America's Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-20/america-s-great-climate-exodus-is-starting-in-the-florida-keys <comment><USER2> Presumably I'll get downvoted for this but here it goes.. I know that news sites like to link anything they can to climate change in the global human- caused sense because it might create more clicks but how is this a "climate exodus" in that sense? It's more a case of people having built homes in a very flat, easily flooded place that has always been really, really shitty for living due to the dangers of extremely bad hurricane damage (something that has been the case since Europeans settled the region). Way too tenuous for a title like that, but it fits the more hysterical narratives of climate change so in it goes. Note, i'm not doubting or denying the very real global dangers of human-caused climate change, but we should be careful in ascribing just anything to them. Some regions of the world have always been unsafe for human habitation due to persistently unfriendly weather, that we have colonized them with our technology doesn't mean that something has fundamentally changed about their climate whenever things go wrong and nature reasserts itself.

<comment><USER3> It's being linked to climate change because small, low-lying islands are seeing serious losses of land mass. From the article:

 _Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana is trying to relocate the Native American settlement of about 100 people on the Isle de Jean Charles, a narrow island that lost 98% of its land over the past six decades to climate change._

My best understanding is that this is, in fact, a new phenomenon related to global warming, the defrosting of permafrost, etc.

 _Some regions of the world have always been unsafe for human habitation due to persistently unfriendly weather_

There is no place without some kind of disaster. I've looked. It's a case of _pick your poison_.

Hurricanes in the Southeast. Tornadoes in the Plains States. Earthquakes and the ever-so-lovely Fire Season on the West Coast.

Etc.

But much of Florida is not far above sea level and some of the issues they are seeing can legitimately be linked to climate change. That's not just hand- wringing in this case.

This is especially true for low-lying islands, which are seeing new problems around the world. It isn't the norm for islands to simply disappear to rising sea levels.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but some places are far worse than others. Down here in Atlanta we get some pretty bad thunder storms (and accompanying low lying land floods), and rare but not unheard of hail. We're pretty far from any real faults, though we have gotten tiny tremors from east Tennessee and north/south Georgia before, they're at most 4-5, with everything in Georgia around a 3. We're far enough away from, and high enough above the ocean for sea level rise to not impact us. Tornados are exceedingly rare. We hardly ever get any real hurricane weather, usually just some rain from the outer reaches of it as it hits the coasts.

I'd choose this over my former South Louisiana digs any day. We had to evacuate for hurricanes multiple times when I was a kid there. For hurricane Andrew we were driving north in the pouring rain and wind so high nobody could close the car doors except my dad. I've never been even close to that scared of weather in Georgia.

<comment><USER3> I think that falls under _personal preference._

I was born and raised in Georgia. I'm abundantly familiar with what goes on there, weather-wise.

Near daily thunderstorms in the summer.

Electrical storms that can kill electronics, appliances or even people.

If it snows at all, businesses shut down, schools shut down, car wrecks go up, etc.

If it gets too cold, they sometimes shut down schools and businesses.

When I was eight years old and we had something like a foot of snow, roofs were collapsing, they were sending a van around to pick up nurses so the hospitals would be staffed and my sister and father walked like five miles in the snow to get to a store to get supplies we needed because no municipality in the state has any equipment for doing snow clearance and all the roads were closed.

Snow is not some kind of natural disaster in places that routinely get snow. But it is a real and serious problem in Georgia simply because it happens so rarely that it doesn't make any real sense to acquire snow plows and the like. They would rust and rot in place and be unusable on the rare occasion that it does snow enough to see an accumulation on the ground. Most of the time, you wait a day or so, things warm up, it melts, schools and businesses re-open.

But, meanwhile, people die in car wrecks.

[https://www.vox.com/2016/1/27/10840810/snow-car-crash- map](https://www.vox.com/2016/1/27/10840810/snow-car-crash-map)

Atlanta sometimes has serious flooding.

[https://www.11alive.com/article/weather/10-year- anniversary-...](https://www.11alive.com/article/weather/10-year-anniversary- historic-2009-flood/85-67a5d008-de15-4529-a68b-796eabcacf65)

Etc.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like Chicago is about as close to safe as it gets anywhere on earth.

<comment><USER6> You are joking, of course. A safe place would not have subzero temperatures during cold season. The world is full of much safer places where there are no weather extremes, earthquakes, or other natural disasters. Of course, you must also consider manmade disasters like overreaching government, civil unrest, and if there are oil reserves you risk invasion by other countries to liberate the population.

<comment><USER7> > A safe place would not have subzero temperatures during cold season

Given the long human history of surviving subzero temperatures, why do you say that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why is the government buying these people out?

The homeowners weren't forced to purchase these properties, so it's not the government's responsibility to remediate the situation.

<comment><USER9> Think about who owns waterfront property, yacht clubs, etc. and ask whether those rich people are likely to be well-represented in the legislatures. Government agencies do what the law makers tell them and it's really hard to roll back decades spent ignoring the problem for short-term profit, especially when there's a large and effective propaganda machine which will attack anyone who suggests policies which realistically accept the scale of the problem.

<comment><USER10> The woman profiled in this Bloomberg piece is 60, likely is not wealthy (her insurance settlement is a bit more than half of what remains on her mortgage, and she cannot afford to bring her house up to code due to the extent of the damages), and could possibly be homeless without a relo buyout. If it was me, I'd buy a new home in Florida (far above sea level!) with my settlement, and default on the shack she's stuck with (Florida law is very strong when it comes to protecting debtors; as long as her new home is her primary residence, all of her equity would be protected from creditors, as well as her social security when she begins to collect). But that's not a solution that works at scale.

As long as the properties are bulldozed and never allowed to be developed again, it's reasonable policy.

Should people know better? Perfect information is hard. I've bugged Redfin several times to include these models in their property search interface with no reply. You need legislation to better assist real estate buyers to fully understand what they're getting into.

<comment><USER11> > Should people know better? Perfect information is hard.

Ordinary people aren't the perfect agents we're propagandized them to be. People often are forced to gamble tomorrow to live through today. I've seen people make the gamble and lose badly and others manage to slip out from under it.

<comment><USER10> Of course. That's why I said this is reasonable policy. Bailouts shouldn't be a four letter word when done properly.

<comment><USER11> I'm agreeing with you. The state zones places that aren't suitable for housing. Banks loan developers money to build. And quasi-government agencies hold loans used to buy the houses. In these clusterfucks the owner is just one of many partially responsible parties.

I remember reading about a disaster in Washington State (I think). A geology professor been doing field trips to an hill side. To show his students an example of an unstable hillside. One year he shows up and there are now houses on it. Few years after that the whole thing comes down.

Another one. During the housing bubble in California they build a subdivision on farmland that was reserved as a flood plain. During heavy rainfall years it's expected to flood. Now there are houses on it.

Are the people that bought those houses responsible or are they more victims? Both?

<comment><USER12> As long as it was disclosed to the buyer then they take the risk with hopefully flood insurance. If it wasn't disclosed then they may have recourse against the property developer and their agent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 'By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each, according to Florida State University demographer Mathew Haeur, who studies climate migration.'

I couldn't find any concrete evidence to validate this, it seems more of a prediction? Mr Hauer is a sociologist so this seems a bold claim [https://coss.fsu.edu/sociology/mhauer](https://coss.fsu.edu/sociology/mhauer)

'his research has focused on how migration induced by sea level rise _could_ reshape the U.S. population distribution'

<comment><USER14> You can, quite literally, find someone from a university in the social sciences who say anything that you want.

The practice of inserting quotes from random "experts" in news stories is one of the worst journalistic practices out there. It's fundamentally dishonest in very obvious ways, and forms the basis of many articles.

<comment><USER15> Including the landscape architecture professor in the article who said, "If we don't, it won't matter, because much of America will be underwater or on fire."

No hysteria at all there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> SLR (sea level rise) is a problem, but this article promotes a kind of alarmist version of SLR, in my admittedly inexpert opinion.

