Olympic executives cash in on a 'Movement' that keeps athletes poor - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/olympic-executives-cash-in-on-a-movement-that-keeps-athletes-poor/2016/07/30/ed18c206-5346-11e6-88eb-7dda4e2f2aec_story.html <comment><USER3> The Olympics are truly not about money for the athletes. And indeed, they cannot be.

Only a select few have any leverage at all to bargain for more money (think Husain Bolt and others at his level). But these select few are already profiting big-time from the Olympics via endorsements, etc. So the last thing they want is to put the games at risk.

The rest of the athletes are there because they love the competition. And there's nothing wrong with that! It's truly a win-win that hundreds of athletes are living out their dreams by competing for a gold medal in canoeing or archery or what-have-you, and that somebody will even be watching them do it.

Stepping back a bit, there's no reason that anybody should be getting a salary simply because they are one of the very best at their chosen sport. Sports stars command large salaries to the extent that they _have dedicated fans_. If you compete in a fringe sport, you're not going to have many dedicated fans.

(This is why every top-tier athlete makes more from product endorsements than from their team salary.)

((This is also why NBA players earn by far the highest salaries among U.S. athletes - basketball allows for much more player/fan connection than any other major sport.))

<comment><USER4> > Stepping back a bit, there's no reason that anybody should be getting a > salary simply because they are one of the very best at their chosen sport.

Indeed. They should be getting a salary because they provide the extremely rare talent (developed through incredible effort and dedication) that makes the multi-billion dollar business that is the Olympics possible to begin with.

The reason they do not get it is very similar to what you see in other fields like science and art: because the sociopaths that run our society know very well how to take advantage of the love that talented people have for their respective fields.

<comment><USER3> The extremely rare talent is _not_ what makes the Olympics possible. The marketing machine (which is run by the executives) are what make it possible.

The top 100 athletes in every sport could sit out the Olympics, and the TV ratings and corporate sponsorship would take only a slight dip.

<comment><USER4> That is all fine and dandy, except that what really makes the Olympics-as- media-circus possible is tax payer money.

Given that it is not a free market operation to being with, but rather a money extraction operation based on political pull, we could do without the supply and demand lessons.

It would be interesting to ask the tax payers if they think that executives deserve to take home all of their money while the athletes that they actually enjoy watching get none of it.

<comment><USER5> The IOC's revenue _isn 't_ tax revenue, it's sponsorship revenue[1] Same goes for Team US: as the article itself points out, one of the reasons the US Olympic athletes are so poor is because unlike many other countries the US teams' budget _isn 't_ topped up by the tax payer (but is topped up by a bunch of sponsorship salespeople who bring in more money than they get paid but expect close-to-market compensation in return). And yes, like any free market organization, the management and the salespeople are better compensated than the people who are just _really, really_ glad to be there.

If everyone on the IOC executive worked for free without any access to their expense accounts there still would be barely anything left for each individual athlete just for competing, _especially_ if like Team USA their local government wasn't prepared to subsidise things either. So it's really nothing to do with monopoly power either. Olympic athletes are poorly compensated because there are an awful lot of them, and most of them only get a few minutes (sometimes only a few seconds) exposure at the highest level per decade in front of audiences that enjoy watching other sports on a weekly basis

As for the athletes people enjoy watching well enough to know their name and buy their preferred hair gel, the free market means they're compensated pretty well for their brand in individual sponsorship deals. Trouble is, there aren't many Olympians that are household names, especially the ones that really need the money.

[1]sure, local taxpayers often end up underwriting an Olympics after the planners overspend on infrastructure, but that's nothing to do with what goes into the IOC president's expense account, or indeed what the athletes get

<comment><USER6> _but that 's nothing to do with what goes into the IOC president's expense account_

It does actually, unfortunately: [https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/may/11/tokyo- olympic-...](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/may/11/tokyo-olympic- games-2020-ioc-international-olympic-committee-corruption-bid-scandal)

<comment><USER5> That's the story of a massive bribe [allegedly] paid to an individual rather than the source of the IOC's funding though. It was _never_ likely to be directed to the part of the Olympic movement that most needed it.

Actually, I suspect that part of the justification for the IOC executives' lavish officially-sanctioned, sponsorship-funded expense accounts is to limit the ability of bidding nations to curry favour with less obviously corrupt "free hospitality" arrangements that apparently were common in the 90s. (You're less likely to feel obliged towards someone for the offer of free flights and a five star hotel for your fact finding mission if you could charge it to your Amex card anyway) Whether it actually works is another question...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty surprised at the HN comments and sentiment here of "if the athletes don't like it don't participate." It is a clear monopoly by the IOC. The IOC is a business. The athletes are the talent.

Look at any comparable business and the talent makes a way bigger % of the money, actors in the movie industry, musicians in the music industry, professional athletes in NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA etc. These are all "jobs" that people would gladly do for low pay just like the Olympics if that was their only choice. Does that mean that the other industries are overpaying their talent? No imo. It's reasonable to expect that the people that provide the talent and a large part of the value to the industry deserve a large portion of the rewards.

Professional athletes and hollywood have strong unions to fight for fair pay(they used to be exploited for low pay), the music industry is a semimonopoly and does screw artists, but at least there is some level of competition. If you don't like one record company you can always switch labels.

The problem with the Olympics and what makes them so valuable to begin with is their rarity. They only come around once every four years. A top tier athlete may only make one Olympics in his/her lifetime and perhaps as many as ~three. Are you really going to organize and "holdout" for a whole Olympic games with your fellow athletes to maybe better the financial position for all your fellow Olympians? It's one thing to sit out a season when your expected career is 10 seasons and you may only have to sit out 1/3 of one season, it's entirely different when you may have to sit out your entire career. The athletes are being exploited because

1\. IOC is a monopoly

2\. Their careers are short

3\. It's too risky to organize because the risk of not competing is too high. They've trained so hard to get there, to not compete is not really an option.

4\. Olympics only happen once every four years.

It's a very similar situation as the NCAA except for #4. If you want to make it "not about the money" that's fine by me, make tickets to attend these events cheap or free, let any network cover the games(why does NBC get a coverage monopoly?), get rid of the endorsements and ads, make all the IOC "volunteer" administrators unpaid, but it's never going to happen. When coaches and administrators are making millions and the talent is making close to zero, the talent is clearly being exploited.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure there is really any comparable business. I mean, if you look at the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA then (i) the executives make orders of magnitude more (ii) the expenses are spread around a much smaller pool of people and training facilities and (iii) the sportspeople play more than once every four years and the second and third tier players are much more widely recognised.

The thing is, you could take away the president of the IOC's not-exactly-FIFA- esque expense account featured in this article and you've got just enough money to pay stipends - the meagre stipends the article complains about - <USER2> 10-12 more Olympic hopefuls. And there are 10,200 athletes competing in Rio, and for every athlete that made it, there are several more that devoted years of their time and their local federation's expense budget to trying to get there. Even if the IOC and the Olympic organizing committees had no costs at all and simply passed on all its 1.4bn per annum income on to local federations, there's really not that much to share between training and developing 50k athletes that might make the cut in facilities in 200 countries; certainly not enough to give them proper cash salaries after expenses.

Sure, some executives might be overpaid, but that's really not why most Olympians are poor or indebted until they medal or break into the media and most of them aren't rich afterwards. [It doesn't help that the article conflates the IOC with how the individual US sporting associations choose to divvy up their cash, which I'm sure is more favourable to the senior executives and less favourable to the athletes than the vast majority of national associations.] It's not the monopoly that's keeping athletes from earning an adequate living from Olympic revenue, it's that there's simply not enough money to go around, unless governments or individual sponsors decide to chip in to pay athletes on top of that. Needless to say, athletes already living on the breadline aren't going to be very enamoured with the suggestion of getting rid of the endorsements and ads so they have to pay all their training costs too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The IOC gets the money because they bring the value to the table. All these same athletes are competing all year, every year. Which event does everyone watch?

A javelin thrower isn't making much money? I'm sorry, but I have all the javelin throwers in my life that I need. Not that I would have seen him on tv anyway since it isn't gymnastics, swimming, men's basketball or a track final with an American contending for gold.

Sure this level of performance is amazing, it's just not valuable.

<comment><USER9> This is more than a bit unconvincing.

I have all the basketball forwards I need, but Channing Frye isn't living on food stamps. He's not the one people come to see, but he helps keep a competitive organization running so that there's a platform for LeBron (who people _do_ come to see). Your personal interest in a mid-range competitor doesn't determine their value, because they're helping to enable the higher- profit performers.

If the Olympic competition isn't a value generator, then the coaches and functionaries enabling the athletes are even less valuable than the athletes themselves. God knows the spectacle and ceremony part of the Olympics isn't a money-maker, that's why cities aggressively resist having it come to town.

The assumption that any of this is a function of market forces is funny to me. Sponsorships are probably the only free-market aspect of the whole program (or they would be if they weren't exclusive and determined above the athlete level) - the IOC operates as a 'charity' drawing money from national governments. As a result they're completely un-accountable to market forces, and athletes can't make any effort to collect their value. The highest-profile competition in the world is funded by donations, and they can't escape it.

Jack Warner and his ilk at FIFA weren't making a fortune because they were so efficient and talented, they were making money because principal-agent problems and regulatory capture are real. If the people raising player funding are also deciding how to spend it, they're likely to declare themselves invaluable and keep it all at the top.

