Show HN: Simple wiki server written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/renstrom/go-wiki

<comment><USER2> I wrote a similar project a while back, you might be interested in checking out.

A friend and I implemented cookies, user login and database. However, I would recommend not using the SHA2 encryption method we used (we did it for fun not for security).

[https://github.com/lettergram/neptune](https://github.com/lettergram/neptune)

</comment><comment><USER3> Whar bothers me in Go (and Python and Ruby, for that matteR) is that there's a strange mix of human-friendly identifiers like ResponseWriter, ParseInt, etc. and old-style Unix'y ones, like stdout, strconv, Println. Wildly inconsistent.

I wonder if "creat" is a valid function call somewhere.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, the Golang core developers regret using the old UNIX conventions in packages. I don't think it's viable at this stage to take them back, but they do agree that it doesn't fit the language well.

[http://gophercon.sourcegraph.com/post/83845316771/panel- disc...](http://gophercon.sourcegraph.com/post/83845316771/panel-discussion- with-go-team-members)

<comment><USER5> I think he only regrets having used upper case names for constants (os.O_RDONLY), which is not idiomatic Go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. As mentioned in the README I created this project as a process to learn to Go.

I'm actually quite happy with how it turned out, I wanted something really simple to use but still have some nice features like showing the history of a page by leveraging Git.

Unfortunately I didn't get to use channels... Yet.

Coming from a Python background mostly I found Go pretty pleasing to work, however it took a while for me to grok the whole `$GOPATH` and dependencies stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good job. I see you went a few steps further than the Writing Web Applications with Go tutorial [0]. Definitely a good way to learn. I like your idea of showing the git history including diffs.

For anyone who might be interested in Go and is wondering how this is done, read the tutorial I mentioned. Go has solid documentation alongside a handful of tutorial style article that are worth reading.

[0] [http://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki/](http://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki/)

</comment><comment><USER7> As usual, I checked the .gitignore. You may want to try "/gowiki" instead of "gowiki".

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense. Just pushed a fix[1].

[1] [https://github.com/renstrom/go- wiki/commit/535c645fb25252e49...](https://github.com/renstrom/go- wiki/commit/535c645fb25252e496396883db8c61fc462ddf6c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting considering Rob's recent defense of the state of Go error handling.

var err error tail.Stdin, err = git.StdoutPipe() if err != nil { log.Println("ERROR", err) }

tail.Stdout = &out

err = tail.Start() if err != nil { log.Println("ERROR", err) }

err = git.Run() if err != nil { log.Println("ERROR", err) }

err = tail.Wait() if err != nil { log.Println("ERROR", err) }

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, not my proudest moment. To be honest, I wasn't really sure what to with all the err's.

<comment><USER9> The only issue I'd really be strict about is that you're not doing _anything_ with the errors.

Specifically, you've:

1\. Encountered an error

2\. Detected it

3\. Printed it

But you've continued execution, and some of those errors are clearly not going to let you continue cleanly.

If you couldn't call git on the command line (i.e. it is not installed), then what are you going to do with the stdout? And if git was somehow replaced with something that only returned a status code and no output, then what are you going to do with no output?

The important point is that errors can be thrown because errors can plausibly exist in a way that affects you. You _should_ handle them, logging is fine as a bare minimum but you probably also want to return and exit out of the func in a way that communicates to the thing that called the func that "Something went wrong, and I don't have the results you're looking for".

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I should probably just add something like this at after every log:

        log.Println("ERROR", err)
        return out.Bytes(), err

Or just:

        log.Println("ERROR", err)
        return []byte, err

But I figured since the error will eventually get returned at the end anyway I moved on and kind of forgot about it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wary Swiss Banks Shun Yanks - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444592704578062570295543436.html

<comment><USER2> 1\. This is happening all over the world, not just Switzerland. Because of FATCA as well as the IRS's enforcement activities over the last few years, U.S. persons are seen as risky and expensive customers. It's more profitable and less risky to send U.S. customers away than it is to make the IRS happy.

2\. It's worse for entrepreneurs. I am now seeing my U.S. clients lose business opportunities outside the USA. Would-be foreign partners are increasingly deciding that having an American in the company (as an owner and increasingly frequently as a mere employee) exposes the whole venture to too much U.S. government risk:

\- The U.S. person will likely report on his/her/its ownership portion of the joint venture. Typically this is Form 5471 for a corporation, for instance. This causes financial data about the company to bleed over to the U.S. government from abroad.

\- The U.S. person will likely have to disclose company bank accounts on Form TD F 90-22.1; this includes how much money is in the account as well as full bank details.

The privacy leaks are unacceptable to non-Americans. Why should their business affairs be disclosed to the USA, when the business never touches the United States? The easy solution is to reject the U.S. person who wants to be in business with them. Which they do.

3\. The consequence: I am seeing (and helping) an increasing number of entrepreneurs acquire a second citizenship then terminate their U.S. citizenship. I'm afraid that I am seeing the beginning (for the USA) of what people say about Detroit: "The people with get-up-and-go got up and went."

(Disclosure: I am an international tax lawyer and I do this stuff in my day job.)

(Personal opinion: All of that pessimism aside, let me just say that I experience frequent moments of gratitude when traveling abroad that I have the U.S. passport. Yes, it is a Very Big World with Many Fabulous Places to Live. But there are also some places where I am glad I can leave.)</comment>


Facebook's Answer to Silicon Valley Housing Crunch: Build Apartments - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-answer-to-silicon-valley-housing-crunch-build-apartments-1469534402 <comment><USER2> I know this comment will get downvoted, but I'm going to say it anyway because I think it's true.

I see in the article how 10-15% of the units will be reserved for "low income". I understand why they do this. If they didn't, it would never get approval from the necessary zoning authority. However, I think it's a mistake.

When people think "low income" they usually think of poignant cases of single mothers trying to raise kids, but in my experience that's not as common as we think.

I live in an SF building where I'd estimate at least 10% of the residents are retired. I think most are on Social Security and using Section 8. I know my neighbor is because she doesn't speak much English (she's Russian) and she brings me her mail to read. I'm guessing the other retirees (almost all Russian immigrants) are in the same boat.

In my opinion, if retirees need public assistance, they should live in a lower-cost area like Livermore, Gilroy, or Santa Rosa, not one of the most expensive neighborhoods in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Heck, I'd love to live in those areas if my job didn't require me to be in downtown SF every day.

But that would make too much sense. Instead, every new housing unit has to have some portion reserved for "low income" so the local politicians can have some currency to spread around among their supporters - and if you don't think they do this you are kidding yourself.

Constantly taking 10-15% of supply and restricting it to low income just raises housing costs for everyone else - and it's a double-whammy too because it's our tax dollars funding this unnecessarily lavish lifestyle (and $3K/month for a studio is lavish - there's no getting around it.)

If you can't afford to live in a certain level of housing in a certain area at market prices, then you shouldn't live there, you should live somewhere cheaper. If the people companies want to hire can't afford to live within a reasonable distance then companies should pay more. If they can't pay more they should leave.

Companies and jobs leaving will be the only way to lower demand and prices - and probably the only way to wake leaders up and get them to address our poor housing policies.

<comment><USER3> And their friends? Their support networks? Their families? The place they know and love?

It only makes sense from a fairly warped point of view.

<comment><USER2> I don't get to live by my family. I had to move for my job. I had to make new friends and travel to see old ones. When this job ends I'll probably have to move again. When I retire (God willing) and if I'm still in SF, I'll probably need to move to somewhere cheaper. I don't see why the same rules shouldn't apply to them.

If their friends and families care so much they should take them in, not put them on the public dole. As retirees they are probably better off living somewhere cheaper anyway, like a retirement community in an exurb, where _everything_ , food, medical, and entertainment was a lot cheaper.

<comment><USER4> Empathy is a trait that, were you to cultivate it, would also likely help you tremendously in business, product design, understanding users, and many other things you find personally valuable in life, even beyond its intrinsic ability to make you more human.

<comment><USER2> Do you have something beyond a personal attack to offer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this a resurgence of the "company town" of yore? Facebook now has work space, restaurants (nee "free meals"), plenty of other amenities (things like laundry, childcare, haircuts, massages, etc). Add in housing and you've basically recreated a mill town centered on tech.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that cities have become so opposed to allowing construction of middle class rental units that it takes the concerted effort of a multi- billion dollar corporation to build any.

<comment><USER7> It's also not always quite that simple. My city is trying to pass a moratorium on residential building permits because the infrastructure is simply not built out enough to handle all the people moving to town. Yeah, yeah, public transportation, etc... but all of that takes time and money to build.

The 2 lane road leading to my house is already overloaded and a builder is wanting to build another 2000 houses at the end of the road. Instead of waiting and relying on the state to improve the road, maybe we should do a better job at shifting the infrastructure costs to the builder when they put up a new apartment building or neighborhood.

