Ways to get screwed by C - <AUTHOR> http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/topten.html

<comment><USER2> Boohoo. I mean it.

I don't think they even make compilers that don't warn about the top 2 issues, and 5 for sure. And after that it gets down to "I did something stupid and something stupid happened." I mean:

        int ii = i/++i;

Seriously? As if defining the order of operations would magically take the suck out of that statement.

There are like 1.5 nuggets of real pain in here. (1 point for returning a stack array, 0.5 points for noticing that C is C.)

<comment><USER3> I think the problem is that a lot of languages encourage you to do something clever, whereas C actively and relentlessly punishes you for being clever.

My favorite example is from #19, which is something that javascript programmers do all of the time.

      int value = a && b && fn(a->x,b->x);

(The author goes on to complain about how value you obviously be whatever fn(a->x, b->x) returns).

In javascript, that's actually good practice (I guess, I had a mentor once who encouraged it, but I never really bought into it). To a C programmer though, that just looks gross. (Or at least to me, and I like to pretend to be a C programmer).

<comment><USER3> (the author goes on to complain about how the value ought to be whatever fn(a->x,b->x) returns)*

That was bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Non-terminated comment

Use a sane editor with syntax highlighting.

2\. Accidental assignment/Accidental Booleans

I always wrap my assignment-conditionals with double parentheses. It sucks when you miss these but I usually type out the right sequence of equal signs when I mean equality.

3\. Unhygienic macros

Treat macros like a search-and-replace with a little more intelligence, but respect how literally the pre-processor might take you for. So, add parentheses.

4\. Mismatched header files

I've not encountered this before, so I can't comment on it. Be careful with namespaces.

5\. Phantom Returned Values

Luckily, gcc -Wall returns: warning: control reaches end of non-void function

6\. Unpredictable struct construction

Can't comment on this one either, although I avoid literal assignments given in the example like the plague.

7\. Indefinite order of evaluation

The example code just looks messy.

8\. Easily changed block scope

Always use curly braces, that's what I say.

9\. Permissive compilation

Not sure in the example why one would just remove the CALLIT macro and assume things to work. Of course, the comma in C means something. Not sure why one would put an assignment before a case in a switch either.

10\. Unsafe returned values

This is certainly expected!

<comment><USER5> Yes, the points he makes are typical beginner mistakes, or at least things that 20 years of programmer conventions have found a way around. Not really big problems of the language.

My biggest gripe with C is string handling. Although the extremely insecure functions have been slowly phased out (such as gets), zero-terminated strings are an attack on sanity.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"My biggest gripe with C is string handling. Although the extremely insecure functions have been slowly phased out (such as gets), zero-terminated strings are an attack on sanity."_

There are some nice safe string libraries out there, like this one:

<http://bstring.sourceforge.net/>

<comment><USER5> Agreed, it is pretty easy to avoid the issue by using a library or framework, and bstring looks nice.

Still, I wish something like that was simply built-in, as external string libraries can cause interoperability issues: Each framework defines its own string handling functions and format, making it neccesary to convert between them in an application, if you use them together.

(the worst thing is that this problem still exists with C++ as of today, even though it has a built-in _string_ people insist on rolling their own)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something similar to #17 burned me at my first job. Did you know that if a variable is declared as a "char", the compiler gets to decide whether it's signed or unsigned? (Consistently, of course - every "char" will be signed, or every "char" will be unsigned). I didn't at the time, but I sure do now!

My employer had code that ran on about 5 billion different platforms, and my job was to port it to a new one. Everything went fine, except for the weird random crashes that would happen periodically. The idea that a "char" could be an "unsigned char" by default was so far off my radar screen that I didn't figure out what was going on until a few days later when I reluctantly dived into the assembly. (It didn't help that it was a mobile platform with basically 0 support for gdb).

Turned out to be a 3 second fix - pass "-fsigned-char" to gcc. Nowadays in new code I always explicitly declare whether my chars are signed or unsigned.

