skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Marriage in the USA peaked in 1958. Please see the chart here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/the-real-re...

Marriage peaked the same year that male participation in the wage economy peaked. It was also the peak year of the baby boom. It was also the peak year for the wage-to-rent ratio (average rent was only 22% of average wage, versus 32% now). It was also the peak year for wages for males under the age of 25. (Average male wage began to decline in 1973, but the average wage for young males has been declining since the recession of 1959.)

Internet porn was not the problem in 1959, or 1969, or 1979, though the marriage rate, and the birth rate, plummeted during those years. But it is possible that the sexual revolution played a role. Barbara Ehrenreich has a fantastic book on the subject "The Hearts Of Men":

http://www.amazon.com/The-Hearts-Men-American-Commitment/dp/...

Although the marriage rate is now back down to levels last seen in the late 1800s, there is clearly a big difference in people's sexual practice. 41% of all the children in the USA are now born outside of wedlock. The number is comparable to London in the early 1700s (see Will and Ariel Durant's book "The Age Of Voltaire" where they quote the Bishop Of London, in 1719, estimating 50% of all couples with children in London were not married. This was at a time when the English government had decided to suppress marriage among the poor by raising the price of a marriage license to something only the middle and upper classes could afford, thus turning marriage into the ultimate status symbol.)

Marriage has once again become a status symbol. The poor raise children without the benefit of marriage, while the (shrunken) middle and upper classes enjoy the prestige of marriage.

The suppression of marriage in the 21st century is less easy to identify than in 1719, because back then it was an explicit policy of the government, whereas now marriage licenses are cheap. But marriage is a commitment to make things work over the long term, and without a stable job no one can reasonably make long term commitments, nor does anyone want to rush into a marriage that they know will fail, so the poor are left going through life without the benefits of marriage (or you could restate this as: "the poor are left going through life without the benefits of financial stability, which limits their ability to make the long-term commitments necessary to make a marriage work.")
Is a virgin who doesn't view pornography likely to be any less selfish or any more successful in a marriage?
For the cohort of HN readers, it is nowhere near that high.

See http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/pdf/marriage-and-di...

Among folks with college degrees, divorce rate is 31% for those marrying between 23 and 28 and 23% for those marrying between 29 and 34. Those with a masters degree, divorce at ~22%.

Even ignoring education and marriage age, only 26% of those who have kids while married (not before married) get divorced: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr049.pdf
That's my impression about non-SF places as well. I graduated from a no name school in 2001, and immediately found a pretty decent corp programming job in Denver. Didn't really feel the crash there, everyone was pretty relaxed.
If a woman can be replaced with (essentially) Youtube.com , then, she isn't offering much is she?

Something tells me the article is not right in blaming porn.
This is a really excellent point - it might sound xenophobic or ridiculous today, but in the 2002-2007ish timeframe, it was taken as a given that after outsourcing swallowed up US corporate IT, it would then consume the rest of the tech industry. Like many trends, it turned out that insourcing/outsourcing is entirely cyclical and gee wiz, there is only so much talent everywhere in the world and you do get what you pay for.
Regarding Script# - I got the wrong project, I always mix these two up and I was posting from my phone. I meant SSharp, which used to be called Script.NET, see...

https://github.com/PetroProtsyk/SSharp
http://www.thelocal.de/20140117/dating-in-berlin-unwilling-t...

Look up exact same articles for Japan, China, S Korea, anywhere. We work more with less social time, prefer independence and marriage expectations are too high so short-term obligation free hookup services like Tinder are preferred to maintaining a relationship.
The problem with all of these graphs is that the rise of cloud players like Coinbase means that a lot (and I'd think probably most) of the Bitcoin transactions taking place these days are off-chain.

Coinbase can settle most trades internally and push out any 'interbank trades' onto the chain. Some of the patterns others have noticed could be them settling internal accounts, not sure though.
> There's no easy way for a male to determine the paternity of the child of a female with which he has mated, other than securing an ostensibly exclusive relationship and monitoring the female's fidelity as best as possible.

I disagree.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005Y34OKA
North Korea Threatens to Attack US If Obama Retaliates
Mea culpa for not reading it carefully, then. I jumped right into the claims, to see how involved a non-copyright-infringing implementation would be.

If there's no patent, the poor guy doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.
At least in Oklahoma, child support laws encourage marriage: I had a friend that ended up paying child support for about six to eight years for a kid that always lived with him. The reason is because his partner got emergency food stamps for a week while he was out of the state taking care of his sick mother. He later married her (though they were living together even before the kid), but was still having his wages garnished for something called “child support”.
For those speculating about what is going on here, what possible explanations hold the most weight in your mind?