<comment><USER8> You know how in software quick and ugly hacks have this nasty tendency to stick around long past their sell-by date and hurt everything around them?

A quick and ugly policy hack like a housing moriturium is the same way.

<comment><USER7> It's not a hack. If you want to use a software analogy it is akin to stop adding features until we get the current system cleaned up. That is often the _right_ thing to do in software. The hack is not a moratorium, the hack is to keep adding houses until infrastructure finally fails and the system falls over. Brilliant plan.

<comment><USER8> OK. It's a feature moritorium. It's an administrative choice that is very easy to prolong. Because it solves the immediate problem, it's also a choice that's very easy to keep making to avoid the significant cost of addressing the underlying problems.

This is the sort of administrative choice that led to the Bay's housing crises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> (Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

Google's been trying to do this for years, but the Mountain View city council keep blocking it. :(

<comment><USER10> That's not an opinion... You made a statement that's either true or false.

<comment><USER11> It is a statement that doesn't indicate how much Google is trying, and the perception of whether someone is trying to do something can be an opinion sometimes. For example, if I am trying to get healthy by only eating carbs, some people might have the opinion that I'm not even trying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A lot of companies used to build housing for their workers, some even had supermarkets for them. I know this time they are building for others too, marketing and PR, but looks we are learning from the past.

</comment><comment><USER13> There area bunch of new apartments built near Facebook campus[1]. Those are not cheap but are much more affordable than actual Menlo Park.

The reason Menlo Park allows building those new apartments is because Menlo Park has a serious segregation problem. North side of 101 is mostly black and latino communities and they usually don't have any representatives in the city hall and don't get involved with the proposals much. So the people of rich side of the city shoot down any construction near their homes but approve anything on this side so they can get the taxes come in to make their neighborhood even nicer.

This new proposal is in this side of 101 again. They're going to make this side of Menlo Park very crowded and keep their nice homes and probably enjoy even higher property values.

[1] [http://www.777hamilton.com/](http://www.777hamilton.com/)

<comment><USER14> I love how their cover photo is of somebody in front of a horribly run down building with rust & peeling paint. That really makes me want to live there!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps FB/Google/Etc should subsidize the cost of employees purchasing property (similar to tenured track profs at Stanford) until they reach a critical mass of voters that can affect changes to allow denser housing.

</comment><comment><USER16> If the rents they charge employees are well below the market rates, won't the ISR crack down on this as a taxable benefit?

</comment><comment><USER17> Ah watch out for the new headquarters building curse.

[https://steveblank.com/2009/05/15/supermac-war- story-11-the-...](https://steveblank.com/2009/05/15/supermac-war-story-11-the- curse-of-a-new-building/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Can people stop posting articles nobody can read.

<comment><USER19> Click the "web" button under the article title (in the comments page), click link in Google.

<comment><USER20> Not everyone knows this. The OP made a fair comment. It's better to upvote him to spread awareness for this feature. I visit daily and only noticed it recently.</comment></comment></comment>


Mississippi bans labeling veggie burgers "burgers" - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/3/20680731/mississippi-veggie-burgers-illegal-meatless-meat <comment><USER2> Seems like a marketing opportunity for the non-meat industry. Call them Hamberders or Ham Burglars ;)

With love to Barbara Streisand

<comment><USER3> Similarly, you cannot call her "Barbara". Her name is "Barbra".

She literally named one of her albums " _My Name is Barbra_ ".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's just silly since "burger" is slang. But States seem to be in a contest to pass asinine laws lately so I'm not surprised they made this one.

</comment><comment><USER5> Its about time someone stood up to this cultural appropriation.</comment>


In Neanderthal DNA, Signs of a Mysterious Human Migration - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/04/science/neanderthals-dna-homo-sapiens-human-evolution.html <comment><USER2> I really think it is time to come up with a better name for ancient people from sub-Saharan Africa than "humans". If all the different hybrid people alive today are humans, then it is very misleading to call one branch "human" and the others Neanderthal or Denosovan.

<comment><USER3> They aren't. They are Homo sapiens, vs homo neanderthalis, homo erectus or the like. There used to be many closely related humans. But we eradicated them (in all likelihood).

From that perspective, sapiens would be a better term than humans..

<comment><USER2> We haven't eradicated them, we have bred with them. Most of us are the decendents of both the sub-Saharan people and Neanderthal people and some of us are the descendants of sub-Saharan people, Neanderthal people, and the Denosovan people (three different species). If we are all human now then why is only one ancient population from Africa called human.

<comment><USER4> We bred with them, but evolution has been heavily eliminating the traces of the breeding and they are generally often linked with diseases. So they do not seem to be on equal grounds. And as for 'us' \- speak for yourself, but much of the human race has no Denisovan or Neanderthal ancestry.

<comment><USER5> > much of the human race has no Denisovan or Neanderthal ancestry.

But most does. Any population originally of Asian or European descent has some Denisovan or Neanderthal DNA, or ~80 percent of the world's population.

<comment><USER4> A fifth of the entirety of humanity is a heck of a lot. If you want to claim that Denisovan or Neanderthal ancestry is just as crucial as the basal homo sapiens, you are writing off a good chunk of humanity. Combine this with the purging of Neanderthal DNA (and the likely purging of the little bit of Denisovan introgression), it's clear that one of these things is not like the others. Let's not overstate the implications of these things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Questions being asked like "What is human?" or "What defines a species?" have differing answers depending on the specific world-view of the questioner.

As I have read the comments already given, it is obvious that there are some here who define a species very narrowly and would therefore treat the Kalhari desert people as a different species to the run of the mill European.

Even the word hybrid as applied to living organisms has major problems, especially when used in conjunction with some definitions of species.

The upshot of the various definitions is that any organism that breeds with another successfully and produces viable breeding offspring are members of the same species. In which case, Neanderthal is just one of the varieties of the homo sapiens species, no more and no less than any existing human today.

I have heard various comments about some people today of how like they are to the images we use for the Neanderthal. Since we only have skeletal remains and no actual corpses, there is much that we cannot tell about how they looked and how different any other bodily feature may have been. The experts use mostly guess work - I am not denigrating guess work based on good evidence. What I am saying is that we don't know with any certitude of the real differences, if any, between modern man and ancient man.

<comment><USER7> I think the labels aid in identifying migrations. i.e. This pattern of genes is called A and that other one is B. If you later see something that looks like a mixture of A & B then you know they interbred around that area at that time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think that we might really underestimate old branches of humans regarding how they developed.

Things like very simple trade, slavery and religious systems could exist in some primitive, chaotic way - that would explain a lot. We are walking into the dark and we will need probably decades before proper picture of ancient people will emerge. Hopefully, there will be enough funding to continue this.

<comment><USER9> traditional view is that before agriculture and animal husbandry slavery wasn't feasible - slaves would eat as much food as they would be able to collect, so why bother. Egyptian "living dead" term etymology as an example. But trade and religion, why not.

<comment><USER8> I think that such a slave could have many uses. Woman slave could be used for breeding and speed up the process of recovering heard numbers after some catastrophe. Also, it could be skill based - where slaves with unique skills would be traded (like making ropes, sharp objects, bowls), something that would be hard to grasp for ancient people. There is also a "mule" thing, where slaves would be used for carrying stuff. And of course the last - religious. Could be that group would have a "different looking" person in a heard as a charm/talisman (breeding with it would result in healthy children - thanks to genetic diversity).

But it could be nothing. More research is important for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yet another attempt to establish "history" using "science".</comment>


A Public Option for Food - <AUTHOR> https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/a-public-option-for-food <comment><USER3> I think both options together are good. Both capitalist and government-planned economies have inefficiencies, but at different areas.

If you have some service provided by government, then it's sometimes inefficient. These inefficiencies can only be reduced by better governance, i.e. people actually getting involved politically and forcing the management to straighten it out.

If you have some service provided by only private companies for profits, then perhaps the production is efficient, but this efficiency can become lost for the end customer in the form of profits. In theory, this shouldn't happen due to competition but in practice it happens a lot (almost no private company operates at marginal costs).

So if you have a choice of both options, in theory you should get optimal results. In practice, it is difficult for societies to keep both options, for reasons:

1\. If the public option is too good (too efficient), no private companies want to compete (no profit). For example, look at some state-owned European companies, such as Swiss post or railways.

2\. If the private option is too good (only decent profit), then there is no reason to have the public option. People want to avoid governance, if possible. The people who pay for private option will question if they actually need to fund the public option from taxes if the private ones are comparably good.

So I think the big problem is that system with both (the best one) is unstable.

<comment><USER4> Worst case scenario is that the private's solution is too good and the state thus regulates the private competition to be as bad as the public.

<comment><USER3> Do you have some examples? I can only see the obvious extreme example of communism, which forbade private competition at all.

But I am not clear who (which party) would push for such a regulation. The benefit to the public is obviously bad, and the private industry would certainly oppose it.

<comment><USER5> I have the opposite example. In the Czech Republic, the national railway was sued by the private railways for being too cheep. And the private railways won in court!