<comment><USER7> You're supposed to use chars for _character data_ , in which case it's not supposed to matter whether or not the integer representation is signed or unsigned. All you generally do with characters is store, compare for equality, and print. Those should all be safe to do without ever knowing if the underlying integer is considered signed or unsigned.

It's only when you start doing arithmetic on characters, or just want to use char to mean "byte" (or "octet") that it matters, and then it's a very good idea to be specific and say "unsigned char" if that is what you expect.

<comment><USER6> Yep. In their defense, this was a codebase with a 20 year lineage that ran on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AS/400, all variants of Windows including mobile, Irix, and some that I'm probably forgetting, and they had never run into this issue before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Still not convinced? Try this one (suggested by Mark Scarbrough ):

         #define DEVICE_COUNT 4
        uint8 *szDevNames[DEVICE_COUNT] = {
                "SelectSet 5000",
                "SelectSet 7000"}; /* table has two entries of junk
        */

Actually, the remaining two entries are 0, they are not junk.

</comment><comment><USER9> Also recommend reading _C Traps and Pitfalls_.

<http://www.literateprogramming.com/ctraps.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER10> ... and I still love C. There's something utterly minimalist and carnal about C. The best part is how it's several orders of magnitude more productive than writing assembly code, all the while 99% as powerful and performant.

</comment><comment><USER11> Of the handful of languages I just checked, a fair number of them—especially the popular ones—treat integers starting with 0 as octal. Python 2.6, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Scala, Java and D all believed that 010 == 8, while GHC, GNU Prolog, GNU Smalltalk, Scheme (Guile and Racket) and Common Lisp all treated it as being equal to 10. Python 3 actively rejects it, because they've changed the octal literal syntax to 0o10 to prevent this from sneaking up on people.

Some of the other complaints are valid—for example, I dream of a sensible module system when writing in C, which would alleviate #13—but a lot of the complaints are sort of petty, and I'd argue that this one, being true of many more languages than C, falls directly into the petty bin.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seriously? I think this page reflects more on the person who wrote it than on C. A top 10 list with 19 items? Genius! Forgetting to include a </pre> tag on item #6? Classic sign of a sloppy programmer.

<comment><USER13> I agree that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I programmed FORTRAN, there were much uglier things to shoot yourself in the foot with. For example, parameter lists in function calls were not checked: you pass in a double, and the function expects an integer? Good luck with that, the compiler didn't warn about it and no value conversion would take place (the runtime would just interpret part of the bit pattern of the double as an int), and it would probably crash at runtime.

Luckily we have function prototypes in C nowadays ;-)

</comment><comment><USER15> 18\. Could be expanded on <http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/gcc/string_buffers.html>

Also no mention of integer overflow handling? [http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/gcc/integer_overflow.ht...](http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/gcc/integer_overflow.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I have never made these kind of mistakes. I have done the things in section 2 and section 19, but I did it on purpose and expected the result, it was not a mistake.

I use Enhanced CWEB for C programming. Many of these things will be caught because you can see in the printout of the book, that there are mistakes. (For example, it typesets octal numbers in italic)

</comment><comment><USER17> I once ran into a bug of this form (boiled down into a small example):

      struct thing {
        int x;
      } aThing;
      int x;
      aThing,x = 3;

Do you see it?

EDIT: fix typo

</comment><comment><USER18> lint(1) [or splint(1)] is your friend.

Or use "gcc -Werror" when compiling.

C is like a sharp knife: in skilled hands, it can do wonders. Unskilled hands end up missing a finger or two.

<comment><USER19> The problem with -Werror is it causes trouble with autoconf-based scripts: Test programs that should've compiled can fail because of a warning as opposed to an actual error. I prefer to compile with -Wall -Wextra and not commit anything that raises warnings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> At every company I've ever worked, curly braces were mandatory after if/elif/else statements and loops specifically because of #8.

<comment><USER19> My standard approach is to only ever omit the braces when the entire if statement fits on a single line. I also enforce a hard 80-char limit on my lines, which prevents a single enormous line.

