Occupy Google: Income Inequality Backlash Hits Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/class-tension-in-san-francisco-hits-new-highs-170448791.html?l=1 <comment><USER2> Wow. I thought this was satire.

I guess this kind of happens in Singapore, too. As the billionaires come in, the poorer locals encounter rising housing costs. And unlike the US, Singapore is an island-city-state, so there's nowhere to run.

I can't think of any solutions to this. Anybody have any ideas?

<comment><USER3> Build more housing?

<comment><USER4> That. The lack of intensification in some of the most valuable real-estate in the world is absurd. Build _up_!

Also, while it stinks for people who are already tied into careers, having money flood into your community isn't exactly a bad thing for somebody entrepreneurial. I mean, if the new wealthy folks want to blow that cash locally, there's a lot of money to be made. It's demeaning in a "trickle-down" services sense, but it's cash to be had.

<comment><USER5> Will this increased building activities cost less than the current housing market rate?

If a new property costs $500k to build, as a builder you would need to at least cover that cost. I can't imagine that this helps the poor unless it's government sponsored.

<comment><USER6> The housing market rate will be lower with new housing than without it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This made me chuckle: "haves" versus the "have nots". How about we change that to: "made smart decisions, studied hard, work hard" versus the "made bad decisions, jealous of others"

<comment><USER8> Haha. Wow. I guess I'm glad someone said this. The way you see the problem is really common and I think too many other people who feel the way you do are cunning enough to keep quiet or massage their thoughts into something more palatable.

To be clear, I think this opinion demonstrates such a completely bullshit, narrow, entitled, and ethnocentric view of the world it blows my mind. It's a helpful reminder of why I don't live up there.

<comment><USER9> > I think this opinion demonstrates such a completely bullshit, narrow, > entitled, and ethnocentric view of the world it blows my mind.

Well you can safely unblow your mind. He used a stereotype broadly applied to a group, but lazy people do indeed make up some portion of the "have nots". Sibling comments show measured, thought-massaged responses that correct the GP.

Let's not combat bad generalizations with hyperbole.

<comment><USER2> I've always been deeply curious about laziness. What makes a lazy person lazy? Is it predisposition? Is it environment? What are your thoughts?

<comment><USER10> This really is the million-dollar question isn't it? It unfolds in all kinds of interesting directions and has big implications - why are some countries more productive than others? Why are some cultures more technologically advanced?

There's a good book on this: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Well worth a read.

There are no easy answers here, though being mindful of history is important in arguing this topic - predisposition and environment have historically been used by social darwinists to assert superiority over other cultures and races (see: "tropical climates breed laziness" and "blacks are predisposed to lesser intelligence but greater physical ability"). They're not verboten, but it pays to tread carefully if you want to argue in that direction.

<comment><USER8> Guns, Germs, and Steel is a super compelling read. It addresses productivity in the large (not in the small), but not laziness I think. I'm not sure how relevant it is to exploring individuals in a population as it is to looking at productivity of larger populations throughout history.

Spoiler: GG&S ends up arguing that the answer to why some countries are more productive than others is historical geographical circumstance, particularly because of access to large grains and domesticate-able animals which propelled some early cultures into agriculture and the rest is history.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, GG&S is very much focused on the macroscopic outcomes, but I do believe they two topics are interrelated, at least traditionally where they're discussed.

The question of why Africa was largely technologically undeveloped was of some importance to Europeans during the slave trade. The predispositional argument was made to justify the practice of slavery, and post-slavery to justify continued discrimination.

Similarly, if you go to East Asia today (see: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong) you will still see today continued mistreatment of Southeast Asian migrant workers under the guise of predispositional and environment inferiority ("tropical climates breed simple minds" and such nonsense), justified by macro-scale outcomes ("look at all the tropical countries, all of them are a mess, clearly non-tropical climates breed harder workers").

These attitudes are depressingly common. The macro-scale differences in countries is often used as justification for odd micro-scale beliefs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This and yesterday's thread [1] are fascinating. Here we have lower-classes seeking direct retribution against higher-classes. Contrast to yesterday's article involving upper-classes discussing how to uplift lower-classes via social policy changes and enforcing certain belief doctrines, e.g., do XYZ, not ABC.

Of course it's easier to rail against the the former camp than the latter; we all believe in some degree of property rights, i.e., you bare the fruit of your labor. However, I propose both positions are unjustified and both parties need to bow out of one another's business.

Not trying to push libertarian beliefs (I am not one). But everyone is an asshole, out to serve their own ends, trying to sculpt the world in the way they would have it.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885226)

<comment><USER12> > One is punished for success via taxes, fees, fines, etc. by the "have nots"

Care to explain that more, the tax system certainly does not punish the haves; it in fact rewards them. By the very nature of the marginal utility of money, the current tax rates hurt the have nots far more than the haves. The _burden_ is quite simply not equally shared by all, it is born mostly by the have nots.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, removed that piece from the original post as I feared it would detract from the main point. The use of "haves" versus "have nots" was intended as an example of divide and conquer. It was not intended as two distinct groups, with obviously distinguishable beliefs. Persons shift beliefs to exploit ends that are most beneficial to them. For other readers, he's referring to:

> This is classic "Us versus Them" (divide and conquer) that systemically > makes it worse for most everyone, especially the individual. One is punished > for success via taxes, fees, fines, etc. by the "have nots"; while the > "haves" punish you for practicing a different set of ideals or lifestyle > choices that go against societal norm.

Again, I meant to show an example. Whether the "haves" or "have nots" are in camp "punish by taxes" or camp "control lifestyle" is irrelevant. Persons shift between camps, when it's convenient. Similarly, all sorts of other camps exist towards other ends.

<comment><USER12> Ok, my point is simply that notion that there exists a valid camp where haves are punished by taxes is simply false, the haves like to claim that, but it's simply not true. The haves are not punished by the system, they're rewarded by it.

<comment><USER11> Again, I didn't intend to setup this argument. However, all one needs to show is that a "Have" is materially worse off thanks to taxes. This gets easier or harder depending on definitions.

Clearly, Have versus HaveNot is not binary; there is a range there. Who is a Have and who is a HaveNot? If a Have is a $20k/yearly worker and a HaveNot is without a job entirely, we could easily argue that taxes are punishing the Haves.

<comment><USER12> I don't think anyone would reasonably call 20k a year a have. In fact we've already seen a pretty good definition of the split in the 99% movement. Haves are the upper class, not the middle class and below.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This has nothing to do with dumb vs. smart, lazy vs. workaholic or privileged vs. unprivileged.

It has to do with the fact that decisions in life have consequences. I can't help myself and have to quote a fantastic line from Star Wars: Your Focus Determines Your Reality.

Coincidentally, I had a long conversation with my oldest son, now in High School, last night.

He screwed up in a big way. He was given a book project a month ago. He had to read "To kill a mockingbird" and annotate it profusely. He read the book over several nights but procrastinated when it came to the annotation work. The work was due today.

On Sunday he came to realize he made a big mistake. What did he do? He stayed up 'till 2:00AM every day to get the project done. He decided to do this on his own.