<comment><USER6> Similarly: in Germany you used to bed able to watch the entire back catalog of public broadcasting companies. They got sued by private broadcasters and now are only allowed to show two weeks back. I think it's ridiculous, since the tax payer paid for and owns the content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Food companies such as Procter and Gamble, Kraft, and Campbell Soup were > also curious about Lands's work and invited him to give presentations. "But > they didn't want to touch the idea that they might be selling foods that > were harmful to people with a ten-foot pole," says Lands. "Bill, we sell > foods that people ask for," Lands recalls one executive explaining. "We > don't tell the people what to eat. If you convince the public that our food > should have a different balance, we'll change it."

\- The Queen of Fats by Susan Allport

Corporations are not guilt free in this mess, but they are not the root of the problem. The high carb, high omega 6 guidelines that have caused our health crisis were instituted in haste and ignorance by the government. The government corn subsidies have distorted the market and make junk processed corn products cheaper than healthy food. Guidelines to reduce saturated fat and cholesterol have caused people to move to industrial seed oils, causing a overconsumption of omega6 fatty acids and consequential inflammatory disease. Corporations have simply provided what we have asked for. The author of this argument is ignorant of the real causes of disease and chooses to blame cheese and salt for our problems. I'm much happier with corporations and the ability to make my own, well informed health choices than government interference.

<comment><USER8> The guidelines created by the USDA have always been and continue to be the product of corporate lobbying, not science. [https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10726606/2015-us- dietary-g...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10726606/2015-us-dietary- guidelines-meat-and-soda-lobbying-power)

<comment><USER7> I believe there is likely a lot of truth to this. I'm sure we can all agree crony capitalism is awful. However, I do not agree with this article that red meat is a cause for health concern. Such claims tend to be based on weak associations from flawed epidemiological studies, which cannot prove cause and effect.

<comment><USER9> I think there is very strong evidence that replacing "red meat" in the Standard American Diet is healthier, and that is as far as the Verge is going to dive into that particular argument.

I do agree the red meat in the Standard American Diet is a health concern, but that's because the healthiest options to consume red meat in our collective dietary preferences are still going to be laden with sugary dressings or carbohydrate rich mashed potatoes. Meat always comes with additional and excessively plentiful carbohydrates.

<comment><USER10> That's because people in the United States as a general rule eat tons of cheap, processed meat. When removed, there's a slight chance it'll be replaced by actual vegetables, of which their diet has tremendous lack of, so in almost any case it will be a win-win for their digestive system and cholesterol. It's not the meat it's you

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I imagine this author has never been to a soup kitchen. One experience with your typical soup kitchen should cure anyone of the notion that this is a good idea.

The food is appalling. The service is terrible. If your stuff gets stolen while you eat because they insisted you leave it elsewhere, not their problem. They assume they know what is best for you, never mind they have no idea what your diagnosis is and no idea about the doctor ordered dietary restrictions that go with it. So the assumption is both flat out wrong and monstrously insulting.

I would literally rather fast for a day or so than ever go back to a soup kitchen. That is not hyperbole. I have made that exact choice on a number of occasions while dirt poor.

<comment><USER8> Like any government program, or anything really, it could be operated well or poorly. We can examine what about the proposal might make it hard to implement properly, such as the wide variety of dietary restrictions as well as peoples' personal tastes and the fact that food for many people is a central part of their family and culture. Maybe that means such a program should focus more on the raw ingredients than delivering prepared food. I'm not sure because some soup kitchens are bad, we should discount all publicly funded food. For one, it does in fact feed lots of people today via free school lunch programs.

<comment><USER4> The difference is that when a private program is run badly, it goes bankrupt and is closed. When a public program is run badly, it keeps going on forever.

<comment><USER8> I think this is a bit naive. Badly run corporations find ways to keep themselves alive, it's not like owners and shareholders look at a bad situation and just say "Oh well, we tried" and go home. I think there's a strong case to be made that shareholders should be much more willing to just close up shop and cut their losses when the world changes around them, but that's not how people work.

<comment><USER7> You are of course right, but it is nevertheless mostly true, and in this case mostly true happens to be sufficient. Evolution works despite the fact that unfit animals don't always die.

More importantly, private companies preserve choice (assuming no monopoly). Government provides no choice. My ability to make my own choice is what is most valuable to me.

<comment><USER8> I don't mean to be too harsh, but you might value your ability to choose less if you didn't know when your next meal would be.

<comment><USER11> I was homeless for a long time. Valuing my agency above all else helped me solve my problems and get off the street.

When you start eroding rights on the excuse that someone is too poor to have any right to care about such high minded frivolities as rights, you deprive them of hope of resolving their problems.

<comment><USER8> I don't think anyone here is talking about taking away anyone's rights. The implication above was that government providing free food might lead to less choice as government crowds out business, but not removing someone's "right" to choose. The tradeoff between more choice in food and people starving doesn't seem to be much of a tradeoff. There's plenty of room for a middle ground.

<comment><USER11> My comments are in regards to your statement here:

 _but you might value your ability to choose less if you didn 't know when your next meal would be._

I am telling you that when I was so poor that I often had no idea when my next meal might be, I valued my own agency -- my right to choose and to make choices -- tremendously. But it looks to me like, overall, most folks here don't want to hear the opinions of someone who actually ate regularly at soup kitchens for a time. They want to say nice things about being generous people who will feed the hungry, and let's not let actual facts get in the way of our pretty ideas that this is always a good thing with no down side.

It is a form of virtue signaling. It is also a form of pity, which is fundamentally disrespectful. You assume you are in a better position than the people of whom you speak to decide for them, while completely dismissing the opinions to the contrary of someone still poor enough that food security is an ongoing question mark.

This seems to be par for the course.

<comment><USER8> While I value your experience and perspective, I don't believe you speak for all people who are food insecure. There is lots of evidence, given the success of food banks, meals on wheels and other programs, that many would welcome this type of universal free food. You also assume that I am somehow in favor of paternalistic policies and against the agency of poor people, when that is not at all the intent of my comment and does not reflect my personal beliefs. I am personally strongly in favor of a universal basic income and other approaches that enable people who do not earn wages or have other sources of income to make the best decisions for themselves. I also think this is a good idea. I think there are a lot of different ways to improve the quality of life of a lot of people, and I don't think just giving away food to everyone (rather than means-testing the program or something) is particularly paternalistic or highly choice-limiting.

With regard to "virtue signaling", that is a derogatory term used to imply that a person is only promoting an idea to appear good to others, without a genuine care or interest in effecting the change they are promoting. I think we have a fundamental disagreement about what sorts of policies would be effective, and using that term is unnecessarily dismissive.

<comment><USER11> _I think we have a fundamental disagreement about what sorts of policies would be effective, and using that term is unnecessarily dismissive._

Using that term mostly indicates that I feel incredibly dismissed most of the time on Hacker News.

This is a new handle, but I am not new here. I have had college classes on, for example, homelessness and public policy. I got myself off the street on my own efforts, not through some program. As best I can tell, I am the only woman who has ever spent any time on the leaderboard of HN.

None of it seems to make any difference. I continue to get no traction. I continue to not get substantive feedback on my projects. I continue to have no connections. My income remains extremely low.

I can't help but feel that sexism and classism are factors and I am just incredibly frustrated. Trying to do something good against long odds, etc begins to seem totally pointless and fruitless. I increasingly understand the very angry feminist types. I don't agree with their approach, but no approach seems to actually work.

You and I do fundamentally disagree. I am not pro UBI. I think that is a polite means to crap all over the have nots and increasingly cut them out of ever more access to money, rights, you name it.

I don't intend to engage further. I don't think this is in any way whatsoever productive. It is yet another exercise in me trying to engage in good faith with someone who seems to fundamentally be incapable of genuinely respecting me. Everything you say is another ever so politely dismissive thing done in accordance with the rules such that me getting offended just makes me look bad in the eyes of everyone here.

I have been facing this sort of thing with, I think, quite a lot of aplomb for more than 8 years, to no avail at all. And I just am not coping well with that fact at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > We don't have government-run grocery stores like we have government-run > schools. And yet most people in the country seem pretty happy with their > grocery stores. They can get whatever they want there, and if they can't > afford it, we subsidize it with a "voucher" (i.e. food stamps). The profit > motive hasn't led to a rapacious system of exploitation.

This isn't strictly true for poorer areas. Grocery stores that have a predominately captive clientele (i.e. can't afford to drive long distances and have big kitchens to store bulk purchases from discount big box stores) do tend to charge more for the same goods than stores in more affluent / mobile areas.

<comment><USER13> As a European that has moved to the USA, I find these "food deserts" here appalling. In order to have access to local, fresh, quality ingredients, you need to be in an outrageously high income bracket. There is absolutely a food supply problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Every town has an American Free Diner in it. The music is great and there's a buzzing neon sign.