<comment><USER21> I personally hate an 80 character limit. I do wrap comments at 80 or 100 chars but code isn't read like english prose--It's very easy to read a long line of code and it makes a lot of sense (sometimes) to keep everything on one line. Especially if there are multiple similar lines where you can make the columns line up nicely.

<comment><USER19> I personally find that the limit means that you're not occasionally reading far away from the main body of code, which makes it easier for my eyes to track. An added bonus is the ability to put multiple files side-by-side, something not easily possible when lines can be of arbitrary length.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> :)

for(i=0;i<10;i++); { / _some code here_ / }

</comment><comment><USER22> The guy's a sissy.

</comment><comment><USER23> The kid who wrote this is _really_ going to enjoy Verilog.

I liked

       int a = 2 && 4 && 8;   // what is the value of "a" ? would you belive a=1 ?

I'm not sure the author has the necessary qualifications to condemn C's "poor design."

<comment><USER16> Yes of course I would believe that.</comment></comment>


Acquisitions: cull the managers - <AUTHOR> http://www.edn.com/blog/920000692/post/270049427.html

<comment><USER2> The author makes a telling comment about how "worker-bee" programmers can be reassigned that displays the same contempt for developers as the managers who call them "resources". Call it a pet peeve, I guess.

One other factor to consider is that if a company were to do multiple acquisitions and consistently behave this way (immediately lay off every manager of the "losing" internal product), it would likely create a not-very- healthy culture of fear and opposition to acquisitions.

That's not to say, of course, that underperforming managers should get a break "just because". Rather, it seems reasonable to say that their performance and future roles should be re-evaluated along with every other affected party's - and yes, they probably shouldn't end up leading the newly acquired team a la Collabra.

(Keep in mind that sometimes the internal product's lack of success is quite often due to senior management's decisions... the same senior management that makes the decision to acquire).

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't a blanket solution, according to this interview that's what Netscape did and it killed them:

[http://www.gigamonkeys.com/blog/2009/09/28/a-tale-of-two- rew...](http://www.gigamonkeys.com/blog/2009/09/28/a-tale-of-two- rewrites.html)

On the otherhand in that scenario the incumbent product was successful where the acquired company wasn't, which is probably more the reason why it was a disaster.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely - I think the original article implicitly assumes that it's a successful product that is being acquired. After all, why would anyone buy a company with an unsuccessful product? (but then, there are a lot of good reasons to do so.)</comment></comment>


The Next Wave: Digital Detox - <AUTHOR> http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-next-wave-digital-detox/ <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be an article on how we could connect with each other again, but it seems to make a point on how commerce can benefit from humanity's detached feelings, loneliness, and anxiety. It kinda bummed me out. Now I need a gravity blanket.</comment>


As More Asian Developers Build for Facebook, Regional Usage Patterns Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/12/08/as-more-asian-developers-build-for-facebook-regional-usage-patterns-change/ <comment><USER2> "But fundamentally, Facebook has always articulated its value proposition as a more efficient way to share information in a trusted way. Personal data shared by Facebook users is what makes the News Feed--the core of Facebook's information distribution system--so compelling to hundreds of millions of people. In cases in which the News Feed is filled with content from random gaming friends, it's quite possible that Facebook could see much lower retention rates from its core features over time, instead more heavily relying on games to drive engagement and growth. If that were to indeed be the case on a wide scale, that could present some tensions for Facebook's core product design--and business--over time."

The rapid rate of growth of Facebook use in Taiwan, if correctly estimated, is quite astounding. I have many relatives there, and they mostly use Facebook in the "western" way, as communication among real-life friends. (Most of my practice in reading Chinese online recently comes from reading relatives' Facebook status messages on Facebook.) But if there is a new pattern of gamers having random "friends," that would indeed change the Facebook experience for many users.</comment>


The Autodidact Ratio: A Way to Measure Bias Against Women - <AUTHOR> https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/more_on_detecting_bias.html <comment><USER2> In Ireland (where I live) most primary school teachers are women, and most bus drivers are men. How do you measure autodidacticism among teachers and bus drivers? This is an interesting idea, but the fact that it only applies to very specific fields of endeavour suggests that it's not terribly useful</comment>


How economics became a religion - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/11/how-economics-became-a-religion <comment><USER2> Not only are the theoretical foundations of some areas of economics dubious but the profession is (particularly at the high levels) very money-driven and, in some cases, very morally dubious. Some professors and academics are paid hefty sums to write papers that support and influence important policies.[0]

Please watch the Inside Job for an example of how money goes around the high strata of the economics profession.