It seems to me that if you have a person or persons in possession of a commodity and by using that commodity in a certain way, while expending just a very small fraction of their holdings they could potentially increase the market value of the commodity they are holding or perhaps just stem/slow the decline of its market value, that would seem to be something worthwhile to engage in, provided doing so did not require a large amount of time or resources that could be better spent.

In the case of bitcoin, creating a lot of dummy transactions to create an illusion of economic vitality in the interest of increasing the value of your stake in the economy requires little time, effort, or resources beyond the initial creation of a small program or two, and thus places it high on the list of explanations for what is going on here.
> I suspect that this goal is fundamentally incompatible with having goroutines or a similar built-in concurrency story

Not really. Here’s an example of writing shared libraries for C in Haskell:

https://github.com/mietek/haskell-so-example
Let's just say it became way more difficult to get $5k gigs building Flash banner ads.
I rarely hear the alternative explanation that speaks most to me: marriage as an institution is currently a segregated privilege. I do not want to participate, lest I lend it some small sliver of legitimacy.

Where are the articles talking about the people who don't get married because they no longer need a plausible cover for their sexuality? Or because they are creating loving non-traditional families? Or those like me who empathize with those who are disallowed from participating?

(These are not rhetorical questions, if you know of such research going on I would like to read it!)

I suppose it's easier to blame the newfangled interwebs and kids these days, rather than talk about the very real social changes that are taking place.
Demonizing? They're saying porn discourages people from marriage. We call that a win-win where I'm from.
I assumed that the majority of couples with children (married or not) have both worked for at least a few decades.

I'm not sure why an average decrease in purchasing power relative to costs of living, if that has even occurred, would cause a reduction in marriages. I would expect a reduction in birth rate, or at least a birth rate distributed differently to income, but not necessarily a reduction in marriages.
Taxes actually favor single income families.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty
The relationship between height and income is very well documented, at least for men.

It's not absolute, certainly, we can all come up with the names of successful short men, just like we can come up with the names of successful black men and successful women. It doesn't mean those things don't put you at a serious disadvantage when talking to VC or trying to get a job.
My experience running my own small consulting company was actually positive. In the late 90's I thought I was a loser since nobody was handing me seven-figure cheques. In hindsite, the stuff I worked on was solid and maybe better than the flashy dot-coms. By focusing on business value rather than what was fashionable gained us increasing revenues year after year.

2008-9 was actually worse... that was the first decline in revenues and it combined with changing climate toward outsourcing with our government clients.
Child support laws frequently have little to do with supporting children. Payments are frequently far higher than necessary and far higher than the non-custodial parent can afford. There is no accountability at all on the custodial parent's spending, while the non-custodial parent gets their wage's garnished so they can't even pay their rent.
I meant a long time ago, when these institutions first developed among humans. The fact that paternity tests exist now probably only corroborates my point. I'll edit the comment for clarity.
The only problem with trimming away something you feel is obvious is that if you need to go back to the notes quite some time afterwards, it might not appear obvious at that time. It's just like when you don't comment something in code and when you go back to it, you're wondering what you were thinking when you wrote it.
Seems like someone needs to read this again: http://xkcd.com/552/

People consuming more porn is a more likely a symptom of what's going on rather than the cause. As whatever forces cause people to be less likely to get married it creates a larger market for porn that the industry is more than happy to supply in greater quantities.

What forces are causing people to be less likely to get married? I can speculate but I suspect it's highly multifaceted. I doubt there's one thing that's largely to blame but more of a death by a thousand papercuts kind of situation.

1. Housing is a bigger commitment

2. Job security is less available making buying real estate less attractive

3. Expectations of what should happen once you get married aren't necessarily realistic

4. Ending a marriage is highly speculative and non-negotiable (a judge says what goes and that's it) and can have lifelong or very long-lasting consequences financially

5. There's a lot less societal pressure to get married to have kids from a moral perspective

6. The economic incentive for a woman to get married so she can stay home to raise kids has largely disappeared as pay equality has largely arrived (so has the notion that it's what a woman should do). It's not 100% across the board but women don't work for 30% of what men do, meaning that marriage might only bring a marginal improvement in financial circumstances.

7. Child support being completely unrelated to marriage means that women can choose not to settle for a man they once liked/loved but who isn't their ideal partner.

I'm not saying that any of these factors are good or bad or just or unjust. I suspect that there are 20 more factors that I couldn't think up in the last 10 minutes.
Err, I think I was mistaken.
Being young myself (early 30s) most of my male friends are terrified of marriage because their parents are all mostly divorced and its ugly.

Men now see marriage as a huge risk, if your wife decides she doesnt like you any more she takes at least 50% of your assets and if you have children its very unlikely the state will give you custody and you will be on the hook for child support if you cant pay (because you get a worse job etc) you will go to debtors prison.
> Because come on, if we don't have culture, what do we have?