SLR has been going on for 20,000 years, and it may be accelerating in the last few decades due to global warming; however, if your property is threatened by a 3mm SLR per year you probably didn't make a wise purchase in the first place. 2+mm SLR per year has been going on for at least 150 years. See [1].

[1] [https://www.flseagrant.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/SLR- Fa...](https://www.flseagrant.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/SLR-Fact- Sheet_dual-column-letterhead_8.2.13_pdf.pdf)

<comment><USER17> People, en masse, rarely react to a problem till it hits them in the face. Florida does get flooded already - Sunny Day Floods, what a beautiful name. Meanwhile real estate prices keep ignoring the issue:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIXRNSA](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIXRNSA)

<comment><USER18> Yes, you are correct.

Of interest though is this study: [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3073842](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3073842) which indicates that prices are 7% than they would be otherwise.

<comment><USER19> Sensitive to exposure -- 22% discount for properties that will be encroached with 1ft sea level rise, 6% with 6ft encroachment -- and to knowledge eg less discount in regions with less belief in climate change, except for investors who don't seem to be influenced by such local beliefs, substantially greater discounting after 2014 IPCC report (dataset from 2006-2017). Recommended read!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think this article presents enough evidence that climate change, or climate in general, is affecting a person's desire to move to a new area. Florida has always had hurricanes, and it will continue to have hurricanes. Our response should not be to say the climate has changed so much its forcing us to leave, but rather what can we do to adapt to the new climate forces?

<comment><USER21> The issue isn't the hurricanes or the strength that is associated with them, it is the water content. In the past, hurricanes main threat was the wind. With wind, you can mitigate that with stronger building techniques and since the flooding was minimal, it was easy to recover from.

The new issue with these hurricanes is that they are bringing significantly more water with them because of global warming. The net result is you are seeing once in 1500 year floods happening every year.

It is very hard to recover from those. Especially if you find yourself doing it every year. At some point, you have to move.

The net loss is property and economic activity to name a couple.

<comment><USER22> >once in 1500 year floods happening every year.

Source?

<comment><USER23> The sea, obviously

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _About 6 million Floridians will need to move inland by century's end to avoid inundation, according to Hauer, the demographer, in a 2016 paper. By then, about 80% of the nearby Keys, the archipelago that includes the tourist mecca of Key West, will be underwater. About 3.5 million people would be flooded in South Florida's Miami-Dade and Broward, the two counties with America's biggest exposed populations._

The article then shows a chart predicting population displacement caused by a 1.8-meter sea level rise.

Is that the accepted consensus, that the sea level is rising ~6 feet?

<comment><USER25> It's not rising 6 feet permanently, but it does during storm surges. Hence the stilts. (which only partially solve the problem), your road network, water distribution network, electrical network etc still suffers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Where are the insurance companies on all this? Shouldn't it become increasingly more expensive to insure a low-lying property? Are they not including climate risks in their modelling?

<comment><USER27> A few weeks ago a 60 minutes segment compared flooding in The Netherlands vs the USA.

In The Netherlands if an area floods homes are not built there and measures are taken to control the water in those areas. In the US people get insurance and build in the same place using the same style.

New Jersey hired a man from The Netherlands to tell them how to break out of that process. This was due to the Sandy Hurricane that devastated the coast.

It boils down to if something keeps getting damaged stop doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.

edit: [https://www.cbsnews.com/video/storm-water-management- dutch-s...](https://www.cbsnews.com/video/storm-water-management-dutch- solution-henk-ovink-hurricane-damage-60-minutes-2019-07-21/)

<comment><USER28> Building codes have changed dramatically for hurricane prone and flood prone properties in the US. Homes are built on stilts/pillars and with roofs designed to withstand Cat5 winds. It's night and day to how they were built even 20-30 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> For some reason I just assumed that Miami Beach real estate was all luxury condos, so I was shocked to see how affordable some condos could actually be in 200-300k range. Not a luxury high rise, but a condo in the heart of Miami Beach nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER30> A little late if hurricanes are your benchmark for climate change.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane)

What's sad is that most reporters know that climate change is measured in decade long trends. Small yearly increases in sea level, gradual increases in global temps and slow changes in atmospheric composition. But that doesn't get clicks.

Associating climate change with outlying catastrophic events is as short sighted as the environmental abuse that causes climate change.

<comment><USER31> I am completely fine with it. We need to convince low information voters that climate change is a serious issue, and the opposition likes to point at snow storms and bring snowballs to congress as proof that climate change is a hoax.

<comment><USER30> Lie because the other side is lying. The bigger bolder lie wins. The truth is considered weak medicine. This is how we got here. It's a disaster.

<comment><USER31> Reminding folks that climate change will result in more frequent and extreme weather events after/during extreme weather events is not lying. If folks mis- interpret that to mean that the weather event in question was due to climate change, then that is their own fault.

<comment><USER32> > Reminding folks that climate change will result in more frequent and extreme > weather events after/during extreme weather events is not lying.

1\. That claim certainly isn't science, because it's neither reproducible nor falsifiable.

2\. If it's not science, what is it?

<comment><USER31> I don't care if it fits your narrow definition of science. If a planet destroying meteor is hurtling towards earth, is that reproducible or falsifiable? Should we do nothing until you personally are convinced that it has been scientifically proven that it will destroy the planet.

If we convert our entire energy and transportation sectors to renewable energy and climate change turns out to be a hoax, we still get cleaner cities, cleaner air and a cleaner environment. That is a perfectly acceptable consolation prize considering the potential risks.

<comment><USER32> > I don't care if it fits your narrow definition of science.

1\. That's not my definition of science--it's the definition of science.

2\. If your argument is not based on science, what is it based on?

> If a planet destroying meteor is hurtling towards earth, is that > reproducible or falsifiable?

That scenario would be a matter of Newtonian physics, which any astronomer could run the numbers for. Newtonian physics is indeed reproducible and falsifiable, as demonstrated by the many objects launched into the solar system, as well as the astronomical observations and predictions over the centuries.

It's disingenuous to compare climate change alarmist claims based on primitive, already-falsified computer models to simple, proven Newtonian physics.

> Should we do nothing until you personally are convinced that it has been > scientifically proven that it will destroy the planet.

Should we do what you demand when you demand it because you personally are convinced that the planet is going to be destroyed? (N.B. Earth will certainly be destroyed, either when impacted by a large celestial body or when the sun expands. Earth would not be destroyed by a minor GATA increase.)

> If we convert our entire energy and transportation sectors to renewable > energy and climate change turns out to be a hoax, we still get cleaner > cities, cleaner air and a cleaner environment.

If it might be a hoax, shouldn't we consider why such a hoax would be perpetrated? Might there be ulterior motives? What would be the implications of those motives?

> That is a perfectly acceptable consolation prize considering the potential > risks.

Your analysis presented here is completely one-sided. It does not mention any drawbacks or side-effects. It is not impartial, it is not fair, and it is not scientific. It is not a reasonable analysis to act upon, especially considering the risks, i.e. decimating the economies and lives of billions of people in poor and developing nations.

<comment><USER31> Nice one, demand that I provide irrefutable proof for my claims, while providing no evidence for your own. I should know better than to engage with climate trolls, but I have some time to kill, so here we go.

> 1\. That's not my definition of science--it's the definition of science.

Definition of science: [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/science](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/science)

> That scenario would be a matter of Newtonian physics, which any astronomer > could run the numbers for.

Please provide citations and evidence for these extraordinary claims. And no, academic references don't count because they are obviously biased due to them trying to advanced their own careers. I will only accept citations from 2-bit think tanks funded by mega-corporations that have obvious financial interests at stake.

> Should we do what you demand when you demand it because you personally are > convinced that the planet is going to be destroyed?

Yes.

> i.e. decimating the economies and lives of billions of people in poor and > developing nations.

