How economists rode maths to become our era's astrologers - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers <comment><USER2> Or as FA Hayek described it.. the "Pretense of Knowledge" -

> _Hayek's greatest contribution to economics was to show that society is far > more complex than we realize, with little pieces of knowledge dispersed > among millions of individuals. "The curious task of economics," he famously > wrote in "The Fatal Conceit," which he published in 1988, "is to demonstrate > to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can > design."_

> _Recent government interventions suggest that politicians and bureaucrats > today think they can design just about anything. This ignorance has > backfired, as it always does, bringing with it what economists call > "unintended consequences."_

Ref: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2014/10/13/f-a-hayek-and-the-pretense-of- knowledge/?utm_term=.32a263ba3ea4)

<comment><USER3> Or as feynmann described... pseudoscience.

[https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo](https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo)

<comment><USER4> I can't even bear to compare my own four decades of head scratching about economics with Feynmann's insights,

but I can offer you a realisation that I have attained through the kind of haphazard real world that experience the sort of life that I remember reading about in Surely You're Joking Mr Feynmann?

Only to understand why the insight was late in arriving, you see I read Surely.. Joking about when I was ten, and growing up in the bosom of a well to do upper middle class family, with my father retired and mother devoted homemaker and a professor my half brother by our father's first marriage and uncle was a DoD director and scientist who also had no children and was devoted to my early years...

And so I grew up in a world in which I was sure that I could attribute to everyone I met, the possession of a underlying and rational logic, even when I was unsure of how they themselves understood what motivated their decisions.

I'm surveying a decade of watching my life and world in the most complete definition possible, being systematically destroyed. Possibly result of accidentally discovering a corruption of immense and blatant scale.

I learned from this experience, of prison and acquittal ("we should never have been in this court.." began the judge after a five year onslaught of abuse, clearly wrecked my mental health, and irreparably my physical health, I see from my now recovering vantage)...

.... there's nothing that motivates people in any reliable way I see purely random behaviour to be the norm...

And economists are won't to portray the world with the idea of rationality of interests.

Erm.... NOPE!

Try another model....

Oops that's the primary assumption... Okay, back to my aimless broken life, unable to communicate with anyone in normal life because I find no motivation for anything, no systems no values... All outsourced to the Nanny State and red masthead newspapers..

Edit: not in any reply to anyone I've not checked out yet for a update, but I was purposely ignoring the STFUARTFA of econometrics and the various things I have done with along my career, particularly auction and micro markets theory and logic, which I just noted to my loyal but only in title one remaining limited partner is among the memories that I have been thoroughly unable to recall of in any part of my work, which spanned more than half of my years on this planet. I certainly know that economics is far beyond the kind that The Economist newspaper is given to making accessible to proverbial common man hypothetical problems and quandary. I never thought that economics was ever limited and possibly that same belief in the limitless application of Economic Theory (intoned with great reference by all who utter the wisdom denounced from whom they are unable to question, not because they lack the ability, but because they are presented with unintelligible morass of signal free human volume)... May be that that limitless applicability which is the candle that will burn both ends forever in some kinds professionally employed as economists, is precisely what should have been the very warning sign, alerting us to a problem. I mean, has any other profession, reached across the desk, and leaning over the work of a unrelated practitioner, suggested that their input was capable of unbounded insights and discovery? Yet, like the populous hope for Panacea or else a Soma, we all have our moments of susceptibility...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in."

Piketty T. "Capital in the 21st century", p. 36.

<comment><USER6> Not sure if that quotation inspires much confidence. Economics has math behind it. Subjects like Sociology have none of the rigor of math and are thus a large waste of time.

<comment><USER7> Do you imply that philosophy and sociology as disciplines are not rigorous? This shows a very weak knowledge of those disciplines, and of maths-focused economics if you still believe that maths = rigor.

<comment><USER6> Not philosophy, but sociology yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article confuses how top-level economists (who are de facto politicians) that attribute sometimes questionable decision making to models (most of the times due to political pressure) with a honest and very complex (at the edge of academic research) profession. It points out the it got so "mathy" that it kind of decoupled from non-technocrats but that can easily be said about literally any field today. What amazes me most is that the author complains about how that happens in the US, the most transparent and actually research- based application of economics in the world. I would invite you to go to some other less developed countries to see how "wonky" economics couples with intelectual dishonesty tries (and many time succeeds) to fool the many in favor of the few. And again, using wonky arguments to fool people is a practice that happens in any field, dismissing an entire profession who actually brought many advances to modern societies is ridiculous. The advance in statistics and econometrics is what made machine learning possible... I have to say, it has been a while since I've read such nonsense trying to pass as a good analysis/critique.

<comment><USER9> This happened in USA, right?

[http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-reinhart- and-...](http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-reinhart-and-rogoff- controversy-a-summing-up?currentPage=all)

<comment><USER8> Cherry picking a controversy doesn't do much to generalize an entire field (if you want I can find some Freud controversies and say that psychology is hocus pocus). By the way, I'm not american. Funny enough, that one you picked is exactly the opposite from here. The authors were harshly criticized for NOT applying "mathy" rigor. The conclusion from "This time is different" is exactly what common sense would tell you, don't get too much debt or else you might grow less in the future and they got crushed because they did not entered in the extreme math/econometrics analysis. What the article criticizes is exactly what "This time is different" did, it applied less data rigor to point out almost a common sense and yet it backfired, so what is it? Should economists apply more or less "math"? I guess either way, this misses completely the point about economics and dismissing the entire field because of it is ridiculous.

<comment><USER9> I am not American either. I pointed this out because you seemed to imply that USA was the best example of how to _properly_ use a mathematical approach.

Also, I think it is appropriate: what we had here was someone "demonstrating" why a specific policy works: "it works because our math model _proves_ it works". So instead of going for an empirical proof everybody was expected to be ok wih this because, look, we have math. Also, if it is not working for you it's because you are not doing it right.

In a proper scientific discipline you design experiments to verify if your formulas are correct: if you send a rocket to Venus and it crashes back on Earth you can't just say "you didn't it right, I have an Excel sheet that says it should have reached the target"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I studied economics and philosophy in college. Did a bit of economics research for a senior thesis.

I was encouraged to study economics as a more "practical counterbalance" to philosophy. The funny thing is, I've found philosophy, in how it helped me improve the rigor of my thought, to be much more useful and practical than anything I learned in economics.

Economics needs to rely more on computation and data than on abstract mathematical models if it ever hopes to have real predictive power.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, it's weird. Early economists clearly didn't have the data or computing capability available to do analysis on the real world. So instead the took some inspiration from it and then built these simplified models, that were at least possible to study and make conclusions about. However, because real- world economic outcomes are so important, politically and socially, people ended up taking their conclusions and trying to apply them back to the real world.

It's as if, after early AI researchers who took some inspiration from biology to create neural networks, the medical establishment then took their results and decided to use them as a guide to performing brain surgery.

<comment><USER12> "It's as if, after early AI researchers who took some inspiration from biology to create neural networks, the medical establishment then took their results and decided to use them as a guide to performing brain surgery. "

I like that analogy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes, economics has not been very successful at making predictions with pinpoint accuracy, and yes, people might place too much faith in economic theory.

But the stark reality is that the existence of economics as an academic discipline is inevitable. Policymakers worldwide make decisions that impact billions of people and involve trillions of dollars, and it simply either isn't palatable to the public ear to proclaim they're going by intuition alone, or involve proposals so complex that our intuition just can't evaluate them - they need an academic foundation to stand on.

And that's where economists come in - they might quibble over more esoteric topics, or waver in giving specific recommendations, but there are areas where they can say what definitely won't work in the long run - for e.g. when foreign aid might work instead of foreign trade, currency manipulation, regulation of monopolies, use of state subsidies, impacts of tariffs etc. The academic consensus in areas like these are a lot stronger than the media make it seem.

<comment><USER14> The libertarian counter argument to this is that public servants/bureaucrats shouldn't be in the business of investing trillions of dollars. The market gets to decide which investments get made and the investor takes the fall for bad decision instead of sucking on taxpayer's teats for a bailout.

<comment><USER15> Seeing "Free market solves all" believers (which libertarians are a subset) on hacker news still to me is amazing. It seems like it requires such double think.

The free-market concentrates wealth/power to those that have wealth/power. It always has, and always will. There is no "fair competition". If anywhere hacker news is blatant about sharing this truth.

Every business plan lools for its "moat". It's way to ensure it doesn't have to compete. _Half the startup exit strategies aren 't to make a long term business, but to get bought out by a huge company and let them own the product_. Ie concentrate more power in one of the aleeady most powerful companies.

Amazon, Google, Facebook... on a daily basis we sit and watch these companies expand at will taking over markets and now industries and forcing out and effectively preventing any legit competition.

Fundamentally how can people believe that the "free-market" is actually a balancing fair effect while watching this data day in and day out.

The positive impact free-market is an idealism that doesn't exist. It's the exact same thing with communism, but a different group who is mixing up their ideologically perfect idea with reality.