<comment><USER10> > _because they 're helping to enable the higher-profit performers._

But it's the other way around in GP's example. The basketball/running/whatever athletes are enabling the javelin athletes to even have a venue of this magnitude in the first place. If javelin/archery/whatever was cut from the olympic roster, would the Olympics have substantially fewer viewers?

<comment><USER9> Javelin perhaps not, although track and field as a whole is one of the most watched part of the Olympics.

But I'm not sure these are conflicting narratives - without LeBron less popular basketball players wouldn't get viewers, but without a base of less talented players LeBron wouldn't have a platform. Javelin's contribution to Olympic popularity is less direct than, say, a weak sprinter who races against Usain Bolt, but it's nonzero.

Bringing so many sports and athletes together is part of what helps the Olympics maintain reputation compared to other narrower events like international track races or swim meets. Phelps competed far more places than the Olympics, but that was still the contest that earned him the most attention and sponsorship.

More broadly, though: even the star performers are getting underpaid unless they get outside-the-Olympics sponsorships. IOC funds don't trickle down anywhere near as much as revenue does for other sports, so Olympians big and small are relying on external revenue to make a living.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What caught my attention in the article is where the high pay seems to be going. The first example of the president making 250k+high class living actually seemed _low_ if we compare to top executive compensation across the board, and actually made me raise an eyebrow at their whole argument. However, the low pay for athletes seemed both supported and reminiscent of the attitudes around college sports in the US. Later in the article additional points supported this, e.g. Nike sponsorship money. Converse incentives between execs and employees (athletes) should be something very familiar to those of us in tech, and I'd imagine an athlete has as little or less bargaining power than we do (citing many recent HN discussions on the topic) unless they are a rock star among rock stars, so I can appreciate that scenario.

I'm not sure if I had a point in this, but to try and wrap up the ramble: I think there's some interesting "lemma" in that the money is accumulating "in the middle" so to speak that someone smarter than me might make, and also that there seems to be a universal pattern for employee taking-advantage-of in situations of misaligned incentives.

<comment><USER12> You presume there is a functional market for executives.

An alternative explanation would be that poor governance leads to organizations spending more for qualifications that are defensible if a mistake is made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Part of me really wonders why, considering all of the controversies with the Olympics and IOC over the years, why we haven't seen an alternative multi- category world athletic competition gain some support. Though I do understand it would be very, very hard to compete with the marketing of the official Olympics. But if the Rio Olympics end up being as terrible as some people fear, maybe that could be a catalyst for a new competition.

<comment><USER14> I'd be interested in a set of games that had minimal rules governing doping. Let's see what the human body can achieve with science.

<comment><USER15> I'd be curious myself, but the argument against this type of competition is that it creates enormous pressure on competitors to do things that could have serious negative impacts on their long-term health for the sake of winning. Even if participants are adults of sound mind, it seems unethical to create a situation where people are encouraged to risk crippling or killing themselves in pursuit of fame, no?

<comment><USER16> > it seems unethical to create a situation where people are encouraged to risk > crippling or killing themselves in pursuit of fame, no?

But think of the millions you could make! Donald Trump could be the host! Make sports great again!

<comment><USER17> NBA, NFL, MBA, UFC.... all make loot while only paying lip service to doping controls.

UFC has only recently brought in WADA, and NBA, NFL and MBA all have strong enough players unions that actually protect the athletes desire to use PEDs. There is some testing in the major US professional sporting leagues, but IMHO it is only there to constrain the guys from going buck wild with the steroids.

Most high level athletes in sports that fall under IOC umbrella are enrolled in the biological passport program and have many, many, annoying, out of competition doping controls where they take urine, blood and hair samples. Think of being woken up at 5 am for a blood test while on vacation. They have to supply there exact whereabouts for months in advance and if they can't be found they will suffer a suspension equal to a failed doping control. Vastly different than Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a shame that the article doesn't provide any info on what _percentage_ of USOC income ends up going to the athletes, especially since the author(s) probably have that information.

If it's 10%, then you could probably easily make an argument that they really are underpaid relative to the revenue of the organization as a whole. OTOH, if it's 90%, then you can't credibly claim they're significantly underpaid unless you can also show that the IOC and/or USOC could charge more, which you would think they would already be incentivized to do.

<comment><USER19> That aside honestly I don't see why anyone would bother to even do it for such low pay.

Being in the Olympics sound prestigious but I wouldn't bother putting the effort for such low rewards.

<comment><USER20> > That aside honestly I don't see why anyone would bother to even do it for > such low pay.

Aren't athletes routinely given room, board, gear, and free coaching from their governments? Aren't many events mainly for upper-class types anyway (events with horses or expensive winter gear, for example)?

If making a living isn't a concern, prestige is a really nice job perk.

<comment><USER17> not in the US. the article states:

"Unlike national Olympic committees in many other countries, Blackmun noted, the USOC receives no government support to help it pay athletes."

the Olympic Training Center has some limited housing for athletes but you have to live in Colorado Springs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From the point of view of what the Olympics were supposed to be about (independently-wealthy amateur athletes competing to be the best amateurs in the world), this actually makes perfect sense: none of the athletes needed to make money, and it is perfectly fine to give a volunteer executive travel expenses commensurate with his station in life.

Given what the Olympics have become, it makes no sense. The sooner they are dropped for good, the better.

</comment><comment><USER22> That's horrible considering the sacrifices these people have made essentially their entire lives. Training to be Olympic level, basically means giving up your ENTIRE youth to it.

<comment><USER23> Just because someone sacrifices their lives to do something doesn't inherently make that valuable - there is no society in the world where that is true.

There's a significant argument to be made that the Olympics were originally setup to demonstrate who was the greatest in the activities of the day, and the activities now are no longer relevant.

<comment><USER24> Classic Olympic events are not much more than stylized version of military training for Hoplite warriors. We may not do the _Hoplitodromos_ [1] any more, but the running, jumping, throwing, lifting events go straight back to infantry training in antiquity.

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

<comment><USER25> So in a way military pentathlon is the true successor to the classic olympics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think the missing point behind this argument is that the Olympics are not meant to pay the competitors a salary, much less a living wage. The amateur restrictions mean that Olympic athletes don't get any money directly from the IOC. They may be paid by the national team they compete with or get their own sponsorship deals, but the money given to the IOC was never intended to go to the athletes.

Plus, the Olympics last for a few weeks every two years. And that's assuming your sport is in both the summer and winter events. Most people don't rely on a gig as infrequent as that to make a living. If their sport is popular, they should be able to make enough money by competing in other events outside the Olympics.

Don't get me wrong, I think the IOC and the Olympics is a scam in general. And the fact that the executives are making bank off the sponsorship money is pretty disgusting. But it's unfair to blame the IOC for athletes living in poverty.

<comment><USER27> > that's assuming your sport is in both the summer and winter events

Are any sports in both?

<comment><USER26> I thought indoor sports like basketball were in both. But I guess that's not the case. So basically, you can only participate in the Olympics once every four years if you're lucky.

<comment><USER28> > I thought indoor sports like basketball were in both. But I guess that's not > the case. So basically, you can only participate in the Olympics once every > four years if you're lucky.

Well, you can do it every two years if you are a multisport athlete with at least one sport in each summer and winter games. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_athletes_who_competed_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_athletes_who_competed_in_both_the_Summer_and_Winter_Olympic_games)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I enjoy playing sports just fine. And I enjoy some degree of spectator sports -- the more closely tied I am to the community and team, the better.

But some years ago, I made a simple decision: I no longer support any form of professional sports. And, sorry Olympic Committee, but what you have there are professional sports. With all the graft and corruption and self-centeredness I refuse to support.

As for the athletes? It has been quite apparent for considerable time what you're signing up for. And... many people lose their job, their career, every day. Individual, personal appeals are not going to sway me.

I do feel for those who use sports to climb out of disadvantageous situations. However, at this point society needs to find a better solution to this that the "going pro" lottery.

Not like my individual decision is going to lessen their chances, anyway. But if and when society starts to say "enough", maybe society will also find fairer means of providing opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER30> > For members of Team USA — many of whom live meagerly off the largesse of > friends and family, charity, and public assistance

This is not true in Canada, although it's a bit of a secret. I wonder if the reporter is ignorant about the situation in the USA as well.

Olympics hopefuls in Canada get generous stipends from the Federal Government to train all year. The amount they get is $25,000 to $50,000 (Canadian) per year depending on various factors such as their location. It's also apparently tax free; keep that in mind when comparing it to average incomes.

Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of "hopefuls" get these grants in Canada. Only a fraction of them get into the Olympics. It's a semi-secret use of tax payer money (and unnecessary and unfair in my opinion). Not a single person who've I mentioned this to was aware of it!

Source: I know two such hopefuls who got this money. (They didn't get into the Olympics.)

<comment><USER31> This is true in Brazil as well. Not necessarily considered a "waste" of money, but Olympians are paid somewhat generous grants. It's still hard to qualify, which kind of creates a Catch-22 scenario, but at least hopefuls don't need to live on food stamps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Also, it should be noted that many female athletes hit their peak marketability / competitive age much earlier than men. Not allowing teens to cash in is a travesty. Worse, looking at soccer, the men's team is much better treated than the more profitable women's team.