Please use science to back up that claim. Until then, clean energy is the way forward. Its already cheaper[1], healthier[2], and creates more jobs[3] than fossil fuel.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-19/solar- and...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-19/solar-and-wind- power-so-cheap-they-re-outgrowing-subsidies) [2] [https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil- fu...](https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fuels/coal- air-pollution) [3] [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.nr0.htm](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.nr0.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This actually started in Louisiana:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/24/louisiana-town-moves-to- high...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/24/louisiana-town-moves-to-higher- ground-amid-growing-climate-crisis.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> > "By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just > because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each"

13M feels low. Given the "of $1M each" then perhaps they means households. At an average of 4 heads per, 52M individuals feels closer.

That said, what goes into a $1M move? Does beachfront property average out that high?

Finally, is that $1M in current dollars, or adjusted for inflation estimates?

<comment><USER34> Lol. Down voted for simple and obvious math. God bless HN. Keep the hate coming. I love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why do people buy beach front houses when they know they'll be under water in just a few years? Doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER36> Barrack Obama just bought a multi-million dollar beachfront home. If any major public figure has the most accurate info about pending sea level rise, even classified level information that might not be released to the public, surely it's him.

<comment><USER37> This is an interesting fact related to the discussion, yet downvoted. Weird.

<comment><USER36> I think the reason is that what I said isn't compatible with the most catastrophized interpretation of climate change. Climate change is one of the few topics alongside topics like guns and abortion where nuance is generally not welcome. Look at the other responses. Does "he's rich so he's probably just burning millions of dollars" feel like the most reasonable explanation of his behavior? I don't think that fits what I know of Obama's temperament. Apparently, some people disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great news Mr Bloomberg, about time some of these bozos left the islands, maybe we can finally enjoy the place without being flooded by tourists. We used to have September to ourselves now not even that is quiet. The Florida Keys are being purchased by conglomerates and wealthy people like never before in history. Housing is blooming, and tourism is also. The exodus is happening, but that is New York City. They are all moving down to Miami and the Keys. You want to play alarmist? Then include Miami sir, because ALL OF FLORIDA will be affected by weather changes and patterns, like LA, like the coastal Carolinas in about 100 years or so. Until then I doubt Amazon would HQ in S FL if there was fear of submersion. Until the great flood will happen, get the heck out of our islands!

<comment><USER39> LOL I absolutely know you are from the islands! What key are you on. This September has been busy, if it had not been for Doreen threatening us, I don't thing it would have slowed down at all. All my favorite restaurants closed shop for the month though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> About time New Yorkers stopped their exodus to come and bug us in the keys.

</comment><comment><USER40> Disclaimer. I have unwavering faith in climate change.

But I do wonder why are banks writing mortgages on houses in these kind of areas? Shouldn't they be more worried about losing their investment over 30 years?

<comment><USER41> You mean the same banks who were underwriting NINA mortgages as fast as they could print them out back in 05-07? (That's "No Income, No Asset", for those of you who do not recall.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> the problem is that they keep building using outdated technologies!!!!

why do they keep building these "paper" houses? average american house is too poorly constructed to handle these things. honestly its just a few sticks and plywood in between most of the time! what hurricane??? Government should force contractors to build using ICF technology, hurricane proof houses on high stilts in coastal areas and problem solved!!!

this is a crucial comment: "She dreams of resettling in Key West or Homestead, a safer spot on the Florida mainland.

"I'd like to take the money and run," Rittel said. "But I'll have to buy something on stilts. I'm not buying anything on the ground down here ever ever again.""

</comment><comment><USER43> The sea is rising more slowly today than any day in the foreseeable future.

Sea level rise is accelerating. This angle may spark some smart thoughts here.

</comment><comment><USER44> "The Great Climate Exodus Is Starting In The Texas Gulf"

[https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/galveston- hur...](https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/galveston-hurricane- texas.jpg)

1891 July 6th 80mph from the south 1900 Sept 8th 145mph the great galveston hurricane kills 8,000 people with a 15ft storm surge even though it was low tide while hitting it traveled 6 to 10 miles inland from the ESE .The pressure at landfall was 27.55inches with winds of 110mph.Half of Galveston destroyed with 2,600 buildings destroyed & 10,000 people left homeless would have been much worse if not moving so quickly. It is said that a one inch steel hull of an ocean going freighter was pierced through with a piece of lumber.According to the hurricane research division winds were of Category 4 strength at landfall. Newspaper headline | max wind map | Monument | surge animation | Interview with Julie Lake summer of the storm 1909 july 21st a 10 ft strom surge with 110mph winds from the ESE 41 killed in texas. 1915 AUG 17th a cat 3 120mph kills 275 ,12' tides flooded Galveston 5' to 6' in the Business District. Winds at Galveston were 97 mph gusts to 130mph putting this in the cat 3/4 range.Press 940 mb,.Seawall prevented a repeat of the 1900 disaster.Causes 50 million in damage max wind field 1932 Aug 14th 145mph winds from the SE direct hit 1934 july 27th, a storm surge of 5.9ft with a cat 1,80mph that passes just east while moving south 1942 Aug 21st 80mph from the ESE 1943 July 27th a storm surge of 4 ft ,nineteen killed,86mph winds. 1945 Aug 27th 140mph from the south just west of here 1947 August 24th 80mph from the S.E 1949 oct 4th 130mph from the south 1957 June 27th 110mph(hurdat) Hurricane Audrey well east from the south. Newspaper article 1959 July 25th hurricane Debra hit with 85mph winds bar 29.07 14.42 inches of rain. NHC Wallet 1983 hurricane Alicia on aug 18th causes 2 bill damage as a cat 2/3 with 71 to 98mph winds in Galveston moving at a forward speed of 8mph. 21 killed 1.2 billion dollars in damage,a 10 to 12 ft storm surge at normal high tide.90% of Dwellings on Jamaica bch destroyed.Many highrise glass buildings sustained heavy damage. Pressure in Galveston was measured at 989mb 29.20 inches at 2:00AM. From NOAA GPST2 - GALVESTON PLEASURE PIER (PORTS) - TX 29.29 max gust 020/076kts Damage photo | #2 | max wind field | Dr Ted Fujita wind map | Newspaper headline | Newspaper headline #2 1989 Oct 15th Jerry 3 dead over 8 million in damage ,85mph winds.The latest a hurricane ever hit the upper Texas coast NHC Wallet 2001 June 5th T.S Allison hits with 60mph winds dumping extremely heavy rain especially inland in the Houston area. Over a 120 hr period houston recorded 36.99 inches of rain.Only 3 tropical systems have produced more rain in this area. T.S Amelia 46.00",T.S Claudette 45.00",unamed 1921 40.00". 41 deaths related to flooding & 5 billion in damage. Allison was finally retired in July of 2002 as the only T-storm to be retired. NHC Report 2008 Hurricane Ike hits Galveston on Sept 13th with 110mph winds causing extensive damage in entire area by 15 ft storm surge.From NOAA GALVESTON G GPST2 11.19 ft storm surge MAJOR 29.29 GALVESTON STATE PLEASURE PIER.A high gust for the Houston area was 92mph at Hobby airport.Gust at pleasure pier 86mph.Deaths reported in Texas at 22 with several missing. Hurricane Warning Show | Before & after aerial shot | Bolivar Peninsula just north | Ike model history | SAR Helicopter refueling over Galveston | Newspaper headline | Newspaper headline 2 days later | Neil Frank describing landfall video | Ike aftermath story video | surge animation | USGS surge info | Radar animation | NHC Final report 2017 Aug 29th tropical storm Harvey just offshore while moving north by 32 miles with 50mph winds. Galveston Scholes Field (KGLS) 22.87 inches of rain gust's to 59mph. Galveston Pier 2.7ft water inundation. Inland counties report upwards of 60inches of rain in some locations most rainfall ever for tropical system in U.S. NHC Final report

</comment><comment><USER45> The article is paywalled.

outline.com and archive.org do not seem to work; Google's cache returns 404. Are there any other such sites that work?