Yes communism probably would be great if the world worked that way, but it doesn't. And yes libertarianism would be great if the world worked that way, but it doesn't. Communist refuse to believe their ideology is flawed regardless of how much evidence there is to the contrary, libertarians do the exact same but with a different religion.

<comment><USER16> You just made a list of assertions based on the popularity of a certain viewpoint on HN, which does have a left leaning bias.

It all depends on what you want to optimize for. If you optimize for equality, go with communism, and everyone will be equally poor. If you want wealth, go with a free market, and billions of people will be elevated out of poverty.

Freer markets lead to more economic growth and therefore more with for everyone, not just the rich. Free markets aren't about fair, they're about progress.

Yes, every business wants a moat. The main source of this moat? Government interventions with regulations, bailouts, prohibitions, etc

<comment><USER12> "Yes, every business wants a moat. The main source of this moat? Government interventions with regulations, bailouts, prohibitions, etc "

Libertarians never can describe what a free market really is. Is anti-theft law a government regulation? Seems to me that pure anarchy is the only real free market.

<comment><USER17> >Libertarians never can describe what a free market really is.

With a small amount of effort using google, you can find plenty of web pages describing basic libertarian philosophy - it really isn't some kind of mystery.

>...Is anti-theft law a government regulation? Seems to me that pure anarchy is the only real free market.

(Since you asked, I would guess that most libertarians would say that the basic goal of a free market is to allow for voluntary exchanges between two parties which leave both better off. In order for this to happen, there has to be rule of law, property rights, enforcement of contracts, etc. And if you are wondering, libertarians likely also think that drugs and electrical devices, etc should be safe - they may just have different ideas on how to achieve that safety. Just because someone is opposed to prohibition on various drugs or opposed to laws against prostitution etc etc doesn't mean they are proposing an anarchistic war of all against all.)

<comment><USER12> Yes I can look up libertarian philosophy. No problem. What I can't look up is how this would work in the real world. Want safe drugs and devices? Who determines that? Somebody has done harm to another person. Who determines that?

Look at tobacco. Without government research we would probably still be at the same stage as climate research where the tobacco companies would claim the science is still unsettled. How can you get a court settlement against billion dollar company who can pay an unlimited number of lawyers and scientists?

I just think a lot of libertarians are intellectually lazy, blame everything on government and offer no practical solutions. There is a lot to improve in this world but dreaming of the ever elusive free market and evil government will do nothing.

<comment><USER18> > What I can't look up is how this would work in the real world. Want safe > drugs and devices? Who determines that? Somebody has done harm to another > person. Who determines that?

What I typically get as a response is that that person or company will go out of business, as people will stop buying said unsafe products. In my opinion this belief comes from wrongly applying parochial common sense to such a large and complex system that is the modern economy.

Victorian England learned this lesson the hard way through its string of adulteration scandals (e.g plaster in bread). You could perhaps make a parallel with the adulteration scandals in China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For 40+ years, the economics profession at large has advocated policies which have massively favored the wealthy over everyone else (globalisation/neoliberalism). The same economists were showered with huge pay packets, consulting fees and prizes (just look at how many Nobel prizes the Chicago school hoovered up). The profession as simply another means by which the wealthy exercise control over the rest of us.

So it's all a bit late for this hand-wringing now. They used you, you got paid, enjoy your privileges and try not to think what you've done.

<comment><USER20> The last 40+ years of globalization have raised more people out of poverty than at any other time in history, and spread progress and prosperity around the world. Check your envy and hatred, friend.

<comment><USER21> The problem is the impossibility of posing counterfactuals about historical questions. If we could compare the last 40+ years with Chicago School economists spreading their theories vs. some other school of economic theory or none at all, then your statement would be sensical. As it stands, you're just throwing out a superficially relevant correlation with no possible way of disproving it.

<comment><USER22> Fortunately during the past 40 years different countries engaged in different degrees of liberalization, so it is in fact possible to compare them to some degree. Some of these countries even had very similar cultures and economic starting points.

For example, Hong Kong and Singapore were extremely economically liberal. They still are, to some extent (some of the lowest tax rates in the world; Singapore even has no capital gains tax, and its top tax rate is 20%). According to Google, Singapore has a per capita GDP of $52,960.71 (the US is $57,466.79), a rich country by international standards. Hong Kong has a GDP per capita of $43,681.14.

Taiwan and Korea were/are less economically liberal than Hong Kong and Singapore, but still have relatively low tax rates by international standards. Korea has a GDP per capita of $27,538.81, and Taiwan of $31,900.00.

China was slow to open up economically, waiting until the 1970s, and even since then its policies are less liberal than the aforementioned countries (see e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index)). China now has a GDP per capita of $8,123.18.

North Korea is even less liberal than China, almost completely rejecting international trade. It has a GDP per capita of $583.00.

While this is not a large sample size, it's better than nothing, and does seem to indicate a correlation between economic liberalisation and economic growth.

<comment><USER23> Or that being agreeable with already established economies, ie the west, allows you to get in on the pyramid scheme early?

The longer term impact for global development is explored by Dani Rodrik

"""This means countries are running out of industrialization opportunities sooner and at much lower levels of income compared to the experience of early industrializers"""

[https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper107.pdf](https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper107.pdf)

Does it bother you at all that you took a simple set of numbers, largely devoid of context, and then waved your hands with some math and made a huge conclusion? No relevance to the subject of the original post we are discussing here?

I think its a direct example of Premature Mathiness but I suspect you'll disagree :)

<comment><USER22> If you don't like numbers, why not come to Asia sometime and see what people here have achieved, see the standard of living they enjoy, and compare it to pictures of the same places 60 years ago? Or go to the poorest regions in China, which are still richer than most of Asia was 60 years ago, and see the difference. Calling it a "pyramid scheme" is frankly absurd, given the tangible increases in quality of life that have been achieved.

>"""This means countries are running out of industrialization opportunities sooner and at much lower levels of income compared to the experience of early industrializers"""

>[https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper107.pdf](https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper107.pdf)

>Does it bother you at all that you took a simple set of numbers, largely devoid of context, and then waved your hands with some math and made a huge conclusion? No relevance to the subject of the original post we are discussing here?

How was what I posted not relevant? The person I was replaying to asserted that there was no basis to make comparisons between the effects of different degrees of liberalism, I presented an example refuting that. If anything the link you posted seemed less relevant: how does a reduction in industralisation opportunities relate to the ability to make comparisons between different economic systems?

<comment><USER23> Simply put, the gains Asia made in becoming the microchip and refrigerator manufacturing SOLE SOURCE for the world will not be replicated in Africa and South America.

"Relevance" wasn't the metric. The metric was you very directly seeing numbers at hand and then using the math tool you had and coming to a broad, simplistic and wrong answer about whether "liberalization" is the way forward in 2017.

Many many mainstream economists are increasingly disagreeing with your simplistic and ideological model.

<comment><USER22> >Simply put, the gains Asia made in becoming the microchip and refrigerator manufacturing SOLE SOURCE for the world will not be replicated in Africa and South America.

>"Relevance" wasn't the metric. The metric was you very directly seeing numbers at hand and then using the math tool you had and coming to a broad, simplistic and wrong answer about whether "liberalization" is the way forward in 2017.

Then if liberalisation is not the way forward, how will countries in Africa and South America be better served by denying opportunities to them and the people in them?

<comment><USER23> It's very unclear what the way forward is, and that is the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Of all the topics in which HN has provided me immensely deep insight, its userbase has failed equally immensely in economics. Comments from people who took just one Economics 101 class in college baselessly trashing the field making it to the top of the comment list disappoints me.

You know someone has no credibility on the matter when they mention _homo economicus_ , as if it was the keystone.

<comment><USER25> > Comments from people who took just one Economics 101 class in college > baselessly trashing the field making it to the top of the comment list > disappoints me.

Yeah, as someone who actually has a degree in _both_ computer science and economics, it's really embarrassing to see the level of discourse that pervades threads on economics.

It's like seeing an economics student who's taken half an introductory CS class argue that CS is "a fundamentally broken pseudoscience", because they just found an implementation of an O(log(n)) algorithm that was slower than an implementation of an O(n^2) algorithm.

<comment><USER26> For you and GP: it's not enough to claim that a criticism is ill-founded. You need to show _how_ it's ill-founded.

Your defense in particular sounds a lot like an argument from authority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Kahneman in "Thinking, fast and slow" covers expert overconfidence. Some funny quotes:

 _" The Duke scholars collected 11,600 such forecasts and examined their accuracy. The conclusion was straightforward: financial officers of large corporations had no clue about the short-term future of the stock market; the correlation between their estimates and the true value was slightly less than zero!"_

 _" The wide confidence interval is a confession of ignorance, which is not socially acceptable for someone who is paid to be knowledgeable in financial matters. Even if they knew how little they know, the executives would be penalized for admitting it."_

</comment><comment><USER28> Economists started using mathematics purely out of Physics Envy. I am obviously not talking about financial products which require some statistics and complex probabilistic models due to the way they're structured.

