Hacker News Reader

padobsonon Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

Four of those 10 districts are suburbs of DC. They're voting for bigger government because they're getting rich from it.

padobsonon Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

Wow. According to that first chart, the middle class has shrunk 10% since 1971, with the upper class getting 5% larger and the lower class getting 5% larger.

padobsonon Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

This causes them to act against their own best interests.

This is why enlightenment values have ultimately tilted toward capitalism. No collective can accurately define the best interests of every individual and design a policy to match. Better to let them sort it out themselves.

padobsonon I Sell Onions on the Internet

I spent a minute thinking about a product local to me that had the same appeal. I typed http://michiganlamb.com into the browser and discovered the concept is not uncommon.

padobsonon Lessons from the Long Depression

I had the exact same thoughts watching this: https://youtu.be/A5xKz5AcuXE

Right around 4:20 he actually argues that real estate investment is a bad thing.

What really blows my mind is that the production value of this video far surpasses that of the average Reddit comment, though the argument is essentially the same.

padobsonon Lessons from the Long Depression

Wow. So do you see an analagous relationship between the freed blacks entering the American labor market in the late nineteenth century and the Chinese peasants entering the global labor market in the last 4 decades?

padobsonon Give Me Back My Monolith

I don't think I blame the author at all. I'm not sure why you would start with microservices, unless you wanted to show that you could build a microservices application. Monoliths are quicker and easier to setup when you're talking about a small service in the first place.

It's when an organization grows and the software grows and the monolith starts to get unwieldy that it makes sense to go to microservices. It's then that the advantage of microservices both at the engineering and organizational level really helps.

A team of three engineers orchestrating 25 microservices sounds insane to me. A team of of thirty turning one monolith into 10 microservices and splitting into 10 teams of three, each responsible for maintaining one service, is the scenario you want for microservices.

padobsonon A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

The process of forcibly integrating colonized peoples into the capitalist labour system caused widespread dislocation (a history I cover in The Divide). Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labour system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died – half the population. This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population of 90% of the country. This is the period of the famines in India, where 30 million died needlessly as a result of policies the British imposed on Indian agriculture. This is the period of the Opium Wars in China and the unequal treaties that immiserated the population. And don’t forget: all of this was conducted in the name of the “free market”.

This paragraph basically backs up all of Pinker's criticisms. No one advocating for neoliberal capitalism would suggest that any of the evils of colonialization are the policies that most quickly brought prosperity to developing nations. Pinker is advocating that as economies become more free, they become more prosperous. There's nothing free about forced labor or death marches.

The bit on "absolute povery numbers" is insane:

The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981, from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion, according to World Bank data.

This willfully ignores the fact that the world population has gone from 4.5 billion to 7.5 billion, because of plummeting mortality rates and access to healthcare and infrastructure. 3 billion extra people survived in 30 years. That's CRAZY! We should be having parades about that everyday.

And the main problem with his poverty metric is that he's changing the numbers to obfuscate the progress. It doesn't matter if you use $1.90/day, $3.20/day, $5.50/day or $7.40/day. What matters is that fewer people live on the wrong side of the line today than they did yesterday, and fewer people did yesterday than the day before, and that has happened every single day for the past 30 years.

Almost every example he uses of capitalism being bad are really colonialism enforced by state power. He rightly points out that some countries enjoyed increased prosperity when they freed themselves from their colonial powers, but that only enforces Pinker's arguments.

Hickel spends most of this piece turning Pinker's arguments into strawmen. It's a marxist rant with cherry-icked stats that don't actually support his position. He should rightfully be dismissed as a bad faith actor in the conversation.

padobsonon Could Get Millions to Turn Factory into Condos, Is Not Selling

I feel like profits need a re-branding campaign. It's so easy to paint them as a negative, and even the most vocal capitalists will shrug and suggest they're something neutral.

Profits are a signal, and a powerful one at that. Outside of rent seeking, which I regard as fairly rare, profits signal that an entrepreneur is delivering value in excess of the costs to produce the value. Spread out over the size of a community, region, or nation, that's like magic!

Furthermore, they're not cold and unemotional, as is suggested here. Value almost always has an emotional component. The profitable condos that people want to build aren't going to be inhabited by automatons. They'll be inhabited by people - people who will date, get married, have children, people that will graduate from high school and college, people that will march in parades, protest in political movements, enjoy and create culture. To look at the value that companies want to create in this space like a shameless cash grabs ignores the very humanity that assigns that value in the first place.

Profits are not evil. They're a signal of efficient production of value, and value implies a benefit for humanity.

padobsonon Roger McNamee says the 'like' button was 'beginning of the end'

I sort of find myself in the same boat, but now I have very few high quality arguments.

Reddit and Facebook and Twitter are chalk full of people ready to have a low quality debate, but there are some rare instances where you'll get some genuine insight from interlocutors.

HN seems to be a good source, but in general on any given subject it's very difficult to find a good faith, intellectually honest, substance-based disagreement on the Internet.