I think that latter sentence is telling. No music is "great" to everybody. In some cases any music at all may make the diner unusable, eg. for autistic people with sensory processing difficulties. The author appears not to have considered this. Centralized food provision will necessarily reduce choice, and reduced choice will harm many people.

Of course capitalism isn't perfect either, for all the reasons described, but it makes more sense to address specific market failures with regulation than replace the whole system. Eg. I don't see why corporations should be considered people with free speech rights, so I'd support heavy restrictions on advertising.

<comment><USER15> That's a big jump from a tiny percentage to "many". How many autistic people with sensory problems would even attend a general populace diner and not their own state run diner attached to their adult care home?

I think you should put aside your music objection. Of course, the NHS, which he used as an example, accommodates a wide range of people. I'm sure as they'd be so many diners needed they'd have rooms available without the music you've latched on to. I would imagine in the UK you might have one room on radio 1, another on radio 2, some silent, etc.

While I doubt it would ever happen I'm pretty certain he's right that this would help far, far more people than it would hurt. And, bonus, if they don't like it they can go buy their own groceries and cook.

<comment><USER14> The music will affect only a small minority, but the music is just one of many choices the author proposes the government make for people. The number of people affected by at least one of those choices will be much higher.

Even if there's a private option, the public option has to be funded somehow. If you can opt out of paying in exchange for losing access to the service then it's no longer "free".

And in my experience, while the NHS is superb for common physical ailments, if there's anything unusual wrong with you then they're close to useless. Healthcare is in any case an atypical market because it's already so heavily regulated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > That's because I tend to think that when a service is for profit rather than > for the public's benefit, all sorts of perverse incentives arise. If schools > operated for profit, with education subsidized by vouchers, the companies > running the schools would have an interest in spending as little as possible > actually educating the students, because every dollar they could save would > be a dollar they could keep.

The problem with this kind of argument is that it forgets the incentive of a government run or public's benefit is that they too have a different metric to adhere to - politics. They then lead to a cumbersome system with nearly zero responsibility. This then gets picked up by people on the opposite side of the fence as failures of public benefit, government run system.

So, unfortunately things have to seen on a case to case basis. Public benefit schooling is a great thing. But public benefit food option? That is debatable. For some it will come off "government controlling what we eat" and hurting fundamental rights.

<comment><USER17> >>> because every dollar they could save would be a dollar they could keep.

Which is why they shouldn't operate as corporations. They can still be "for- profit" but under a different corporate scheme. Make all the kids/parents shareholders/members in the association and keep those profits internal.

<comment><USER13> So a cooperative model? I like that. I think pretty much everything would be better off and we would all benefit more if our institutions were structured as worker-owner and worker-consumer cooperatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Americans live on junk food; they have terrible diets, with too much sodium, > too many calories, too much sugar, and too few fruits and vegetables.

Yes. That happens because they are able to execute their own free will and choose for themselves - and of course, most people are easily manipulated and choose poorly.

But here lies the fundamental difference between "left" and "right" positions. "Left" tends to optimize for the best utilitarian value from some objective, authoritative point of view (like how good a person diet's is) and would favor a situation where a well-intended authority would choose what's best for the people. Meanwhile, the "right"-wing objective is to optimize a person's individual freedom - which, of course, usually leads to most people making poor choices and having less total utilitarian happiness.

Which of those values we should optimize for, and what is the best compromise is a complicated question that lies at the basis of a lot of modern political debates. In this particular comment I'm not trying to take any sides. But why am I talking about it at all then? Because it seems surprising to me how people on the "left" side of such arguments naively assume that we all want to optimize for the same total utilitarian value, completely disregarding that the other side tries to optimize for a different metric.

<comment><USER19> Phrased this way, it starts to sound like an ML problem. Optimize based on a cost function, now what cost function do we use?

Having people choose to maximize happiness seems to be leading to worse outcomes by many objective standards. The monetary costs are high for the society in aggregate (and the externalities are not distributed according to the costs), health outcomes seem to be getting worse even to the extreme of lowering life expectancy, and so on. Purely seeking individual happiness seems like the wrong cost function based on that.

Of course, focusing only on economic cost to society would be even worse, and health outcomes tend to be based in large part on individual happiness.

I guess I'm saying that as you've characterized things, you make it sound like the "right" position is the correct one, but there seem to be a lot of things about that position that aren't so great. To be fair, you said "less total utilitarian happiness," but I thought it might help to give examples.

<comment><USER18> > Phrased this way, it starts to sound like an ML problem.

Which, I think, it pretty soon well be, and in some sense, already is (trading).

> I guess I'm saying that as you've characterized things, you make it sound > like the "right" position is the correct one

While this is indeed my position, I tried not to express it in this particular comment, because it's not about who is right in this debate but rather about acknowledging it's existence and importance in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing I was talking about with some other people is to have a community kitchen. You could buy prepared food, or if you have more time than money you could buy the ingredients sold there and make it yourself in the kitchen. This could be really great for people that lack a kitchen (like college students) or for people who weren't taught how to cook.

The major problem with this is who's responsible for cleanup, and how would we divide labor for this place. What do y'all think?

<comment><USER21> I have had similar thoughts. Also just an option for people who don't have families or live far from their families (e.g. single and moved to a new city for work) to prepare and share meals together. Like maybe I know that I'm cooking for ~6 people every Tuesday as part of a meal sharing, and someone else is cooking on Thursdays. Or maybe one night a week, I know that I'm cooking on the first Tuesday of every month, and someone else is cooking the second, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > I went to a public school. I enjoyed myself there. I believe it taught me > some things.

My mom switched me from public to private school in elementary school. Without a doubt the quality of the private schools' facilities, teachers, staff, and education were much better then the public school. I ended being held back in the 3rd grade simply because I was so far behind my other classmates in terms of knowledge that was not stressed at the public school. Yes, private school can be expensive, but if you have the resources and can find a good school with a track record of success, I highly recommend enrolling your kids in a private school.

<comment><USER23> Come to a Scandinavian public school. Then you'll see working public schools. Evidently, this has nothing to do with publicness or privateness, but rather a culture. The big question is: in what direction should we push the society?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> In 2010, 18 million people lived in a food desert, without reasonable accessibility to any grocery store, and 41.2 million people live in a food- insecure household.

That's _10 percent of the population with no access to healthy food_ , and _1 in 7 Americans going hungry every year_.

And this guy wants to build Diners (where no grocery stores exist) and not only collect food there, but cook and serve it to people. And thinks this will solve our nutrition problems.

Sorry, but this guy is a fucking idiot. Besides the fact that this would be a bigger infrastructure project than fixing all our ailing bridges and roads, How are you going to handle thousands of people all wanting to eat at the same time? Are you going to provide transportation for them all? Leftovers? Handle all possible allergies, dietary and religious restrictions? Is the food going to cover a range of cuisines, since people in the US all come from varying backgrounds and traditions?

There's probably a thousand different problems with forcing people to go to a specific place every single day just to get a meal, besides the fact that this would _never get funded by the government_ , because almost all food banks and soup kitchens are privately funded, because the government won't.

</comment><comment><USER25> I understand the article is more about feeding in mass.

However, how hard is it to eat healthy?

I don't understand why people have trouble here. It is fairly simple concept we can apply logic to:

if food is prepackaged:

        if food has ingredients you can't pronounce:

             bad for you

        else:

             probably bad for you

else:

         good for you

Do I eat salads everyday? No. I get my chickens from a local farm up the road, killed the day I buy them. I fry them up with collard greens on the side. The collard greens are made from the pig I bought from the same farm and had slaughtered - its understand collard greens are made with bacon slow cooking all day.

Does everyone have access to these farms? No. Though you can still buy quality food at the super-market.

I look at people's carts, and its full of soda, chips, frozen food, Starbucks coffee cans etc... Literally none of the food requires any type of cooking - heating in the oven or microwave does not equate to cooking. Plus this stuff is not cheap, chips are $3, soda is $3 - 5 a 12 pack etc... Drink whole milk at $2 a gallon or brew ice tea at $0.50 a gallon. Buy popcorn kernels at $8 a bag (expensive from local farmer, $3-4 is more likely), melt Kerrygold butter pour over top and add salt.

If you do not know how to cook I recommend starting with 'The Essentials of Italian Cooking' by Marcella Hazan. You can make sauce and pasta (not required) from scratch in under an hour. Inexpensive, fair better tasting and healthy. Most recipes are simple and teaches you how to cook - Italian cooking at least.

<comment><USER15> This thread is full of victim blaming.

The simple, completely obvious, counter-argument to this is that if it were that easy, every person would do it. There would be no obese people. Virtually no-one wants to be fat.

Instead the problem is getting worse. Telling people to eat less and move more is simply not working.

<comment><USER25> There are no victims because it is a personal choice. If you want to be fat and lead a horrible life, so be it.

Eating healthy is very simple. People research which TV to buy, what television show to watch, what political news story to be enraged about etc... But can't spend five minutes how to eat properly?