<comment><USER33> The women's team is far more successful, however the men's team brings in about twice as much revenue

<comment><USER32> That would be wrong: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/united-states- womens-soc...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/united-states-womens- soccer-equal-pay_us_56fd37e3e4b0daf53aeee5d7)

"USWNT will generate $8 million more in revenue for U.S. Soccer than the USMNT."

<comment><USER33> USWNT is projected to generate $8M more in FY2017. They only generated 2M more the year after they won the World Cup. If you look over the last 4 years the Mens team does far more in ticket sales than the Womens team.

On that note, I do agree that the Womens team should be paid equally, if not more, if only for the reason that their earning power during their career isn't anywhere near what the Mens team.

<comment><USER32> Let me also point out some of the ticket sale difference can be attributed to inferior venues (the women had to cancel games because of poor turf in 2015), but the point remains they are now generating more money and more profit. They also have worse accommodations (flight and hotel) than the men.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There is so much wrong with the Olympics that I suggest you join me in just not watching.

<comment><USER35> Agreed. I stopped caring about the Olympics after 1988, when a pair of hometown girls won the silver in synchro swimming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Do Olympic executives have to finish their staff meetings under a certain qualifying time to keep their jobs every 4 years?

</comment><comment><USER37> May be I don't get it but how does any sport can lead to "harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society". Sports is nothing but a form of entertainment and it is about money and of course the ego of being "better" than other humans at something.

<comment><USER38> How often do HN job postings talk about "changing the world" when they're really talking about getting underpaid to develop a food review app?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> What I find even more ridiculous is the whole "volunteer at the games" thing. Working for free at a multi-billion dollar event while corrupt politicians and cronies fill their own pockets is baffling.

</comment><comment><USER40> Athletes are content providers on the Olympic platform. They also have no leverage to force a more equitable distribution of income.

Given how poorly most platforms compensate content providers, I see no inconsistency here.

<comment><USER41> The athletes could stop participating. A boycott of the best ones should have a great impact of what the IOC can charge.

<comment><USER12> The masses that contribute the attention that makes advertising attractive would have little idea if you subbed in second tier athletes. Just keep telling human interest stories and praising them for being great.

<comment><USER42> In fact, we have no way of knowing if that's already happening!

It could very well be that the _best_ athletes are already just going where the money is, and we're getting those that have a burning desire to be in "The Olympics" rather than making a lot of money.

American Ninja Warrior (and the Japanese show that it came from) show some amazing athletes in every contest. If those people trained for the Olympics instead, I think they could be rather good at it. And many of them are just regular people who decided to try this crazy contest. Now that people have started training specifically for Ninja Warrior, the obstacles have gotten a lot harder. This year's are pretty hardcore, IMO.

<comment><USER43> My wife and I just got into that show again recently. (I prefer the Japanese, honestly, because IIRC they don't waste as much time on human interest stories, but YMMV.)

One of the things that I sort of like about it is that most of them do seem to have jobs and such. _Most_ people aren't IMHO-wrecking their lives to compete. Though the description of what it takes to "walk on" is a bit BS; people literally quitting their job to camp out for a week or two is a problem, ANW, not something to brag about. Most people don't quit their job, but still, that is an awful lot of time to ask people to piss away to show up on your show.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It costs money to get good people to work for you. If you want to see how underpaid workers generates dysfunction just look at most government agencies where "if you're an intelligent hard worker you can walk across the street and double your salary in private industry".

The benefits of gov work such as unfettered job security and good pensions which draw people (although not necessarily talented people) are probably not available with IOC. So without good pay you're left it mostly altruistic reasons (loving sports) or for the 'fun' of it.

IOC needs smart business people like any organization. Running the biggest events in the world smoothly and coordinating a massive organization with thousands of people of different nationalities is hard work.

From that baseline of expectation, the numbers they are putting up (such as $250k for the president) don't seem very high at all.

</comment><comment><USER45> Did anyone really expect them to be any better than FIFA? Send the FBI in already.

</comment><comment><USER46> Pretty bad deal for the athletes. The execs walk out multimillionaires, the athletes walk out broke. Smells like the proper thing to do is go on strike until the money gets spread around a bit more.

<comment><USER47> I doubt that will work. Just like other prestigious or enjoyable things people do (like photography) there is basically an unlimited supply. The only strike that can work is countries boycotting it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Where there's money there's corruption.

Also would have been interesting to hear more about these IOC positions, how are the people selected for these roles and how often do they change? I bet the answer is nepotism. FIFA is another rotten nest.

</comment><comment><USER49> IOC, FIFA and UN are nothing but cesspools of corruption. The corrupt officials should get long jail terms.

The people doing the selections should be formal Olympic athletes.

</comment><comment><USER50> For the athletes, the Olympics isn't about money. It about the glory of being an Olympian. And they are willing to sacrifice everything to get there.

Most are already making more than enough before the Olympics comes around, so whatever they make at the Olympics is just a bonus.

By the way, what the USA pays medal winners is not bad for a few days of work.

<comment><USER51> Yeah, but it's crap pay for years of work. People need to eat...

<comment><USER26> Most people don't rely on a two week gig that comes around every two to four years in order to eat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The athletes staying poor doesn't bother me. Whatever your sport, there is a pro-option if that's what you want to do.

The construction workers getting cheated of their wages in Sochi, and deported from Russia, however, is an obscenity the IOC should be taken to task for.

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't know if there is any principle like this, if not I will coin it here...

xlayn principle:

Any organism conformed of several type of different units with one of them capable of political capabilities will transform itself to have a head (read it as president, board of directors, human head as brain, stakeholders, etc) and will transform itself such as that the head become the goal at the expense of the rest of the organism.

e.g.

      -head decides to overeat to enjoy the related pleasure
       at the expense of other organs in the body
      -company shift objective to make money to the board of
       directors at the expense of the employees
      -humans as the "reason de etre" of the world destroys
       every other specie for the sake of their benefit...
      -this article...
      -corrupt governments

edit: Please let me know if a principle that states this exists.</comment>


Apple Music and Labels Investigated in Two States - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/technology/2-states-look-for-collusion-between-apple-music-and-major-labels.html <comment><USER2> I get the feeling margins have gotten so slim in the music industry (at least for the big labels) that they feel they need to make a big play. Apple, with their almost iconic relationship with the music industry, seems like the right move to them.

What I think they don't realize is at this point (IMO) it's probably going to end up being a fruitless effort.

They're competing with empowered independent artists, whom alot of times only have to earn a paycheck to pay themselves, who simply love music and don't care about fame or becoming wealthy from their efforts. Most of them care about making great music and making a modest living doing so.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "They're competing with empowered independent artists, whom alot of times only have to earn a paycheck to pay themselves, who simply love music and don't care about fame or becoming wealthy from their efforts. Most of them care about making great music and making a modest living doing so."

Sorry but this is BS.

1\. Independent artists are empowered in the way that they can distribute music in so many places online - getting people to listen is another matter. Even if your music is good marketing it by yourself is very, very hard.

2\. Even artists who aren't part of a group (I'm thinking DJ's for example) have to pay more than themselves. They don't travel alone and every live musician usually has to pay a sound guy and probably a lighting guy.

3\. I think very few musicians care about getting wealthy - they just want to make a living. They want to be able to play and make music 24/7\. Even reaching that level is incredibly hard. I can't remember their name but there was a Medium article posted here a while back by a band (quite a well known indie band) who were trying to do just that. They sold out 1,000 seat theatres around the country but the costs of putting on a show caught up with them.

Artists need labels. Maybe not in the form we've always known them but they are still very important. I think it's also probably in the interests of artists if one place becomes king in streaming. You can focus your efforts there instead of having to distribute your music on all these streaming services with their own social sides you must also contribute to.

<comment><USER3> You describe that labels could provide usable service for musicians.

Fine, but labels do not work like this. They work rather as investment banks and their income does not come from service fees but from speculative bets in hopes to find few musicians with very high returns.

I.e. musicians do not get a product from labels but are themselves a product.

<comment><USER4> _Fine, but labels do not work like this. They work rather as investment banks and their income does not come from service fees but from speculative bets in hopes to find few musicians with very high returns._

Although some service fees would be reasonable (recording an album, pressing small batches of CDs), most other things that labels offer are simply not affordable for musicians who did not make it yet, e.g.: hiring a good producer or setting up a nation-wide or world-wide PR campaign.

Although, it's not impossible to get there by slow, organic, growth, getting an investment can be much more effective if you are good[1]. It's not all that much different from starting a business.

[1] Of course, these days some labels do not pick up good musicians, but pretty faces that can playback to music written by label's writers, recorded with pitch correction, etc. But that's what a segment of the general public wants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apple's a lot shittier of a company than many people seem to want to give them credit for here.

<comment><USER6> There's acting shitty, then there's acting illegally. This may be the later.

That said, you're unlikely to get very many people on HN to admit that post Steve Jobs Apple acts shitty. There are still a lot of people here drinking the kool aid.

Seriously though, grats on getting pinned tabs in Safari and transit directions in iMaps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> from the article: """Last month, Stephen Cooper, the chief executive of the Warner Music Group, the smallest of the three majors, warned that "before people conclude that freemium should be burnt at the stake, we should think very carefully about the consequences." """

How do you guys/gals see the "consequences", preferably with details of how it's gonna happen ?