<comment><USER46> It is only paywalled if you let your browser run the javascript served from the site. Blocking all the JS with NoScript results in being able to read the article with no paywall.

<comment><USER47> In Chrome, you can also do per-site Javascript blocking. Blocking Javascript from [*.]bloomberg.com in preferences will let you read Bloomberg without problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> A counter-argument to climate alarmist statistics, shows use of selective presentation of statistics to portray specific conclusion on climate change:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8455KEDitpU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8455KEDitpU)

<comment><USER49> Billions of birds dead, insect apocalypse, amphibian populations decimated, etc... But yeah people are just being alarmist, it's the end of the world and I feel fine.

<comment><USER50> The thing is just that people continually present opinions that require numbers in proper context to validate, but seemingly reject the concept that numbers in context are socially appropriate, at all.

<comment><USER51> We have enough context for the numbers.

Taken in context, the numbers paint a very expensive picture economically (trillions and trillions of dollars), as well as a grave tale of unnecessary suffering for many tens of millions of people, if not more.

<comment><USER50> Suffering _is_ necessary; I don't subscribe to the belief that it's somehow _due_ as the wages of original sin, but to suffer and die is the fate of every human being. Not tens of millions, but all of the billions that have ever existed; not one has ever escaped it.

And money is an abstraction. You could eliminate trillions and trillions just by hacking the systems that keep track of who has how much.

What I'm trying to say is not that the consequences of climate change aren't grave, but that without mentioning specific numbers and their relationship to other numbers that describe reality, and researching and choosing those in good faith, you are saying nothing.

<comment><USER51> Not all suffering is necessary. Much potential suffering that climate change may cause is understood and avoidable, if we take action.

If you want actual numbers and the relevant context, perhaps you could read the IPCC report.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Guido's final word on Tail Calls - <AUTHOR> http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/final-words-on-tail-calls.html

<comment><USER2> I really love Guido's pragmatism. It's inspiring how he says "no" to a "would be nice feature" - - a feature that seems simple to implement at first, but probably would complicate a lot of things.

Viva la Gudio :)

</comment><comment><USER3> The subtle overtone here is the rather sensible conclusion that Python is not going to be an "everything language". I think the defining characteristic of a successful language designer is the ability to recognize and acknowledge the inherent limitations in your own language.

</comment><comment><USER4> FTA: > One other thing I learned is that some in the academic world scornfully refer to Python as "the Basic of the future".

I'm not from the academic community and have never heard anyone else say it before, but have thought of Python this way for quite a while now and am pleasantly surprised to see I'm not alone.

Thats not me being snarky, its a very serious observation - you'd get laughed at for learning Basic today. I'm young and expect Python to die well before the end of my professional career, so I do invest my time in longer term languages such as Scheme and Haskell.

<comment><USER5> _I [...] expect Python to die well before the end of my professional career [...]_

Why?

 _I do invest my time in longer term languages such as Scheme and Haskell._

What makes Scheme and Haskell "long-term" languages?

<comment><USER4> > Why?

Obviously I can't know it for sure, but my argument hinges on parallelism. Imperative programming isn't so well suited to parallelism as you probably know, and Python is sticking firmly to the imperative pseudo-code area of programming (which it does very well). Even for the scripting tasks I think in 10 years time it'll just be unacceptable to have so many cores under-utilised and functional languages make parallelism so much easier that it'll be a fairly easy choice to start coding a new project in those languages instead of Python. And then on top of this main argument, I'll just say you never know - I don't think people would have predicted the decline Perl has had to such a big degree (sure its not dead but its going that way). Python won't be here in 100 years (or 200, or 300..), I'm 100% sure. So I'm just arguing that the actual number of years left of Python is likely to be within 30 years. No-one knows the exact length, but my prediction is that its within that range.

> What makes Scheme and Haskell "long-term" languages?

They're just very simple and pure, and that's important for longevity because they aren't likely to be replaced in a kind of "major revision change" by a similar but better language, because they don't really need a big revision change, they're very good (or should I say "good enough") already. Python just doesn't so obviously provide the best language of its kind (dynamic, OOP, imperative) and is prone to be replaced by a different kind of language or a slightly different language of the same kind.

Both my answers are long enough that no doubt there'll be holes to pick in them. Eg. Should I have said "Scheme"? Well I don't think Scheme will ever make it big, but I do still think it'll be around in the long term to much the same degree it is now.

* By long term I meant at least 100 years for both Scheme and Haskell.

*Edit: That was a bit big, I'd like to correct it to "at least 30 years, and quite likely 100 years"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love 'Basic of the future' as a slur/compliment for a programming language.

<comment><USER7> If Python is the Basic of the future, then what is the PHP of the future?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> nice hack returning the next function in the chain. As a FSM user I will probably need this someday.

<comment><USER9> As the comments mention, it's an old technique called a trampoline.

<comment><USER10> I am surprised (and to some extent disappointed) that he did not know about trampolines, as it's common knowledge among language implementors (e.g. it's used everywhere to implement proper tail recursion for FFI calls).

Somehow I though that being a language creator (or working on a compiler for a decade) implies unimaginable amount of knowledge...

<comment><USER11> Another point of view is to be disappointed in language theory, if one can be so incredibly successful without it.

Reminds me of Edison.

<comment><USER12> I think GvR's special expertise is more in the 'user-interface' of programming languages than in their implementation. The whole point of Python, really, is to put the former before the latter; which is exemplified in GvR's 'readable- stack-traces before fancy-features-in-the-implementation' reasoning on the present point.

<comment><USER11> _Even if you're designing for professional programmers, in the end your programming language is basically a user-interface design. You will get much better results regardless of what you're trying to do if you think of it as a user-interface design._ Alan Kay <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nothing Is Like You Think It Will Be - <AUTHOR> http://powerstartups.net/2011/05/nothing-is-like-you-think-it-will-be/

<comment><AUTHOR> A few people told me I should blog and after a few days thinking about it, I'm following that advice. Blogging is really fun and providing value to HN in this way is the least I could do after getting such sound advice from the brilliant people that make the rounds of this board.

This is one of my very first articles, guys and I hope that you find it enjoyable :)</comment>


Microsoft Censors Pirate Bay Links in Windows Live Messenger - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-censors-pirate-bay-links-in-windows-live-messenger-120324/ <comment><USER2> We'll be seeing a lot more of this in the next couple of years. The RIAA and the MPAA will get more and more desperate and will call in more favors with industry buddies as they get closer to the recognition that they are losing the war in spite of winning a couple of battles.

In the Netherlands 'Brein', one of the rights organizations has done more to promote the pirate bay than the pirate bay ever could have hoped to achieve by themselves.

This is the biggest case of disruption that I've witnessed in my life so far and even though the outcome seems all but certain it remains to be seen how much damage the wounded bear will be able to inflict before finally keeling over.

edit:

This prompted me to post a thing I wrote a while ago but didn't publish: <http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+death+throes+of+an+industry>

<comment><USER3> I'm disappointed to see the destruction of property rights (intellectual or otherwise) being lauded on HN.

The RIAA and MPAA make deals with artists to distribute their music, and you want to interfere and just steal it instead. It's dishonest, it's juvenile, and it's eroding at the basis of society (equality under the law, property rights, basic respect and goodwill towards others, etc.).

<comment><USER4> What is fascinating to me is the hypocrisy.

Most HNers probably believe some sort of property rights for software (or even blog designs). May here would argue that the GPL is a great license and violators should be punished.

You can also often read that Hollywood and the Music Industry are producing worthless crap, but yet The Pirate Bay is dominated by commercial entertainment, not by Creative Commons content.

Much of it is certainly an emotional reaction to the aggressive behavior of RIAA/MPAA, but it really is sad to see so little capacity to see things from a different perspective.