All the great economists of the liberal tradition up to and including Von Mises wrote monumental works without the need for equations. It was Keynes who first used mathematics both as a quest for respectability (Physics Envy) and as a way to convince credulous politicians like FDR that this stuff is complex and best left at "experts". The disastrous results are still with us today. And no, Keynesian politics did not end the Great Depression, they actually prolonged the misery and it took WWII and the destruction of all global competition to end it.

Not to mention that what passes as "mathematics" among the economists is laughable among mathematicians. Latin was employed towards similar ends by the Roman Catholic Church (although a plausible defense could be mounted that a standard language better preseved the Doctrine against heresy). Ditto for the complex models sometimes employed by astrologists.

A con game, 'nuff said.

</comment><comment><USER29> These complaints against economics are getting ridiculous. It's the same BS that's getting levied against climate science, coming from a place of ignorance. Science is hard.

It feels like, "Physics can't unify QM and gravity, it must be wrong!" Well yeah, there might be parts that will be discovered to be broken, and it can't describe everything yet, but there are parts that are totally valid and incredibly important. Econ is like that, just younger and less mature. Not having all the answers doesn't make it astrology.

Imagine that some poorly understood aspect of physics was incredibly important. Maybe we get devastating earthquakes across the country every 6 years. Physicists can't predict these very well, so physics is astrology? Even without perfect understanding, the government has to make decisions about earthquake relief and planning. I would _hope_ they turn to the scientists to see which areas have the highest risk, even though the predictions will likely still be way off. Earthquake-ology is young and hard, but it's better than letting actualy astrologers drive.

More surprising than anything in this article is the suggestion that the math and stats are a _bad_ influence. I flip a coin, telling you it has a 60% chance of coming up heads. It comes up tails, 'proving me wrong.' Are you going to accuse me of peddling pseudoscience?

<comment><USER30> Isn't the difference simply that physics has theories backed by reproducible experiments, whereas economics has theories but one can't do such reproducible experiments without an inspectable multiverse to settle all the counterfactuals.

<comment><USER29> Not really. Climate science is actually a decent analogy. We look at the historical record (observational, can't do experiments, very macro) and combine it with theory we can back up from foundations and experiments (done on a micro level) and get an overall picture of how things work. Just as we don't need to recreate the entire planet's history in a lab, we don't need to recreate the global economy.

I chose the 'large earthquake' example deliberately. We can't do experiments on the level of large-scale earthquakes, it's very hard and pretty inaccurate, but we can still do quite a bit of real science. And it turns out that physics is more than just earthquakes, just as econ is more than macro.

This isn't to say that macroeconomics is spot on or even good, but just to say the challenges around experimentation aren't fundamental barriers to scientific understanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Related article: [https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/11/how- economics-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/11/how-economics- became-a-religion)

<comment><USER32> Excellent article, thanks.

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14781426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14781426)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Macro has a pretty bad reputation, but economists often point to successes of the field as a counterpoint. Noah Smith points to four areas: Matching theory, discrete choice theory, gravity trade models, and auction theory [0].

Does anyone know about these topics? Are they really as successful as their proponents claim?

[0][http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/is-economics- sc...](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/is-economics-science.html)

<comment> barry-cotter At a push gravity trade might be considered related to macroeconomics but they're all really microeconomics, i.e. the branch of Economics that has made and continues to make progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Aeon is by far the dumbest site that is regularly submitted here. So many articles making huge claims with nothing to back them up. It's awful.

Come at me.

<comment><USER34> Software profession seems to be the last corner where to expect some sound knowledge about economics. Looks like a McDonalds cashier would have a better understanding of business cycles.

<comment><USER35> Why do software engineers think they are intelligent enough to criticize other professions? The vast majority of the people on this forum are dumb code monkeys with a bachelors degree and an extremely basic understanding of math.

<comment><USER36> You are correct. They think this way because they spend less than 5% of their time talking to other people, whereas the normal population spends bare minimum 30% of their time interacting with humans directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I always thought Economics as a discipline is iffy. On the first day of my Economics 101 class I was introduced to "economic man" or to make it more academic "Homo economicus." According to my professor this is a, "hypothetical person who behaves in exact accordance with their rational self-interest." Not only was he hypothetical but this is how we all behave whether we knew it or not. According to him I had this strange power to make 100% rational decisions. And I didn't even know it. I have never gotten passed that economic principle. And that economist uses it as its fundamental truth. WOW, talk about building on sandy soil. And upon that rationalize it as truth with math. The truth is that like any social science, ideas and behaviors change depending on how the person feels at that moment. There are no fundamental laws that can be found other than those that are needed to stay alive and even they vary depending on the individual's mental state at the time.

Economists would do their profession a favor if they treated it as the social science that it is rather that the hard science they profess. A perfect example of advancement in the field is the Nobel Prize given to Daniel Kahneman in 2002 for his and Amos Tversky work on cognitive basis. Their field is psychology, yet they got their prize in economics. No where do you see math as the tool they used to get to their discoveries. Yes, they might have used statistics to refine their ideas but not to find the fundamentals. Yes, you might say that they call their field behavioral economics but the reality is that human behavior is what economists study and as such they should treated it as the soft science it is.

<comment><USER38> > On the first day of my Economics 101 class I was introduced to "economic > man" or to make it more academic "Homo economicus."

Of all criticisms you could make, this is pretty iffy. Did you complain in your physics class when they said "calculate speed of an object and assume no air resistance"? Or when they tell you to "consider it as a point mass"?

Here they are making the assumptions they work with apparent. You can't define exactly how people are, so we need to make some assumptions. That lets us clarify where and when these things might work or not work, and possibly look for explanations when our results are completely wrong. Imagine if they were to teach the same material, without the disclaimer "this only works if you make the assumption of homo economicus".

Any science works with models, and we need to define those models to be able to determine if they are useful or not.

"The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat." \--Norbert Wiener

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> We should stop referring to 'Nobel prize' winning economists, and instead say 'Sveriges Riksbank Prize,' just to take them down a notch.

<comment><USER40> I guess we could, if the nobel foundation didn't keep giving out the economics prizes at the same award ceremony and put the economics prizes on the same website as all the other prizes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> There are other fields where prediction is hard, geology (earthquake prediction), medicine, etc I think using a single data point (e.g. Interest rates) doesn't represent the aggregate, which is if you ran the same experiment 100 times, would Economists do better than chance?

<comment><USER42> This is an implicit appeal the article is making that is really unfounded at some level.

They seem to be arguing that, because economists missed the Great Recession, economics is a failure.

The problem is the assumption is that a severe, large event is inherently very predictable because it is severe.

The opposite often happens, though. As you say, predicting volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, suicide, violent acts are all notoriously difficult to predict, and you could make the argument that severe economic events are the same (I'm not saying this is true, only that it's an equal counterargument).

<comment><USER26> I think it's more that the economics establishment had convinced themselves that the Great Recession was impossible than that they didn't see it coming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't buy argument. It confuses economics used to advance political or commercial goals with academic economics.

Economics is far ahead other social sciences because it uses mathematical modelling. Models make it easier to see the limits and the scope of the arguments. Ability of outsiders to clearly see oversimplification s is strength.

Rational actor model is the best first order approximation of behaviour. Moving to others, there are others, should be justified carefully.

Other social sciences have it worse.

Btw. Economics is only partially social science. Actors don't have to be humans.

<comment><USER44> > It confuses economics used to advance political or commercial goals with > academic economics.

Does it? Or is this totally confused in the practical world too?

<comment><USER43> It's not.

For example, the austerity debate has been academically settled. Politicians took one academic paper (outlier) with error and used it to screw things up. IMF did mea culpa after data disagreed.

<comment><USER12> How has it been settled?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Fantastic analogy. Most of economics, especially macroeconomics, is quackery and neoliberal political agendas masqueraded by complex equations and mathematical models divorced from reality. The fact that only a handful of economists saw the recent economic depression is extremely telling. The data is often so aggregated that a lot of the broad conclusions are practically useless. The obsession over maximizing faulty metrics like GDP and the U-3 unemployment rate is ludicrous.

</comment><comment><USER46> Yes, economics is too mathy in constructing models. At the same time, maths and computation do have predictive power.

So you have to discern between academics trying to model the economy, and economists in industry just trying to make short-medium range predictions (and who are generally more accurate).

</comment><comment><USER47> My favorite line: _Occasional governmental efforts to scientifically micromanage farm life in different climes using li ended in famine and mass migration._

</comment><comment><USER48> This is crap. For one I find the authors background highly dubious to be writing on economics, philosophy and religion? Yes both are very concrete sciences. /sarcasm

Next he says no economists predicted the Great Recession but then references Krugman. Krugman did predict it, he even republished his book predicting it, with a new foreword pretty much saying "I told you so." As well, economic theory did help us in the fallout from the crash. I can't say how my jaw dropped when he alleged it didn't.