<comment><USER8> I'm thinking he's referring to piracy, as in if you take away streaming with ads people that aren't willing/can't afford to spend $9.99/month for subscription will resort to pirating music.

<comment><USER9> Yup.

And they've been down this road before, starting with Napster back in the day. At that time, the labels were offered a very serious and consistent amount of money, with tons of growth locked in. Was the dawn of broadband in the US, and Napster had 40 million users, many of whom would have paid some monthly amount without thinking hard about it.

They killed that, saw the growth of many different distributed schemes.

iTunes brought many back to the fold, and regular, common sense, moves to add value back to the process saw more people paying and fewer pirating.

If he's thinking about the consequences, he's right. Remove AD driven streaming, which is basically the replacement for aging and increasingly irrelevant FM radio, and people will just start sharing hard again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hace a strong Anti-Apple bias BUT I don't think anything will come from this.

This is just the AG of NY and CT making sure Apple knows they are looking at them every time they make a deal.

<comment><USER11> It was already pretty widely reported that Apple was trying to get Big Music to kill Spotify's free tier as an anticompetitive measure. And it fits in well with the standard Apple playbook if you look at previous music deals, ebooks, etc.

<comment><USER10> I think you might be right. I didn't think about them being stupid enough to actually say that in official circles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Last fall, the singer Taylor Swift removed her music from Spotify in a > dispute over its free version.

What's the tldr version of this? She wasn't getting enough of the revenue?

<comment><USER13> Basically. Though it is a pet peeve of mine that they refer to "Taylor Swift" as having done this, as if she was sat at the Spotify admin interface deleting albums. It was her record label that did it - a company that, by coincidence I'm sure, is looking for a buyer.

<comment><USER14> Well she made public comments about it. She basically said something about if people value the music they like they should pay for it. So it wasn't just the label, Taylor Swift was involved.

<comment><USER15> As a spokesperson for the label?

<comment><USER16> You're really that skeptical that an artist who has been dominating pop stations for years is upset that more and more of her listeners are moving to a nearly revenue-less distribution stream?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How do you, as a wannabe monopoly, do business with a monopoly without colluding with a monopoly?

<comment><USER18> While I agree apple is a significant and big actor, in what way are they a monopoly?

<comment><USER7> Imessage has strong lock-in factor ,even for people who want to move to android. I'm sure there are other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Android version of Apple Music not having a free version like the iOS/OS X/Windows versions can be another factor in that probe?

<comment><USER20> There's nothing to indicate that the Android version will have any difference in the content available. If you check out the Apple Music membership site it shows Android as a fully fledged member when the software itself is released in the fall[1]

[1] [http://www.apple.com/music/membership/](http://www.apple.com/music/membership/)

<comment><USER19> [http://www.apple.com/it/music/membership/](http://www.apple.com/it/music/membership/) [http://www.apple.com/es/music/membership/](http://www.apple.com/es/music/membership/) [http://www.apple.com/uk/music/membership/](http://www.apple.com/uk/music/membership/)

> *Apple Music for Android features are limited to paid members only.

<comment><USER21> In other words, that should mean that either Apple will make their Beats One station exclusive to paid members if they use Android, or that this radio station will not be part of the app so that the app essentially becomes paid only.

Only that feature and the non-music parts of the artist pages (in which case their websites and Facebook pages are probably far more substantial in content) have been announced to be free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is just stupid.

Aside from the fact that the cost of access to music is at an historical low, there are vastly more important issues that I would love to see the the AGs investigate. The scandalous treatment of African Americans is a bonafide crisis.

Where are the indictments of the many individuals responsible for the unjust imprisoment and torture of Kalief Browder? This happened in Eric Schneiderman,s own state!

The military-industrial-political-financial-complex is bursting with targets for reform.

Don't even know why I'm posting this here, but once in a while I feel motivated to share my thoughts...

<comment><USER23> You're arguing that this isn't important simply because there are other important issues out there.

Surely two important issues can co-exist?</comment></comment>


Serving static files with Go - <AUTHOR> http://www.shakedos.com/2014/Feb/08/serving-static-files-with-go.html

<comment><USER2> Nice writeup!

One other thing I'd mention to anyone considering serving static files in Go is this:

You might be tempted to cache the static files into a map for "performance". After all memory is much faster than disk, right? Be careful with this, Go's http FileServer uses sendto on platforms that support it and because it bypasses the userland/kernel barrier and can thus do a zero-copy transmission, sendto (in combination with OS-level file caching) will almost certainly outperform your in-memory caching.

If you really want to optimize transmission, one way to do it (if you're serving mostly data that isn't already naturally compressed) is to gzip everything that is gzip-friendly either in a post-compile step or at runtime, and then serve an on-disk-cached (filename).gz version instead of (filename) with appropriate headers (and checking client headers to make sure they can accept gzip content), but still using the internal FileServer logic to make use of the sendto functionality. Go's internal http stuff is very comprehensive but it is an API and not really a framework and it doesn't try to do anything clever with gzipping of content.

As always, whenever "optimizing" make sure you measure extensively to make sure you're actually helping and not making things worse.</comment>


Assembly Language for the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.viksoe.dk/code/asmil.htm?

<comment><USER2> Usually when people refer to "assembly language for the web" they're talking about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the building blocks for higher abstractions. These guys took the phrase a bit more literally.

<comment><USER3> People should take that "assembly language" quip more seriously. Why are we still writing raw CSS?

<comment><USER2> We (<http://280slides.com>) have zero CSS, zero HTML (excluding the loading screen and landing page)

<comment><USER4> What are you using to generate your HTML and CSS? Haml and Sass or something else?

<comment><USER2> No, not even generated HTML or CSS.

HAML and SASS seem to provide a very thin abstraction; you're still basically writing HTML and CSS.

Our JavaScript framework builds everything via the DOM. But our application code doesn't touch the DOM either, it's all abstracted.

<comment><USER4> Is that a public framework, or something that you guys wrote internally?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or hurl.

</comment><comment><USER6> This guy <http://timhatch.com/projects/jsassembly/index.html> implemented an x86 assembly interpreter in JavaScript that runs in the browser.

<comment><USER7> I've seen a couple of similar projecs out there (mainly MIPS). I started writing one for MIPS when I was taking a computer architecture course so that I didn't have to install SPIM, but eventually lost interest.

That is pretty neat, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a waste of time! I'm forced to say.

</comment><comment><USER9> someone should code a wiki using this ... :P

<comment><USER10> someone would rather die ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Haaaaa!!!!!!! This is the greatest use of technology ever!</comment>


SAT Reading, Writing Scores Hit Low - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904491704576571060049856724.html

<comment><USER2> Although I can't read this because I'm not a subscriber, I can offer an anecdotal perspective.

This isn't only Reading and Writing. I'm a Teaching Assistant at one of many college that claim to be the Harvard of the Midwest, and have been for a few years now. Most students coming in are placed into the Calculus for non- scientists/engineers and few even have the algebra skills to survive. I'm constantly reviewing how to add fractions, factor equations, and the like, before I begin to help them on the issues of Calculus. Even worse, more students are enrolling in the past few years and less seem to be adequately prepared.

<comment><USER3> copy the title then paste it to google</comment></comment>


No office, no boss, no boundaries – rise of the nomadic rich - <AUTHOR> http://travel.cnn.com/new-nomads-814536 <comment><USER2> Anyone else have their "sketchy" filters activated after reading this article? Author mentions how he travels around the world and how he's meeting up with friends / colleagues at this conference (and that he knows them from email lists / online forums), but there's no talk whatsoever in the article about what businesses any of them run.

That's usually a red flag to me -- feels like the scummy side of the Internet.

Doesn't take away from the point (mostly) - that the Internet is enabling a new type of remote-working lifestyle - but I can't get over my spidey senses tingling about the underlying...

<comment><USER3> I think there's an exponential return on efforts for a lot of this work. Most people can't take away enough time from their day job and responsibilities to get good at it, but people who do and take an investment mentality (investing their surplus time back into their skills and contacts) can take off.

For example, if I spent 6 months on an app, I doubt it would pay rent, because there's a lot I'd have to learn and it would probably (?) be amateurish. On the other hand, if I cut out 18 months and kept iterating, I'm sure I'd do better, financially, than I'm doing at my day job.

I haven't won this game yet (I have a fairly typical day job for a top-5% programmer of my age) but it seems like the trick is to find an avenue where you can rapidly get better, invest heavily in yourself when you find it, and eventually be independent.

<comment><USER4> > On the other hand, if I cut out 18 months and kept iterating, I'm sure I'd > do better, financially, than I'm doing at my day job.

This is exactly it. At his last job, my (now) boss started a project on the side. Eventually he had to quit, not because he was making lots of money, but because he didn't have enough time to support the side project. It was bringing in money at this point, but not enough to match his previous salary. He kept at it though, and eventually the revenue grew. Twelve months later, there are 15 of us and money in the bank :)

<comment><USER3> May I ask what this project was? How did he know it was worth it to leave his current job?

It seems to me that the scary part isn't the month or few without income, but the risk that you can't get back into your old gig (or something comparable). That's a very small risk of course, because developers are in high demand, but enough to give pause.

One month to try something cool is a small cost, but quitting your job usually means you can't go back in the same standing.