Neither my wife nor I made him do it. He recognized his mistake and made the decision to right it entirely on his own. Up until yesterday afternoon we had no idea why he was working so hard. I have never been a micro-manager, professionally or at home. I assume and expect responsible behavior of others and, of course, try to lead by example. So I asked my kid if he really needed to stay up late doing this work and, when he said "yes" I just got out of the way and supported him by staying up, making tea and generally being there for him. I would get down to the bottom of it once he got done.

He got done last night. We had a talk. He is getting an A in English. This was extra credit work he didn't need for grades and didn't really need to complete. Yet, he told me he had committed to doing the work and explained how sorry he was he procrastinated and to such a degree.

I think my reaction surprised him. He's never screwed up on anything to this extent. He thought I might be angry or disappointed. The summary of a two hour conversation boils down to this:

In life we are guaranteed to make bad or non-ideal decisions from time to time. Not one person is immune to this. What matters in life; what defines a man is how he chooses to deal with these mistakes. Some will cave in and sink into a dark hole of self pity and agony. Some will find every possible creative way to deflect the blame and rationalize what happened as being someone else's doing or fault. And yet others will look you straight in the eye, own the problem and do whatever is necessary to fix it.

I said: "Son, you screwed up. You took responsibility for your actions and worked incredibly hard to make good on a promise you made to yourself and nobody else. You didn't need to do this for a grade. You already had an A. You did it because you are becoming a man with high values, morals, ethics and honor. I am proud."

I almost cried when i said this. It is an incredible feeling as a parent to see your kids make the right decisions.

In a country like the US the whole business of income inequality has two facets.

The first is that of Liberal politicians manipulating the masses because it is far easier to get them worked-up en-masse with stuff like this and then you get their votes...by e millions. That's the nasty reality of the Liberal party: They benefit directly from low education voters' suffering because that is easy to convert to votes. This is the oldest trick in the books and it is not monopolized by US politics. I lived in Argentina for a while and learned quite a bit about their Politics and history. Evita was known for sending trucks into poor neighborhoods to give out blenders, refrigerators and other vote-buying crap. At the same time they kept the poor down because, not surprisingly, without them they'd get no votes. Things are not done the same way here but it really is the same. Pit the masses against the successful, throw them a bone here and there (minimum wage, union pay and pensions, etc.) sit back and collect the votes. It's sick. It's all about pandering and manipulation.

The other aspect of the income inequality situation has to do with a massive change in the work ethic of the American worker and American youth over decades. We have devolved into an entitlement society where people want it all, don't want to work hard for it and everything is someone else's fault.

When I owned an electronics manufacturing business I made it a point to hire students from the local junior college. I would say maybe one out of ten, if not twenty, had a reasonable work ethic. I had a couple who stole components and expensive tools (crimpers, etc.). Others screwed around and played on the Internet if nobody was watching. In general, most were down-right disappointing in their performance and attitude towards the job. A select few were absolutely exemplary. I have no doubt the will become valued members of society.

What will become of the rest? Once they realize their mistakes in life, rather than work hard to correct them they will fall back on the simple idea of blaming it on others. They will undoubtedly become tools of the only political party that will roll down the street handing out virtual blenders and refrigerators. They will scream bloody murder at someone like my son who will get where he is going because he worked hard, made good decisions and, when he made bad ones he busted his ass to own and fix them.

It's about the decisions you make in life and whether or not you are man (or woman) enough to own them.

Your Focus Determines Your Reality.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have really mixed feelings about this. First of all, the "victims" were probably Google peons, not the insufferable royalty. The vast majority of Googlers are people I like (I worked there) and they aren't responsible for the problem. Like I said in another post here, the engineers doing all the work will soon be priced out to make room for product narcissists and those horrible executives that VCs implant to grant a favor to a friend, making twice as much money as engineers while working 11-to-3. It has already happened in New York, except it's bankers and traders. At least traders are respectable (it's pretty meritocratic) and the bankers actually work. Startup executives tend to be the people who failed in New York and in finance, so they seek them some VC coattails to ride on into someone else's company.

In 2008 when Wall Street tanked the economy, people were saying, "I wish all that talent were somewhere useful like Silicon Valley." This seems laughable now. Silicon Valley? Useful? Anyway, "tech" had the good faith of the nation for a long time, we were the "good rich" as opposed to the people on Wall Street-- and, in the next 5 years, _fucking blew it_ thanks to debacles like FWD.us, Sean Parker's wedding, and all the bad behavior that Valleywag so excellently chronicles.

We were the good guys. We still should be. Most of us, by population, are. The fuckers at the top, who don't even code and 90% of whom are MBA/private-equity types, have ruined not just our industry but our reputation. Now, people associate "techie" with spoiled brats, misogynists, and entitled, crypto- right-wing fuckheads (like the character played by the union organizer when impersonating a Google engineer).

Engineers and technologists and _real_ visionaries (not executive bikeshed painters) need to take technology back. Now. No fucking excuses. We _are_ the good guys-- the bad guys are private equity douches with no business in our world-- but if we don't take back our industry, it and our work will be used for bad (as we see in the Bay Area) and we will be the ones to get the blame.

<comment><USER2> Love your passion. I see nothing mixed about your feelings. :p

<comment><USER14> I have mixed feelings, specifically, about the bus blockade. It hurts the wrong people.

I love technology and there are a lot of wonderful people in this world, but I hate what has been done to it, mostly by MBA-culture outsiders who'd be better for the world (and make more money) as passive backers, but their ego gets in the way and they have to act as an executive caste.

"Business" should be about creating value for all (including oneself) and not about wielding and accumulating power.

<comment><USER2> Oh, right. I see where you're coming from. I think the "executive caste" problem you describe is almost universal. It's a tragedy. =\

<comment><USER14> Any aggregation (market, election) has the Cheap Votes Problem. People who don't really care will, if they can, sell their votes (often through passivity) and this makes people who purchase and can control the cheapest of the cheap votes very powerful. That's _why_ vote-buying is illegal; because, otherwise, it will happen all over the place.

VC is a Cheap Votes Problem over what a certain set of highly intelligent people, when given capital from a certain pool, will work on. Passive investors don't care (as long as they get decent returns) and trust the VCs, who use the investors' cheap votes to pursue their career goals and those of their friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why is "Google" the default shothand for "silicon valley"? And not just in this case.

<comment><USER16> Because they are the most visible and get the most press. It is very much like every article with "Apple" in the title. Apple is too old to be the poster child for the valley, so Google takes the hit. Plus, Google is visible in this scenario due to their buses and outspoken executives.

<comment><USER17> Larry isn't very outspoken at all. Are you referring to Eric? He's just on the board of directors now (chariman) and isn't involved in the day to day.