The issue of economic accuracy isn't the math, it's that people treat it like a belief system instead of a science. Economics should not have politics involved, the science itself has no room for it. Tangentially, I blame religion for this tainting of the science's perception but that's a whole long other conversation. This same problem has affected the "hard sciences" throughout time and still does to date (i.e. Racism and bigotry in biology are still present).

Mathematics in economics is highly underrated by those who don't understand it or think for some reason it's malicious. Why? Because they don't understand how feeling and math can go hand and hand. People believe quantifying things is some sort of evil, but is it? Why? If you take enough economics you realize by and large the units people get so hung up on are nearly irrelevant compared to the relationship between them. Those relationships are economic models. Can models can be simplistic-- sure, but the assumptions are there for you on paper listed clear as day (normally).

The "rational man" isn't something people take seriously as a reflection of the world in Econ (at least sane educated people don't)-- it's merely a starting point which gives us traction to move forward and see how the real world measures against it. It's not permanent, it's not looked at as real, but it's merely somewhere to get some leverage to move forward.

Economics actually helped me understand a great deal of high level mathematics because I was able to "feel" it by looking at economic models. Something I couldn't do from pure math. The ability to talk about the world around us in mathematics is an advantage not a hinderance. Being able to then describe my world using math has a been a very great advanatage for me in life and one I would not underrate.

Finally, the author gives no hard examples of its failure but merely quotes some random people to support his claim. There is no real analysis here. The Li he refers to is a shit comparison. He shows no math or statistics and expects his point to be taken seriously. Why? Are the two even comparable? I mean c'mon. It's just the ramblings of someone who doesn't like not being taken seriously academically or is paid less.

Economics is hard and it's probably always gonna be that way, taking away the math isn't going to make it easier it's gonna make it even more bullshitty. Ignoring the math will leave gaping holes in your ability to understand and think critically about it.

People assume economists haven't figured out how to do things properly. They're wrong. What really has happened is politics and money have shit all over the science and made it difficult for outsiders to find those answers. One of the reasons I'm pro socialism is because that's what the science shows works. The sciences shows how having a gold standard is idiocy and only bothers the ignorant. Libertarians, republicans, and gold bugs hate me for saying that but it's true.

I'm tired of ranting and economics on HN is literally worse than Twitter because people think they're educated on the subject so I'll stop right now.

<comment><USER49> Glad to see this comment here. There seems to be a lot of other people on HN who really like to make fun of economics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> See also how the Austrian School of Economics does not fall in that category at all and has created sound, useful and correct economics without math, but only pure logic.

<comment><USER50> If I recall correctly, the Austrian School of Economics has a tradition of rejecting the scientific method and instead using something they call praxeology, which is most definitely not a scientific methodology.

<comment><USER51> I found this quote from von Mises when trying to work out what on Earth praxeology is:

 _" They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts."_

Sounds more like ideology than a science to me....

<comment><USER44> So you think mathematics is an ideology?

<comment><USER51> No - science and engineering _use_ mathematics to model the real world and generally do a mighty fine job of it.

Arguing that your subject, which most definitely is attempting to model part of the real world is actually a part of the a mathematical world and therefore not subject to the same rules as sciences seems a bit dubious to me.

<comment><USER52> But mathematics is itself a science!

It uses a priori truths and deduction from it to arrive at new results.

Additionally several branches of philosophy and logic use a priori facts to derive results from it.

Praxeology is one of different ways of scientific reasoning. Just because you cannot get quantitative results from it, doesn't mean its unscientific. It cannot get you very far in predicting concrete human action, because in its view, humans act based on a subjective value "function" that has a discrete scale (you can only say: A is better than B, not by how much). and since every human is unique with their own values, which are simply not objectively comparable, there is just no way to make predictions or qualitative assumptions from this approach to science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm torqued at the economists, but from what I saw in the OP I should be torqued at that, also.

The article seemed to say that _econometrics_ or some such was not within their criticism and that, instead, they were criticizing the -- pure, theoretical, mathematical Nobel-prize seeking, etc.? -- economists or some such. Uh, it was not too clear just which brand, type, style, category, etc. of economists they were criticizing.

Okay, I'll defend some of the economists!

The field of economics is a train wreck, a theoretical, empirical, practical, intellectual, scientific, academic train wreck. E.g., they still have no F = ma (Newton's second law), and their predictions are as bad as those for the weather.

Why? Sure, likely like the weather, the economy is darned complicated.

Next, it's tough to get good data about the economy, e.g., the usual US Department of Labor, etc. statistics are crude approximations to reality.

E.g., for the crash of 2008, it was mostly a fairly closely held secret just how bad so many of the mortgages were, and those bad mortgages were the key to the crash. So, for the 2008 crash, which was over 8 years ago and that we are still pulling out of, that is, has been 2/3rds as long as the Great Depression, we were missing clear views of just the basic data. Outrageous. E.g., at

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/oral- history/financi...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/oral- history/financial-crisis/richard-kovacevich/)

see the _Frontline_ interview of Well Fargo CEO Richark Kovacevich with in part:

"... when they came to me, I would say: 'This is toxic waste. We're building a bubble. We're not going to like the outcome. I'm very concerned.'" Not many people had enough data to see the problem. Outrageous.

Next, emotions, fear, mob behavior, the news looking for headlines all can affect what people do and the economy.

So, to do economics as a science is tough.

Well people in high end academics are supposed to do research. In the case of economics, they are supposed to try to make a good science out of it. So, they try.

In particular, the most respected work in science _mathematizes_ the field.

Recently on the news was a remark about something else, but we can use it here: "Ask a Navy Seal how to eat an elephant, and he will say 'One bite at a time'".

Well, in trying to make economics a science, in particular, to mathematize the field, about all the high end research academic economists can do is try one bite at a time. So, they do. So, the work has not yet eaten all the elephant, moved all of the mountain, cleaned up all the mess, finished building the castle, etc. So, it's a work in progress. In particular, for the castle, they are still working on the foundation, and so far there is nothing like a roof. So, when it rains, there's no roof and anyone in the castle gets wet. Or, the kitchen just isn't ready to serve good food yet; the land is not cleared, and we are not ready to grow a crop yet.

Some of the mathematics I studied for my Ph.D. and some of the math research I did and published is close to some of the math some of the economists have tried to use. So, that math gives me a view of math in economics.

For that math, some of it really is okay for some questions about economic things. E.g., optimization, mathematical programming, e.g., linear programming, linear integer programming, actually can and sometimes do save money in some economic, business situations. The academic economists usually call such situations _micro economics_. So, some decades ago, as such math was developed for operations research or whatever, the math got used by academic research economists. IIRC linear programming was the core math of several Nobel prizes in economics.

My view is that linear programming, and optimization more generally, has next to nothing to do anytime soon with predicting, say, the growth in GDP over five years, but one could call that use of math in the research one bite of the elephant, one brick for the castle, one tree stump on the way to clearing the land ready for row crops, etc.

E.g., there was a famous paper in mathematical economics by Arrow, Hurwicz, and Uzawa. Arrow won his Nobel prize long ago, and Hurwicz won a few years ago. The paper makes use of optimization, in particular, the Kuhn-Tucker conditions (KTC) of non-linear optimization. So, in grad school, when I was studying the KTC (not much like KFC), I saw a tricky problem, didn't see a solution in the library, did some research, and got a solution. Later when I went to publish I saw that my work also answered a question stated but not answered in the Arrow, _et al._ paper. Okay.

So, alright, in some sense I knew the KTC as well as or better than Arrow, etc. My opinion of the KTC is that they have next to nothing to do with predicting, say, the growth in GDP over five years, but maybe that use of the KTC is a little progress. Maybe that work got some Nobel prizes not because it was especially good work, say, did for economics what Newton did for physics, but because it was the best work in economics the Nobel committee could find that year!

So, net, economics is not yet a science; some researchers are trying to make it a science, in particular, to mathematize the field.

There is a description of how this research goes: The researcher looks at some math and the economy, makes some simplifying assumptions about the economy, so, has a _model_ of the economy, sees where they can apply that math to that model, makes the application, reads off the consequences for that model economy, publishes the stuff, and hopes for a Nobel prize, at least for tenure, and hopes that their students will do more along such lines. Yes, it's like in freshman physics were we have a frictionless ball bearing and no air resistance and, then, calculate how fast the ball would roll except, e.g., the KTC, much worse.

Gee, if the research is really bad, then there should be a big opportunity to jump into the field, get a relatively good salary, maybe get a Nobel, get famous, get high consulting fees, maybe get some adoring coeds, etc.

For me? I've got a startup. I've already done the original applied math research and written the software and am eager to go live. If the startup works, I'll be nicely wealthy. So, I'll stay with my startup!

Besides, when I tried to study economics, I thought that the subject was so badly done I should just close the book and f'get about it.

