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Comment by gesman | Hacker News Reader

In 1985-87 I worked on plant that manufactured personal computers with russian-translated DOS in Minsk, Belarus.

The cost of this computer was close to the cost of car so blue collar workers established multiple schemes to steal either parts of computers or the whole computers.

The best plan by far was to throw computers out of the windows of factory so it would land on the soft grass right outside of the secure perimeter fence. Then whatever was thrown - would be picked up by co-conspirators and drove away immediately. Usually during the night shifts.

Clever, simple and working scheme that took a while to discover and crack for local security and law enforcement.

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Lol, classic Soviet Union story. It worked well in soviet-influenced countries, too. Widespread corruption was inevitable with everyone doing this stuff (I still blame the shit government) :-)

Reminds me of a terrible old Cold War era joke:

Russian worker sees a queue to buy sewing machines at the local GUM (department store) and joins it. Eventually he gets to the front, and the sales clerk has run out of the machines, but offers to take down his name for when more come in. After he takes his name, he asks for his address and workplace.

When the man gives his workplace, the sales clerk stops him. "You work at the sewing machine factory. Why are you here? Just smuggle out parts and make your own at home."

The man shrugs. "I tried that, but each time I end up with a submachinegun."

Actually, this joke is more about Soviet economy fixation on (covert in this case) military production instead of producing sufficient amount of so much awaited home appliances.

And this joke actually is interlinked to the main story.

Namely many of Soviet PC projects were motivated by the late requirement for the military factories to also produce a civil product.

Of course in the end all of it ended in the doom as these factories were not prepare to compete in high competitive open market environment and the market was flooded by cheap Taiwanese PC clones.

Sometimes it turns out ok. Wasn't the Internet built for US military at first.

We could thank nuclear arms for the Internet. I am wondering how much of the current state of Internet holds to the initial promise.

While the Internet as we know it was derived by Darpa, I'm not convinced we wouldn't have one without it. Large scale networks already existed. INTERconnected NETworks don't forget. I had access to Janet, FidoNet & Compuserve prior to the current network.

ARPANet funding started in 1967 or 1968 and brought up the first links in 1969, CompuServe in 1969, FidoNet started in 1982, JANET in 1983, so I don't think you had access to Janet, FidoNet, and CompuServe prior to the ARPANet, or even prior to TCP/IP in 1978 or so.

Some kind of network was going to happen — but remember that Telenet, Tymnet, and PC-Pursuit (aside from CompuServe, The Source, Minitel, and of course the PSTN itself) were already generally available in the 1980s. The issue is that the existing networks were either too tightly controlled and inflexible (Minitel, CompuServe, the PSTN) or too slow (FidoNet) to support a lot of the applications to which we put the internet today.

I'm from the UK. I had access to Janet in 1989 at Uni, and then Compuserve and then FidoNet. Internet access here was about 1994. I personally had it when Windows 95 arrived and I bought the Plus Pack which included Internet Explorer and dial-up software.

Though I must admit, I had an Internet email address I collected via FidoNet using Bluewave.

DARPA barely counts as military.

Yes but the main motivation was to have a network that would sustain nuclear strike.

That's supposedly an urban myth...

From Wikipedia:

In A Brief History of the Internet, the Internet Society denies that ARPANET was designed to survive a nuclear attack:

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET; only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.

Bullshit, DARPA/ARPA is as much military as a freaking nuclear warhead. In his speach introducing ARPA, Eisenhower made it extremely clear that its purpose was to cary out research that maintained technological superiority over enemies of the United States ("enemies" is his word). The "Defence" part was only added later for political reasons.

You don't even have to try hard to see the evidence: DARPA is unique among ALL OTHER government agencies because it is military backed and at the cutting edge of defense research.

DARPA has at most 300 employees overlooking a budget of $3 billion (an order of magnitude more "revenue" per employee than Apple) because 90+% of employees are project managers who have a maximum term limit of four years. The only DARPA employee that I know of that worked for the agency twice did so 25 years after his first term. Each of these managers oversees one or more projects worth anywhere between $1 million and $25 million and are advised by an individual scientific board (whose members can stay longer than four years to maintain some continuity).

Dnot get me wrong, I am a firm believer that DARPA is one of the greatest examples of what humans can achieve when they are given the ability to create, rebel, and dream beyond the current capabilities of engineering, but let's not kid ourselves. DARPA primary purpose has always been death and destruction. (Case in point: DARPA's currently most funded project is a scram jet based nuclear warhead that can hit any spot in the world within an hour of launching from the continental United States)

We're just lucky that cooperation is so much more profitable than mutually assured destruction.

In a normal country, yes. In a state capitalism (aka communism as we got to know it) it is either used for military/state applications or is completely discarded.