There are no victims here, just people unwilling to accept responsibility for their choices.

<comment><USER15> Again with the victim blaming, no matter how many different ways you say the same thing, you're completely wrong.

It's not a personal choice, it's like claiming smoking is a personal choice. 40 years ago it really wasn't, it was a social normal, and then when it became clear how badly the tobacco companies had misled the world, it took a lot of struggle and effort and huge public policy initiatives to reduce smoking.

A large section of society has been attacked by companies for profit using lies, addictive substances and manipulation and simply saying "stop smoking" or "start spending inordinate amounts of time researching every thing you eat to find out if it has added sugar, even though it's presented to you as healthy", didn't/hasn't worked.

That you're still trying to peddle the obesity crisis as a moral failing of some huge swathe of the population is really sad and disappointing.

<comment><USER25> You are completely wrong.

What you eat is a personal choice, such as smoking is personal choice. Regardless of societal norms, it is still a personal choice.

Not every issue in society requires a victim. Victim for example is someone who was raped because they didn't have a choice in the manner. Going to the store, and choosing which items to purchase does not equate to a victim. Just because a large portion of society makes poor choices does not equate to a large portion of society being victims.

If all of society jumped off a bridge, are they all victims?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > If schools operated for profit, with education subsidized by vouchers, the > companies running the schools would have an interest in spending as little > as possible actually educating the students, because every dollar they could > save would be a dollar they could keep.

How can someone actually believe this?

That point of view makes the rest of this article hard to take at face value.

<comment><USER27> My kids have been in 3 schools. Public (among the best in the area) has proved far worse than private. "Keep" too much, and the money walks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > That's because I tend to think that when a service is for profit rather than > for the public's benefit, all sorts of perverse incentives arise. If schools > operated for profit, with education subsidized by vouchers, the companies > running the schools would have an interest in spending as little as possible > actually educating the students, because every dollar they could save would > be a dollar they could keep. That strikes me as dangerous, and I can't help > but think that it will lead inexorably in the direction of giving children > iPads rather than teachers.

The trouble with a public system is that all sorts of perverse incentives arise. Civil servants' unions have an interest in maximising benefits to their members, and in the U.S. they spend their dues (taken, ultimately, from the taxpayer) to lobby politicians to increase their members' benefits (taken, ultimately, from the taxpayer). A public system mandates that everyone contribute, regardless of his or her beliefs: in Tennessee an atheist might be forced to spend on a school which teaches creationism, while in San Francisco a theist might be forced to spend on a school which teaches that there is no God.

There would be similar problems with a 'public food option.' The author notes 'I could give you a dozen people who could run a nutritious, delicious, and decidedly non-dreary nonprofit diner given a sufficient budget': what would prevent those dozen people from each building their own little empires on the taxpayers' dime? Who is to determine what is a sufficient but not exorbitant level of non-dreariness? Is it okay for the Free American Diner to serve meat? Non-kosher food?

None of this is to say that private firms don't _also_ have perverse incentives: he's right, they do. But I think that the answer is generally to try to fix that (e.g. by regulation) rather than to go public. At least with competing firms one _might_ have a choice: with a public option, only the very wealthy can opt out.

</comment><comment><USER29> > "Then I remembered that nutrition in America is a total disaster, that ⅔ of > the country is obese or overweight, and that half of the country either has > diabetes or is at high risk of having diabetes soon. If we start providing > education like we provide nutrition, then God help the little children…"

The irony here is (pardon the hyperbole) literally deadly.

If we're going to prevent obesity then more people need to be educated on the causes. In many (read: all) of the non-medical condition based cases, the individual is their own best enemy. There is nothing more choice based than what you put in your mouth.

No doubt, there's room for improvement in the food system. But I've seen people with choices consistently choose badly. To blame the system is blaming a symptom.

<comment><USER15> This is discussed extensively in the article, and is in fact the main argument of the article.

The thrust of his argument is that capitalism forces companies to play to biological triggers that are bad for us, and to play them hard. And then use psychological tricks to make you feel ok for falling for them, even though you logically know you shouldn't.

If they don't their competitors will.

So the system is deliberately exerting pressure to become obese, it's not a symptom, it's a direct cause.

He even uses examples of how Brazil and other countries have been targeted deliberately by companies selling sugar and salt and have suddenly developed obesity problems, after US companies ran around giving away desserts and other sugar laden food.

I would re-read the article and pay attention to the parts about Coke, Raisin Bran and Minute Maid juice, plus him discussing Brazil, if you missed the arguments.

<comment><USER29> Yes. I got all that. I see it everyday. My point is that when we've reached a point where it's acceptable to blame anything but ourselves for what we buy at the supermarket...for what we put in our mouths...then we are in very bad shape.

Fixing the system isn't going to fix The Problem. The lack of self responsibility will only manifest itself elsewhere.

Put another way, in the bigger scheme of things, we can't keep complaining about the power of the overseers (i.e., the 1% et al) and make every solution one that champions the Nanny State.

<comment><USER30> At a certain point I think it's reasonable to say that a company spending half a billion dollars on psychology research and manipulation (advertising) MIGHT just have the upper hand.

<comment><USER29> Pardon my non-HN tone but...does that reasonable point come before or after I look down and can't see my own penis when I pee? How isn't that a trigger for "something is wrong"?

Yes, there is a well-armed enemy. But most people I've come in contact with are in denial that enemy exists. You can't stop a problem if you're unwilling to admit it exists. You can't improve your health if you're more committed to the idea that you have a God-given right to a sugar frosted donut. __

Is it unreasonable to expect people to look in the mirror, literally? I 'm not suggesting it's easy, but why is trying a bad thing?

 __Furthermore, and not to get too off-topic, but aside from too many sugars /carbs the average American diet includes too much factory farmed animals - whether that's milk or meat. Those animals are VERY resource intensive. Those animals also produce green horse gases (i.e, they fart, a lot).

So when was the last time you heard ANYONE of significant leadership say "America! You need to change your diet - for your own good, as well as the good of the planet"? Sure Obama got us ACA but he never met the much bigger (no pun intended) - less politically beneficial - root problem head on.

That's. Not. Leadership. Is it?

<comment><USER15> We're not talking about sugar coated donuts are we?

We're talking about a supposedly innocuous looking water that turns out it's sugar laden and a healthy looking breakfast cereal that again has huge amounts of added sugar.

While in the us/UK/etc. there is now widespread knowledge that coke and sweets are bad for you, the healthy looking alternatives also have tons of sugar added, deliberately, with manipulative packaging. But in poorer countries they're just using the old cheaper tactics, showing deliberate malice even though they know their product is generally damaging.

In my supermarket in the UK if you want to buy sugar free yoghurt you have to inspect the fine print. A large number have sugar as their second biggest ingredient. They're out to trick you all the time, with things that look like they have no sugar in them.

Not sure how your Obama beef is relevant.

<comment><USER29> Maybe this will help as it's a perfect example of the arc of my point.

In my supermarket in the USA, if you want to buy sugar free yogurt you go right for the plain knowing you can add anything you want; and that you'll know EXACTLY what you're adding, how much, etc. Personal responsibility to my body & mind trumps convenience (and a sugar high); it's my pushback against blaming The System when I already have and use the tools I need.

Plus, it also reduces shopping stress. There is no decision, just get the plain. (BTW, I'm not vegetarian / vegan but I do try to avoid yogurt as much as possible.)

Food is for nourishment, and occasionally to stimulate the senses (read: strictly for enjoyment). The problem is, too many have inverted that ratio; too many are unwilling to modify their relationship with food so they are healthy. There is nothing more personal than that relationship (i.e., what goes in your mouth). The System offers temptations. That doesn't make it okay to cheat on yourself.

p.s. My beef isn't with Obama. It's with (so called) liberals. Healthcare (which rightfully includes personal health), as well as the environment are both said to be liberal hot buttons. They are also connected. But all we get is ranting about the ACA and the Paris Accord? That's not leadership, at least not the type of leadership we really need at this point.

<comment><USER15> When did you learn that plain yoghurt is ok, but all the others are not ok? The packaging makes all the others look ok. Plain yoghurt vs strawberry yoghurt sounds like, and is presented like, a taste choice. Not a choice between 0 spoonfuls of sugar and 10 spoonfuls of sugar.

How did you learn it? And this is one example in a myriad of food choices! Almost every cereal, "whole grains and nuts", has sugar listed as the third ingredient. _Including_ the healthy looking ones. In the UK, Special-K, advertised by thin women in red swimming costumes, presents itself as a diet cereal. Third ingredient? Sugar. " _specifically tailored for women with a mix of ingredients to give you a positive, healthy start to the day and help you feel strong from the inside_ ". Healthy start my ass, it's just carbs.

What about all these other little rules and gotchas and tricks that you've learnt manipulative companies are trying to play on you?

How many articles did you have to read?