<comment><USER5> It's interesting, because there are sources on the internet that catalogue a taxonomy for all manner of fallacious arguments (Wikipedia is one obvious example), but there doesn't seem to be a name for claiming that internet posts written by the people in set A are hypocritical because they presumably- contradict either 1) posts by people in set B happened to appear on the same website, or 2) some hand-waving characterization of the zeitgeist of the site's denizens.

This is clearly fallacious, I don't know why people keep using this technique, and we really should give it a name so that it can be referred to by shorthand. (Any suggestions?)

If you happen to find a person in the set A intersect B, then you've got a case against that individual. But nobody seems to go to that much effort.

<comment><USER6> It's called the ecological fallacy -- the idea that a phenomenon which is observed (or in the GP's case, totally made up) at the population level can be automatically assumed to apply at the individual level. Stereotypes are a common example of this fallacy.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I'd be willing to bet this is due to some malware flag (as that pretty much always ends up being the case with IM provider X is censoring Y), I am baffled as to why people would consider it scandalous that a multi-billion dollar company who makes pretty much all of its revenue from selling intellectual property licenses might drop links conveyed using its free service to a site that is unabashedly one of the world's foremost facilitators of intellectual property rights violations.

<comment><USER2> The would consider it scandalous because:

1) they consider their communications private

2) they think that what they type into an IM client will pop out on the other end unchanged

3) they believe that their relationship with the facilitator of their communications media should not be subject to relationships that provider has with other commercial parties.

Where does it end? Being unable to share the link of your favourite restaurant because it hurts the interests of your communications provider?

The amount of modification of any messages by two parties that trust each other enough to engage in one-on-one communications should be set to '0' by default, unless they request otherwise.

<comment><USER8> That gives me an idea for the most evil chat system ever: modify links to hotels, restaurants etc based on the size of kickbacks from competing establishments.

More seriously, chat _should_ work so that the client signs and encrypts each message, hiding it from the provider and anyone other than the intended recipient.

<comment><USER9> Or you could just create a chat client that modifies links to amazon and other retailers to automatically include your affiliate link. Profit!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what the political forces behind this are, because I'd like to think that the engineers that implemented it understood that

a) it will do nothing to stop piracy, and b) it will reduce usage of Live Messenger

<comment><USER11> To be fair, there is a lot of malware masquerading as The Lion King.torrent. They may not care about the piracy aspect; they may just want their users to have less malware on their computers, especially since Windows machines seem to be a prime target for botnets.

<comment><USER12> The comment section always have people informing if it is malware or not, besides; in that line of logic they would have to censor all file hosting services (those don't even have comment section)

<comment><USER13> Firsty, comment sections are usually full of noise and it's next to impossible to distill any valuable information out of it. Secondly, don't expect an average person to bother checking for potential malware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, what's the most convenient way to IM with end-to-end encryption? I don't like the idea of it being _possible_ for an intermediate to scan through my private messages.

<comment><USER15> Possibly Skype? It does have end to end encryption but this is hard to validate independently.

<comment><USER16> Well I for one hope they roll out this "feature" in Skype too, ASAP. I've been preaching to (some of) my buddies for years now why it is not a good idea to rely on a closed, centralized platform for communication, but they keep on telling me that Skype is just "so convenient" and they "don't need anything else".

Making Skype less convenient (by means of censorship) would mean that open and decentralized alternatives like XMPP get more attention, and that's a good thing IMHO.

<comment><USER15> Of course its a bad idea to rely on a closed platform. Except that the majority of people rely on closed platforms (Windows and iOS) to communicate all the time. MS could prohibit pirate bay links on windows using the automatic update system; but they probably wont't.

You have to use software that people are actually comfortable with and operate within that ecosystem. At the moment Skype may well be the best bet. Try finding another piece of software that has end to end encryption and is widely adopted by non-geek's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm a regular WLM user and this has been happening for years, I've seen innocuous links to small websites blocked too. It's rare that links are blocked but I wouldn't be so quick to suggest this is intentional on the part of Microsoft. The frequency at which a new URL is being shared could have triggered some sort of automatic blocking system because it's assumed to be a worm?

> Apparently, the company is actively monitoring people's communications to > prevent them from linking to sites they deem to be a threat.

Everything passes through their servers, it's not P2P and never has been, doesn't everyone know this about WLM? It's how they're able to support offline messaging.

<comment><USER14> There's a difference between having a private conversation pass through your server and scanning it for naughty words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If this was actually done by mistake by their software, then we can expect TPB links to start working again in Windows Live Messenger any minute now, right?

I don't need Microsoft to "protect" me by not allowing me to see something. At most what they should do is warn me that it might contain malware, which is something they used to do with file transfers, too. But today I believe they just outright block most of them - even .rar files, unless they are scanned with some special MSN software of theirs that you need to download.

No thanks, Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER19> As more and more of this surface in critical times of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA etc. we will see an "outer net" emerging soon based on a p2p solution and highly encrypted. I know there is TOR but it`s not cutting it yet.

Maybe one of the big players (Google?) will join this battle for free speech and an open internet. Most of us do not want to be censored in any way.

The Unstoppable Force vs The Immovable Object.

<comment><USER20> Google needs the cooperation of the content industry to make its media service, Google Play, anything approaching successful. If the choice is between censoring content and having a successful product then kowtowing to the other entities will always win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder whether they block magnet links as well. In either case, URL shorteners seem to be a sufficient solution.

<comment><USER14> Maybe switching IM networks is an altogether better solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> HN is slowly turning into Reddit.

TPB is probably being censored by the software because some automated process to ingest and aggregate threating sites flagged that site as hosting malware. This is just like Google stopping you from clicking thru to sites which they know host virii / trojans. Calm down.

</comment><comment><USER22> If Microsoft is able to police conversations carried over Live Messenger, shouldn't it be unable to invoke the dumb pipe defense and be held responsible for any piracy its service allows to happen because its negligence in blocking the evil activity happening on its own network. They even _profit_ from those activities! And not only copyright infringement - bank robberies, terrorist attacks, child molestation, heresy - it's all their fault for not blocking it in the first place.

I would _love_ to see this idea in court.

OTOH, who can be sure they do not store IP and login (or other personal information associated with the Live profile) and hand it to anyone with the proper court order?

</comment><comment><USER23> MSN/Live Messenger is blocking all URLs ending in .torrent for years already. But blocking a FQDN like thepiratebay.org is even stranger... who makes/maintains these censoring block lists, and why is this not explained to users?

</comment><comment><USER24> That's why people should move to open and decentralized instant messages networks.

xmpp/jabber for example are easy to setup, federation is supported by some major parties (google talk for example) and use OTR (or PGP if you can convince your friends) encryption whenever possible.

Pidgin, Adium and others support it out of the box or through easily installable plugins and even your [mom] can use it since the key generation and handshake can be automatic, requiring only optional authentication if you are paranoid.

</comment><comment><USER25> Facebook does this as well. (Or at least, they did until The Pirate Bay changed it's TLD to `.se`)

You could argue that it's for the user's security. Torrent sites do have a lot of sketchy cruft.

<comment><AUTHOR> > You could argue that it's for the user's security

Who would believe that argument?

<comment><USER11> People who frequently have to clean out their parents' computers because they wanted to watch something, and ended up joining a botnet.

<comment> v-yadli +1

Tech people detect malware with bare eyes,average users do this by installing the malware.

<comment><USER11> > average users do this by installing the malware

And even then, I'd say they only detect it 50% of the time, at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is there anything stopping them from doing the same in Internet Explorer ? And they're not stranger to issuing automatic updates that mess with Firefox, so..

</comment><comment><USER27> Just one more example of why you shouldn't use private communication without end-to-end encryption.

</comment><comment><USER28> This doesn't bother me. Or, I should say, I'm not inherently opposed to it.

Microsoft is a private company acting on their own will. This censorship is one I might not agree with, but it could just make the case for another uncensored client to become popular.