[0] [https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make- mor...](https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-more-than- thousand-bucks-hour-peddling-mega-mergers)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-14/so- many-c...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-14/so-many-critics- of-economics-miss-what-it-gets-right)

Noah Smith has good rebuttal for standard blanket critiques and he uses this article as an example.

<comment><USER4> Idk... He admits upfront that the standard critiques have merit, but that recent shifts to hard data are a positive upheaval(thank you, you hackers you).

<comment><USER5> Too bad the Austrian Schoolers didn't get that memo and continue carrying on as though lack of empiricism is some kind of virtue.

<comment><USER6> The "Austrian school" isn't what you think it is. The Austrian school refers to a theoretical school of thought of a very narrow subsection of macroeconomics (which itself is a very narrow subsection of economics) called business cycle theory. That subsection doesn't even represent 1% of what professional economists worry about, yet it somehow has 100% of the attention of armchair economists and political parties.

The funny thing about the statement isn't that it is true (the Austrian school doesn't rely on empiricism) but rather that you singled out a single school of business cycle theory for that criticism. Because BCT _can 't rely on empiricism_. It is an area of economics where controlled experiments are impossible and standard impact measurement methods used in econometrics are not applicable due to dynamic cycles. That's the reason why " _see, look at this trend line...your idea didn 't work_" is always defended by " _well it would have been worse if we didn 't do it!_".

The implication is that by design, none of the "schools" of BCT use empiricism and all of them rely primarily on theory. Any appearance of empiricism coming from one of those schools is highly suspect on its face and far more likely to come from a politically backed think tank than from a peer review process. And that includes the incredibly terrible claims of empiricism from Keynesian and Monetarist schools in addition to your target of scorn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm an economist by training (PhD) and by trade. The claims in the article are astute. Economics is a "social science" that often tries to answer the "why" people do things by postulating on the "what" they do (Weak/Strong Axioms of Revealed Preference). There is certainly a generation of economists who focused on theory, formalization, microeconomics foundations to macroeconomics, and general equilibrium theory that required heavy mathematics to succeed--resulting in survival bias towards formalization on systems involving choices. The questions of formulations of preferences (preferences drive the underlying utility theory) or moving outside the consumer context are taboo. Since taboo, they support a religious overtone.

Of course, people relying on economists have often quipped they wished they could find a one handed economist ("on the other hand...")

Thanks for the great article.

</comment><comment><USER8> Economics is worse than religion: it's astrology.

It has the trappings of mathematics (ODEs and whatnot) as astrology uses numbers, like astrology and auguring (in their day) economics is a fantasy serving to flatter the powerful.

<comment><USER9> Economics has many successes, but the problem is it's trying to approach psychology with math. They know that people are not actually rational, but there is some value in treating them as such.

<comment><USER3> Rational choice theory is usually the right model. There are others.

<comment><USER4> The biggest problem I run into with this is that I believe the bounds of rationality for different individuals had far more variability than is accounted for. I suppose it's still useful to look at for a perspective on some things though

<comment><USER3> Economic models usually look at average behaviour for large groups. There are cases where the model breaks, but jumping into "oh, it was all bs then" is just populism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From what little exposure I had as a student in Biological sciences to the economics department at the University of Chicago, I saw the economics department as an excuse to do lots of sophisticated mathematics and proofs. I never heard people in the economics department talk about collecting data or measuring the flow of money. It was always prove this or solve that. It was the opposite of science and very much like theology -- theory divorced from testable observation

Edit, I need to emphasize the use of the word little

<comment><USER11> Economic research can be roughly divided into three subfields: Macroeconomics, Micro theory, and Empirical Micro.