<comment><USER16> "He's just on the board of directors now (chairman)"

Chairman of Google's Board of Directors makes for a fine headline and suggests his opinions might have an effect on Google's policies.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New iphone costs $27.94 more than the old iphone - <AUTHOR>

Okay, we all know that the new iphone price is just a marketing ploy to get people in more expensive contracts. But how much more will it cost you. Assuming a 5% opportunity cost for your cash.
New iphone w/ $69.99 plan: ($1,794.34) =PV(5%/12, 24, 69.99) - 199
Old iphone w/ 59.99 plan: ($1,766.41) =PV(5%/12, 24, 59.99) - 399
The new, $199 iphone costs $27.94 more than the $399 old iphone when you consider the monthly plan and time value of money. <comment><USER2> And you are getting 3G and GPS.

<comment><USER3> Yes, and if you really would rather have the money eBay is about to become well stocked with alternative, slightly-used iPhones for you at _really_ good values.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The 8GB 3G iPhone will cost just £99 on a new £30 per month tariff and the existing £35 per month tariff. Consumers choosing either the £45 or £75 per month tariffs will get the 8GB 3G iPhone for free."

That's much better than the previous offering. I was looking at the £35 per month tariff with iPhone v1, but the ~£300 price tag put me off. So now I can get the same tariff and a reduced up-front cost -- what's not to like?

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/06/10/bcnapple210.xml)

</comment><comment><USER5> What is the 5%? Why do you not just do $10 * 12 months?

<comment><AUTHOR> A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. (You can buy something else, invest it, etc.) All things being equal, it's better to defer payments rather than all at once.

People are carping that the new iphone might be $200 cheaper, but then you have to pay $10 * 24months = $240 more in monthly payments. (Difference of $40 dollars more for the new iphone.)

The math is wrong, you have to discount future payments. I choose 5% as a conservative interest rate.

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry, but I still don't get it. This concept is totally strange to me. How is a dollar today worth more than a dollar tommorrow?

How is it better to defer payments (add debt) than to pay everything at once? If I pay now, I can bulk up on money quickly later without having it reduced by debt repayment.

<comment><USER6> > How is a dollar today worth more than a dollar tomorrow?

Inflation, among other things. Deferring payments might add debt, but you've got to include the price of the debt: the interest rate.

Imagine you have $100 in the bank, earning interest. Lets say, if you keep it in your account for a year, you end up with $110. So, if someone gives you the option of paying $100 now, or paying $100 at the end of the year, which do you pick? If you pick now, you'll end up with $0 in your account. If you pick at the end of the year, you'll be left with $10.

Back to your question, normally when you add debt, that debt has interest payments attached to it. So the choice isn't "$100 now or $100 later", but "$100 now or $150 later". Imagine you still have your $100 in the same account, now the choice is to have a balance of $0 now, or -$40 at the end of the year, so it's better to pay now.

Whether you are in the first or the second situation depends on the relative profits from keeping your money invested (ie, via the bank) and the cost of the interest on your debt. For the iPhone, your monthly payments stay the same, so it's more like the first example than the second example, except that the new monthly payments are higher than for the old iPhone, so you still "loose".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shouldn't e be in that formula somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER8> Don't forget that 16GB is $299.</comment>


An online flea market that pays people instantly for their used goods - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-03/now-you-can-get-paid-instantly-for-your-old-rolex-with-an-app <comment><USER3> Don't know why i found it hard to grasp the ghist of this but.. he buys second hand items (paying before receiving) and then sell them at higher price on his own (in-app) store (if they arrive)?

If that's the case, such a system would depend on people being honest. In Japan, this provenly work, maybe even in Sweden - but in less honest countries, i really doubt it.

<comment><USER4> > such a system would depend on people being honest

People always said eBay would never work because people aren't honest, but it turns out most people _are_ honest.

<comment><USER5> Most people are honest, but it only takes a couple of bad apples to spoil the entire barrel. eBay 15 years ago was so much more awesome than the eBay of today.

<comment><USER4> > eBay 15 years ago was so much more awesome than the eBay of today.

That's simply not true.

There is so much more available on eBay now. I do almost all of my shopping on eBay because it presents a consistent user interface, with a quick checkout flow, and good competition between vendors to keep the prices down.

<comment><USER6> ...and I have abandoned eBay entirely, due to my perception that's its a hive of villainy. Folks listing computer equipment for sale above the regular price. Auctions that routinely go for more than you can easily buy elsewhere. Insincere bidders that try to con sellers into cancelling a bid (thus ensuring their confederate will now win, with a bid well below the value of the item). And so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In many jurisdictions there's a major problem with taxation: if you sell something from a person to another, you can usually do it tax free, at least on a small scale. If you create a company to facilitate this process, and the company acts as a middle man by buying the things from one person and selling them to another, the company probably needs to pay value added tax from the sale. In Finland, for example, that's a 23% added cost. And if you take commission, you'll need to pay the tax for that as well.

<comment><USER8> The laws vary hugely based on city/county/state/country and purpose of sale, but in my experience in the US you are almost always required to report income made from personal sales and pay income tax on it, and the person who bought it from you is supposed to pay sales tax. Sometimes there is a quantity exception, fewer than x sales and/or lower than y total value. With trades it is much murkier but in my experience not required.

Not to say I do or that the tax man will ever come for me, but the laws are there.

<comment><USER6> Surely its 'report profit from personal sales'? And flea-market sales of used items will rarely qualify.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Considering the wave of scammer responses every time I try to sell even the most trivial thing on craigslist nowadays, I highly doubt such a pay-first scheme will survive very long if someone were to try it in the US.

At best, maybe it could be a loss-leading gimmicky feature to drive traffic to less easily gamed traditional ecommerce aspects.

<comment><USER10> You might be able work around this by striking a deal with the company handling the transit. If there's a pick up service, the guy doing the pickup could make a quick check on the goods and release the payment. This of course does not help for issues like selling pirated goods, which can't be detected on quick inspection.

My gut feeling is that large part of business comes from regular customers. I guess the probability to cheat goes significantly down on each subsequent trade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this works well in a relatively homogenous society like Japan. Do you think this would take off in the USA? Maybe if you restricted selling to the local neighbourhood store.

<comment><USER12> Canada is more diverse than the USA, so every time (and it happens a lot for some reason) someone says "That couldn't happen in the USA because it's not homogenous" I always compare it to Canada, which generally seems to be the country that actually is what the USA advertises itself to be.

<comment><USER13> Canada is nowhere near as diverse as the US.

Canada is 1.x% hispanic, 2.x% black, 78% white.

The US is 20% hispanic, 13% black, 60% white.

Canada is a homogeneous nation.

Latin America's population is ~650 million. Canada intentionally designed its immigration system to be exclusionary to immigration by poorer people. Which is why, during the time in which the US massively boomed with Latin American immigration (1970s forward), Canada did not.

How can there be 650 million people in Latin American, nearly 70 million hispanics in the US, and only ~450,000 hispanics in Canada? A skill & education restricted immigration system that doesn't allow in typically poorer, lower skill, lower education hispanics coming from Latin America. It's extremely anti-diversity.

<comment><USER12> People of Chinese, East Indian, First Nations, Ukrainian, Dutch, Polish & Filipino ancestry all make up a bigger proportion of Canada's population than hispanic or black people. Your own numbers only add up to 81% for Canada but 93% for the USA. That's people from as propontionally large a group as African-Americans in the USA that you've skipped over.