As long as this type of behavior isn't forced by a government, I actually like it in the long run. I think companies should take a stance on things, and seeing Microsoft act this way just makes me more happy with companies who take the opposite stance. If that favorability change happens with enough people, theoretically Microsoft could hurt financially. This would then make it more profitable to be open and uncensored.

So, in a nutshell, I've seen comments elsewhere about this that were SUPER negative and hateful. I understand them, but at the same time, I think this is just another signal to instead focus on and promote those platforms that focus on and promote freedom. And a big signal, to boot.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's an unregulated private service, they can. It's just that they can no longer claim "commOn carrier" status. If they don't do that for everyone, they are assisting piracy. Let the lawsuits begin.

</comment><comment><USER30> The text looks like it thinks TPB is malware. TPB is certainly not a site I'd visit on a Windows box, the ads bring new meaning to the word "shady".

(Google's safe browsing database disagrees with me here, though.)

</comment><comment><USER31> I think this is totally fine. Live Messenger is a private service, and Microsoft can run it however they want. Users will simply switch to competing services that don't suck. Let the market decide.

Also, as behavior like this increases in frequency, we'll finally be forced to address the current usability issues with point-to-point cryptography and adopt it more broadly. Microsoft shouldn't be able to read anything you write unless you choose to share it with them.

A world where all communication is encrypted requires more software development effort, but ends up better for everyone in the long run. Calls, emails, text messages - none of them should be intelligible to anyone other than the parties explicitly involved.

</comment><comment><USER9> Any censorship or modification of your "private" communication is a very scary precedent to set. Will they start modifying hotmail emails or bing search results next?

</comment><comment><USER32> wow I thought everyone knew this. I ran the 110mb.com infra and that domain and subdomains were blocked in messenger. years ago that was.

</comment><comment><USER33> So what does this mean for companies that conduct legitimate business over TPB. Does this allow for some kind of action against MS?

</comment><comment><USER34> Solution from the comments: tinyurl.com (or similar). This should be instinct for many twitter users by now

<comment><USER35> Shortened urls are trivial to check, and could still be easily blocked. Or else the url shortening services will just be flagged themselves as being "bad" links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Microsoft knows very well that people will just write "thep!!!!!ratebay.se/slug".

</comment><comment><USER37> I feel sick to my stomach. Companies shouldn't censor personal chats like this.

</comment><comment><USER38> Thank you, Microsoft for promoting endpoint to endpoint encryption.

</comment><comment><USER39> The Gmail Man seems to be working for Microsoft now.

</comment><comment><USER40> "Actively" by having software do it for them.

</comment><comment><USER41> this is clearly not a solution

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh give me a break! I hate when they pull the censorship card like that. It cheapens all other real threats to free speech.

If you like propaganda that justifies pirating, keep reading the Torrent freak blog with their red herrings like censorship and their "battle for free speech".

Microsoft is exercising their rights just like we get to exercise ours. It's a private company offering you free software (as in no money exchanged) and they don't want to let you share torrent files and for good damn reason. I'd do that too if I were Microsoft!

Anyone who claims the Pirate Bay is a place to share cool new media that's released for free is just kidding themselves. Look at their most popular downloads. It's primarily all copyrighted music, movies, and software that are being shared without the owner's consent. Sure, there are a decent number of artists sharing their work via TPB and the Pirate Bay do a lot of promoting of that stuff. But make no mistake, the majority of people are just downloading a bunch of free, copyrighted work.

It would be censorship if Live Messenger were the only or one of few viable options for IM but that's far from being the case. I sincerely doubt Microsoft cares about you downloading albums for free. They just don't want you sharing Windows 8 over their app (when it finally ships, that is) that's all.

Is that not a legitimate concern? To try to stop people from getting your product without paying you? That's reasonable. They put a ton of time and money into developing software and they don't do it for their health. Just because it's digital and takes zero effort to copy doesn't mean that after the first copy is sold everything else should be up for grabs.

Whenever the torrent people start yammering about censorship and free speech and try to sound all hip, smart, and progressive, it's just a distraction. It's really about continuing to operate while ignoring IP laws. Whether you think copyright is okay or not is irrelevant because the laws are on the books and enforced. If all you do in protest of those laws is pirate music and movies you're really just creating more problems for yourself. Piracy alone as a protest only creates more censorship and restrictions of free speech as Torrent Freak would call it. If you really believe in all those nice sounding ideals you have to get up from behind your monitor and write a letter, make a phone call, or actually show up somewhere and do something.

This article was downright laughable. This is just a PR war and damn easy one to win too. It's easy to hate "big evil corporations" and to love getting shit free with little to no effort needed.

<comment><USER43> >"It would be censorship if Live Messenger were the only or one of few viable options for IM but that's far from being the case. I sincerely doubt Microsoft cares about you downloading albums for free. They just don't want you sharing Windows 8 over their app (when it finally ships, that is) that's all."

Not at all true. Free speech is free speech. Where do you draw the line? This establishes precedent, and frankly it's pretty creepy to think that M$ is monitoring all your communications.

Solution: tell M$ that you're dropping all of their products over this, and actually do it. Then set up XMPP and dump their messaging service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Now we know why Microsoft/MSN doesn't have a true "off the record" feature. They want to be able to monitor your conversations and censor you like this.

</comment><comment><USER45> The world _has_ gone mad.</comment>


Hack your brain to learn more, faster and better - <AUTHOR> http://www.blinkingcaret.com/2016/05/04/hack-your-brain-learn-faster-better/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR: Use spaced-repetition software.

<comment><USER3> Just put the questions/against in an IR system so they are at your fingertips when you ask them again so you don't need to mess around with Google and SO.</comment></comment>


Unfavinator: A Free Tool to Delete Twitter Favorites - <AUTHOR> http://unfavinator.com/

<comment><USER2> Semi-related: I use favorites to "bookmark" tweeted links I want to read later ... is there any tool to turn the links in my favorites into a feed or put them into my Flipboard?

If not, I'll "seed invest" $25 to someone who builds it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use IFTTT and Pocket to read my favs, I assume you want to create a magazine.</comment></comment>


Pixelmator for iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.pixelmator.com/ipad/ <comment><USER2> At $5, this is a steal. (I was honestly expecting $10, as is the case with Photoshop). It's extremely fast, especially on an iPad Air 2.</comment>


The Story Behind a Radical New Idea: A Social Network for Academia - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/srikumar-rao/richard-price-academia-edu-users.html

<comment><USER2> Sorry to say that I almost fell off my chair to see a claim that a social network for academia is a radical new idea. This is an old established idea that has been with us for over 150 years. Academia is one of the most successful social networks ever. Sure, there are changes in how it functions but I wouldn't call that radical. Academics were the early adopters of the Internet, creating thousands of mailing lists before the web came along.

I read lots of academic papers and I find them in two ways. One, is that I google for them. And the second is by following up references in papers to find a particular author's web page where they usually have lots of info about their work including a complete list of papers that they have published. Often these are very old school web pages that were started circa 1992 or so. The WWW only went public in 1990.

Ever since academia moved onto the Internet in around 1990, they have been innovating with bibliographic servers that go far beyond a web search engine. It is nice to see some more incremental improvements but the hype about it being radical and new does more harm than help.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't see how this is a "radical new idea". It's a good idea and very valuable if executed correctly, but taking an existing, proved model (aka facebook) and tweaking it to work for academics is not new and hardly radical. I'm not hating on the idea, I love more tools for academia, but the title is hyperbole.

<comment><USER4> i thought the same thing at first, having just read the title, but it seems it's really not about the "social network" part at all. this is more like arXiv.org in that it's a platform for academics to publish their own research papers.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried actually logging in? This is not quite arxiv.org — I'd estimate that 90% of the engineering going into academia.edu has gone towards features on par with LinkedIn for their spamminess. I signed up, and was asked about 10 times to connect to Facebook, Gmail, invite my friends, etc.