At least any DARPA/NASA/etc projects had a chance in the private sector...

Similar to another communist joke from ex Yugoslavia:

A worker is waiting in a huge line at 4am to buy cooking oil. Discouraged by how long the line is, he whispers to the guy ahead, "Hey, I heard the general store got a shipment of detergent!" People overhear this and everybody scrambles to the general store, leaving him at the head of the line.

He thinks, "wait, what if the general store did get detergent?" and heads over himself.

Here's a similar joke I found in Viktor Suvorov's faschinating Kuzkina Mat [1] :

A man is walking down the street carrying a 12-roll pack of toilet paper. People surround him, all excited: "Where'd you get that?" The man answers, "I just got it back from the dry cleaner's!"

[1] http://www.andrewnurnberg.com/books/kuzkina-mat/

Lol, classic Soviet Union story.

I have been thinking about this.

In general people tend to work on greed and fear.

Could we build a system that is based on peoples goodwill or it would be doomed?

I still blame the shit government

Quote: "The cadres determine everything."

>In general people tend to work on greed and fear.

People are pretty flexible depending on their environment. Paulgraham.com/good.html is not totally naive but depends on an environment where evil doesn't prosper too much.

> In general people tend to work on greed and fear. Could we build a system that is based on peoples goodwill or it would be doomed?

Some people work on greed and fear, while some others do work on wanting to improve the world.

In my experiences and observations, the ones who work because they want to improve things were the ones who grew up in stable and loving households and were taught to be nice.

There has actually been a great deal of work trying to find the best predictors of generosity and trust; people who have grown up in free markets have more of both than do those who grew up in more socialist countries. Interestingly, the first people to make this finding were socialists who thought the games (such as 'the dictator game' and 'the ultimatum game') would show how socialism improved fellow-feeling, kindness, and understanding.

That's very interesting, any suggested reading? Were the socialist researchers able to publish their results in their own countries?

I tend to believe that many (likely most) of the people related to the parents anecdote where indeed ones who grew up in stable and loving households and were taught to be nice as the Soviet social system was relatively stable.

As long as you worked within said system. Try anything outside it and you'll quickly find yourself in big trouble.

I guess it's the same everywhere, but at least a capitalist system gives you more leeway to do what you want, just enough to make it possible to grow big enough that the main system sees you as an equal (or at least a necessity) instead of a mortal enemy that needs to be shut down...

If you convert "greed and fear" to "rational self-interest, tempered for risk", there's a field of study called mechanism design that looks at how to set up systems and incentives so that everyone's rational self-interest yields a desirable overall result.

I suspect one of the biggest problems with adapting an algorithmic result to the real world is that the resulting system has to be self-sustaining and resilient: you have to provide enough incentive not to change the incentives. Leaving aside its internal merits or lack thereof, it certainly did the Soviet Union no favors to be opposed by a roughly equally-powerful nation that was constantly threatening military action if they didn't change their mechanism. The mechanism itself has to solve that, or it will require benevolent people to keep it in place who have zero incentive to remain benevolent. (See also, the Soviet Union.)

In most other cases you don't have this problem because people actually are benevolent enough. If you're designing a congestion-control protocol like TCP, you just have to make it incentivize nodes to behave; you don't also need TCP to incentivize sysadmins to keep running TCP instead of replacing it with something else.

> I suspect one of the biggest problems with adapting an algorithmic result to the real world is that the resulting system has to be self-sustaining and resilient: you have to provide enough incentive not to change the incentives.

An analogous situation within a different optimizing system: it's pretty easy to create a GMO tweak to improve crop yields for the indivdiual seeds you created. It's a much harder problem to create a tweak that's actually advantageous to the plant, such that will be kept in the next generation and spread to fixation.

People work for all kinds of reasons. The more you can accommodate, the better.

Open source software still fascinates me, and it's interesting to see how people just build stuff just to have others use it for free.

This would not be possible at all in a "communist" country - you either work for the state or you don't.

Anything you do is either benefiting the state or it doesn't exist. Citizens don't even get to know about the stuff.

Absolutes are bad either way, but people need at least a bit of freedom to get informed about the latest developments and work on their ideas without someone watching over their shoulder and dictating their every move...

> In general people tend to work on greed and fear.

I don't think that's an accurate depiction of humans. People work either: (1) they want money, and/or (2) they want something to do during their waking hours.

Even if I had enough money that I never had to work the rest of my life, I still would definitely work, because I enjoy work, and want to do something meaningful (from my perspective) with my life. I would most likely be a pro bono computer science researcher, and might maybe join a PhD program -- if I get to pick what I research on, which might be possible since I don't need grant money, and would cost the school zilch.

But basically, my point is that what motivates me (and most people) to work is either: (1) the love of work, or (2) the need for money.