Possibly there's two layers of miscommunication about "diverse". One, people could consider Scots, Irish, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Welsh, Norweigan people to be non-diverse if they fit some social category of whiteness. Even if one of the groups still speaks it's own language and has a seperatist movement.

Second, having big chunks of certain demographics could be considered less diversity than having lots of little chunks from different places.

<comment><USER13> Facts are facts. Canada's immigration system is absurdly anti-diversity, which is why Canada has so few hispanic and black people, and why it's nearly 80% white.

Within about 20 years, the US won't even be a majority white nation. Pretending Canada is more diverse than that, is ridiculous. That Canada is somehow a super diverse nation, is a pretend claim that is unsupported by the actual demographic facts.

Why don't more poor black people immigrate into Canada from cities like Detroit, Chicago or New York? Surely their lives would be considerably improved given Canada's superior safety net, healthcare system, etc. - <USER2> Canada has good wages and a healthy unemployment rate. It's simple, they're not allowed to. Canada's immigration system excludes the possibility that most people with lower skill & education backgrounds can ever get in.

If Canada were actually pro-diversity, they'd liberalize their immigration policies and let in a large amount of immigration from Latin America (after all, the vast majority of the Americas is hispanic), such that Canada's hispanic percentage closes the gap with the US over the next 20-30 years. They're never going to allow it.

<comment><USER14> > which is why Canada has so few hispanic and black people, and why it's > nearly 80% white.

Er, or it's not bordered by Mexico and doesn't have nearly the extensive history with African slavery that the US does?

> Why don't more poor black people immigrate into Canada from cities like > Detroit, Chicago or New York?

I'm not trying to argue one way or another for Canada's immigration system (I know very little about it), but this is a very simplistic argument.

Why don't all the ex-coal miners in WV simply move to where the jobs are?

Picking up and relocating your life is way, way more involved than you're making it sound.

> It's simple, they're not allowed to.

This is _also_ the case in the US, hence the widespread fears about illegal immigrants.

If life was significantly better in Canada, one would expect far more illegal immigration.

<comment><USER13> > but this is a very simplistic argument.

It's not a simplistic argument. It's a facts based argument and I'm the only one in this discussion so far that is actually using facts.

> Er, or it's not bordered by Mexico

Canada also isn't bordered by Asia. It allows in plenty of skilled Asian immigrants. What does bordering have to do with Canada's regressive immigration policies that prevent low skilled, low education persons from immigrating into the country?

The US isn't bordered by Pakistan, India, Vietnam, China, Philippines, or El Salvador. Six of the top 10 immigration countries for the US.

Borders don't mean much if you're not allowed to immigrate regardless.

The US is also not bordered by Colombia, Hondurus, Ecuador, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Brazil, etc.

> Why don't all the ex-coal miners in WV simply move to where the jobs are?

Well that's exactly how the US has worked in fact. People - over time - migrate toward opportunity state to state. That's why West Virginia's population hasn't grown in 80 years (!).

See: population growth over time in Nevada, Arizona, California, Florida, Texas, etc. Silicon Valley exists precisely because the US works that way.

<comment><USER14> > It's a facts based argument and I'm the only one in this discussion so far > that is actually using facts.

Your facts-based argument is that people in Detroit would move to Canada if the immigration policy was relaxed? I see no facts at all around that assertion, which is the one I was calling simplistic.

> What does bordering have to do with Canada's regressive immigration policies > that prevent low skilled, low education persons from immigrating into the > country?

You said (paraphrasing):

>> Why are there no hispanic people in Canada, relative to the US

I said:

>> Because it's not bordered by Mexico

(And, by the way, Mexico is the #1 source of immigrants for the US).

> The US isn't bordered by Pakistan, India, Vietnam, China, Philippines, or El > Salvador. Six of the top 10 immigration countries for the US.

Out of those 6 countries, one would qualify as contributing to the Hispanic or Black population in the US (the groups we were discussing).

Out of the top 10, none are from countries in Africa or the Caribbean (which we might also consider to be a "black" population).

So we can agree then, that the US's diversity w.r.t. black people has nothing to do with immigration?

> See: population growth over time in Nevada, Arizona, California, Florida, > Texas, etc. Silicon Valley exists precisely because the US works that way.

Those are also states that have heavy immigrant populations because they're attractive for skilled workers or close to natural entry points. You'll have to cite a source stating that the growth in those populations is from internal movement.

The US as a whole is fairly close to replacement rate births, so we would actually expect populations to remain stable.

<comment><USER13> > Your facts-based argument is that people in Detroit would move to Canada if > the immigration policy was relaxed?

My facts based argument goes back to the original parent discussion that you joined, which is: the US is considerably more diverse than Canada and that that is due to very different immigration policies over time. I've overwhelmingly backed that up.

Would poor people have immigrated out of Detroit and into Canada as Detroit collapsed, seeking a drastically superior social safety net, free universal healthcare, etc.? Hell yes they obviously would have.

> You'll have to cite a source stating that the growth in those populations is > from internal movement.

You can't actually believe the US has historically lacked for internal movement (in fact it's only very recently that that has been the case).

California's population in 1960 was 16 million. The US total hispanic population in 1960 was 6.x million. As recently as 1970, California's white population was nearly 80%. In 1970, 16 million of California's 20 million people were white - how did they get there? Millions of people moved to California from other states, _famously_ , in the post WW2 era.

Las Vegas, which makes up a quarter of Nevada's population, is 44% white, 11% black and 7% asian today. How do you think those people all got there? The Las Vegas population figure was 8,422 in 1940.

I'm certain I don't need to cover Arizona (boomed internally similarly to Nevada), Texas and Florida. Florida has very famously seen vast internal US migration as older people flooded the state over decades.

<comment><USER15> Actually, you've moved the goal post.

Your actual claim was that Canada immigration policy is _anti-diversity_. The only correct claim you've backed up is that the Canadian immigration policy is greatly favoring rich and educated immigration.

It's no wonder people feel offended. Saying Canada is anti-diversity is a close proxy to say it's systematically racist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just another VC-money shower.

So the company buys used goods, but I see no mention of them selling it profitably?

<comment><USER17> It is mentioned, but there's not a lot of detail. This seems to be the juiciest paragraph concerning the actual business:

 _All told, less than 1 in 10 second-hand-goods sellers didn't deliver as promised. That was good enough for Mitsumoto, who relaunched the service, called Cash, in August as a new way to gather inventory for an online flea market. Total daily purchases are capped at 10 million yen, and are limited to smartphones, luxury handbags, watches, clothing and other specific items from a list of several thousand. Customers take a photo and are given a non- negotiable offer. Prices are set automatically based on data gleaned from other second-hand marketplaces and Cash makes money by reselling the goods._

Granted, it is a bit vague about the reselling.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, "Cash makes money by reselling the goods" is quite vague...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder how many of those "luxury hand bags" he buys are knock-offs?