As you say, it seems better for one's IQ and eIQ to lose Reddit and Facebook and Twitter, but it'd still be nice to have a place to sanity-check new ideas.

padobsonon Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet

They should stop selling advertising and charge for API access to the social graph, both users and app developers. There should be a free tier with the core functionality for users.

This will realign Facebook's interests with the interests of their userbase.

padobsonon The Market for Lemons

I wonder if there's a tipping point in information asymmetry where the theory becomes irrelevant. Sellers will almost always have more information than buyers about a specific instance of a product, but there comes a point in a market where buyers have ENOUGH information to avoid buying a lemon, and so can adjust their offer based on that information and disrupt the feedback loop that drives peach owners out of the market.

As an example, you probably could have done very well for yourself in 2009 buying mortgage-backed securities that didn't include any subprime loans. The securities may have had other problems, but at some point there was enough information available to stop buying the lemon securities for subprime loans and pay a bit more than p.avg for the security if it wasn't backed by subprime loans. Information asymmetry still exists, but there's enough information available to avoid making a catastrophic purchase.

So it's almost like the market for lemons is forced to self-correct, because the quality of the product in the market will necessarily drop until it becomes obvious to the buyers what attributes distinguish between a lemon and a peach.

So maybe the chief lesson in The Market for Lemons is if it looks like a market is all peaches, you shouldn't buy anything at all until you've found a few lemons, and there's money to be made in that market if you can distinguish between peaches and lemons before anyone else.

So is information asymmetry really just a market opportunity for a savvy buyer?

padobsonon Strong and Weak Technologies

I completely agree with this. After reading some of the examples in the list (E-Sports vs. Traditional Sports, Hybrid Cars vs Electric Cars), it was clear the concept was not fully baked. This one needs to go back in the oven for a bit.

In the case of hybrids vs. electrics, it's fine if you want to say hybrids are like the Blackberry - an initiating technology that prepares the market for a sweeping, fundamental change. But that's certainly different from Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, two technologies that aim to accomplish different things, or streaming music vs MP3 downloads, which offer two different value propositions in the lease vs. own models.

The idea needs to be more specific, like initiating technology vs. mature technology or evolutionary technology vs. revolutionary technology. One could say the Blackberry or the Palm Pilot was actually the revolution, where the iPhone was the right evolution of that technology to fully capture the market. But now I'm just trying to backfit a backfitted concept.

padobsonon Startups Rejecting Venture Capital

I think what you're describing is really a part of the decision making process by founders and initial investors who are taking the company public or shopping equity to VC.

The default mode of a company is to increase shareholder wealth, but a company that clearly communicates to potential investors and the market as a whole that they have a different metric of shareholder value (e.g. social conscience, environmental concerns, customer experience) can still be successful in taking a company public or raising funds from VCs, they'll just be selling equity to a different, if overlapping, group of investors.

Companies that want to do good and don't think through how going public or taking investment will change the incentives on which the company operates are destined to end up in the default mode.

As always, try to put both your consumer and investment dollars in companies that understand that.

padobsonon The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

After a successful hanging, there are plenty of possible afterlife scenarios where you could have plenty of opportunity for regret. Most religions teach that suicide is punished in the next life. If we're living in a physics experiment or computer simulation, there's no guarantee our consciousness won't be stored elsewhere after death, opening up the possibility of regret, especially of the storage system sucks.

Maybe there won't be an opportunity for regret, but it's certainly not definitive.

padobsonon Blue Apron becomes a penny stock, trading under $1 for the first time

Still too much work!

How about you give me a list of meals, I pick 50 or 100 of them, and then you give me a shopping list for the month including where to get it at the best price, taking advantage of bulk purchasing and overlapping ingredients. Then email/text/notify me every day with the recipe for dinner that night. I'll keep the left overs and use them for lunches.

This should minimize time for planning and cost of meals, two things Blue Apron largely fails to do.

It'd also be nice if I could get a further notification asking me how long it took me to prepare, so the service can get an idea for how long it takes me to cook and help me plan dinners accordingly - maybe giving me faster alternative alongside the normal dinner plan.

padobsonon Scientists are looking for ways to put the simulation hypothesis to the test

There's a question as to whether ethics/morals/compassion scale with power. I think there's a solid argument to be made that human power has scaled near exponentially over the last 200 years while human ethics seem to be coupled to it (slavery and genocide are almost universally reviled where they were common place before, per capita violence is way way down, international and intercultural cooperation via trade, communication, etc have never been higher).

Are the two things tightly coupled? Seems difficult to prove, but if they are, they folks running our simulation are probably going to treat us a lot better than we treat each other.

padobsonon The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

Yeah, I definitely hear that. It's very easy to fool yourself into believing that something is helpful when it's not.