<comment><USER5> If you really can't get a job anywhere as a good developer, or as a freelancer, you probably should check what you are doing wrong.

You aren't likely to go back to your previous job, but even a failed startup should qualify you for a better job.

If you have the oppertunity, go for it. You regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did do.

<comment><USER3> What you say is all true, but there's one thing that probably hasn't hit most HN readers yet: the job-hopping stigma. It sucks that it exists, but it can catch up with people after a certain point.

Yes, good programmers can generally get better jobs quickly, but there is a point some people get to where the "job hopper" image starts to hurt them. Most people, if they see a string of 6-month jobs, assume this person is constantly getting fired.

<comment><USER6> I don't think employeers worry these people got fired. I think companies are concerned whether you're just a hired gun (not that there's anything wrong with that). But if I'm a young company and I want someone to come on board, I'm not making the decision lightly. I want a long-term partner. So yes, a lot of short term employment would be concerning.

<comment><USER3> At 6 months, literally "fired" is unlikely because most companies don't act fast enough. But the assumption people make based on a lot of short job tenures is that the person was unsuccessful at all of them. Most unsuccessful people don't stick around long enough to get fired, but that's irrelevant.

It's somewhat self-reinforcing, I'd imagine. Because of the stigma, people are less inclined to leave jobs, and therefore a higher percentage of departures are negative.

There's also a "can't win" dynamic from short job tenures. If you're obviously moving up, you're a mercenary. If you have a lot of lateral moves, you're unsuccessful.

Additionally, I think _few_ people actually want to be job hoppers. I'd love to find a 10-year fit. On the other hand, it's uncommon that a I find an environment where I keep learning for long enough to justify more than a year or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, working for yourself over the Internet can bring you financial security and scads of free time, which will let you avoid conventional life indefinitely. There's no need to take on the responsibilities that come with marriage, children, and community, which admittedly can be a huge drag. However, there's also a lot of deep pleasure in that conventional, normal life, pleasure the nomadic traveller is forgoing - wandering around the world indefinitely comes with an opportunity cost.

If this was just a temporary choice of one thing over the other, I'd say 'go for it, and enjoy yourself', but I wonder if this sort of lifestyle, done long enough, can really be put down. By the time you want a spouse, a family, and a place to put down roots, will the temperamental changes brought on by your nomadic living even make this possible? The guy at the end of the article who's lonely and wants a home - he might want it, but I'm not at all sure he'll be able to get it or keep it.

Perhaps I'm completely full of it. It certainly wouldn't be the first time. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who knows a long-term womanizer who can't manage to settle down, even though he now claims to want to. These guys might be setting themselves up for the same sort of problem, with 'new experiences' taking the mental place of 'new partner'.

<comment><USER8> I know a few people who live like this but most of them are semi-nomadic rather than totally rootless. They have a home city where they live for half or so of each year, the ones who are richer / picked a low-cost city own or rent a home there permanently, others pick up a new rental contract every time they come back.

There's also people who aren't strictly speaking nomadic but do take long (multi-month) trips and work from there.

The only quibble I have with this article is the use of the word "rich". No- one I know with this life-style is really rich, they have good upper-middle class incomes doing jobs that are easily done remotely and they leverage that to live in a way that other people cannot.

I think that as these guys get older most will start to move from nomadic to semi-nomadic to "takes long working vacations", but some may indeed live like this forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Aside from the bit about loneliness, which I regard as his personal problem, this is the lifestyle I aim for. I don't want to be on the road constantly, but my life and I love travel. I'm early on the path (see: [http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/a-solo- bootstrapp...](http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/a-solo- bootstrapping-odyssey-2012-was-the-year-i-quit-my-day-job/)), but it's totally doable. With a laptop and an Internet connection, I've run my business from an Alaskan Cruise Ship Cabin, a Cozumel Mexico dive trip, and a recent trip to Waikiki. Met one of my co-conspirators in Waikiki for dinner.

It's good stuff.

The flip side is I work 24x7. When I'm on a push to get a product out, I've been known to forget what day it is. And I have had to limit myself to doing all my marketing work after 7pm. I do customer service from about 8am-9:30am. So that's a lot of hours in a week.

Wait. How's that different from a startup where I own only a small equity stake instead of 100%?

Hmmmm....

</comment><comment><USER10> >> "For the first time in three years of non-stop travel, I wish for a home."

Something I had to learn myself. Something, I did learn and it centered me, gave me context and a lot more happiness.

So I am happy for everybody living that way. If it does please them and does not hurt anyone else. But I know for me, that this is not my style of life.

<comment><USER11> Yep, same here. I'm currently sitting in a University library in Germany, working on some projects for my clients. I have an apartment in Texas, but haven't hardly seen it in three months.

I'm so, so thankful for the experiences in travel that this lifestyle has afforded over the last three years. I also think that in some ways, being constantly on the move has made me a better worker, but it's time for a change. I start a full-time sit-down-in-an-office position in February, which I chose to do for exactly the reasons that the article outlines. I echo the parent comment - it's a cool lifestyle that you should try if you can, but it's not for me any longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A few years ago, I was emailed by a firm that billed itself as being located in London but the IP address was in the Philippines. The correspondence indicated that it was a native English speaker on the other end of the conversation. They had some interest in one of my blogs. Through discussion (always email, the London phone number went to voicemail) I determined that they wanted to add link-filled pages to my blog in return for $125.

I suspect many nomads are following similar SEO consultant/"passive income" schemes, but I also know from previous HN threads that there are a fair number of members (many of whom I assume are programmers) living an expat life overseas:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1752868>

</comment><comment><USER13> I would like to take my skills on the road, but I have a wife and two kids. My wife does not work. Is this lifestyle practical for me? Any advice would be appreciated.

<comment><USER14> No. This lifestyle is basically a scheme to trick yourself into believing that you're still living the youthful college dream.

Do you want your kids to grow up in hotels and short-term rentals, never having been in one place for too long? If the answer is "sure", talk to people who grew up in military families who were shipped all over the world -- it's not fun.

If the idea is that you're going to travel, and the family stays put, understand that the cost is that you won't have a family at some point. Road- warrior consultants generally aren't the happiest people.

<comment><USER15> > Road-warrior consultants generally aren't the happiest people.

So true, I did similar kind of "on-the-road" consultancy for a 9 month period in a previous role and that was enough. Saved a load of money though as I had no accommodation expenses of my own in those 9 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> oh well, look at the core of his site: <http://postmasculine.com/10-best-ways- to-make-money-online>

awesome.

</comment><comment><USER17> Really not a very good article. The title suggests it's going to be a glowing appraisal of a new set of people. All it really accomplishes is describing a particularly sad-sounding circle-jerk "conference" for people who write about writing about lifestyle, etc., and otherwise (I presume) contribute very little..

</comment><comment><USER18> Lifestylists. (Not people doing businesses around users' and customers' lifestyles, but people doing businesses FOR their own lifestyle). Also known as dilettantes.

</comment><comment><USER19> How does this work with visas, etc? Maybe Asian countries are less strict but in the US and EU you'd need to jump through many hoops or lie to immigration officials about intent.

<comment><USER20> In my experience, most countries want you to have a working visa when you intend to do a job that someone else in that country could be doing. Immigration law/policy hasn't really caught up with the Information Age in this respect... But as long as you aren't in a country working for clients in that same country, the country isn't going to care.

I guess it's similar to how visas work for writers. There are artist visas for writers, but they seem to exist so the artist can stay longer.

<comment><USER19> The test of your first paragraph is if the visitor says that when questioned on entry. It seems some countries don't care but if you said to a US immigration officer that you were planning to work in any form while in the country, you'd be on the first plane back without a visa, alas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> TL;DR Life as a nomadic-broke founder is fun and possible if you want to and will reward you with life-changing experiences.

I personally find the topic interesting for various reasons. For once, because i've been living a "nomadic-founder" lifestyle for the last 17months (sidenote: rather "nomadic broke" than "nomadic rich" :) and because my startup creates a platform that tries to free more people from classic employment and enables them a global "workdesk".

My whole journey was inspired by someone's travelling-story on reddit, which is why i'd like to share mine here. Maybe someone thinks about doing something similar, in which case i hope my story can give insights/inspiration as well.

I'm in my mid-20s, IT-guy for >14years, YC alumni, don't have kids, speak 2 languages (english & german) and in the process of learning spanish (thank you duolingo!). When i started, i moved out of my apartment, gave away all my belongings but a backpack of clothes, my camera and thinkpad. I had only little money on the side and apart from my role as a startup founder, not really any perspective on regular income in the near future. Never had plans for more than 1 month ahead, sometimes plans would completely change in matters of hours. I was expecting to be living very low profile and in case money runs out completely, find some simple job to get by. Money and materialistic belongings became my lowest priority pretty soon. On the upside you gain a completely new sense of freedom. (A particular quote from "Fight Club" immediately comes to mind)

So moneywise, in the first few months i was still employed and working remotely for a befriended company as a programmer. But that ended soon, because i wanted to focus more on the startup. One of my co-foundes had some funds from his former startup with which he could support the team for some time. Not overly much, but enough to get by without much luxury. Earlier that year i got the opportunity to build a funded art-installation[0] that won a price and some money. But to be honest: I'm constantly broke, but somehow there's always a way if you want to.