</comment><comment><USER19> Is this like a Craigslist, with option to pre-pay? If so, it would be a convenient way to reserve something instead of racing out to the actual seller's location first. I don't know how many times I went to the seller's house only to find out that it was sold earlier that day. I once drove almost 2 hours to buy a used car, which I confirmed it was available before I left the house, only to find that it was sold by the time I got there.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting, Yardsale founders created another app that IIRC basically did this. It never took off for some reason but I thought it was great to get an instant buy and pickup for electronics.</comment>


Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest - <AUTHOR> https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/obfuscation <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how smart it is to give people advice on privacy and which software to use to avoid surveillance via a traditional book. I'd much rather get my advice from EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense or TTC's Security In-a-Box because they're online and can be updated easily if a critical bug is discovered with any given popular privacy or security software. Capabilities change over time and when they do, you can't update a book as easy as you can update a website. If someone relies on this books' recommendations and think that they're secure when they're not for whatever reason, that's incredibly harmful.

Reading the overview though, the book is also seems to be about history of obfuscation and protesting laws (?) so I guess it could be useful for people who're seeking that information, but I wouldn't recommend this or any book that acts like a tutorial to someone who's trying to learn more about online privacy.

<comment><USER3> Would it be less ironic if they published the information on a website supported by targeted adds? There aren't many privacy-friendly options to monetize content these days without resorting to donations.

<comment><USER4> Well _privacy_ and _content monetization_ do not play well together. The only option I can think would be a blog with 1 add a-la "Daring Fireball", but you need a huge amount of hits in order to make that a viable business, as J. Grubber does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Same author created Ad Nauseum to click on every ad you encounter as opposed to selectively blocking them [http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2014/10/06/helen- nissenba...](http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2014/10/06/helen-nissenbaum- on-ad-nauseum-resistance-through-obfuscation-and-weapons-of-the-weak/)

Obfuscation won't slow down data scientists. To see this in action open your gmail account and notice there's (likely) no spam in your primary inbox. Those spammers spend considerable resources to obfuscate themselves from Google's filters yet still fail.

<comment><USER6> But what if the user would "read" the spam?

Of course "fake behavior" could be dected if you have known real behaviour to compare it to.That also means that it is possible to simulate "real behavior" given the relevant data.

Whis is a win-win situtation, ad networks get to fight fake traffic, fake traffic becomes indistiguishable from real human trafic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why isn't this in the public domain?

<comment><USER8> It's also quite hypocritical to sell a book about privacy that is encumbered with DRM.

<comment><USER9> Aren't they two different things? The open software community has been, in general, a big supporter of human rights, but every author or artist should be able to decide how he or she sells or gives away their creations. (Am I missing some important point?)

<comment><USER10> Maybe in theory, but when the DRM tracks when you're reading the book:

[https://www.adobe.com/privacy/ade.html](https://www.adobe.com/privacy/ade.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The ebook version from MIT press is Adobe Digital Editions. It is also available (more expensive) in Kindle format: [http://www.amazon.com/-/dp/B0135G71BG](http://www.amazon.com/-/dp/B0135G71BG)

</comment><comment><USER11> I was already thinking about a whole industry that could be spawned based on this premise. You could hire people that would inject "noise" into the internet on your behalf, and you could ask (other) people to measure the signal-to-noise ratio that remained.

<comment><USER8> It should be possible to add this kind of obfuscation noise algorithmically. Real human activity isn't random, but it does follow certain patterns.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you get a user forum off the ground? - <AUTHOR>

A forum can be key to user retention and connection (helping establish that family-like community). Anybody have experience building one from the ground up?
How do you kickstart the conversation? How do you keep it going?
If done properly, I think it can be just like game mechanics, where it may not be the core competency, but it can have a world of impact. <comment><USER2> [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ev2zb/i_run_thathighco...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ev2zb/i_run_thathighcom_and_it_pays_my_rent_in_san/c1b6ql9)

Shortly, fake it until you make it

<comment><USER3> Or, simply have the content. Then start conversations about said content. Seriously, it's easy.

<comment><AUTHOR> @tst_ - i hear ya. thanks for sharing the link.

@veb - yeah, at this point we've begun topics and are just hoping that the conversation will build around us...then we can let it grow from there.

we actually started a VIP listserv for some of our most active members to start the chatter. we were hoping to transition them over to the forum once it was set up.</comment></comment></comment>


Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/97903574 <comment><USER2> Great presentation as usual. One fundamental tension I see in much of the work he does is between purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments.

The challenge in both the maker space as well as much of the visual learning and programming material he has done previously is that each of them is incredibly time consuming to adapt to each new different project. In the real world even similar tasks within projects in the same domain often have enough subtle differences that re-use is not possible or very costly.

That isn't to say these are insurmountable but maybe much of the focus needs to be on meta-tooling that can accelerate the work of experts to build these purpose-built environments (as opposed to making generic tooling).

Inspiring stuff.

<comment><USER3> Especially for programming, the tools have to be narrowly tailored to the examples since you're constantly wrestling with the specter of Turing- completeness. Any given program is an instance of an infinite number of more general classes of programs, and it's the tool designer's job to choose which dimensions of the design space are meaningful and important enough to be worth simultaneously visualizing the consequences of possible alternatives. I think it's going to take some very judicious integration of recent work on modularity-enhancing programming paradigms into the design of reflective language implementations before it becomes tractable to build responsive special-purpose reflective tools on top of a generic infrastructure. Or at least that's the strategy I'm trying.

<comment><USER4> That strategy lead to quite the run-on sentence. You have much work ahead of you friend from that appearance alone.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I've been thinking too much in code, not enough in English.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think software engineer and the fundamentals of coding have always had a bias towards those who can conceptualize ideas in the abstract, then build with the assumptions that those concepts are happening regardless of their ability to see them.

This is fine, except that it limits those who need to tinker in order to find out how those concepts work. When the elements are visually recognizable and physically manipulatable, you can tinker without having to hold the entire chain on concepts in your mind. It reduces the load and increases the likelyhood of 'playing around'.

I hope some day more of Victor's ideas can be realized through the understanding that visualizing processes allows us to use more of our brain to design and develop or products -- not to mention stumble upon and explore unexpected outcomes.

<comment><USER6> I can't tell if everyone one is like that (I assume not), but I am extremely reliant on visualization, and I suppose Bret is also. I believe profoundly on it's power partly because it's the only way I can really get things done properly, which is why those tools resonate so much to me. I have a friend however that shudders every time I mention making programming more visual.

I mean, If I'm not visualizing something, I can perhaps find some solution in a logical way following some guidelines -- much like following a recipe to solve a equation or doing trial an error to solve an algebraic problem. But critically, I can't _create_ this way. I may _stumble_ unto something useful, but it's an entirely different process from creativity -- it's efficiency is so much lower that it's qualitatively different.

But my difficulty at that is not fundamental, I think. I _believe_ you can be creative purely 'algebraically', but I have no experience with it -- but I do believe that some people have the same efficiency that I have when I think visually and perhaps stumble a little more when trying to visualize things themselves.

I do think this diversity is quite good, but that's missing the point. My point is that Bret's tools shouldn't be universally _essential_ , but are probably universally beneficial. And for some people, like me, they'd be simply enabling.