But once it was suggested that I take a course in economics. So, I did. I showed for the class, took notes, and said nothing. That was the first day with lots of freehand supply and demand curves. After the class, with just the prof and I, I asked him, nicely I thought, just what he was assuming about his curves, continuous, differentiable, continuously differentiable, infinitely differentiable, continuous and differentiable almost everywhere with respect to Lebesgue measure, convex, pseudo-convex, quasi-convex, etc. (or some such). Soon I got a call and was told "You are out of the economics class.". Gee, I was just asking!

Gee, those questions were not so bad! For that thing I did for the KTC and the Arrow, _et al._ paper, part of the work was to show that for the real numbers R, a positive integer n, a set C a subset of R^n and closed in R^n with the usual topology, there exists an infinitely differentiable function f: R^n --> R so that f(x) = 0 for all x in C and f(x) > 0 otherwise. E.g., the Mandelbrot set is closed. So, there's an infinitely differentiable f 0 on the Mandelbrot set and strictly positive otherwise. Instead of the Mandelbrot set, use a sample path of Brownian motion, a Cantor set of positive measure, etc. -- amazing. So, gee, for the Arrow, _et al.,_ paper I considered infinitely differentiable!

</comment><comment><USER54> Quotes from Nassim Taleb regarding economists:

An economist is a mixture of 1) a businessman without common sense, 2) a physicist without brain, and 3) a speculator without balls.

Those with brains no balls become mathematicians, those with balls no brains join the mafia, those w no balls no brains become economists.

To have a great day: 1) Smile at a stranger, 2) Surprise someone by saying something unexpectedly nice, 3) Give some genuine attention to an elderly, 4) Invite someone who doesn't have many friends for coffee, 5) Humiliate an economist, publicly, or create deep anxiety inside a Harvard professor.

A trader listened to the firm's "chief" economist's predictions about gold, then lost a bundle. The trader was asked to leave the firm. He then angrily asked him boss who was firing him: "Why do you fire me alone not the economist? He is too responsible for the loss." The Boss: "You idiot, we are not firing you for losing money; we are firing you for listening to the economist."

Discussing growth without concern for fragility: like studying construction without thinking of collapses. Think like engineer not economist.

Success in all endeavors is requires absence of specific qualities. 1) To succeed in crime requires absence of empathy, 2) To succeed in banking you need absence of shame at hiding risks, 3) To succeed in school requires absence of common sense, 4) To succeed in economics requires absence of understanding of probability, risk, or 2nd order effects and about anything, 5) To succeed in journalism requires inability to think about matters that have an infinitesimal small chance of being relevant next January, ...6) But to succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

[On his greatest disappointment]: That I am unable to destroy the economics establishment, the press.

Friends, I wonder if someone has computed how much would be saved if we shut down economics and political science departments in universities. Those who need to research these subjects can do so on their private time.

Being nice to the wicked (or economist) is equivalent to being nasty with the virtuous.

<comment><USER55> It still amazes me that people unironically cite these Taleb quotes without addressing how plainly neurotic these comments are. Does this increase or decrease your prior belief in his actual ability to carefully read, and then entirely dismiss, an economics academic literature that involves nearly ten thousand active young academics with backgrounds from all over the world, an undergraduate education that ranges from mathematics to physics to philosophy, and markedly diverse political beliefs, and who mostly work on topics that have nothing to do with financial math?

Or does it perhaps tell you that this top b-school PhD graduate, who

1\. works on similar financial-math topics as the people he viciously smear in the media

2\. publishes in the same journals that econ/finance academics publish in

3\. had key results inspired or derived from previous economists including Daniel Ellsberg (who, by the way, is a national hero)

4, and was repeatedly hired by top econ/finance departments, but was never able to keep the same appointment for more than a few years

perhaps has deep-seated personal, psychopathic issues that prevent him from simply getting along with other academics in his own discipline, and that the academic world wasn't stacked against him and his insights?

and perhaps his actual academic analysis don't give you the sweeping indictment of his fellow academics that he'd have you believe in his bitter tirades?

and maybe you shouldn't take him that seriously when he periodically goes into his online rants and show a vicious tendency to smear and destroy any individual that's responsible for a perceived slight on him?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Economists these days are basically trying to find a way to avoid hard work and thrift. Unfortunately the only way we get better computers is by very smart people working very hard to develop better machines. The only way we get houses is by people building them. And the only way to obtain a net worth is to save more than one spends. However, economists seem to think that with enough money printing, borrowing, and other shenanigans they can somehow get more houses built in the places they are most needed. Of course, it is a joke and wrecks out everybody's wealth in the process.

As Hazlitt taught:

'The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.'

Anyone interested in clearing through the crud should read Henry Hazlitt's _Economics in One Lesson_.

</comment><comment><USER57> I think this in fact comes from this engineering of language in order to pass some agenda.

You create something that is really not science and call it social "sciences" and then you put inside those stuff like economics and all the shebang.

Of course that some people think those are actually scientific and then, when all the predictions fail not only stop believing the social "sciences" like economics, but in fact start looking at all sciences, even the real ones, as some fake agenda from someone.

In the end it's a double wrong, first because you are telling people that social "sciences" like economics actually predict anything and second because we are destroying the public view of real science.

I think what we need is some outreach program that explains people what the real sciences are in order to regain credibility for science and to get people suspicious of any predictions coming from social "sciences".

Not to say that some social "sciences" are not worthy of research, but we must understand that they are only ad hoc fields of knowledge and that they don't predict anything. For instance like history, a respected area that doesn't need to get some fake validation from calling itself a science.

</comment><comment><USER58> The same bad arguments against economist repeated again and again. The people who write this are either stupid or simply write what people want to read.

<comment><USER36> The issue is that dumb unemployed programmers love to hit the 'up' button on articles shitting on things they don't understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> A lot of people don't get that economics isn't about making predictions nor that the fact that a statistical model may lack predictive power has nothing to do with whether the model is correct. All a statistical model tells you is that the dependent variable will take this or that value _given_ some values of the independent variables. So predicting the dependent variable requires you to _know_ the values of the independent variables in the future, which means most of the time the model is completely useless for forecasting purposes. That doesn't mean that the model is useless in a general sense, or unscientific.

<comment><USER51> So what can you use a model for if it doesn't make predictions? Presumably a non-predictive model can't explain things either?

Also, if a model doesn't make predictions how can you compare it to reality to see if it is actually a useful model or not?

<comment><USER50> You can say: if X and Y happen, then with a great degree of certainty Z will follow. That's explaining things, despite not being able to predict if Z will occur or not. There are many ways to test the validity of a model, for example, you can "forecast" past values (using known values of the explanatory variables) and check the accuracy of the predictions.

<comment><USER9> There is a little problem here, though. In other scientific disciplines the "laws" are not time dependent. I.e. Chemical reactions in 1894 work just the same as in 2017 or 3251. On the other hand discovering that your country is sitting on a big oil field in 678 b.C. will not help your state budget at all, while in 1940 it could be enough for your neighbours to finance a war of invasion.

So being able to "explain" past economical phenomena is not very useful if you then cannot use the (now validated) model to guide present and future decisions.

<comment><USER50> It's true, although it's still useful in many instances if we take a more general approach. So, let's say that instead of focusing on the effects of discovering oil on the national budget, we could focus on studying the economics of natural resources in a more general sense. Here historical evidence could be perfectly useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> All these articles from opinionated outsiders aiming at "stimulating debate" sound extremely arrogant to academic economists. Do you really think you are telling anything new?

<comment><USER36> The people silencing you by fading you into the background do.</comment></comment>


Big customers that won't close - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2011/3/10/big-customers-that-wont-close

<comment><USER2> Handle these sales in an asynchronous fashion. Just because it feels like it's taking forever _to you_ doesn't mean there isn't progress being made.

The unfortunate thing is that you may have the sale completely clinched or you may have already lost it and you might not know for months or longer. All you can do is touch base with your contact occasionally, and let them know you're there if they need you.

You can also try to offer to help the sales process for them. Sometimes that works well if the hangup is at the executive level. Offer to send them some plain-English case studies about how your product (makes / saves) money for them. Spell out what the expected ROI is, etc...

The other side of this coin that's worth mentioning: Sometimes the big customers that won't close just aren't worth the effort. They will always be slow moving. They will always consume much more of your time than a smaller company will.

If your company culture value agility, perhaps you should just decide that the sale isn't a good cultural fit and spend more of your time focusing on customers that are a better fit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Besides just size, you need to look at the industry and calendar cycle.

For example, if it's retail/ecommerce, many of those decisions need to be done early in the year so that they can be implemented in time for Q3, and perfected for Q4. Approaching them in Q2 will often mean you need to wait 10 months.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Six months later, things are still sounding great and not happening. What's going on?_

It could be that nothing unusual is going on. A six+ month buying cycle for anything over 4 figures is normal. Whenever selling to an enterprise, you should ask your contact:

      1.  Who is the champion?
      2.  Who is the decision maker?
      3.  What is the process for each tier?
      4.  What should we do the best ensure our mutual success?