And why do you think the rest of society has this same level of education about food? You, I assume, are well paid, have time to sit at your desk reading articles about yoghurt and added sugar. You have a vastly different level of education than most of your country, access to much higher levels of pay, have different exposure to revealing stories about the tactics of companies adding sugar came from.

We haven't even touched on how carb laden, added sugar food is vastly cheaper and easier to cook than nutrional food, making it extra seductive in two ways to poor, overworked people.

You've fallen into the classic trap of "I know this, I act like this, I have this level of money, I have time to act on this, therefore everyone else should be able to".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There's one huge flaw with the American Free Diner, and it's that it would inevitably be supplied by a place like Sysco or Aramark. Not only that, it would be the cheapest option with the lowest quality ingredients, and it would still wind up being relatively expensive to run.

I remember the Malcolm Gladwell piece ripping Bowdoin for serving good food, and thinking how he got it all wrong. There are so many schools that wind up with garbage from Aramark, and they still pay an arm and a leg for it.

</comment><comment><USER32> "I've also always been suspicious of privatization schemes. That's because I tend to think that when a service is for profit rather than for the public's benefit, all sorts of perverse incentives arise."

Holy crap, how can anyone take this piece seriously with this zinger in the opening paragraph.

Neither private nor public are by themselves a panacea. Everything has trade- offs. This kind of polemic is not contributing to any kind of rational discourse.

</comment><comment><USER33> I agree with this. However there's a different way I'd look at it.

It takes 25 sq ft of vegetation to feed a person. Along with this, you can also raise tilapia. Aquaculture. But this is backbreaking work. Farming sucks, and hurts the body.

So, don't farm. We can instead use Farmbot.io as a platform of what to build. So we have a basis of how to automate farming. It still requires killing fish when they mature, but im sure even that can be automated.

Now, back to 25 sqft. If there's 30k people to feed, that's 750k sq ft to feed everyone. Now, if we construct a building 3 stories tall, that's 250k sq ft per floor.. square root of that = 500ft x 500ft floor size...

We need a building 550'x550' 3 stories tall to feed 30,000 people. And that would be climate controlled for the food you're producing, and ideally free for any to eat.

I call it food security. It may be "communist" for some definition of communism. But I don't care. This provides a right to live, by the very fact that you now have a guarantee of a share of food. No compulsion or anything.

<comment><USER27> You were doing great until "free". It's not free. It's hard work, using resources of value. There _is_ compulsion, whereby others must sacrifice (under threat) their own wealth & resources to facilitate what is falsely advertised as "free".

You have a right to live, insofar as nobody else may unduly take your life from you. That you live, comes the responsibility to provide for yourself - and suffer the consequences of your choices.

We've seen communism tried time and again. The death tolls & misery are staggering. Many of us will make sure it's not "tried", aka imposed by threat & violence, here; this is not up for debate, and you'd do well to understand why.

<comment><USER33> > You were doing great until "free". It's not free. It's hard work, using > resources of value. There is compulsion, whereby others must sacrifice > (under threat) their own wealth & resources to facilitate what is falsely > advertised as "free".

Initially yes, it is an expenditure. It would cost tax dollars, which I'm guessing by your tone, is "theft by a gun from state entity". Yes, ive heard the normal libertarian trappings. But this provides guaranteed food. And for those preppers, it's also local production. And it's provided to all.

> You have a right to live, insofar as nobody else may unduly take your life > from you. That you live, comes the responsibility to provide for yourself - > and suffer the consequences of your choices.

Yes, and the law is equal, in that it bans both the rich and the poor alike from sleeping under bridges.

The rich can afford whatever food they want. The poor cannot. This would provide a buffer for every living person in this country to get healthy food. Where you talk of "Self Actualization" ideals, there's people in this country starving. That itself should be abhorrent and disgusting. But I'm sure you'll have excuses why they should deserve to starve.

> We've seen communism tried time and again. The death tolls & misery are > staggering. Many of us will make sure it's not "tried", aka imposed by > threat & violence, here; this is not up for debate, and you'd do well to > understand why.

Communism has useful tools and ideas. So does capitalism.

Communism's been tried and gets stuck at military dictatorship on its way to stateless egalitarianism, every time. Capitalism goes the other way with large monied interests turning into their own dictatorships. It's not like many of the robber barons enacted company farms and company stores, and kept strikes from happening by violence... Oh, they did. Quite a few were killed by companies and National Guard.

And the big difference that you fail to cede to, is that with computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, we can start changing:

         "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
         --TO--
         "To each according to his needs".

And that would entail nobody "by threat & violence". Try looking past 1850's political theory. I know I try.

<comment><USER27> _Communism 's been tried and gets stuck at military dictatorship_

Of course it does. It has to. You're compelling people to engage in behavior they don't want to. That "to each" unavoidably requires "from each", decided by people no better than others, denying producers the full fruits of their labors, and blessing the idle with those fruits. Superior productivity becomes intolerable (as "inequal") and thus suppressed. The only way to enforce this unnatural state of affairs on people is thru threat of force leading precisely to military dictatorship. It's unavoidable.

Capitalism, however, lets people work out what is mutually beneficial _without_ being bossed around by uninvolved strangers. Yes, some become powerful and persuade trade, but people always have the option to not - nobody's going to get fined, jailed, exiled, or killed not buying Brand Mega products. I've seen many massive corporations collapse - nobody died in the process, everyone had the choice to not associate with them.

(And yes, you always have the option to buy some cheap seeds, buy some cheap land, and go live off the land yourself. That's basically how I grew up.)

"Large monied interests" do NOT turn into "dictatorships". Any worker who doesn't like the work/pay exchange can walk away. Any customer who doesn't like the product doesn't have to buy it. (The strikes you reference involved wanton physical disruption & destruction; obstructionism, vandalism, and violence gets met with likewise.) However, in communism: mutually beneficial contracting without state sanction gets one jailed; walking away from communism gets one shot.

And yes, there will _always_ be a need for "from each". Food doesn't grow & harvest itself in, no matter how automated. Buildings don't construct themselves. Work will need doing by humans. There will always be something for someone to do, so long as the state doesn't interfere. And ONLY capitalism will bring the price of food/shelter/etc down to the point that one need work very little to earn those basics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> TL;DR the CrossFit of permaculture

Yes! We need this and I dream about dedicating my life towards this work. Permaculture fits in this. It might be tricky to keep the stigma of food kitchen out of this idea, or maybe expand and fund food kitchens some how.

I want to farm healthy food and give it away. I want to cook healthy food and show people a better way of eating.

I think the MVP of this idea is to sell food as close to cost as possible. Make it taste amazing. Make the atmosphere not feel like a cafeteria but more like a Starbucks.

Invite people to stay as long as they like, invite them to help.

The biggest expense would likely be the commercial kitchen (hopefully buying the building and land). The first versions of this idea could be private but substidised. Government gives me 100k and I use 100k of my own money to buy and setup the facility.

Another idea is to treat it like a gym membership, like those crossfit clubs that have sprung all over the United States.

Pay $150/mo for all you can eat healthy choices.

</comment><comment><USER35> Also check out the interesting response from Slate Star Codex. [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/21/contra-robinson-on- publ...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/21/contra-robinson-on-public-food/)

<comment><USER36> The argument seems to be that "government can also be bad" and that "food industry is distorted by subsidies". Which is valid as far as it goes.

Getting to choose your own food and housing? Great, far better than being allocated by the government.

Getting to choose your own healthcare and education? Do you really have enough information to make an informed choice there? Are people who are unconscious or under 5 really good at being informed consumers? Or are they just having the decisions made for them by someone else?

Not getting any food or housing because you can't afford it? State option starts to look really great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Sure seems like something our society could experiment with and see what happens. Step A - build one (1) of these in a city somewhere, maybe another in a sub-urban location and see if people show up. Don't cut any benefits or anything, just see if people are interested in the setup.

If that works, scale it up in a single large city, then a single state.

The place where I see this most likely to fail is that the organization will be under constant dual pressure of budget restrictions (pressuring them to serve cheaper foods) and 'usership' (pressuring them to serve less healthy == tastier foods). As with any system, the incentives have to be set up properly from the start.

<comment><USER27> Similar has been done. "Pay what you want" restaurants featuring healthy options have all failed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is a response to an earlier article by Scott Alexander, and he's already written a response to this one, too:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/21/contra-robinson-on- publ...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/21/contra-robinson-on-public-food/)

The general idea is "you can't compare real capitalism with a fantasy government, you have to compare real capitalism with a real government, and real governments are worse than real capitalism"

<comment> bad-joke You can absolutely compare the real with a fantasy. That's how innovation happens.

<comment><USER38> Well, yes, but you generally have to have a plan for how your innovation happens, rather than "my version won't have any of the problems the existing versions have" without having an explanation for how you achieve this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Markets are incredibly good at giving people what they want, not what they say they want, but what they actually want (economists call this revealed preference).