You'll learn to enjoy your life with the little you have. You get creative eating healthy for little money (have never eaten so much good fruit in my life) and finding places to stay. Mostly i stayed in hostels or i could live with people i met on my journey. Sometimes only due to their hospitality, sometimes in exchange for work (small IT stuff, built a hostel, crafted a "designer locker", gardening and so on). When you stay in inexpensive hostels (my only requirement was wifi), you'll also meet interesting people that are in a similar situation and learn new ways to get by.

For the last 6 months i've been in south america. Life here is comfortably cheap. Most of the time you can easily get by with 10$ a day or even less. And if you're schedule is flexible and you're not in a hurry it's easy to experience some of south-america's incredible nature for little or no money. And you will meet interesting people and life-changing moments travelling outside the usual touristic way of moving around these countries.

What i'm trying to say: If you feel your situation is similar and you maybe even have some money on the side for the beginning: do it. You will not regret it. Don't be scared and never give up. Just always remember that, even if hard times come, there's always a way and surviving those will only make you stronger. You'll find a simple way making money on the side for food & shelter (heck, here in south america you could just be making and selling bread or cake on the street for some hours a day and get by).

Needing only your laptop and wifi to work is an incredibly enabling gift. Pretty much everywhere i went i had access to wifi and could work on my startup and communicate with my co-founders. Take use of that gift and you will have a life-changing experience. Founding a startup in such a globalized way _is_ possible with some coordination skills. Our whole team is spread around the world for the whole time being and we successfully launched a couple of months ago.

Shameless plug: We[1] are building a plattform that enables many many more people to live a location-independent lifestyle like ours. Our vision is that you'll be able to work directly on our site, offer your expertise and/or being presented with jobs directly targeted at what you're good at, always knowing how much money a finished job will make you. We're still in the process of collecting feedback and iterating. Getting a two-sided marketplace off the ground is hard :)

If you have any questions about the story or feedback on our startup, i'd be happy to answer them here or contact us at email@example.com

[0] <http://www.ffaloox.com/wiremap-principle/>

[1] <https://www.work.io>

<comment><USER22> > What i'm trying to say: If you feel your situation is similar and you maybe > even have some money on the side for the beginning: do it. You will not > regret it. Don't be scared and never give up.

I'm in a slightly different situation and wonder what advice you might have.

I'm not on the border of going broke. I work for myself from home, alone, and have a comfortable income that I expect will continue for a while. Definitely enough to travel with. So I'm not afraid of not having enough money.

But I am afraid of simply not knowing what to do. Typically when I take vacations it's pre-planned, a week-long thing with a specific destination or event, and then it's over.

A part of me really wants to go "nomadic" and travel lots of places, but I just don't know what I'd do with myself. How to choose where to go to next, how to get the most value out of where I'm at, etc. It seems like constantly moving and trying to get something unique out of each place would take so much consistent planning and work as to be a second job, sucking attention away from where I'm at so I can plan where I'll be.

I don't work with anyone else (even remotely) and I don't have friends scattered across the country/planet. It's extremely unlikely that I would be receiving random calls from people I know, deviating me from my path and pulling me into unexpected interesting places or scenarios.

So my fear is that I'd end up wandering aimlessly, missing the good bits for the obvious ones, not getting a whole lot out of it, and wondering what I'm doing. Is this a legitimate fear? Is there a way to prevent this?

<comment><USER23> My 2c from personal experience:

      1) Pick a place. Let's say Paris.
      2) Go to hostelworld.com, sort by highest review, choose the first hostel in your price range, book a week stay.
      3) Sit at a large table in the common room, nurse a beer or coffee, work on your laptop, wait for others to wander by.
      4) Strike up conversation, ask about where they've been, what they've done, and what they recommend.

I traveled for 3 months in SE Asia in this way. Everybody is in the same frame of mind as you, ready to meet new people, share stories.

It really is that simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems very similar to Fjord's 'Digital Nomads' report, released in March 2011...

[http://www.fjordnet.com/sites/default/files/FjordDigitalNoma...](http://www.fjordnet.com/sites/default/files/FjordDigitalNomads-201103.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER25> Whenever I read articles like this I just read it as these people thinking "Thank god I have rich parents, because lol at any actual human being living in the real world doing this." Pretty much exactly how I felt watching the Bravo startup show as well.

</comment><comment><USER26> If I don't have two kids and the wife (I'm glad I have) I can do that too, although I'm not rich at all but I can afford the travel while working on my software products.

</comment><comment><USER3> How does this work for people with families?

I'd really like to see someone turn a cruise ship into a moving, floating tech city that would move about the world (possibly spending a week in each port, allowing inland travel) so people can travel but also have a stable support network. It'd even have a school for people with kids. It'd probably be cheaper than living in New York or the Bay Area.

<comment><USER27> ResidenSea did this, but it was priced at a point where only the super rich could afford it, and those people were so rich that they treated it as a part- time vacation residence.

I've looked at this (from even the mid-1990s), and it's really hard to make the economics work. Ships are expensive, both in capital costs and especially in operations costs. You can buy used ships, but they're never very efficient or suitable, and retrofitting them is expensive.

People who would be comfortable living out of a tiny cabin with limited services are almost always better off just renting a place on land for a period of time and flying in between destinations. It's only if you need a large, constant space that it makes sense, and doing that with a ship is expensive.

There's also a horrible scale problem -- you could maybe make this work on a per-user cost with a $10b world's largest ship, but a $100mm ship is probably 10x less efficient, and a $1mm boat is another 10-50x less efficient.

There's also the loss of freedom with a large ship. I'd rather just make enough to buy a $5-10mm boat of my own (or, ideally, $100-200mm), and have some guests sometimes, vs. try to coordinate when people get on or off or where it goes as a collective.

There's the regular cruise ship industry on the low end as competition, too. You can get deals and just book 90 days on cruise ships if you want, and get the scale advantages of a large ship; the downside is boredom and being around a bunch of old people (usually) or sometimes drunk college students. Block- booking (how most "gay cruises" or other special interests are done) works. Geekcruises did some of this.

What might make sense is a bunch of ships going on a specific route, with transferability across them, or big fixed platforms at sea where people can go to/from by air, boats, or bigger ships. Of course, now you're looking at many billions of dollars in capital and a very large minimum scale; it's really hard to be incremental in this market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This guy is yet ANOTHER self help guru sort: <http://postmasculine.com/>

<comment><USER29> Just shows how big demand for such stuff there is, similar to "making money from writing about making money from writing" ;)</comment></comment>


The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend - <AUTHOR> https://www.gwern.net/Tanks <comment><USER2> I first encountered this idea in a sci-fi story (I want to say it was one of Peter Watts' "Rifters" novels, but I can't find it now). The idea was that someone trained a neural network to look at live video feeds of passengers moving through a subway station, and control the station's ventilation system. Unfortunately, the movements of individual people were fairly random, whereas the large-scale traffic patterns were extremely regular and periodic. So instead of basing its output on the actual crowd patterns, the neural net decided it was more accurate to look at the hands of an analog clock that happened to be visible through one of its cameras.

All well and good, until the clock stopped working during rush hour, and people started asphyxiating.

<comment><USER3> It's starfish, [http://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#bulrushes](http://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#bulrushes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >I suggest that dataset bias is real but exaggerated by the tank story, giving a misleading indication of risks from deep learning

I don't see how this story gives a "misleading" view of deep learning. From my (admittedly limited) experience with self-driving RC cars, this type of mistake is quite easy for a neural net to make while being quite difficult to detect. In our case, after utilizing a visual back-prop method, we realized our car was using the lights above to direct itself rather than the lanes on the road.

Now, you can refute this and say "well clearly your data wasn't extensive enough" or "your behavioral model is too simple for a complicated task like driving" however as these tools become easier to use, more and more organizations will put them into practice without as much care as the researchers behind most of the current production efforts.

<comment><USER5> Another more modern and well-documented example of this would seem to occur in a 2015 write-up of the "Right Whale" competition in Kaggle: [http://felixlaumon.github.io/2015/01/08/kaggle-right- whale.h...](http://felixlaumon.github.io/2015/01/08/kaggle-right-whale.html)

Contrary to this author's claims, despite using data augmentation and a fancy modern CNN, a neural network trained to identify whales hit a local optimum where it looked at patterns in waves on the water to identify the whale instead of distinctive markings on the whale's body.

I don't buy the "this isn't a problem in real world applications" argument being made in this article.

<comment><USER6> He says that his first attempt at whale recognition looked at waves instead of whales, but

> This naive approach yielded a validation score of just ~5.8 (logloss, lower > the better) which was barely better than a random guess.

which is different from the tank story. For the tanks, the neural network appeared to perform well, but was actually not looking at the tanks. Here, it never performed well, and when debugging why not he found that it was not looking at the whales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The whole "Could it happen"? section is a bit strange. On the one hand, it focuses on CNNs when it's clear we're talking about a binary classifier (the article itself points that out). If Fredkin was really the originator of the story, then discussing CNNs is an anachronism (they were 30 years away at the time).

More importantly, it's obvious that "it" could definitely happen and in fact happens a lot- "it" being overfitting to examples. Machine learning classifiers suffer from this a lot, it's the whole bias/variance tradeoff issue. Neural Nets are not only not immune to overfitting, they are even particularly vulnerable to it (especially the ones with millions of parameters). We've probably all read the adversarial examples papers- a clear case of overfitting to irrelevant details ("noise").