The only reason for surprises in the sales cycle is if you didn't bother to ask.

It someone sold a cure for cancer for $1000, everyone would buy it and the world would be healed.

If it cost $10,000, you'd probably have to await corporate paperwork and approval for 6 months and only then start implementation.

</comment><comment><USER5> heh I work for a big corporation, 70K+ employees, and I see us doing that to other companies all the time. I feel bad for those startups trying to get their software in here, but I'm only a small cog in a huge wheel (for now anyways).</comment>


VxRail in a Nutshell (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://d8tadude.com/2018/11/20/vxrail-in-a-nutshell/ <comment><AUTHOR> The underlying idea here seems to be something like _" Decouple the workstation physical hardware -- from the VM's that actually do the work"._

For a business, this model looks like this: You buy a physical workstation for every person that needs to have access to the network. You buy a bunch of physical servers too.

But, but, each workstation no longer runs its own OS, nor is an island onto itself. Instead, it connects to a VM instance, which runs on one of the servers.

In that respect, the workstation is a whole lot like a dumb terminal -- except that it has better graphics...

Each server runs multiple VM's, but does not have an infinite capacity. When more VM's are needed, servers are either expanded in terms of capacities, and/or more servers are added...

VM's could also be ran in the cloud, that is, locally managed (if the servers are local), or remotely managed (if servers are in the cloud)...

Diskspace can similarly be decoupled... that is, no longer does one user use one physical drive, but a virtual one, where the "unused space" (virtual unused space) is actually apportioned out to other users...

If I am incorrect about any of these points, please feel free to correct and/or elaborate...

(Also, yes, I am aware that VMWare and other virtualization platforms -- might also work similarly...)</comment>


Might Our Universe Have Been Born Inside a Black Hole? - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25430/

<comment><USER2> Please don't submit these sort of "Scientists Now Believe" articles. The universe "Must" not have been born inside a Black Hole, that's just something one 10-day old paper is claiming.

Let is settle for a while before shouting from the rooftops that it's a groundbreaking bit of science. Many others have suggested before that black holes may be feeding baby universes, but it hasn't stuck.

<comment><USER3> I like reading such theories in the same way I like reading Sci Fi. They are fun for the adventurous mind, they can also be a source of inspiration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clearly God is an Object Oriented programmer. Universes inheriting from each other, time being an inherited property... Nice.

<comment><USER5> This theory corresponds more closely to prototype-oriented programming, like Javascript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whenever I see this "We're inside a black hole" idea, two things always come to mind:

1\. Wouldn't this invalidate the laws of thermodynamics, with energy pouring into the universe out of "nowhere"?

2\. Conversely, shouldn't the universe be evaporating?

<comment><USER7> It's the creation of the universe. It's pretty much going to violate conservation of energy no matter how you slice it.

<comment><USER6> But I mean, shouldn't conservation of energy be invalid _right now_ , as more matter and energy fall into our universe from the outside-place? It sounds like he's not just saying black holes spawn universes, but that universes exist inside black holes. Thus universes should grow in mass beyond what they started with, and should eventually lose all their mass to Hawking radiation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting theory but the comments below the article indicate that the theory is all pseudoscience crack pottery.

Any good reason why or why not I should take their theory seriously?

<comment><USER9> I can tell you why I wont take it too serious for now.

"The problem with inflation is that it needs an additional theory to explain why it occurs and that's ugly."

It's always a bad sign when scientist start looking for beauty rather than go where the facts lead them even if it's ugly.

On top of that, it's not like there haven't been many many many many very intelligent people trying to solve this problem.

He seems to try to solve the problem semantically, i.e. try to re-interpret the facts into a more aesthetically pleasing model which is exactly where it becomes pseudoscience.

To the best of my knowledge (and I am no scientist) the information that we have about the universe simply can't lead to a solution to the problem if it can be solved at all.

Only if we get additional information about our universe will we be able to perhaps find another way to interpret what this all means.

But cherry picking in the current knowledge base won't magically create a theory.

It's not about interpretation it's about facts.

The facts lead us to two "competing" theories that just can't be combined.

Maybe he is onto something, but then he needs to make some predictions with it.

<comment><USER10> When scientists say that an additional theory is ugly, they mean that adding the theory means ugly math. Ugly math is complicated, unsupported calculation --it's tweaking the theory to suit the data. In other words, the very reason they call it ugly is because of the things you cited. Now, it is certainly pseudo-science or wishful thinking, but cherry-picking the current knowledge base is how you create new theories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Must have been? Like it escaped after being born and is now out in the wild? To me, these sort of papers seem to be exercises in futile epistemology. It's not even wrong.

</comment><comment> b-e-p Why "must" it? Can't we just say sensible things like "New evidence and thought experiments suggest that…"?

</comment><comment><USER12> Actually, I enjoy reading those theories on hacker news. Cosmology is so mystifying.

</comment><comment><USER13> At least one truth comes out of this article, big questions lure big egos.

</comment><comment><USER14> Turtles all the way down.

<comment><USER15> Honestly.

You forgot about the elephants.

[http://infomavensdesktop.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/discwor...](http://infomavensdesktop.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/discworld1.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If anyone needs another bong hit, the HN bong is hidden under the third comment below.</comment>


Never Have I Seen So Much Fake Unemployment and Jobs Data by the Bureau of Labor - <AUTHOR> https://wolfstreet.com/2020/07/02/never-before-have-i-seen-so-much-fake-unemployment-jobs-data-by-the-bureau-of-labor-statistics-while-labor-department-nails-it/ <comment><USER2> This is way worse than when the census survey for median incomes was quietly changed a few years ago to make it seem like things were getting better [1]. This makes me question if the fault is with the BLS survey itself, or with the people reporting on the data.

[1] [https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/us-median- hou...](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/us-median-household- income-not-significantly-different-from-2017.html)

<comment><USER3> The definitions are different and always have been.

There is a long history of reasoned debate about which measure is better and what the differences are, and there are many worthwhile articles on the subject.

This angry rant is not one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I don't understand from the article is why I should believe the Labor Department over the Bureau of Labor? There is no evidence presented, the author just states there is a difference and then concludes it is the Bureau of Labor who is wrong. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> The BLS is the bureau within the labor department that computes these numbers. The BLS is the department of labor.

      There are different numbers based on unemployment claims vs. a survey of people who say they're looking for work.  It is possible to look for work while not being eligible for unemployment insurance, for instance.

During COVID in some places it is possible to receive benefits while not actively looking for work, as the government has shut down many jobs. This is a matter of nuances in the definition of the figures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does the data account for reduced hours workers. Because many people receiving the federal unemployment subsidy of $600/month are only working less hours, but are still employed. The same goes for all the gig workers making less right now but still technically working.

So unless that data is broken out, it seems plausible that the dol number includes employed and reduced hour workers where as the bls survey is just asking if you have "some" employment or not.

</comment><comment><USER7> What a house of cards the U.S. economy is. I am truly worried wondering when the other shoe is going to drop.

<comment><USER8> When the hopium that wall street is smoking runs out. Probably the end of November.

<comment><USER9> Hahaha no disrespect, but I've been seeing almost this exact conversation continually for at _least_ 20 years (the number of years I've been curious about economics).

At this stage, it doesn't matter what runs out, who takes the fall, or anything else (save the democratic power of the people): the power structure will do whatever it takes to maintain that house of cards.

Fractional reserve lending alone can prop up the system almost indefinitely. (Feel free to debate this if you feel strongly, but A. it's only 1 tool in the garage, and B. Arguments about "they can't" or "it's not legal" are irrelevant because they will simply change or circumvent the law.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That the unemployment numbers are politicized is hardly a shocking claim.

However, given the demonstrated willingness of the current Administration's detractors to attack the way the man drinks water or descends a ramp, it seems odd that a substantive story like "The Numbers Are Baked" has been overlooked.

</comment><comment><USER11> Home prices will fall. Lots of tenants probably not paying already right now. Commercial properties - lower demand. Job security in the near future is huge problem especially if the next shutdown will be imposed in winter.

<comment><USER12> I remember reading a third of tenants in LA did not pay april rent

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The unemployment figures were conveniently off by a few million last month too. Clearly they are being manipulated to prop up the stock market. It's so obvious.

<comment><USER14> A lot of things look suspicious if you've never noticed them before and have no frame of reference. Official statistics have always been revised over time, and any given person may or may not have ever noticed, and nothing forces the media to notice or be consistent about it.</comment></comment>


What's it like being a non-profit in Y Combinator? - <AUTHOR> http://80000hours.org/?p=34583

<comment><USER2> "We decided to focus on online content rather than coaching." Color me not surprised haha (given its a YC company that moved to Mountain View). But I hope they are working on ideas that can really replace or improve the value of an actual human coach. Career coaching has to be really complex in today's changing environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> "We've coached over 200 people, written over 300 articles, and worked with academics at Oxford, to figure out how to have the greatest social impact through your career. The answers aren't what you'd first think – you don't have to work at a charity and we won't tell you to follow your passion."