To give an exaple: when I see a system of linear equations, I don't think of a bunch of steps to solve them and the number of cases that the solutions may look like in terms of constraints of variables an so on. I think of the Image hyperplane, which can be abstracted as a plane in 3D, and the Kernel, which may be for example a line not on the Image. Then instead I wonder if the Kernel is non-null, what funny things this matrix is doing to the vectors (are they rotating, contracting, and so on), or what are the invariant subspaces. I can answer most questions one could ask about such system, but it's a distinct way, I'm not sure if more efficient or not (and that may be up to the task).

<comment><USER7> A major problem I can see is that the more interesting a problem becomes, the more impossible to visualize. You might visualize a system of linear equations when it is 3 dimensional. But try visualizing a system with 1000 dimensions. It breaks down very easily. In the end my opinion is that one is simply going to be better off learning to think critically and in the abstract.

Again just my opinion - those who say they are better at visual problems often just need to practice more without the crutch.

<comment><USER6> A big part of abstraction for me is bringing problems into something I can visualize. This reduction itself works better if I have visual intuition. I suppose linear systems are a simple case, since their functional behavior for finite dimensions can pretty much all be mapped into 3D (I guess 4D would be a little richer with double complex eigenvalue pairs, but that's just 2x 2D rotations). I don't claim to be a great problem solver, but I've gone halfway through college so far with pretty good grades without changing how much visually I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It blows my mind that Bret keeps giving talks in public and sharing his ideas for free when pretty much each of them could have been used as a startup pitch in return for likely investment. But I guess he's more interested in inspiring others than just committing to one idea for years. I'm glad we have him around.

<comment><USER9> it blows my mind is how little of what he's put forth has led to others creating startups out of them.

...what blows my mind more though is he keeps giving talks and hasn't open sourced any of his software on github, like he said he would. i doubt he's working on some big product that puts all his software to use. it's all going to waste and could have helped propel the visions he's set forth. it makes zero sense.

<comment><USER10> [https://github.com/worrydream/Tangle](https://github.com/worrydream/Tangle)

<comment><USER9> tangle is really old, and his least innovative stuff at this point. it hardly counts my friend. Bret needs to stop teasing us. At least deliver the code for the one he said he would put on github.

I think it's very obvious what needs to happen to software development right now. I'm straightup doing it--my startup is making come to life much of what Bret put forth in Javascript, where it should exist (on the web, not objective c and other technologies). He could help a lot by sharing his code, no matter what language it's in.

His stuff could change the entire landscape, and now. I get it--we're all stupid developers doing the status quo who can't think for ourselves and invent something new. I get his message. And yes, that's a big part of his message whether he knows it or not. But the point is that the stuff he's put forth for all the live coding and coding observability stuff needs to happen now and like a lot--it will enhance coding by several orders of magnitude. So, I don't need any more talks about how we must think. We need to make simply what he put forth. We need to get done his gospel already so he himself can see what it actually looks like and move to the next level.

My guess is he doesn't want to share the code because of some sort of philosophy that we need to do it ourselves, and more people need to be true thinkers and inventors like him, thinking outside the box. Fuck the philosophy. It's kinda arrogant. Release the code if ur not making ur own company out of it. I used to think he was starting his own company, which is why I never spoke up. But my latest prediction (after seeing this maker spaces drivel) is that he certainly is not.

...And it's drivel because he's making the whole point about observability regarding hardware startups, where it's way less of a big deal as in coding. Like, his breakthrough moment was when he pointed out how all us coders were so stupid for going along with how current coding tools work, which are totally unobservable. That is especially relevant in the abstract world of coding, whereas it is way less profound when it comes to concrete hardware objects, which by nature are observable. Not that it doesn't apply--it's just not at the level of breakthrough described in all his essays on his site.

ps. ur talkin to someone who's read every single essay on his site, cherished his every word. this maker space stuff is crap. he's fallin off, side tracked, whatever. I'd like to see him truly help get some of his ideas executed. It would take zero energy on his part--release the code is basically all im asking.

<comment><USER11> Have you tried asking yourself why Bret would not want to open source his demos? Can you think of any other reasons that don't pre-suppose he is "arrogant"?

<comment><USER9> Yea no good ones. He's OCD and not happy with his code. He has a lame philosophy that we must make it on our own and shouldn't have help, ie that providing the code will detract from it. ..he's the one saying he would. I get the sense he's just disorganized and all over the place, hyper focused with his latest discovery du jour. ie there is no grand plan. I used to hope he was buildin a commercial company but I just doubt he is. I want answers. If u people weren't so busy kissing his ass u would do. I love Bret Victor--I'm holding him accountable to the greatness he is.

<comment><USER11> It seems your response says a lot more about your thinking than it does about Bret's. Perhaps you might try taking the view that Bret has really good reasons for doing what he's doing and try to figure out what they are, rather than presuming what he's doing is not for good reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love Bret Victor's talks, blog posts, etc. They're super inspiring.

2 things came to mind though.

1\. It seems, possibly, the exact wrong time to make rooms with giant displays. With things like Google Glass and Oculus Rift as first gen (2nd?) VR/AR you could project all of that info virtually and cheaply and be able to have all the visualization he describes wherever you are, not just at a makerspace that only a few people can use at a time.

2\. I'm always super inspired by the Bret's visualizations but when I actually try to figure out how they'd be implemented I'm clearly not smart enough to figure out how that would happen.

In this example in particular, he shows graph toward the end where the system tries every setting and graphs the results so it's easy to pick out the best setting. How would that happen? How does the system know what "good" is? It seems to me it can't know that. You'd have to program it which in itself would be pretty hard. Worse, most system have not just one adjustment but many. Just a few and there'd be tens of thousands of variations/combinations to try to figure out "best".

I'm not saying we can't get there. Maybe the first step is building a framework that would make it easy to make systems like that with various kinds of visualizers, analysers, time-recording, searching features etc, and maybe somewhere along the way we'd figure out how to automate more of it.

I'd love to help work on such a system.

<comment><USER13> There are two big problems that I see with the current generation of VR goggles for applications like this. The first is bandwidth, the Oculus's screen had too low of a resolution for densely packed information and text, this may have been solved in the latest but I haven't seen it in person. Google Glass has the problem because of it's really small size, trying to access and manipulate much information on that interface would be extremely slow and cumbersome.

The second is with full VR goggles. Right now there's not a really good way to be able to use them and interact with anything outside the VR environment.

For your other point about the graph the system doesn't have to pick out the best on its own. Just having the possible values and the results displayed the user could pick which one achieves their goals best. For his light following robot though there's a pretty easy way to evaluate the parameters, how far is the robot from the light, that is a simple function and could easily be programmed.

The integration of the whole room and how you get the robot to automatically do many runs with different parameters, for the viewing across possibilities, is where I think a lot of the difficulty lies. To do that with a small robot you have to have a lot of things automated: robot repositioning, light movement, data collection on the robot, etc.

<comment><USER14> The new Oculus and the consumer version are high enough resolution for text rendering. Though obviously artifacts of rendering them in 3D if anything but screen aligned and pixel snapped.