Some people, like the author, see this as a problem. He had no viable solution to the problem. We have actually tried to the "free healthy alternative" in schools, and what happens is either the healthy parts are thrown away or traded away.

<comment><USER40> Schools with health breakfast and lunch options are strongly correlated with academic success. It's actually one of the most efficient uses of school funding even if many students don't partake the difference is staggering.

[https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center- chalkboard/2017/...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center- chalkboard/2017/05/03/how-the-quality-of-school-lunch-affects-students- academic-performance/)

<comment><USER39> There seems to be a single study that looks at what children were given - <USER2> what they ate - and I'm not sure how they controlled for other factors (i doubt this is the only change). I will read about it later though.

<comment><USER41> How can you say there's only one study? Why would you cast doubt on a study you admit you haven't read yet? What studies are you citing to back up your _own_ claims?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Soylent- the UBI of nutrition!

Soylent distribution machines in every school and prison cafeteria, on street corners, any place where food scarcity exists. Each has a single button which dispenses a soylent, free of charge. No limits, no strings. All the soylent you can carry! Do away with food stamps- send 150 bottles of soylent a month, by mail, to any human being who can ask for it.

<comment><USER43> Moreover to reassure people it will be completely optional once they have consumed their first four bottles for the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> You can take a look at the English-as-a-foreign-language schools in a few Asian countries to see what a private education system would look like and it is just as described, even despite the results being fairly measurable (can you speak in English or not).

</comment><comment><USER45> Attacking the profit motive is insane.

There were a billion people on this planet 200 years ago and now there are 7 billion people. The main reason for that is profits.

When someone grows a bushel of wheat for $3.75 and sells it for $4.30, they're able to grow 13% more wheat in the next harvest. That profit makes the growing of wheat self sustaining and scalable.

Now apply the logic to every crop, every home appliance, every energy source - every endeavor human beings pursue. The result is 6 billion people who didn't die of starvation, disease, or exposure.

The biggest problem with lefty attacks on the profit motive is they simply don't realize that the profit motive could be used to solve the problems they describe!

Upset about the education options in this country? Create a profitable alternative and you can scale it out to every student in America.

Don't like the obesity problems developed countries face? Find a profitable way to turn fat people into skinny people and watch the pounds of every population dwindle.

Profits are like magic. They make solutions to difficult problems available on a mass scale. There have no doubt been some growing pains as humans have learned to harness this magic, but the solution to those growing pains is not to eliminate the profit motive - the best solution is always profitable.</comment>


Kim Philby, Lecturing in East Berlin, Bragged of How Easy It Was to Fool MI6 - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/kim-philby-bbc-lecture.html <comment><USER4> Before you take Philby's comments at face value, a few things to note:

1) Philby gave this speech under the auspices of the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state where communication was heavily controlled and censored, with art required to be politically acceptable, with neighbors spying on each other and family members reporting disloyal statements to secret police, and with copy and fax machines requiring licenses (IIRC); where saying the wrong thing could get you killed, imprisoned in a mental hospital or sent to Siberia; and where propaganda was omnipresent. He said no more than what was allowed and likely, I think, what he was told to say.

2) In the recording the audio doesn't match the video. The BBC attributes that to equipment issues; but maybe his speech was edited or dubbed. The Soviets seemed to do things like that regularly; for example, leaders who later became unpopular with the regime were reputedly removed from historical photos with an 'airbrush' (this was before digital imagery) and from all other historical records.

3) At least one aspect of his speech sounds clearly like Soviet propaganda: He attributes a large part of his success to being in the 'governing class' in England; that is, Philby is blaming UK's the class system for their intelligence incompetence. A foundation of Soviet ideology was that they were a classless system, superior to the West where the masses were oppressed by the elite. It would be surprising to me if Philby's comments were a coincidence.

<comment><USER5> >It would be surprising to me if Philby's comments were a coincidence.

Why do you need handlers or propagandists to attribute this to? Couldn't this simply be what he believed? He was an ideologically motivated spy after all.

Do you think it's implausible his position in the UK class system got him in, and protected him?

<comment><USER6> Personally I think it more likely that Brits just don't like to be reminded of the fact that their society was built on a class system, and its not going away any time soon. It doesn't matter if the Soviets say it or not: Brits don't like to be reminded that their empire requires rather a lot of serfs in order to even get itself out of bed in the morning ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These days of course you would be confronted with a lot more that would make it hard to simply deny things:

(a) Absolute records of your physical movements. (Cellphone, car)

(b) Absolute records of your communications and social network. (Cellphone, email/social networks)

(c) Video evidence of activity in almost any semi-formal place of work, carpark, ATM, shop, or similar. (Physical surveillance ubiquity)

(d) Probable audio recording of your conversations via hacked cellphone.

<comment><USER8> In theory, you can watch anybody, but for this to work, you'd need someone to actually look at the evidence i.e. suspect the person in the first place. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes... And in this case it's the guardians of the guardians: who are you going to trust with watching the head of MI6's counter- intelligence division 24/7?

As the CIA found in its paranoid early days, over-suspicion is highly counter- productive (see e.g. [1]). You just HAVE to trust your managers. Even if all services have some kind of internal intelligence setup to watch the watchers, it's focused downwards where the risks are higher and cost of suspicion lower, and it has to be run by people you trust the most. You balance the cost of a mole, versus the opportunity cost of turning down genuine defectors and trusting your own staff.

This is why (according to [2]) many European services are run by people from wealthy, old families, preferably with at least a few members who have served. It's expected that on average, these people have profound ties to their country - if nothing else, in the form of immense property portfolios - <USER2> thus are much less likely to defect. You can't bribe them, you can't offer them a better life [3], what's left? Ideology, and that can be somewhat watched for. Of course, you deny yourself some great talent that way but as with managing a hedge fund, you want to limit downside rather than maximize upside. Nationalism and dynastic politics are a form of defense against foreign enemies.

Hence Philby. He was trusted by design, not because MI6 were "bloody incestuous fools" or whatever, and no amount of surveillance would have changed that.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Main-Enemy-Inside- Showdown/dp/0345...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Main-Enemy-Inside- Showdown/dp/0345472500)

[2] [http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques- speciales-...](http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales- services/dp/1482745518)

[3] Kalugin recalls in [http://www.amazon.com/First-Directorate-Intelligence- Espiona...](http://www.amazon.com/First-Directorate-Intelligence-Espionage- Against/dp/0312114265) that he was somewhat worried about Philby's living conditions in the Soviet Union (unheated flat, alcoholism, etc.). It's been a while since I read the book but I recall he or someone else decided to push for him to have a good quality of life as an advertisement to other potential defectors; only then was Philby put up in proper accommodation and welcomed by the Soviet system.

<comment><USER9> Philby wasn't trusted from 1951 onwards, he was sacked from SIS and caught in lies by interrogators - using things like his wife's passport stamps to capture his movements.

Technology these days may enable mass surveillance but historically the same thing happened - because there was much less international traffic. MI5 could "burgle their way across London", open all the international mail it wanted to, read the telegrams sent abroad etc.

The sheer change in volume of international travel and communication is recent.

<comment><USER10> Per capita this wave of globalization is about the same as the last one, 1860-1914.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs and don't know much about the world."

Adam Curtis hilariously documents the 20th centuries near 100% failure rate of the British Secret Services (except when they manufactured a plot).

And how they were created to hunt fictional spies dreamed up by paranoid tabloid readers obsessed with novels about German spies.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460)

<comment><USER12> It's more frightening to realise that there is no conspiracy running the world, pulling to strings, and realise that everyone is not very good at their jobs and dont know much about the world.

A conspiracy is comforting, the reality of ignorance and incompetence is much more scary

<comment><USER13> You say that, but just a few days ago the Panama Papers were released. I don't buy into the worldwide conspiracy thing, but there's clearly stuff going on that others don't want you to know about.

<comment><USER14> Other than a list of names, what did the Panama Papers tell the world that it didn't already know? That the rich use offshore accounts and shell companies to hide their money from the government wasn't exactly a secret to anyone. For that matter, not everything revealed in the Panama Papers is necessarily illegal.

<comment><USER13> Given the world's reaction to this news[1], I'd say it actually is news and not stuff that was known, but maybe only suspected.

The best response is for the common man should stop paying taxes as well. If that happens, you'll get across the board tax reform immediately.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/05/iceland- prime-m...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/05/iceland-prime- minister-resigns-over-panama-papers-revelations)

<comment><USER14> As yet, this isn't the world's reaction, merely Iceland's. From what I can tell, most of the outrage seems to be from governments wanting to know where their tax money is - popular outrage seems to be minimal.

Although to be fair, the momentum would probably take more time to build in larger countries with more diverse and complex societies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> well, for anyone who read le carré philby here confirms one of the key failings of british intelligence services - the utter disbelief that anyone from their top-universities/upper echelons could ever be a communist.

tinker tailor soldier spy is basically all about that. they hired students who had openly joined leftist groups and never really followed up on that.