I'm not sure that's great advice if you don't recommend working on what they enjoy and believe in.. Is there more to it?

Also, reading your site's articles on mobile is pretty annoying with that drop down that sometimes does or doesn't cover the top of the screen. I like to be able to scroll up or down to reread.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try reading the career guide: [https://80000hours.org/career- guide/basics/](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/basics/)

I agree that's an issue - we're working on better mobile optimisation.

<comment><USER3> Got it. Have you ever met anyone from dosomething.org? They work with kids under 25 who want to have a social impact. Many go on to start their own non profits. Maybe you can hook up your networks. I used to work there

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you say something on how do you measure reading time? What is the length of your content? Do you measure 100% only, or also partial reads?

Having 50k+ users in July means about 12.5k in the last week, that for 170h reading is 49s reading/user on avg. Do I read it correctly?

<comment><USER5> It should be 170h _per day_ over the last week, so more like 6 minutes each visitor.

<comment><USER4> Ops, misread, sorry. Anyway, I wasn't criticizing the number itself, I just wanted to understand more about the measurement process.</comment></comment></comment>


A flat icon set for OS X - <AUTHOR> http://flaticns.com

<comment><USER2> Philosophically or practically: What's the justification for nearly everyone switching to flat design? Is there any articulable reason it's "better" than the rich, three-dimensional style[1] that was previously popular? Or is it just an arbitrary trend?

Some say the change is driven by high-DPI displays. I disagree. I don't see any intrinsic reason that flat designs look better than rich, three- dimensional designs on a high-DPI display. Without a doubt, flat can look nice, but so can things like this:

[http://www.sequelpro.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2013/01/seq...](http://www.sequelpro.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2013/01/sequel-pro-1.0.png)

Another justification I've heard is that it's a reaction to the excesses of the previous trend. People often point to the leather motif in certain Apple applications as an example of such excess. But first of all, those examples are outliers; few designs actually went that far. Second, the existence of a questionable use of a given style is not an effective argument against that style in general. Third, "some things were extremely 3d, so now we'll be extremely flat" seems like contrarianism for contrarianism's sake.

[1] Some call this skeuomorphism. I tend not to, because the term technically means something narrower than what we're talking about: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph)

<comment><USER3> Frankly, I don't care about the look of the icons (these should be theme-able anyway), but I do care a lot about the actual application user interface, and for this, flat design is a step back into the 80's.

Flat design is good as long as there are no important visual cues lost what elements can be interacted with and which are just passively displaying information. I really do still have problems in iOS7 to separate passive text elements from interactive text elements (formerly called "buttons"). Examples are the contacts list or the famous shift-button of the onscreen keyboard.

Thankfully in OSX 10.10, buttons are still recognizable as buttons, and I like that less radical flatness much more then iOS7. Although, in the current state the UI looks a lot like a Gnome skin which tries to mimic OSX though, I hope that improves until release.

<comment><USER4> It's not a jump back to the 80s exactly. For example, here is an old NT screenshot: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Windows_NT_3.1...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Windows_NT_3.1.png)

A lot of it is flat, but they use simple bevels for buttons and other clickable elements, and its reuse on, for example, the buttons in the file manager window, looks tacky because it appears cluttered and overused. Also, excessive lines (e.g. for the window borders), high contrast colors, and small color pallet makes the overall appearance not nice to look at. Also the icon set suuuuucked.

<comment><USER3> The Windows 3.x UI was always ugly and didn't make any sense ;) But that's the 90's, I'm talking about the 80's.

For instance: AmigaOS 1.3 (notice in the bottom-most screenshot how the buttons don't have '3D edges':

[http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html)

'3D' UI elements were introduced later in AmigaOS2.0, and I remember how the user interface style guide made a big fuzz about how UI elements that appear raised are supposed to be clickable while flat or recessed elements shall be used for non-interactive or disabled UI elements which cannot be interacted with.

Actually this site is a pretty awesome collection of operating system UIs. BeOS still looks nice, almost like retro-modern pixel-art.

<comment><USER4> Everyone knows the early 90s was part of the 80s!

Older UIs like the Amiga OS one suffered from an even more limited pallet, and even worse typography.

I used BeOS as my main OS for a while and really liked it - it was very snappy and felt more "homey" (that is, more like classic MacOS) than early OSX versions did. (The browser, NetPositive, was absolutely awful though).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I may be in the minority, but these feel really boring and dull to me. I think there is a way to have a "flat" icon while still providing some depth to them.

I've also seen dozens and dozens of flat icon sets for Android that basically have this same exact look. Just go to XDA or the Play Store and search "flat icons", I'm sure you'll find a bunch that have a mix of these designs.

<comment><USER6> I think one of the main issues for me is the lack of saturation... the color palette is a little pastel.

<comment><USER7> Everything looks like it is covered in a thick layer of dust.

Looking at these icons makes me want to lick my finger and swish across my screen to remove the dust from those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like these, but they seem a bit fuzzy to my non retina macbook display. Particularly the music and calendar app icons just seem overly aliased. Can anyone else confirm?

<comment><AUTHOR> They were designed on a retina screen but I'm not sure why that's happening. I'll have a look and see what I can do!

<comment><USER9> I disabled the width property (width: 12.5%) for the .icon class and the icons look crisp now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for looking into this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Icon sets suck. They aim for system-wide consistency, but can never achieve it, because there are N+1 icons to be replaced. They focus too much on any given design pattern (flat, round squares, dark, etc.), and forget the basics: icons should represent the program, they should be memorable. The only sensible use case for an icon set I can think of is a graphic designer who wants to practice.

<comment><USER11> With you until the last sentence. How about icon sets for those who are colour blind? Whilst I'm sure you could, to some extent, automatically convert, I'm also sure there are nuances that only a human designer could cater for. Also, how about different sets for different nationalities/cultures between whom analogies can vary greatly.

It would be nice to solve the N+1 problem with a semantic hierarchy providing fallbacks, particularly in the case when only one application within a specific group is installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I do not understand this trend of 'flat design'. It looks horrible. It started with Apple and the other copied it. Now microsoft has it, google started implementing it, samsung as well. It looks horrible.

<comment><USER13> Well. Microsoft had it first with Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8. But yes it is now everywhere. Latest KDE Plasma release is flat too and other DEs will soon follow suit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like you can't change the calendar icon. The calendar ICNS is used for the first time after cache reset, but once calendar opens, it uses its own embedded empty calendar icon and fills in the date. Any way for liteicon to change that blank calendar? I noticed you provided the blank calendar icns. I suppose I could open up Calendar and replace it to try it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, good call, calendar has to be done manually a little bit differently. I forgot to add instructions for that - I'll do it tonight

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Along the same vein: [http://appicns.com](http://appicns.com)

<comment><USER16> Those are too abstracted, it's hard to figure out what they are icons for. For instance, the Adobe suite icons are impossible to decipher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thanks for releasing these. I am changing over now! Hoping my dock and icons flow better.

Here is my new dock: [http://imgur.com/2vEM5Yv](http://imgur.com/2vEM5Yv)

Why the down vote?

<comment><USER13> 1\. You complained about the downvote.

2\. Image is low-resolution.

<comment><USER17> so I got downvoted for taking a picture of my exact dock, exact size? So I should have made my dock way larger and posted a better quality picture?

All I was doing was telling the author that I liked what she did and showing that I did indeed take time to implement it.

<comment><AUTHOR> For what it's worth, I appreciate it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you want to implement minimalist design, you might as well go the full nine yards and use no more than 2-3 (properly contrasting) colors. This is middle- of-the-road and frankly evokes neither elegance nor brilliance.

To elaborate on why the above may be interpreted as harsh, by limiting the ingredients at your disposal to flat colors and simple shapes, you run the risk of amplifying the severity of any mistakes in their selection. The less visual information that get presented, the more the visual units come under closer scrutiny.

</comment><comment><USER19> Windows 3.11 HD

<comment><USER20> Mac isn't bad in the historic flat design department either: [https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/486510620276441088/...](https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/486510620276441088/photo/1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like them.. They might just get used if OS X goes flat..

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice job! Just missing a Facebook icon for my Facebook SSB.

<comment><AUTHOR> Coming up soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't like the firefox one.</comment>


The moving sofa problem - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_sofa_problem <comment><USER2> Recycled anecdote from the last time this was discussed on HN:

While a student, I looked after the apartment of a friend of mine, who was overseas.

When he moved there, we were _just_ able to eke his sofa around the last corner from the stairwell and through the door to his apartment. Just. After much cursing and several failed attempts.

So, what does a good (cough) friend do while the owner is overseas?

Get some hardwood mouldings/trimmings/whatever you call those long, thin pieces of wood typically put where wall transitions to ceiling or floor and nail them to the exterior doorframes, making both door openings perhaps 3/8" or so narrower, paint them in the color of the doorframe, sit back and wait.