Additionally there are already plans for a front facing camera (that could do pass throug), because of the being blind part and the potential for hand/peripheral tracking in addition to augmented reality.

Bonus: I hope they just go all out and make/purchase custom hardware tech for structure.io/project tango structured light real time 3d scanning. Would be so cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Every time I realize I'm guessing about (rather than directly seeing) the behavior of my code I think of Bret's talks. I never actually improve my workflow, but at least now I'm angry about it!

<comment><USER16> Interesting. I frequently think back to his talks and use it as a framework to guide my approach especially when debugging. I think about what I can see, and what I can't, and try to address what I can't see. This process has broken through many bugs that seem challenging until they are visible.

<comment><USER17> /optimistic

I think debuggers are under appreciated by Open Source languages(as in, it's not THE priority). An approach I am forced to use is heavy log statements and a DEBUG flag, so that I can feel the program show me what it's upto.

I think Bret's ideas are worth pondering on. The only issue when dealing with the philosophical idea of time, I find for myself, is that it's an easy rabbit hole to fall into.

Nice interesting paper tangentially related to this, [http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011001_final_worlds.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011001_final_worlds.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In other words... a meatspace debugger? Cool idea, but I don't quite buy the comparison to "spaces laden with sensors and visualizations" like the NASA control center, Large Hadron Collider, etc.. All of those spaces revolve around monitoring, not the design/making process. In a similar vein, in my field of computational science, heaps of money has been invested in spaces for data exploration/visualization [1], unfortunately, they are essentially useless for the scientific process.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environment)

<comment><USER19> > All of those spaces revolve around monitoring

It's not only monitoring because it's not passive, they interact with the system and make changes on the fly, so it's making in a sense too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some of this is extremely similar to Jun Kato's research.

[http://junkato.jp](http://junkato.jp)

More specifically see phybots:

[http://junkato.jp/phybots/](http://junkato.jp/phybots/)

Kato leverages the overhead camera trick in this system, though in a bit different way. See "A Toolkit for Easy Development of Mobile Robot Applications with Visual Markers and a Ceiling Camera:"

[http://junkato.jp/publications/uist2009-sakamoto- andy.pdf](http://junkato.jp/publications/uist2009-sakamoto-andy.pdf)

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the excellent link. I only took a quick look, so maybe the information is somewhere on the site, but do you know if this person (or others) are doing similar work for robots in 3d?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> These kind of things would be really great for science labs also.

Let say you're doing some medical research, growing some cell cultures and you add some compounds to the cell cultures to see what happens. Then something weird happened to some of the cell cultures, and you don't know exactly what caused it. Perhaps that thing was really an important scientific discovery waiting to happen, but you missed it, because you didn't have all the data.

The process is normally recorded with a lab diary, where you write down everything deemed important. The problem is, you're not going to notice everything, and there is also a lot of things that you can't see without more sensors that just your eyes.

The system Bret describes here is basically an automated lab diary. With enough sensors it could record much more data, much more accurately than a person, and it has a way to query the actual data rather than having to either manually browse through pages of text or searching through it with just a basic full-text search engine.

A problem with many scientific experiments is that you might a lot of measuring equipment and sensors for the thing you are doing an experiment on, but you don't have the same thing for the experiment itself, to easily be able to debug the process and to see where something went right or wrong. Why was one lab able to reproduce an experiment, but another couldn't? This kind of questions can be very difficult and time consuming to answer.

</comment><comment><USER23> BTW, for good reading material on control rooms, look on Google Scholar for papers by Paul Heath and Christian Luff. They're very thorough in their analysis of how people in control rooms communicate and "spontaneously" synchronise their actions.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think spaces like this would do well to incorporate projected augmented reality ala CastAR: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpmKq_qg3Tk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpmKq_qg3Tk)

You could collaborate, sharing the same view, or each individual could project different views, or mix and match.

</comment><comment><USER25> I agree with Bret Victor here. I already have something similar of what he is proposing. Not so great, but my prototype is real and works. You can make one of this using "inexpensive" TVs for most of the room. Cheap cameras with HDMI and framegrabbers, a PC with CUDA-OpenCL cards. Arduino sensors work anywhere with all OSes and super easy to use, albeit not very efficient.

My experience with years of embedded programming is that NO HUMAN BEING is made for working with the cold, brainless machine or metal if you don't visualize your data.

Even the person who tells you she likes doing it, she can't work on it for long periods of time without burning.

It is like climbing over 7.000meters of altitude. Humans could survive for some time with those conditions, but depleting internal resources fast.

</comment><comment><USER26> Some of the software shown in the first minute: [http://vimeo.com/66085662](http://vimeo.com/66085662)

Some pretty tools in there.

</comment><comment><USER27> He just keeps knocking stuff out of the park.

<comment><USER9> no, he's not. this is his weakest presentation yet. he was on, but now he fell off. it's not making any sense that he's gone in this direction, and let last year's software ideas wither away on the vine. He should actually propel forward last year's ideas by at least releasing the stuff he said he'd open source on github. Instead, he hasn't done that, nor has he made his own commercial company (which would be a perfectly understandable route), but instead is giving lower quality talks that regurgitate material about observability that was way more profound when he shared it in relation to software, which by naturel, unlike hardware products, is unobservable.

<comment><USER28> You should hesitate for a second; your arguments favor exploitation rather than exploration. Bret's work aims to move beyond 'the tiny rectangle' of computer screens, and companies are nearly decade scale commitments. Why not continue to produce great research before deciding upon the idea that's 'the one?'

I realize this is antithetical to the prevailing theory of lean startups, but, from a deep research perspective, that is exactly why committing to support an open source project or a company is so dangerous. Soon you would have people depending upon you, and the freedom to explore vanishes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am totally in favor of good tools with good visual representations but those almost always have to be handcrafted for every specific problem. Which is probably why Bret has never delivered anything useful.

And if you're going to talk about ideas and inspiration: Lighttable does nothing that emacs didn't do 20 years ago except a little prettier.

</comment><comment><USER30> A theory that I have been developing that might be a basis for understanding the possibility of Seeing Spaces is called Schemas Theory.

See [http://SchemaTheory.net](http://SchemaTheory.net) for a draft presentation that is still in work. Audios are still in production for the tutorial.

Other papers on Schemas Theory are at [https://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer](https://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer) and [http://emergentdesign.net](http://emergentdesign.net) and [http://archonic.net](http://archonic.net)

A good book on Schemas is Umberto Eco Kant and the Platypus.

Basically schemas theory tells us what it is possible to see and also give us the intelligible templates for our designs.

[http://kdp.me](http://kdp.me)

</comment><comment><USER31> I think Oculus technology would allow people to do all of this virtually with the physical portion being merely props. This would be a lot cheaper than doing everything for real.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think this is how the NSA became the NSA as we know it today. When your task is to prevent terrorism you need to see. You need to see in time and detect patterns. So you need to store as much data as possible because.

So it's good to stick to some boundaries. In the example of the robot: you could measure room temperature, because maybe the sensors are acting to it. Or you could measure the amount of people in the room because sensors could act to it. Heck, maybe the sensors are acting different to different people, so track there faces and store it. Well maybe sensors are sensitive to somebodies smell so track that too.