The story (apocryphal or not) seems like a cautionary tale against overfitting, or a not-so-innocent attempt to poke fun at machine learning researchers. One way or another, overfitting is no joke and it's definitely no urban legend.

<comment><USER8> > One way or another, overfitting is no joke and it's definitely no urban > legend.

Can you give an example of where overfitting happened and was successfully corrected for?

<comment><USER9> That's why testing and validation sets exists. Overfitting is prevented by ending learning process when error on validation set starts growing. It is a standard procedure, so it's unlikely there's a recent case of overfitting slipping into production.

If irrelevant feature is present in all class samples, then it is not a fault of NN to use it as a class feature, it's bad data.

<comment><USER8> So you would agree overfitting is not a real issue and talking about it is distracting from NN?

My question is are people using overfitting as an excuse of a what is instead a badly made NN.

If you are smart enough to create a NN that can tell if it's sunny or not then tanks would also be possible. But if your NN just sucks than blaming overfitting is a convenient out.

<comment><USER7> >> My question is are people using overfitting as an excuse of a what is instead a badly made NN.

Overfitting is a major issue in machine learning and it's an inherent characteristic of learning from examples and not the result of a mistake, or of poor practice. There are special techniques developed explicitly to reduce overfitting- early stopping (what red75prime above, describes), regularisation, bagging (in decision trees) etc. A lot of work also goes into ensuring measures of learning performance don't mistake overfitting for successful learning (e.g. k-fold cross validation).

I'm sorry that I don't have time to track down a good source for a discussion of the bias-variance tradeoff and overfitting. You can start at the wikipedia page [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias%E2%80%93variance_tradeoff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias%E2%80%93variance_tradeoff)] and follow the links. In short- a model that learns to reproduce its example data with very high fidelity, risks generalising poorly, whereas a model that generalises well may have high training error. Linear classifiers in particular are high-bias, whereas nonlinear learners, like multi-layered neural networks or decision trees, are high-variance.

The problem is real, it's a big bugbear and you won't find any specialist who dismisses it, or who considers it "not a real issue".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a better, actual example of this problem, see the leopard sofa: [http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard- sofa.ht...](http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard-sofa.html)

<comment><USER11> That comment section took an immediate and unexpected turn for the worse.

<comment><USER12> >That comment section took an immediate and unexpected turn for the worse.

What the heck is going on there?

<comment><USER13> Terry Davis - he occasionally chimes in here with similarly themed posts (but only if you have show dead enabled).

He's schizophrenic, is famous for TempleOS and infamous for the contents of his posts on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the author's conclusion- that this scenario is unrealistic and would never happen given today's understanding of machine learning techniques- is _extremely optimistic_. NNs are demonstrably[1] not robust image classifiers.

In my opinion, it's far more dangerous to downplay the limitations of this technology and embolden snake-oil purveyors than it is to demand an inconvenient degree of rigor and caution in reporting results.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07397#](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07397#)

<comment><USER15> > I think the author's conclusion- that this scenario is unrealistic and would > never happen given today's understanding of machine learning techniques- is > extremely optimistic. NNs are demonstrably[1] not robust image classifiers.

I am well-aware of adversarial examples, and they are not the same thing as dataset bias, and I am very troubled by them. If you look at the section on whether we should tell the tank story as a cautionary story, I already say:

> I also fear that telling the tank story tends to promote complacency and > underestimation of the state of the art by implying that NNs and AI in > general are toy systems which are far from practicality and cannot work in > the real world (particularly the story variants which date the tank story > recently), or that such systems will fail in easily diagnosed and visible > ways, ways which can be diagnosed by a human just comparing the photos or > applying some political reasoning to the outputs, when what we actually see > with deep learning are failure modes like "adversarial examples" which are > quite as inscrutable as the neural nets themselves (or AlphaGo's one > misjudged move resulting in its only loss to Lee Sedol).

To expand a little: dataset bias at least has the tendency to expose itself as soon as you try to apply it. You waste your time, but that's generally the worst part. I'm more worried about stuff like adversarial examples, which will work great in the field right up until a hacker comes by with a custom adversarial example (eg the adversarial car sign work showing you can trick simple CNNs into misclassifying speed limits and stop signs using adversarial examples pasted onto walls or signs or streets). This is not dataset bias; you can collect images of every single stop sign in the world and that will not stop adversarial examples.

> embolden snake-oil purveyors than it is to demand an inconvenient degree of > rigor and caution in reporting results.

I think it's ironic to say that doing the very simplest level of fact-checking like 'did this story ever actually happen' is an 'inconvenient degree of rigor and caution' and 'emboldens snake-oil purveyors'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I get the author's feelings about why we shouldn't tell this story, but I still disagree. It's a pithy, funny example of GIGO in machine learning. People _could_ read conclusions about the abilities of neural networks from the story, but they're wrong to do so -- it's a PEBKAC error, not a technology one. "Truthy" cautionary tales are a near-universal feature of human cultures -- why shouldn't machine learning have some?

<comment><USER17> It's a plausible story. Fine to present as a parable, but we should stop presenting it as true unless we can find a reliable source for it.

Until today, I believed it was true. It was told to me as an undergrad, by a professor who believed it himself.

<comment><USER18> I first heard it in an AI class as well. When I relate the story I usually give it as an anecdote of apocryphal origin. But I do love the story, because it brings into focus several issues: what do you actually want your classifier to learn? what does your training set actually teach? how do you know you've learned the right thing?

Many times it seems like people go into these things hoping that the machine learning part will figure out things for them and relieve themselves of the problem of thinking hard about the problem. It doesn't. It only moves your problem over a bit and increases the difficulty.

In fact this problem pops up even in pedagogy where the lessons people are taught actually train them to do the wrong thing (for example pilots responding to aircraft attitude upsets).

The parable's lesson is a simplistic one, basically: "stop and think about what you're doing". But like other simple lessons about crying wolf or stitching in-time, it bears repeating.

<comment><USER17> > It only moves your problem over a bit and increases the difficulty.

Well, that's not quite true. In robot sensing several things have recently moved from the nigh-on-impossible column to the holy-shit-that-actually-works- pretty-well column, thanks to ML.

But I agree with the rest of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are three separate lessons to be learned from this parable, and I think people are conflating them:

1\. Training on a biased data set leads to biased predictions. This is undoubtedly true.

2\. Data sets can be biased in unexpected and unforeseen ways, so therefore productions can also be biased in unexpected and unforeseen ways. The examples at the end of this article don't quite touch on that point. But examples of this abound in social science. Eg: [https://blog.conceptnet.io/2017/07/13/how- to-make-a-racist-a...](https://blog.conceptnet.io/2017/07/13/how-to-make-a- racist-ai-without-really-trying/)

3\. Deep and convolutional neural networks are susceptible to this phenomenon. This is the point that the article is debating.

</comment><comment><USER20> This kind of stuff is fairly normal actually. I don't really agree that it couldn't happen. Neural Networks train for the wrong features all of the time. It's part of what happens when you're training unsupervised. You load in a lot of data and then you find the bias. Sure, as the article purports, if done perfectly it wouldn't happen. But that's like saying "If you build a bridge perfectly it won't fall down." before building the first bridge. This was supposedly an old tale so I'm not sure why the author would assume the people working on the original theoretical NN were data experts who knew the correct ways to train NNs.

<comment><USER21> Do you have any documented examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Umm, but then a story linked from the article as "alternative example" (thus presumably "better" than the tank story), and it being one from HN by the way, seems to have a nearly identical gist, at least for me as a layman: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6269114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6269114) \- only not about neural nets, but genetic/evolutionary algorithms. Or is it somehow drastically different and I just don't understand that?

<comment><USER15> The difference is that api (Adam Ierymenko, 17k karma, 10 year old account) there says he did it himself - he is not retelling 'a friend of a grad student of a professor told me about some NNs'... I am willing to believe that a HN user who says something happened to himself, that it actually happened.

And there is a big difference between something that happened and something that did not happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For those who say we shouldn't pay too much attention to urban legends about neural network failures, here's a real-life example of neural networks translating "inorganic cat litter" as "in organic cat litter" and thereby creating a real-life half-billion-dollar dirty bomb that genuinely exploded.

[https://jonathanturley.org/2014/11/21/kitty-litter-dirty- bom...](https://jonathanturley.org/2014/11/21/kitty-litter-dirty-bomb-new- mexico-nuclear-disposal-plant-causes-500-million-of-damage-by-using-wrong- kind-of-kitty-litter/)

This is a hasty link, IIRC the error happened when someone read out instructions aloud to someone else took who was taking notes.

Yes, that badly behaving neural network(s) was human, and therefore far more sophisticated than any we can build yet. Which makes the problem worse and more real, not better or less real.

</comment><comment><USER24> The big takeway for me is that even if untrue, similar situations are true. Like this one from the article: "Gender-From-Iris or Gender-From-Mascara?" [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01304.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01304.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER25> All this speculation is silly. Just generate your own data set (since the story is from the early 90s, if not earlier, the number of training examples would have been quite small compared to today's data sets) and see if today's networks make the same mistake.