They have some interesting features (such as feeds of recent articles organized by journal you can sign up for), but by far the most important feature of academia.edu is growing academia.edu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the first I have seen of academia.edu. Everyone I know are on researchgate.net. First comment was about orcid.org, another site I just found out about. Talk about market saturation and social network fragmentation!

<comment><USER7> Very, very fragmented. I'm building something that is in some ways competing with Academia.edu, and I didn't even discover them until I was _deep_ into the market research. But maybe I'm just a crappy researcher :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8>
      It has 4.8 million users--about a quarter of the 17 million academics and graduate students worldwide

Looks like they're hitting critical mass. I love the idea that this is liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers that our taxes are paying for.

I'm also delighted that Khosla Ventures are giving this room to breathe. "Khosla does appear to be increasingly open to investing in startups that have a social mission and a business model. This is often referred to as 'impact investing'"

<comment><USER9> > liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers

Annoyingly, you have to register an account and log in to download any papers. The uploader doesn't have any control over this. It's still free, but distinctly worse than arXiv, or heck, even the classic academic homepage with PDFs on it, both of which already exist.

I would guess this also inflates their membership count, which is, I assume, the reason for the requirement. I myself never use academia.edu when I can help it, but I have an account because I must sometimes log in when someone has chosen to host their paper there instead of somewhere better.

<comment><USER10> Although not primarily in the discovery space, if you're a user of arXiv, you may be interested in the n-gram viewer our lab made: [http://arxiv.culturomics.org](http://arxiv.culturomics.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know whether it's Rao's write-up or not but this sounds like absolute rubbish written by yet another "business management" "consultant".

Is Hacker News about hacking or about lame web-2.0 bubble business bullshit?

<comment><USER12> About 20% hacking, 80% bbb. But I find so many gems in that 20% it's still one of the best single sources on the net for hacking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Worth mentioning Orcid.org. Solves broadly the same problem. No need to get profit involved.

<comment><USER14> One of the problems with for-profit is that the company is likely to sell its community out if they think that'll make them more money. See: Elsevier buying Mendeley and the backlash from that: [http://www.theguardian.com/higher- education-network/blog/201...](http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education- network/blog/2013/apr/10/elsevier-buys-mendeley-academic-reaction)

This Onion talk put it really well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_m6U1f9o)

<comment><USER15> @smokinn thank you for the great video! I didn't know that the onion had such quality talks. I personally use Mendeley, but only to obtain other people's Papers and sync my Bibtex fies.

@afandian NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia.

Generally speaking, I really don't get what's good about those platforms. Can anyone try to explain why people keep using it for another thing than peer- pressure?? I mean you upload a damn pdf with some meta-data attached to it. What's so hard? Use XMPP/IRC or Usenet for the communication and you're set, I must be dumb. I don't see why there is a need for those "new social networks". When email/mailing-lists/irc/xmpp/usenet/forums etc. already exist.

<comment><USER13> Sorry I didn't understand your comment "NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia". Could you clarify?

<comment><USER15> Not worth it for academia means, that academia deserves something better than a vendor lock-in, by some closed-source software. It deserves a medium that doesn't stand in it's way, but empowers students/professors, scientists and other people, instead of depowering them by centralizing all power to one login provider.

Academia is about innovation and sharing knowledge. A gatekeeper or a closed- source platform inevitably creates a bottleneck that slows innovation and knowledge sharing down. Furthermore, a social network as Academia requires a medium that adapts to it's need, not the other way around, therefore an optimal solution can only be opensource.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This places some of our greatest resources into a closed box not available to the general public.

</comment><comment><USER17> How does one obtain a .edu domain name?

<comment><USER9> Either you have to be a legitimate academic institution, or you aren't, but are grandfathered in because you acquired the domain before 2001. This case is #2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought that was how facebook started

</comment><comment><USER19> April fool?</comment>


Ask HN: Tooltip with full title of the post in 'Comments' and 'Threads' - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I humbly request this feature.</comment>


Writing an OS in Rust (Second Edition) - <AUTHOR> https://os.phil-opp.com <comment><USER2> I think these posts will be much more enjoyable in 2020 when we hopefully have a stable compiler. Not a huge fan of switching to nightly to get certain functions.

And don't get me started on the cross compile support. While Go ships a single binary that supports many targets, in rust you need to mess with rustup, compile your own libraries and even then it might not work...

Can't wait for 2020 to arrive.

<comment><USER3> Is there some guarantee that the features you have mentioned will arrive in 2020, or are you just wishful?

I too am waiting for a time when Rust's cross-compile support is as good as Go.

That being said, if my application can work with a garbage compiler, is Rust still the right choice?

<comment><USER2> I think the features are already accepted, we just need to wait for them to mature and find their way into the stable version.</comment></comment></comment>


The Universal Right to Capital Income - <AUTHOR> https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/basic-income-funded-by-capital-income-by-yanis-varoufakis-2016-10 <comment><USER2> I think Varoufakis is profoundly misled in thinking that basic income can be a left-wing policy.

It is a well-known fact that there are two versions of basic income out there: the right-wing version, where welfare is removed and replaced with a single allocation that isn't high enough to live of it; and a left-wing version, where the distributed amount is sufficient to live a decent life and thus gives "real freedom" to people.

Here is why I think the left-wing version is a fantasy: I start from the assumption that capitalistic economies like ours mainly relies on coercion. In other words, critical parts of production depend on people who would rather do something else, if it wasn't their only way to eat. Under that assumption, any policy that gives people a real choice between being employed in a factory and doing the things they really want to do removes in fact the coercion — making the economy collapse.

The form collapsing would take could for example be the following: low-paid, exhausting and low-considered jobs are not taken anymore, and yet society depends on them. The only way to make the workers come back is to pay them much better. But this can only lead to a combination of dramatic price rises and cuts in shareholder profit (and I am not an advocate of capital income, but sadly it is currently one of the main incentives for investment).

For these reasons, I am convinced that any attempt to implement a left-wing basic income will inevitably result in the right-wing version taking over, meaning less rights for the workers and a destroyed welfare.

<comment><USER3> That's clearly a faulty assumption. If production depends on a job and supply is short, then the value and pay will rise until supply meets demand.

The assumption also ignores advances in automation. Factories of the future may not need a single human, except the capitalist to sign papers.

<comment><USER2> > That's clearly a faulty assumption. If production depends on a job and > supply is short, then the value and pay will rise until supply meets demand.

I don't disagree with your statement about supply and demand. But as a matter of fact, the supply is never short, because structures of society force a large fraction of the population into jobs they cannot let go, whether they like it or not.

It is common knowledge that people of low social status are given a choice between shitty jobs and starvation. Saying "if the job is not good enough, supply will fall and wages will have to rise" does not take into account the highly competitive character of the job market, especially for those with low educational capital.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do all discussions of basic income omit the best argument in favor of it?

I would think, especially on a site like HN, that people would realize just how valuable BI would be to entrepreneurs. Many people don't pursue business ideas for fear that they'll burn through savings or have problems paying for the necessities of life. With BI, that concern goes away. You may have to scale your lifestyle back a bit, but you basically start at ramen profitability.

And yet all discussions of BI tend to frame it as an extension of welfare given to people who can't earn enough to support themselves. I'm not against taking care of the poor, but when you frame the argument like that, you miss the benefits to society from all that extra entrepreneurship.

<comment><USER5> You have to counter-balance that benefit by the fraction of adults who otherwise would be working productive jobs but instead decide to spend their hours and BI rock climbing, playing video games, or writing bad poetry.

Would extra entrepreneurship make up for their loss of production? Maybe, but I don't think entrepreneurship and employment levels in nations where welfare provides everyone with guaranteed "ramen profitability" are encouraging on that front.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like there may be entrepreneurial opportunities for rock climbing gear, video game design, and poetry sharing.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but ultimately the money to pay for those things has to come from production. There's no free lunch.