There are limits to what is useful to track.

</comment><comment><USER33> After a while of reading the replies, Iron Man came to mind.

</comment><comment><USER34> Bret Victor is the Leonardo DaVinci of the age. A curator, assembler and presenter of the great ideas of our time.

</comment><comment><USER35> Augmented Breality</comment>


Haiti earthquake: Trapped under rubble? There's an iPhone app for that - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1244635/Haiti-earthquake-Trapped-rubble-Theres-iPhone-app-that.html

<comment><USER2> Despite the rather irreverent title to this submission, it is a pretty amazing story. It highlights the crazy implications of having n entire world's worth of knowledge at our fingertips at all times.

There are a few things I'm really unclear about though, namely why isn't it mentioned that he contacted anyone over the phone or internet to let them know where he was, or that he was alive, or to get medical advice for that matter. Also it mentions he was trapped for 65 hours. No possible way that an iphone battery could last that long, is there?</comment>


SPARC T4 looks good enough to stave off defections to x86 and Linux - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/sparc-t4-looks-to-be-good-enough-to-stave-off-defections-to-x86-linux.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll find more gory details on this Real World Tech discussion: [http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&...](http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=122683&threadid=122683&roomid=2)</comment>


The Keyword – New central source for news and stories about Google - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/ <comment><USER2> Page Speed Insights for [https://blog.google/topics/inside-google/introducing- the-key...](https://blog.google/topics/inside-google/introducing-the-keyword- our-new-official-blog/)

      Mobile: red 58/100
      Desktop: red 64/100

see: [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.google%2Ftopics%2Finside- google%2Fintroducing-the-keyword-our-new-official-blog%2F)

There are two (and prop. more) different Googles:

The ones that care, and the ones that make marketing!

</comment><comment><USER3> For those who didn't know about the ".google" TLD:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/26/google_turns_on_goog...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/26/google_turns_on_google_internet_extension/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, that was literally my first thought on reading the title and seeing the URL.

I imagine this is a trial balloon of some sort; I wonder if [http://mail.google](http://mail.google) is going to be next?

<comment><USER5> [https://domains.google](https://domains.google) is a thing.

<comment><USER6> And works with Weebly... ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A key development here is the move away from Blogger to what looks like a custom CMS.

I wonder if we'll see Blogger deprecated or even shuttered in due course. Perhaps the only real indicator that Blogger was still in development was that Google was dog-fooding it for their own comms - and this just ended.

<comment><USER8> i wish information density was an option on all these pinterestesque sites.

[http://techmeme.com/river](http://techmeme.com/river) [http://hckrnews.com](http://hckrnews.com) [http://reddit.com](http://reddit.com)

[http://digg.com](http://digg.com)

one of these things is not like the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And thus knocking SEO firms targeting the keyword "keyword" off the top of the results. Well played, Google, you humorous bastards.

</comment><comment><USER10> If anyone from Google is reading this, love the idea. I subscribed via the ancient RSS, but would love full articles in the RSS feed (not sure why it's just snippets).

<comment><USER11> RIP [https://reader.google](https://reader.google). :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the new central resource to keep up to date on marketing direct from Google I just wish Google would get a readability expert on their team. They are using a very thin font with the color of #333 on a #fafafa background and, as per usual, they love their whitespace making the page look silly on my widescreen desktop monitor. I still look forward to going to a single resource instead of the various blogs now.

<comment><USER13> #333 on #FAFAFA passes every contrast check in existence. I don't mind the thin font, but they render really poorly on some systems, so it's definitely a weird choice.

Your widescreen monitor doesn't increase readable line-length, so it's kind of pointless unless they cram some sidebars into there — which just distracts from the main reading experience. Maybe they could have pulled out the images and made those larger with more screen real estate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The TLD surprised me, I didn't know you could request one. The article I found that covers off on purchasing (leasing?) a TLD ironically used Google as an example. The article is from 2011.

"The process itself may be relatively straightforward. ICANN will make applications available (get the May 2011 draft of the Applicant Guidebook) from January 12, 2012 through April 12, 2012, giving companies time to develop a marketing plan and come up with justification to pay the $185,000 application fee and, if approved, the annual $25,000 fee. "

Source: [http://adrianroselli.com/2011/06/make-your-own-tld-i-want- ba...](http://adrianroselli.com/2011/06/make-your-own-tld-i-want-bacon.html)

<comment><USER15> I'm slightly disappointed they haven't set up [http://google.blog](http://google.blog) yet.

[https://get.blog/](https://get.blog/)

<comment><USER16> If Google buys it, they'll probably just buy it to squat it, rather than use it. They're probably butthurt they lost out on the .blog gTLD. Google wanted to make it a completely walled garden TLD only for Blogger users. And Google cost us the option of having a .dev gTLD, that's for Google's use only.

"Let's not forget, the Californian goliath had tried to bag .blog, which it intended to pair with its Blogger service so that the only way to get a .blog domain would be to use Blogger."

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/13/google_developer_gtl...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/13/google_developer_gtld_domain_icann/)

<comment><USER17> > Google wanted to make it a completely walled garden TLD only for Blogger > users.

And they lost to Wordpress, who did exactly that.

<comment><USER16> That appears to be false, as [https://nic.blog/](https://nic.blog/) is soliciting registrars to offer it and .blog does not appear on ICANN's list of exclusive use gTLDs.

<comment><USER17> Ohh, great to hear. Thanks for the correction. I was right about ownership, but not about what they plan to do with it.

[https://ma.tt/2016/05/blog/](https://ma.tt/2016/05/blog/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm impressed that they actually seem to have aggregated most of their blogs into this(except for a few like the google cloud blog that someone else here noted). I'm not used to google transitioning fully to a new service at launch. Usually the new and old versions of services are left to coexist as the new version works on reaching feature parity.

</comment><comment><USER19> Oddly (or perhaps not), this does not include news from Google Cloud.

</comment><comment><USER20> I really loath gTLD, I understand because of domain squatting we need to increase the supply but this is just gross. A fairer system would have domains registration costs vary by length (shorter is more expensive)

<comment><USER21> This appears unsubstantiated. Why, exactly, do you hate gTLD?

<comment><USER20> Because it grates against the implied purpose of the inclusiveness of the internet. Every company registering these new TLD's keep all the good ones for themselves or in googles case they just keep the whole thing. The means for the majority of internet users to access this kind of land rush just dont exist.

<comment><USER16> And Google's either kept or tried keeping like 20 gTLDs to themselves. Look for Charleston Road Registry, a Google shell corp, on this list: [http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/agb/base- agreement-c...](http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/agb/base-agreement- contracting/ccer)

cal, dev, drive, play, and prod are all ones I think the open Internet would've liked a chance at.

<comment><USER22> I don't think shell corporation means what you think it does, given that a gTLD is a pretty significant asset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Intercept.

The Macro.

The Keyword.

<comment><USER24> The Syntax.

The Grammar.

The Exception.

...</comment></comment>