Absolutely not greed and fear, as you say.

Now with regard to communist societies, I think the biggest problem is the utter lack of freedom. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a strong feeling that the epic failure of communist economies like the Soviet Union or pre-1990 India could be directly attributable to heavy regulation of businesses. They made it hard to start and run a business.

Now I'm sure over 90% people will never start register a company in their lives (maybe that percentage is reducing now), but making it hard for 10% that do start & run businesses could be the direct cause for the failure of these large economies. For example, India, until 1990 followed Soviet Union-inspired policies, and one of the biggest consequences of this was insane red tape know as "License Raj"[1] wherein you couldn't start a business without approval from a dozen corrupt government agencies, and even if you did succeed in starting one, you were subject to an overwhelming number of regulations that made it insanely hard for you to run your business.

Why do I think making it hard for 10% to run business is the cause of their economic failure? Because it prevented any sort of free market capitalistic competition. Everything was run by a bunch of non-business-minded bureaucrats who predictably did a bad job at it. Restricting private businesses and especially competition prevented an increase in production efficiency, and made the economy as a whole less efficient. A lot of these factors and other factors rolled in to one, led to the hour long lines for milk and butter.

More fundamentally, regulations erodes away your freedom. If you want to do something -- and starting a business or selling something is doing something -- if the government steps in and says "no you can't do that without my approval" that is an insane Mafia-protection-racket-esque interference in your personal freedom. You're just trying to make something and sell it! Nothing wrong with that! People have been doing this for millennia! Why do I need to listen to you, follow your little rules, or pay you a fee, to exercise my personal freedom?

Regulations take away freedom. And enough of it destroys economies. End of story.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj

> Regulations take away freedom.

The freedom to employ children, the freedom to lock the fire doors, the freedom to drive your truck for 36hours straight, the freedom to pollute the environment.......

Online debate of 'regulation' seems to rapidly, if not instantaneously, settle into this false ping-pong between "regulation is evil" and "regulation is required to save the children".

If you have ever run a business, you would understand that the problem isn't the type of constraints you list here but instead is the endless number of ill-conceived, ill-defined, and just plain dumb regulations that are more often about protecting a special interest than in protecting individuals.

The net effect of the monotonically increasing complexity of regulation is that the government has more and more power to control our economic activity. Is it any wonder that special interests spend enormous amounts of money to influence this process?

I have run my own business so it is rather impertinent for you to take some higher "I know better than you" ground.

The purpose of government and therefore regulation is to control externalities.

That some regulations are bad is not the fault of the concept of regulation; it is the failure of your government structure.

I apologize for my impertinence, it seems to have distracted you such that you missed the point that I was making that regulations are neither an absolute good nor an absolute evil (despite what you read on the Internet). Using extreme examples in either direction to argue in favor of the other extreme doesn't convince anyone of any thing.

There are lots of theories of government. Controlling externalities is really a special case of protecting individual rights, which is the role of government from my point of view.

I'm not sure what is or isn't in your definition of 'government structure'. I was trying to point out that to the extent that we support an expansive scope of government regulation we create a situation where it is completely rational for people and organizations to expend considerable amounts of time and money to influence that process. If instead we support a limited scope of government regulation that diminishes the pressure to influence regulations.

Cool. Next time I steal a TV from a shop I'll blame the shit government. Widespread corruption, you see.

Some Americans went rioting and looting and blamed the cops for killing someone. Fuck the police, you see.

The difference is you can legally buy a TV with your legally earned money. The grandparent's "shit government", on the other hand, payed you an amount of money it figured you deserved regardless of the actual demand for your skills, and then with that money you could buy very little on the legal market because few things were sold on the legal market, while the black market prices were likely out of reach for you, even if your skills were tremendously important to the economy. In this situation stealing parts from your factory (not from a shop where little was to be found) and selling them on the black market is more compelling and IMO more excusable than under some other form of government.

That is a fascinating story, If you don't mind would you expand on it?

We're you stealing computers yourself as well? How dangerous was it?

Where would you normally go to sell a computer like that in the soviet union?

Not OP, but I would guess the components were not to sell, but to use.

No, you could easily sell or barter them, too. We stole car parts and fuel this way, too.

Because, you know, at the end of that unholy union, they were struggling to produce stuff for themselves (military, politicians and their relatives), much less for the citizens...

I didn't steal anything, but wanted to assemble my first computer following radio schematics in Radio magazine (that article mentioned). Collected slowly bunch of parts frmo electronics store but never got into completing the project due to lack of parts.

For comparison:

About 1988/89 we got our first PS/2 workstations [1]. With some upgrades (RAM, 60MB HD, network card) these were about the price of an entry level Mercedes S-Class - in today's money about US$100k each.

[1] IBM PS/ 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2

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