More people means traffic gets worse, muni gets more crowded, commutes get longer. The only people who want growth are real estate developers and recent transplants who are fine with not trying to actually go anywhere besides home and work.

There's a point where the congestion starts to lower quality of life drastically and people would rather deal with high rents then being stuck in traffic for hours or stuffed into a filled to the gills muni, bart or caltrain with people coughing up flem around them.

Getting to work in downtown is awful when there's a Giants game going on and they wanted to eliminate pier 30 parking and put another stadium in there? I'm glad that got shot down. San Francisco is full. Get over it.

<comment><USER13> Too bad transportation infrastructure is completely verboten in America.

New York has it grandfathered in (was built before the car era) and New York does not have this problem. The simple reality is that cars don't scale beyond a certain density because, well, cars can't pass through other cars. Cars work fine for light to medium density but beyond that you must either build trains or stop growing. (Or waste billions and countless hours every day with millions of people stuck in traffic.)

<comment><USER14> My favorite part is that SF has gotten it in its head that being car- unfriendly (planned closing of Market St) is a great idea, while not improving public transit at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Legit thought experiment and not a troll, because I'm curious about thinking through this.

What happens if legislation is passed that more or less prevents people from owning property that's not their primary residence? Like: if you don't live in it more than 190 days a year, you pay a really high property tax on it.

I've always thought a big part of the landlord - tenant issues around rent control, fair market housing, and a lot of other stuff all stems from the position that people are allowed to own more homes that they can live in, and derive income from landlording.

There's some obvious issues - not everyone wants to live in a home / apartment that they own (liquidity, mortgage, etc). This could be obviated with some workarounds (and market forces might help out a bit too - I'd imagine real estate could change hands a lot more frequently in that situation).

Anyway. Thoughts?

<comment><USER16> Have you ever bought a house? I have. I do _not_ want to go through that process every time I move. Plus, while I have purchased a house before, it ended up being foreclosed on and I certainly couldn't get a mortgage now (and I shouldn't... I can't afford a mortgage). I would be pretty SOL if owning a house was a prerequisite for not being homeless.

How is commercial property treated?

What prevents a company building a huge apartment building, "selling" it to an apartment manager (in the form of a very expensive mortgage) and then having the apartment manager rent out "rooms" in his very large "house" to cover his mortgage?

In short, the longer I think about the idea, the less practical it becomes.

<comment><USER17> I've bought a few houses, the process has generally been simple and painless (other than the physical moving of stuff part, which is the same for own vs. rent).

My last few vehicles purchases have involved significantly more paperwork and signatures than my most recent property purchases.

What is it about the process that you've had issues with?

<comment><USER16> Our experiences differ vastly. Granted I've only bought one house and it was 8 years ago. Maybe things have gotten better in the intervening years?

My experience buying cars has involved signing maybe a dozen pages, while my experience buying a house involved signing form after form after form (most of which I didn't really know the purpose of) for literally hours. I'm certain I spent more time just signing paperwork to buy my house than I've ever spent on the entire car buying process from the time I walked into the sales guy's office after the test drive to the time I drove off the lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "would lift U.S. gross domestic product by 9.5 percent"? Really? Over what period of time? If it's one year it's unbelievable. If it's over 50 years, who cares?

<comment><USER19> I believe the calculation is for when the system approached its new steady state. And why shouldn't one care about the world of fifty years from now? I intend to still be alive, and so will a lot of the people I care about.

Plus it's not like we'd see no improvement whatsoever for 49 years and then WHAM. We'd see gradual returns on this investment every year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> People who want to move here (for opportunities or work) by definition do not have an established life here, are not part of our community, do not have family and friends they have known for years based here, and have not worked to contribute to making San Francisco what it is. I am not overly concerned about how hard it may be for them to arrive.</comment>