<comment><USER6> Increasingly, machines can and will be handing out "free lunches" of production. Under traditional assumptions, these free lunches belong solely to the factory/AI owners, and those made thusly obsolete can fuck off and starve or lobby their representative forms of government for crumbs of the pie. Or we can start recognizing that now more than ever the fruits of capital and the means of production must be redistributed.

Think of it another way, we're getting the above mentioned losses of human production _anyways_ , because vast swathes of human mass will be made completely obsolete. Except without redistribution they won't be playing video games, writing bad poetry, or going rock climbing, they'll simply be starving. The question is do we let them hang, while those lucky enough to inherit server clusters running AI and fleets of self driving cars sit back and solely claim unprecedented concentration of capital?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >The idea that you work hard and pay your income taxes, while I live off your enforced kindness, doing nothing by choice, is untenable. If a universal basic income is to be legitimate, it cannot be financed by taxing Jill to pay Jack. That is why it should be funded not from taxation, but from returns on capital.

Capital is savings is unconsumed income.

"Universal dividend" is another name for tax on investment which is another name for tax on income. Whether confiscating income to pay for leisure is "untenable" shouldn't depend on the name you give the act of confiscating income.

In the end, a corporation is a machine that takes investment now and distributes dividends later, and the reason why the investment occurs is the promise of dividends. A corporation has to distribute $100 in dividends to get $75 into the hands of its investors (given a tax on capital gains of 25%), or it has to distribute $100 in dividends to get $75 dollars into the hands of its investors and $25 for the government because the government confiscated 25% of the IPO... what's the difference? I guess in Varoufakis' model people can still buy, like, gold as an investment and enjoy preferential taxation.

<comment><USER6> Not posting to disagree, necessarily, just to state my somewhat muddled thoughts and ask for your critique.

> Capital is savings is unconsumed income.

If you think of it that way you can pretty much equivocate capital and income tax. The way that they differ in reality is that subsistence laborers generally have no reason to pay capital tax. For the rich, capital tax is a huge proportion of their tax burden. Picture an heiress who does not earn a salary a day in her life. Modern trends of decreasing capital tax leads to effectively a regressive total tax structure. I think the author is essentially arguing for a more progressive tax, in a way that feels more "fair".

<comment><USER7> >If you think of it that way you can pretty much equivocate capital and income tax

They are equivalent. Income is only good for consumption and investment (which is just deferred consumption), so if you tax income and you also tax everything that income is used for, you have taxed the same income twice. In fact income used to buy equity is taxed three times, first when it is earned, second every time the company reports a profit and then third every time the company issues a dividend. But all of these are collected on the "same" money.

If you want the rich to have a greater part of the tax burden, that's fine, but Varoufakis pretends he can argue against income tax in one paragraph, and argue for a functionally identical revenue scheme in the next.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fixation on IPOs seems more than fishy to me. Corporations that already exist would get to pay 100% tax free dividends, whereas corporations that IPO after the watershed moment give the unnamed percentage of dividends to the "Commons Capital Depository"? What about private companies? This would just create uncalculatable incentives. Corporations are already going far too much for war-chest over dividends as it is.

So why not at least tie it to estate taxation? It seems so obvious to me that Varoufakis not mentioning the possibility looks like him being all too careful to avoid stepping on certain feet.

Seize that percentage when they are passed on from someone who (maybe) earned the capital to someone who by definition did not. Convert shares to special "dividends taxed for CCD" shares if you don't want to repeat for each generation and/or you don't want to mess up voting. It would certainly create an imbalance between public corporations and privately held ones, but according to the usual anti-estate-tax arguments that is exactly what you want: don't split up the family farm. But share portfolios are inherently splittable. If the next AT&T or Standard Oil turns out to be a private company due to abuse of this imbalance, forced IPO beyond a certain size might be an emergency hatch option. But that is one of the few problems where i think it is perfectly reasonable to not put too much thought into before they happen.

I do however like the idea of something UBI-like that is not defined by needs (with all their inherent negotiability and the destructive bickering that comes with it) but directly by the capability of the underlying economy.

(edit: removed concrete numbers which i somehow thought were inside the original article, but which i only accidentally picked up from a peer comment)

<comment><USER5> _I do however like the idea of something UBI-like that is not defined by needs (with all their inherent negotiability and the destructive bickering that comes with it) but directly by the capability of the underlying economy._

If you squint at the right angle, this is essentially the argument for "privatizing" Social Security. Even in that limited form it's a huge political loser (for a mix of good and bad reasons, IMO).

<comment><USER8> An interesting observation. The way i squint at it, i see a separation of concerns between need-based welfare (e.g. disability support) and purely redistributive aspects intended to avoid collapse by the combined forces of capital concentration and shrinking demand for labor.

Defined rules instead of making up decisions as you go. That is always a tough sell, because it considerably reduces the scope of activity for politicians. Less for them to decide or promise. But that does not mean that we should not try. Imagine the opposite: a state that engages generously in welfare, but only ever in one-time handouts. It would be a perpetual repetition of those in power feeding of all critical mouths.

I think that this is exactly how the Roman Empire dealt with the "automation problem" of their time (a massive increase of forced labor imports -slavery- completely wrecking the domestic labor market). Now where again did fascism's namesake originate? Not really the point, I am convinced that everybody would agree that one-off welfare is a power politicians should not have (even politicians, as long as they are not in power).

No matter where you stand on the question of more or less welfare, I think you should always fight for it being more regulated. Which in the case of welfare, means "de-politicising" it as far as possible.

<comment><USER5> I've always thought it would be interesting (albeit massively undemocratic) to give the Fed a lever on fiscal policy.

I am not an expert on central banks and macroeconomics, but I don't see why the Fed couldn't wiggle payroll tax rates around, keeping it revenue neutral by making up any shortfall with the printing presses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only problem with this is that it would concentrate ownership of all industries in the hands of the government, eventually.</comment>


Greece tries to start up - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupgreece.gov.gr/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sorry I deleted by mistake. The site seems to be up again but things like that happen when you are a startup. In general Greece is like a startup, no fixed procedures, formalities and so on and a high risk to fail :)</comment>


Facebook now shows you your own search history - <AUTHOR>

If you go to your Activity Log and check the box that says "Include Only Me Activity", all your searches will be displayed. Personally, I'm scared I'll forget to log off my facebook account one day and that someone might get access to which of my friends profiles I've searched for. What are your opinions? <comment><USER2> This is actually several months old:

[http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3369878/facebook-saves- you...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3369878/facebook-saves-your- searches-activity-log)

> The default privacy setting for searches is "Only Me," and cannot be changed > unlike the privacy toggles of other Activity Log entries. But, you can > delete any searches you want to hide from yourself. The idea is to provide > added context and transparency to using Facebook, as well as provide you > with complete control over every single thing you do on the site, like > searches — which apparently we're doing a lot of.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see any searches, in fact the only thing that seems to change by clicking "Include only me activity" (and what is that even meant to mean?) is the query string in the URL.

I really wish everyone would switch to Google+, it's so much better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try to search for a friend using the search bar on your newsfeed. Then go back and look again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is what you end up with — <http://i.imgur.com/bmdVc.png>

Not the most comforting feature they've ever introduced. Especially as it shows you your history previous to this point.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hate it. What are our options for deleting/preventing this?

<comment><USER6> You can clear all of your searches in one click:

Activity Log >>> More (Under Comments) >>> Search >>> Clear Searches

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> they have been showing this for a couple months. I wasn't thrilled when I saw my history so now I don't do much searching. FB logs everything.

<comment><USER8> So does Google.. and probably a lot of other sites.. Amazon etc.</comment></comment>


Homeless moms evicted after taking over vacant house in Oakland - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/15/moms-4-housing-oakland-homelessness-eviction <comment><USER2> A similar (potential) headline: Milpitas Man Arrested for Stealing Car

</comment><comment><USER3> TLDR: can't take things that belong to other people.</comment>