That said, I've definitely gotten a ton of benefit from reading HN. It's a great resource for discovering new tech, startups, research, and many other things. If you find part of it beneficial, maybe you should work it into your daily plan/schedule/checklist or however you might organize the productive parts of your day. Put it after a high-friction task, something you have trouble starting. Then reading HN is like a reward for completing that high-friction task.

Then you can contribute what you learned to a blog post or comment thread on HN, thus perpetuating the community.

padobsonon The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

Love this. Especially this part:

When Implementation mode fails it means the architect needs to reevaluate why and make changes

Every plan I've ever put together to improve myself or my life has failed on initial implementation. It wasn't until I expected the first iteration of the plan to fail that I learned how to succeed.

Plan. Fail. Tweak. Retry. The goal usually doesn't need to change, but the plan often does.

padobsonon NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

Plus anything that can be done to juice the supply side of the healthcare curve is a big benefit. Cheaper school means more doctors means lower labor costs means cheaper healthcare.

padobsonon NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

TV series residents don't even have time to sleep

Unless it's with each other...

padobsonon Video game crash of 1983

I've read that Nintendo basically had to make guarantees to big retailers like Sears that they would buy back any un-sold stock. That kind of risk taking coupled with the reasonable assumption (particularly in hindsight) that video games weren't just a fad along with the quality of games like Super Mario Bros. was the recipe for the NES re-starting the industry.

padobsonon The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do

Akrasia and Enkrateia remind me of the dual nature of humans that St. Paul describes in Romans:

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. Romans 7:14-25

Paul is writing here about the battle between a person's moral ideals and how their desires conflict and often overrun those ideals, admitting that even he is a hypocrite who does things he otherwise condemns.

I like how procrastination is discussed in forums like HN. We can recognize it as something keeping us from our goals, but can also empathize with each other in failing to master it. This is how I see the early church's approach to sin in St. Paul's era, or at least that was the point he was making in Romans.

In the same way, we can combat procrastination as a community by sharing our stories and providing the insight to overcome it. This is my favorite part of community, be it in church or on HN or elsewhere.

padobsonon $100M Was Once Big Money for a Startup. Now, It’s Common

I thought those particular examples were caused by federal subsidies and regulations juicing the demand side of the price curve via Medicare/Medicaid, Fannie/Freddie/FHA/USDA, and guaranteed student loans.

As I understand it, QE (and monetary policy more broadly) juices the supply side of the price curve, leading to a general rise in prices due to the increased supply of the metric we use to measure prices (i.e. dollars).

So it's likely QE has led to a general devaluing of the dollar that would lead upward pressure on all prices. The reason the three industries you mentioned have outpaced every other seems to be federal policies like subsidies and regulation juicing the demand side of the curve.

It also seems like those three industries are fairly insulated from globalization and, to an extent, automation, which accounts for a lot of the downwards pressure on prices, offsetting some of the devaluing effects of QE.

padobsonon Companies Shouldn’t Be Accountable Only to Shareholders

This is, by far, the best comment in this thread. It explains clearly, with simple arithmetic, that Marx's dream is already available to labor via the machinations of capitalism.

padobsonon EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

Pretty hard to call Nixon a small-government conservative. He was the last of the Rockefeller Republicans (counting Ford as part of his administration). Some Nixon Admin policies:

-Nominating Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court, who concurred in Roe v Wade.[0]

-Creating subsidies to turn corn into a commodity crop, effectively paying farmers to grow a lot of it[1]

-De-coupling the US Dollar from the value of gold and instituting price and wage controls[2]

No Republican in any district in 2018 America could get the nomination supporting these policies.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Supreme_Court_deci...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz#Secretary_of_Agricul...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Domestic_policy

padobsonon Periodic fasting starves cisplatin‐resistant cancers to death

It's pretty close to an 18/6 IF, depending on whether or not he does the tea in the evening.

padobsonon How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

Trying to replicate may be the biggest problem with education.

LeBron grew up in Akron. He knows the problems these kids are facing, and he's going out of his way to solve it specifically for them.

That kind of local leadership combined with updating the school day and curriculum for kids with specific problems that are best understood at the local level can't be replicable.

How that is applied to apportionment is an open question. Vouchers always seemed like the best solution to me, but I'm not expert on this subject.

padobsonon In 5 states, richest Americans live in a “new Gilded Age”

Even as the gap between the rich and everyone else widens, the quality of life for the bottom 99 percent has vastly changed since 1928.

This makes me wonder how much people care. In a global economy where the 1% are investing in markets that can reach billions of people, extreme poverty on a global scale was sliced in half in a 30 year period, and supply chains allow us to have super computers and unlimited entertainment for tiny fractions of the median wage, you can expect a lot of inequality, but life is way better for everyone in the world since 1928.

Inequality is only a problem in so much that it leads to higher crime rates and (eventually) civil instability in places where its most apparent. We haven't seen much of that (yet), but don't stop looking for it.

padobsonon [dead]

I know there's other places I can do a sanity check when a website crashes, but HN is usually at the top of my list.