<comment><USER15> Tanks are already in ImageNet: [http://image- net.org/synset?wnid=n04389033](http://image-net.org/synset?wnid=n04389033)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have heard this story multiple times. My impression is that often person who tells the story treats the fact that the mistrained model was NN-based as a minor detail (or the kind of juicy but ultimately insignificant detail that make the story more fun to tell; and if the original story was about a NN, nobody is going to change it to a SVM or something else).

From this viewpoint, I found the section where the author lengthly argues how this could not possibly happen with the current state of the art visual task CNNs (especially because people apply preprocessing steps such as whitening and augmentation to get rid of exactly this kind of biases), let's say, weird. The parable is not about CNNs, it is about the importance of paying attention what features your model will extract from the training dataset and whether your model is learning the right things.

</comment><comment><USER27> Scare-quotes dataset bias (in science we say "selection bias") is the bread and butter of any field that doesn´t get an opportunity to fine-tune sample design issues.

There's even hierarchical models with an equation giving the probability that an item will be observed at all, conditioned to known features.

Those who don't know their statistical models are bound to reinvent statistical theory.

<comment><USER18> reinvent it poorly as well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > a common preprocessing step in computer vision (and NNs in general) is to > whiten the image by standardizing or transforming pixels to a normal > distribution; this would tend to wipe global brightness levels, promoting > invariance to illumination

Is there anybody still doing this?

<comment><USER15> Seems to still be pretty common: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C21&as_yl...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C21&as_ylo=2016&q=whiten+OR+normalize+image+site%3Aarxiv.org) Am I wrong?

<comment><USER28> "normalizing" is a bad search term, it can mean a lot of things. And whitening images is pretty much dead. What is done is subtracting mean colors from each pixel, but those are means over the whole database, not per-image, so that keeps brightness shifts intact.

<comment><USER15> In searches you should err on the side of broadness. If you cut it down to just 'whitening', as you can see from the snippets as well, there are plenty of hits. You may not like whitening, but it does still seem to be common.

<comment><USER28> Using your search, at least for me, none of the snippets on the first page use normalization in the sense that you are in this context. So including that term just got you a lot of noise. And the only reference to whitening on that search page is not using it in an input pipeline, it is using ZCA to detect images that are modified to be adversarial.

If you want some better data than unreliable searches, go download pretrained models for popular architectures and popular frameworks and look at the input pipelines for them. You'll find that whitening is absolutely not common for image classification/detection today (yes, there are still some cases where it is used, but typically on smaller datasets where you can't get that invariance from data, which is the way you prefer it to be - if one class actually is more likely to be present in dark images, you don't want to kill that information).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I always heard the version that went the other way around. After it was shown that single layer perceptrons were unable to deal with data sets that weren't linearly separable, there was an effort to figure out how the single layer tank classifier was working.

<comment><USER15> That's an interesting variant - none of the versions I've seen so far link it to Minsky's perceptron book. Any chance you recall where you saw that one?

<comment><USER29> This was from a prof giving an undergrad ML lecture at Cornell about 10-12 years ago. Wikipedia's coverage of _Perceptrons_ suggests my lecturer also had only heard the mistaken version of Minky's XOR example, so this could have been entirely wrong :)

<comment><USER15> Oh. How boring. Wonder if I should include that as an example... It's a valid example of how urban legends evolve, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's funny, I heard this legend a bunch, but stopped hearing it after the 2012 AlexNet paper.

<comment><USER31> For reference:

 _AlexNet[1]_ is the name of a convolutional neural network, originally written with CUDA to run with GPU support, which competed in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge in 2012. The network achieved a top-5 error of 15.3%, more than 10.8 percentage points ahead of the runner up. AlexNet was designed by the SuperVision group, consisting of Alex Krizhevsky, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ilya Sutskever.

AlexNet Paper(PDF)[0]

[0]: [http://vision.stanford.edu/teaching/cs231b_spring1415/slides...](http://vision.stanford.edu/teaching/cs231b_spring1415/slides/alexnet_tugce_kyunghee.pdf) [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Makes me think of the story of soviet soldiers training dogs to carry explosives under tanks during WW2. Only they used their own tanks to train the dogs. So when deployed to the battlefield, well...

</comment><comment><USER33> I've always liked this story better, it's in a somewhat similar vein: [https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of- circuits/](https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/)

</comment><comment><USER34> What does one validate that a trained NN has learned a correct method?

</comment><comment><USER35> Why is it called an urban legend, it seems to accurately depict how NNs work.</comment>


A friendly report from  Google Analytics in your inbox. Daily - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailytics.com/ <comment><USER2> yay!</comment>


Elm 0.12.1: Fast immutable arrays - <AUTHOR> http://elm-lang.org/blog/announce/0.12.1.elm

<comment><USER2> I think this means to say fast persistent arrays. A fast immutable array is trivial - just use an array!

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what persistent means in this context, but what is meant by "fast" immutable array here is that the immutable array supports operations like insert and delete (returning new immutable objects) in near-constant time.

<comment><USER4> Rich Hickey (re)popularized the usage of "persistent" to mean what you just described immutable as. That is, the previous version of the data structure "persists" after you add an element, and now you have two values.

To the people using that definition of persistent, "immutable" just means constant, i.e. no insertion or deletion at all.

<comment><USER5> That's not quite right. All immutable data structures are persistent, but not all persistent data structures strictly use immutability.

Immutability is a common way of achieving persistence, but fundamentally a persistent data structure simply preserves previous versions. This can be achieved through some mutability via things like fat nodes[1].

It turns out that when you use immutability, many other nice properties often fall out from that decision. You can absolutely insert and delete into an immutable data structure though. You'll simply get back a new structure.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure#Fat_N...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure#Fat_Node)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I read elm I thought it was about an email client. I think that makes me officially very old.

I miss those email clients. They were much nicer than most of the email software which is considered modern today.

</comment><comment><USER7> Couldn't they just use Mori?

<comment><USER8> Mori doesn't implement RRB-trees, thus doesn't support logarithmic concatenation.

<comment><USER9> Maybe mori could include core.rrb-vector[1]. Other interesting persistent data structures (by the same author) are persistent sorted maps and sets[2].

[1] [https://github.com/clojure/core.rrb- vector](https://github.com/clojure/core.rrb-vector) [2] [https://github.com/clojure/data.avl](https://github.com/clojure/data.avl)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Logarithmic is not constant.

The fact that elm announces constant array access will not surprise anybody, as this is an inherent property of arrays. But then seeing that they have to use radix-trees for arrays and announcing it as constant is highly misleading. These guys should switch over to politics.

And this only holds for immutable arrays! So even without push,pop,shift,unshift they have to use trees for arrays.

<comment><USER11> Why are Elm's arrays so much more complex than JavaScript's O(n) arrays?

<comment><USER12> It's about mutability vs immutability. I think Zach explains the whole idea of immutable arrays really well: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/julia- vectors-maps-sets](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/julia-vectors-maps-sets)</comment></comment></comment>


A Python internals adventure (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://flowerhack.dreamwidth.org/3594.html <comment><USER2> The reason for why the whole unicode checking is done in python3 is to guarantee Unicode support in python3. I actually disliked the old half-string- half-binary approach and almost from the start enjoyed the clear distinction between str and bytes in python3.

That being said, the strings/bytes cleanup was also one of the few things that really broke backward compatibility with 2.x.

</comment><comment><USER3> The convention with the Python C API is to return a non-NULL pointer to a python object on success, and return NULL and set the exception global variable on error. Yes, global variables are also alive and well.

        PyObject *fout = _PySys_GetObjectId(&PyId_stdout);
        stdout_encoding = _PyObject_GetAttrId(fout, &PyId_encoding);

The python equivalent of this is `sys.stdout.encoding`. The StringIO object was constructed without an encoding, so this is None.

        stdout_encoding_str = PyUnicode_AsUTF8(stdout_encoding);

This tries to convert None to a C string, which fails.

</comment><comment><USER4> The bug has been fixed since then:

[https://bugs.python.org/issue8256](https://bugs.python.org/issue8256)</comment>


Banner Ads on Flies - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/10/29/banner-ads-on-flies/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if they can release a virus that brings you up in hives that spell out their company name ... incredibly creative.

One of the other companies present needed to hand out branded flyswats ... perhaps a computer company "we kill the annoying bugs before they get to you!".</comment>


Show HN: Enkel – The clean and simple RSS reader - <AUTHOR> https://enkel.fyi <comment><AUTHOR> Enkel is a clean and simple RSS reader. If you like me, you probably have multiple news apps or sick go being bombarded with images and popups. I aim to simplify the way you aggregate and check your news.

Inspired by the minimal movement and the challenge of building a black & white UI, I want the user to be able to focus on the content.</comment>


Have the Public Clouds Killed Hadoop? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/06/06/have-the-public-clouds-killed-hadoop/ <comment><USER2> Hard to argue that the ease of use of public cloud data solutions isn't having some effect. There are ways out - like truly functioning identically on-prem and multiple clouds but it's challenging.</comment>


The Case Against the Case Against Google - <AUTHOR> http://slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2223755 <comment><USER2> Sorry, but this article is nonsense. Anti trust violations are wrong, even if no harm should come of them. To look 10 years into the past and say the anti trust case against microsoft was misguided is using hindsight to prove a point.

Who knows what the world would have looked like if the DOJ had _not_ pressed ahead. We know much better how far we can trust Microsoft today because of that case in the past.</comment>