<comment><USER16> He wasn't communist, and that nonsense worldview is why they missed the problem. He was an opportunist, like many people in all governments. He sold info to russians while others just sold contracts to friends or embezzled directly. It's not us vs a foreign them, there are selfish and power-hungry monsters throughout all sides.

<comment><USER17> He was not an opportunist, he was vindictive; when he did not get certain things or recognition, he sought out the Russian government's approval.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Strange how the author slips "said Mr. Philby, whose treachery was responsible for the deaths of hundreds" casually into the final paragraph.

<comment><USER19> The article generally appears to be written with the assumption that the readers already are quite aware of the doings of the Cambridge Five - <USER3> reasonable assumption for people over a certain age, but probably less and less likely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I read this book a few months back, and was amazed to how easy it was get to the top secret information. Good information as it was easy to read and to understand.

[http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Among-Friends-Philby- Betrayal/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Among-Friends-Philby- Betrayal/dp/0804136653)

<comment><USER21> All of Ben's books are amazing. Check Agent ZigZag out. I've read it like 4 times. _Such_ an amazing fun story. [http://www.amazon.com/Agent-Zigzag-Story- Espionage-Betrayal-...](http://www.amazon.com/Agent-Zigzag-Story-Espionage- Betrayal-ebook/dp/B000VSW7SO/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8)

<comment><USER13> Zig Zag was good, but if just starting with Ben Macintyre, I'd start with the Philby book. It's the better of the two. I've read both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yeah, it's easy, just be a wellborn member of British aristocracy.

<comment><USER23> I decided to look that up...

The result is curious indeed. It appears that Kim Philby's father, St John Philby, was a senior civil servant, but not an aristocrat. He was what was called in those days an "Arabist" and had converted to Islam.

He does seem, however, to have passed onto his son a love of intrigue...

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

<comment><USER9> Kim Philby was also mixed race - his mother was Indian. In British society at the time that very much didn't make him part of the Establishment, and he did face prejudice from senior officials because of it.

<comment><USER24> Do you've more information on this? Wikipedia says his mother is Dora Johnston, that doesn't sound like an Indian name.

<comment><USER25> Picture of Dora: [http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00528/34242...](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00528/3424237_a_528244j.jpg)

Dora's parents: [https://www.geni.com/people/Dora- Philby/6000000013566932381](https://www.geni.com/people/Dora- Philby/6000000013566932381)

<comment><USER9> Looks like I was led astray by a newspaper article today, thanks for the correction. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/04/kim-philby- was-a-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/04/kim-philby-was-a-bad- liar-his-true-talent-lay-in-self-mythology/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> i remember reading an excellent book called "spycatcher" which details a first-hand account of peter-wright (employed by mi5) exposing kgb spies in the highest echelon of mi5.

<comment><USER27> Spycatcher was banned in the UK on publication by Margaret Thatcher which a) immediately validated there was truth in its page and b) made it a huge best seller. It's actually a pretty dull book, I think, apart from a few fun stories like breaking into the building sites of embassies and pouring thousands of bugs into the wet concrete walls meaning the entire walls would test as "live" making the whole complex unusable for classified work.

Interesting side-note about Spycatcher for geeks:

In the book, Peter Wright talks about he "and Tony bugging and burgling their way across London in the 1960s".

"Tony" was his engineer who installed bugs. His name was Tony Sale. You best know him, perhaps, as the founder of the Bletchley Park Trust.

After his time with MI5 he decided to restore Bletchley Park and rebuild the machines there like Colossus, etc.

I met him on a visit there in 1999, and I think I was the first person in many, many years who had asked him about his connections, because he seemed slightly taken aback that I knew he was an ex-colleague of Peter Wright's.

Nice bloke. Liked Peter as a man, thought what he'd done with the book was potentially very, very dangerous.

<comment><USER28> > a) immediately validated there was truth in its page

Alternatively, it was simply a question of the fact that he had broken the agreement he had signed that prevents ex-intelligence officers from publishing memoirs without them going through official screening first.

<comment><USER27> In the UK, no such agreement exists.

Source: I know people who would have been required to sign it.

They confirm that they would have it screened both out of a sense of duty, and a desire to avoid accidental breach of the Official Secrets Act if they ever produced such memoirs (release it to your agent with something you thought had been declassified? 30 years in prison for you!), but they were not explicitly asked to sign such an agreement.

<comment><USER28> I would argue that signing the official secrets act constituted just such an agreement

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Always thought the first rule was never lie, not deny, deny, deny. Watch interviews with former heads of the CIA when asked a question they don't want to answer to see what I mean.

<comment><USER30> An interview is something different from an interrogation. See for example Gen. Alexanders lies to congress. Even after it's been made clear beyond any reasonable doubt that he was lying he goes to conferences and denies that he was lying when heckled about it. He'll deny and then confuse the audience by casting further doubt.

<comment><USER6> The CIA are required to lie, by law. Therefore they are extremely good at it.

<comment><USER29> Exactly which law(s) are you referring to; as in links are requested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A quote from C. S. Lewis seems apropos: "We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."

</comment><comment><USER32> Here's the BBC Radio programme about the tape: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076v1zq](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076v1zq)

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lfylv](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lfylv)

The BBC have had many interesting programmes about Philby and the Cambridge spies. It's really hard to search the BBC website to find these programmes, and many of them are no longer available to listen to. It's odd that the BBC missed the opportunity to have a meta page of all the Philby coverage, linking to the programmes. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076y5w](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076y5w) or this one

<comment><USER33> The BBC did have a really interesting viewer for all the meta data at [http://open.bbc.co.uk](http://open.bbc.co.uk) \- but that seems to have disappeared.

[http://duncan.hull.name/2012/08/03/meta- bbc/](http://duncan.hull.name/2012/08/03/meta-bbc/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Full-fat version for non-mobile devices:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/kim-philby- bb...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/kim-philby-bbc- lecture.html)</comment>


Dot-com party madness (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2000/04/25/party_5/ <comment><USER2> This brings back memories.

Also, what an amazing link graveyard.

Of course, Salesforce.com is still with us.</comment>


Apple Opens Laboratory in Taiwan To Develop New Screens - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-15/apple-said-to-open-secret-lab-in-taiwan-to-develop-displays <comment> Kor-Chung_Tai interesting ... thanks for the sharing....

</comment><comment><USER2> I hope with all that cash laying around they'll hire some developers to invest in software quality, performance and stability, specially on iOS.

Cook seems to have forgotten that it was iOS that brought the customers, not shiny bricks with high margins.</comment>


So, you want to be a Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.singhrahul.com/2012/05/so-you-want-to-be-programmer.html

<comment><USER2> "there's no room for a bad programmer" -- apparently you haven't spent time in big business.</comment>


The great electric car race is just beginning - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/08/business/electric-cars-audi-volkswagen-tesla/ <comment><AUTHOR> The article contains predictions that VW will go from 26k electric cars sold in 2018 to 1.4m in 2025, while the current sales leader Tesla will only manage to go from 200k to 400k. There's a bunch of rhetoric in the article from car manufacturers that they will easily win because they've been building cars for a century. Statements like _we were not in the production hell, and we are still not, and we will not get into any kind of production hell_ from an Audi executive. However there's very little talk about the most likely bottleneck they will face, which is battery production. There's a brief note that _automakers are snapping up every battery they can find_ but no discussion of any potential problems they might encounter in snapping up enough to sell millions of electric cars per year. The much repeated 100 year experience certainly doesn't apply to battery production. Not only that, but even the battery manufacturing companies don't have experience in producing batteries in such quantities. It's still very much uncharted territory.</comment>


Ask HN: what is the difference between IPSP and ISO? - <AUTHOR>

What is the difference between an Internet payment service provider and independent sales organization? Could you forward some links or give examples of IPSPs and ISOs? <comment><USER2> [https://www.merchantconnect.com/CWRWeb/glossary.do?glossaryL...](https://www.merchantconnect.com/CWRWeb/glossary.do?glossaryLetter=i#14)

Visa and Mastercard are the usual parties when it comes to giving out merchant accounts. An ISO is an institution created by a bank or a consortium of banks to allow merchants to accept various cards, but without having a merchant account with either Visa or Mastercard, instead they have their merchant account with the ISO or 'MSP' as it is also called.

[http://www.mastercard.com/au/merchant/en/acquirers/communica...](http://www.mastercard.com/au/merchant/en/acquirers/communications/msp_rules.html)

It is unlikely that you will find yourself in the position of a MSP or that you will be dealing with one, banks normally use these only for groups of merchants for which it makes no sense to have a direct merchant account with the large card companies.

They are an instrument for 'vertical' markets. An example of a member service provider is for instance PaySquare, positioned to accept point-of-sale transactions.

[https://www.paysquare- services.eu/form.aspx?id=71&ver=4&...](https://www.paysquare- services.eu/form.aspx?id=71&ver=4&lang=en-EN)</comment>