Well reasoned and logical action?
I'm not sure how hands on you are being teachinging your friend, but I tried going the full JS stack route with another friend with only 2-3 courses of programming under his belt, and he clearly was struggling due to the complexity of tooling, setting up environments, and generally having a difficult time figuring out the problems & coming up with solutions to them - I am not inexperienced with teaching either, having done it in various capacities (as a paid & unpaid tutor, a lecturer, and discussion section leader).

FWIW, we were working with Sails.js (http://sailsjs.org/), with the intent to getting to use Socket.io, Angular.js, and MongoDB - the setting up of Sails and understanding what things did in Sails ended up being the problem spot.

Instead, I changed my approach to act more like a mentor and have my friend go along the excellent Ruby on Rails Tutorial (https://www.railstutorial.org/). Things have been much better, although my friend has fallen on his face a few times with Git & SSH in general. I now believe a good intro text is worth far more than picking the right framework(s) to learn.
We had to get adjusted to not being treated like a rock stars just for knowing unix. We stopped chanting IPO, IPO. We learned the stock market is disconnected from reality. Took a hit in salary, but nobody starved that I recall. Looking back on it, it was if we hit the lottery but we were too young to realize that this isn't a normal economy we were living in. But c'est la vie, change is opportunity and all that. Just keep your skill set relevant and keep switching jobs until you land a gig working on something that is interesting with people you enjoy being with, and don't expect to get rich, but if you work hard you just might anyway.
I'm rather entertained at the number of people objecting to your description of marriage as an "economic institution". That's exactly what marriage has been for thousands of years: primarily a way of ensuring the continuity of property and perpetuation of a family name. Feelings, by and large, don't enter into it in the grand scheme of things.

Marriage today would be tolerable if it weren't for the absurd debt spectacle involved (in both getting a ring and a ceremony), the rather nasty legal implications upon divorce, and overall the lack of societal support for raising a family these days.
> While on the subject of configuration, if you are not a fan of configuring your editor, I'm not sure I understand what you're doing using Emacs.

I don't mind configuring something when I actually want to change its behavior, but I'm a big fan of sensible and helpful defaults that Just Work. I'm not complaining that there isn't a vim mode that works exactly like auctex out-of-the-box; I'm annoyed that there doesn't seem to be one that has equivalent functionality out-of-the-box. I could reinvent it using templates/snippets, but I didn't have to do so with auctex.

> As for latexmk, depending on how complex your needs are, you may not have to configure it, just run it. A "latexmk -pdf foo.tex" will probably do what you want.

I understand that I wouldn't have to configure latexmk (or rubber, or any number of other DWIM scripts for LaTeX), but I'd still need to configure vim to use one of them and have a convenient keybinding for them. I'd also prefer not to rely on an external script; I'd rather have something built into vim and configurable within vim.
I prefer Mykolab for that purpose.
yeah but you don't need rvm. rvm is not great.

edit: so what that it beats rvm? bundler + ruby-install does everything that you need and works very well.
Abstractions are what make it possible to reason about complex systems. Being able to ignore parts of your codebase is the only way to make changes to it once it gets beyond a trivial size.

The whole of the Unix philosophy is enforcing this policy of strong abstractions by making each part of a complex overall system its own binary, such that they can only communicate using the file I/O abstraction, possibly via pipes. C was therefore designed for a system which promotes abstractions.
I've been writing a parser generator in rust as a way to learn the language, and it's been a mixed journey of being very impressed, and very frustrated. A large part of my frustration comes from what seems like a negative feedback between algebraic data types and the borrow checker. I often find myself with a piece of code that looks clean and simple, using the Option and Result monads to deal with errors in an elegant way, but then I can't compile it because of issues with borrowing. Ultimately, I usually have to break apart the nice structure that feels natural and reimplement it as either a sequence of match or "if x.is_ok()" statements, which just feels... wrong somehow. It becomes tempting to just punt on the error handling and call unwrap() on everything just to get it working for now, which leads to problems later on. It's so close to being incredibly expressive and great for systems programming, but it isn't quite all the way there (at least for me, at this point).

I think that higher-kinded types will probably help a lot with this if they make it into the language, and it's likely that there's a way to get around the errors and get the full benefit from the algebraic data types and monadic functions that I just haven't found yet. The language is enough of a level-up from my C++ days that I'm sure I'll stick to it, even if those things aren't true.

I thought this quote from the article really nailed it regarding my recent experience:

"Expressiveness or elegance is not a goal of Rust. It’s certainly not bad in this regard, just not as wonderful as you may wish if you care it a lot."
Did you read the words too? What did you think about this part?