Then, years later, as he is about to leave town, moving company comes along and everything runs smoothly until one item remains. The sofa. Obviously, it got in - so it'll (as obviously) come out. Only it doesn't.

We (everybody except the owner and the moving guys were in on the joke) managed to keep a straight face for several minutes.

The moving guys even laughed as they (eventually) left, mollified by a bottle filled with a Scottish export product which we'd kept on hand to ensure no feelings were hurt afterwards.

<comment><USER3> That especially hurt me too read as just this morning I helped a friend move a couch. We had had to turn it pretty much every way possible and the only reason we kept trying was because we knew somehow she got it moved in. It's interesting that in so many different areas knowing there is a solution makes finding the solution easier.

In a related story my dad remodeled his house and put in a new wall blocking in a couch. When it came time to move it (years later) I thought it was going to be a permanent feature of that room. My dad came up with the solution of getting a saw and cutting the couch into pieces.

<comment><USER4> This is such a common issue in NYC that we have a business (the couch doctor) that does nothing but take apart furniture and reassemble it in place. Friend of mine used them and they were apparently really impressive (he told them what sofa he had, the dimensions of his door, and they knew right away it wouldn't be a problem)

<comment><USER5> A number of years back I bought a couch from my brother. I promptly took off on a trip on which I managed to badly break my foot so he ended up dumping the thing at my house and it sat in my garage for months.

Once I was mobile again, I realized it was a tight fit and the sofa wasn't actually symmetrical. Fortunately, it was asymmetrical in the right way for the room but I had a momentary panic.

>we have a business (the couch doctor)

I also have to say that I just love how businesses get created to deal with especially largely localized problems and do a really good job at it. Even at a national level, I met with a specialist company yesterday to do something in my house and it was very refreshing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If anyone hasn't read or has forgotten Douglas Adams 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' then I warmly recommend it. It includes, iirc, The Sofa Problem and the solution is classic Adams and all HNers will love it! :)

<comment><USER7> Wondered if anyone would mention this, also if you haven't tried it the Netflix version of Dirk Gently is wonderful, departs from the books without departing from the characters.

<comment><USER8> The first season is delicious, the second one (unfortunately) veers too far off into the odd mix of fantasy, conspiracy theories and mysticism. I'm curious what the third one brings.

Casting-wise, I am not sure Elijah Wood was the best choice. Big name for impact maybe, but the role just feels ill-fitting.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately nothing, it's been cancelled.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/deadline.com/2018/03/dirk- gentl...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/deadline.com/2018/03/dirk-gentlys- holistic-detective-agency-will-not-have-a-season-3-producer-1202335666/amp/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gibbs's computational approach is really interesting [1]. Keep the sofa still and move the corridor, and the optimal sofa shape is the intersection of all (well n, since it's a numerical approximation) the corridor shapes as they sweep around.

[1] [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311900489_A_Computa...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311900489_A_Computational_Study_of_Sofas_and_Cars)

<comment><USER11> That link does not work for me, but this may be better : [https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~romik/movingsofa/](https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~romik/movingsofa/)

<comment><USER10> That is a different article. My link to Gibbs's article came from Wikipedia, but your link points to another copy: [http://vixra.org/pdf/1411.0038v2.pdf](http://vixra.org/pdf/1411.0038v2.pdf)

Maybe that one will work for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kudos to the animation illustrator [0]. See also [1]. I'm collecting these for reasons.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rocchini](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rocchini)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15549197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15549197)

<comment><USER13> That particular guy appears to have a knack for geometry, 4-dimensionality and hyperbolic spaces. Topics that I feel like I have a foot in from watching my favorite Parker square videos...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This problem seems tame and uninteresting compared to the real-life 3D case.

Last christmas, I was moving a sofa on my mother-in-law's home, and it was stuck in the corridor. She told me "i seem to recall that you have to raise this side a bit". I replied something to the effect "no way, i am a mathematician and there's no way that this can possibly make a difference".

Of course she was right. I could only move the sofa by rotating it in 3D _just so_ , so that the slightly protruding arm and leg could pass one after the other.

So the real question, not dealth with in the wikipedia page, is: what is the largest sofa that we can move through a unit corner, allowing it to rotate in 3D ?

<comment><USER15> I guess the answer might be to take the largest 2D sofa and just extrude it upwards 1, so that it fills the height of the corridor.

<comment><USER14> It will depend on how you define the "largest" sofa: total volume? surface area of the ground covered by it?

If it is the largest volume, you need to limit the height of the corridor (to be the same as the width? a multiple of it?). Otherwise, you can pass an arbitrarily long L that you turn side-wise on the corner.

<comment><USER15> I was thinking of maximising the volume of the sofa in a corridor as tall as it is wide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Somewhat related, but more counterintuitive and "solved": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakeya_set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakeya_set)

</comment><comment><USER17> Nice numberphile vídeo on the subject:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=rXfKWIZQIo4](https://youtube.com/watch?v=rXfKWIZQIo4)

</comment><comment><USER18> Would proving this advance our knowledge in some related field such as mathematical topology? Since the values have already been brute forced (but unproven) there really isn't any direct practical application for knowing the solution

<comment><USER19> > there really isn't any direct practical application for knowing the solution

Oh, but math always seems that way. And often, it is. But sometimes, very rarely, your solution to the sofa problem explains a key detail to P vs NP, or allows a breakthrough in transistor design, or improves the airflow calculations allowing for faster jets, etc.

Math's true beauty is that it's never done playing games with us as we realize all the strange connections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Kickstarter idea: Gerver's sofa in Italian leather.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't seem very practical as furniture - there's a big hole in the middle. Actual sofas can be moved in three dimensions, so can be more usefully shaped.

<comment><USER21> It might not be awful if it came with a matching coffee table for the middle section.

<comment><USER22> Even better - a detachable ottoman. It fills the hole when you want a sofa, and becomes a footrest when you don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Numberphile did a great video on this topic [https://youtu.be/rXfKWIZQIo4](https://youtu.be/rXfKWIZQIo4)

</comment><comment><USER24> Pivot!

<comment> ezequiel-garzon Yes! [https://youtu.be/Tam7KO4qhUI](https://youtu.be/Tam7KO4qhUI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It would be great to someone create a game where you should calculate and create sofa in order to move sofa through the building passages

</comment><comment><USER26> Can someone just put this in an ISO standard already, so I know how wide to make my hallways?

</comment><comment><USER27> var numberOfMovers = (! hideABed) ? 3 : 0;</comment>


Helm: The Kubernetes Package Manager - <AUTHOR> http://helm.sh/ <comment><USER2> This is a duplicate submission of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535988)</comment>


Is Jaxtr competing with Google (GPhone)? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/14/jaxtr-widget-lets-social-networkers-chat-on-real-live-phones/ <comment><AUTHOR> With Google launching its 411 service ( <http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/06/google-launches-free-411-business/> ) along with the rumor about the GPhone, it does suggest that Google is entering the voice enabled communication/services domain. With Google's mass following, this only makes logical sense.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is MySpace along with other social networking platforms, where companies like Jaxtr ( <http://www.jaxtr.com> ) are trying to connect the offline medium with the online medium.

Should Google really be concerned at this stage?</comment>


Maybe Null Is Not an Option - <AUTHOR> http://orthocoders.com/blog/2016/06/08/maybe-null-is-not-an-option/ <comment><USER2> Once you get the hang of at least one programming language where nulls do not exist, you realize just how much unnecessary pain they cause.

There are of course several ways to represent the absence of a value, fit for different paradigms and programming styles, but I think most of us can agree at this point that having untyped null values is a very bad idea in most cases.

Whenever I program in C#, I always have to be overly paranoid, as more or less anything can be null. Option types certainly introduce some development overhead up front, by forcing the developer to handle the possibility of an absent value, but in my experience this is still far less than the amount of defensive programming necessary to handle nulls correctly.

As a response, I decided to implement a practical and safety-focused C# option type, and now use it more or less everywhere.

Reference: [https://github.com/nlkl/Optional](https://github.com/nlkl/Optional)

Certainly, this does not guarantee that values are not null, but it allows you to be explicit about absent values in your own APIs, which is of great value. In turn, null checks become much easier as you do not have to accept nulls as legal values (except at boundaries to external code), and working with potentially absent values become much less cumbersome, due to a convenient API.

Interesting things are happening to programming languages these days, and I am quite curious to see the next steps. The C# language team as well has some focus on this ([https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/features/NullableRefer...](https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/features/NullableReferenceTypes/docs/features/NullableReferenceTypes/Nullable%20reference%20types.md)).</comment>


Show HN: Secure Windows Shell - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SecureWindowsShell/SWSH <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I like hardcoded URL's that fetches stuff every time I run a program without good reason. Also, I wouldn't ever trust the program itself to check its integrity. But I digress, it's definitely an interesting project.

What are the pro's and con's of using it instead of the win32 version of OpenSSH? [0]

[0] [https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH](https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH)</comment>