Regarding the prospect of growth in value exchange occurring via off-blockchain services: I still think we would expect to see off-blockchain value transfer manifest itself on-blockchain, in much the same way that buy and sell pressure at a single off-blockchain service flows throughout the entire ecosystem. If an off-blockchain service did somehow manage to become an “island” and transact increasing amounts of value without any of the growth showing up on-blockchain… it would be bad for bitcoin on a number of levels.

--

the rise of cloud players like Coinbase means that a lot (and I'd think probably most) of the Bitcoin transactions taking place these days are off-chain.

It's ironic that you so often see these comments forecasting how in the future most bitcoin activity will occur in these single authority corrals, or 'cloud players' as you call them. It's really no different from saying "Most people using bitcoin in the future, won't actually be using bitcoin."

So it raises the question of, if the future of using bitcoin is not actually using bitcoin, what is the future of bitcoin?
Similar, I graduated with a BS in CS in 2001. I was lucky to have finished my job search in the Fall of 2000. The market had still been hot in the fall, I received several (4-5?) offers for 60-75k (boston/nyc). Each seemed like they were on the "new, exciting" project at a company where their revenue came from elsewhere. I took a job with a company I'd interned at.

By the Spring things had definitely changed. First lots of hiring freezes and then offers to friends rescinded. (A few lucky ones got paid 50% to take a year off.) I think most of the offers I had were for projects that were likely killed since they didn't add anything to the top line. The did a round of layoffs where I was joining in the spring before I started. I remember anxiously waiting at my college apt to find out if I was unlucky. I wasn't affected, I believe primarily because I was "cheap" compared to the people making 2x or more than me they chose to let go.

I felt very fortunate to land on an interesting team doing real product development; others I know who graduated in 2002 had no option but the longer path through customer support / non-tech jobs for a little bit.
It's uncouth to use the word in this context, but the intended analogy is simply that of theft or plunder, which is a well-accepted definition of the word and is in common usage.
> Porn is purely selfish pleasure. Thus, when a person is married, they're used to being selfish about their sexual pleasure, resulting in strife.

Are you married? For that matter, have you actually had sex?

You and your wife can enjoy sex without you putting any additional effort into it. The mechanics of it kinda guarantee that.

In fact, that's probably a massive difference between actual sex and what it portrayed in porn. When you're with somebody, you don't take turns ... they do that in porn because two people can't really fit into the shot. In real life there are no turns, you're both having fun at the same time.

> So, porn is a cause, or at least, part of a cause.

Porn isn't the cause. The parent is right. It's entirely rooted in economics and self-interest.

On top of what's already mentioned, there are heavy penalties for a male if the marriage ends. Child-support, alimony, 50% of your property, custody of children, etc.

So not too much upside on a successful marriage and heavy penalties on a failed one ... not surprising many men are choosing to opt out.

There are, of course, good reasons to still marry, but the answer isn't as clear-cut as it was before.
Thanks for the historical knowledge, but it no longer means that.
it's not that our appetite for coveted real estate has grown. the real problem is that our alternatives to big cities are not good enough. here are your choices. you either live in an environment devoid of culture and community where nothing happens ever, where you live in a split-level townhome across from a stripmall across from a shopping center ... or you find a way to live in the city, where life is happening, even if you have to live in a bathtub.

america's brand of suburban development created this situation. and now everyone has the internet, so they can be in touch with cutting-edge culture and painfully aware of how little is happening in their suburban town. of course, all people want to do is get out of these horrible places.
>what would be the total dollar cost to make security a forethought

There isn't one. There are too many people involved who categorically refuse to consider security, and there is no way to fix that in a reasonable time frame. We'd need to fix the education problem and then wait for a whole generation of new people to go through it.
Still, the fear of having to pay child support could discourage people from having extended exclusive relationships, and those are generally a prerequisite to marriage.
I think marriage is fundamentally an economic institution. People got married because it made economic sense

Marriage and divorce laws are also biased against men—which Helen Smith details in Men on Strike: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594036756 . The book is not great but it is a decent introduction to these issues.
It seems you should have omitted the first sentence.
> Instead, [tptacek] recommends Cryptography Engineering*

So do I, by the way - CE is a modern book and it shows just how hard it really is to build a secure protocol. But it assumes a certain baseline background.

AC is old. I do not dispute that. But as to why certain types of constructs are used, it's still a properly readable book.

And quite true, the threat models in AC do not account for active attackers who are flipping bits to do real-time differential cryptanalysis. When the book was written, "data at rest" was the most common problem.

If there is an equally readable, modern book which explains the whys of the constructs, I'd love to know. CE is a great book once you understand the basics - but IMO it's not really fit for a first pass.