The first 2/3 of an undergrad curriculum at most universities is all macro and micro theory. So, most of what an undergrad sees is _prove this or solve that._

But far more econ faculty focus on empirical work for their personal research.

It's possible that we focus on theory because it spreads economic orthodoxy faster than empirical work. But economists spend much less time doing theory when they are outside undergraduate classrooms.

<comment><USER12> > _It 's possible that we focus on theory because it spreads economic > orthodoxy faster than empirical work_

Or for the same reasons we start physics in a frictionless, idealized environment.

<comment><USER13> Pretty sure when I started physics in high school we started with measuring trolleys accelerating (or not) done an inclined run timed with ticker tape and covered the maths alongside the experiments.

Edit: I seem to remember friction being addressed pretty quickly as it was required to explain why your trolley would stop accelerating.... [NB It's been 30+ years]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They use the word `ideology' in the article, it would be more correct to use it in the title as well. _Both_ sectarian religious thinkers _and_ partisan economists let their ideology lead their reasoning. So are oblivious to this, others are aware of it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Mainstream economics is a bit of a cult due to the identifiability problem. This is the problem that empirical evidence is ignored in most econometric papers and there is usually no way to identify economic events discretely that correspond to the ones mentioned in papers. Paul Romer, a professor at the Stern school of business, has published a great paper calling this out (pdf: [https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP- Trouble....](https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf) ) .

Central planning has and always will be an epic failure. The economic calculation problem always leads to its downfall.

The Chinese banking and finance model, which is akin to largely privatized central planning, is the only real alternative and it is ignored, though it seems to have solved the business cycle, given that western observers have been predicting a Japanese style prolonged financial crash for 30 years and instead there's been continuous growth.

</comment><comment><USER16> Economists don't want to address the elephant in the room: whenever money is created, by private interests, is given to governments and society as debt. So, the way economy is structured now, it's by design a transfer of wealth => resources => power from the public to the powerful.

<comment><USER12> > _whenever money is created, by private interests, [it] is given to > governments and society as debt_

The U.S. government, in 2016, issued $1.4 trillion of debt [1] and took in almost $3 trillion in taxes [2]. I'm not sure I see your point.

[1] [https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/feddebt/fedde...](https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/feddebt/feddebt_ann2016.pdf)

[2] [http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/119/2016](http://federal- budget.insidegov.com/l/119/2016)

<comment><USER17> The argument boils down to this:

1) The economy is a system with some amount of money in it.

2) The money is measured (see; M2 [1]).

3) The amount of money appears to be increasing extremely quickly (exponentially, in fact).

4) The new money is not being expressed in wages. The government doesn't appear to be pushing it into the economy directly because they are taking on debt instead of printing money.

If you accept this frame, then the follow up is that someone is being given a lot of money, and the question is why not change the rules so that the newly created money is given no-strings-attached to the government?

[1] [https://www.federalreserve.gov/RELEASES/h6/Current/default.h...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/RELEASES/h6/Current/default.htm)

<comment><USER12> > _why not change the rules so that the newly created money is given no- > strings-attached to the government?_

Argentina, Brazil and various countries tried this. TL; DR Politicians like to print money to hand out favors [1]. An independent central bank, governed by and reportable to elected officials at an arm's length, turns out to be a better solution.

Note that flat wages with job growth doesn't comport with your fourth observation. More wages were paid in June than in May [2], and in May than in April [3], _et cetera_. There were just more people earning them.

(I'm not suggesting stalled wage growth, especially relative to upward- marching productivity, isn't an area of concern. It's just that history shows it's better to address these issues through fiscal, versus monetary, policy.)

[1] [https://people.ucsc.edu/~walshc/MyPapers/cbi_newpalgrave.pdf](https://people.ucsc.edu/~walshc/MyPapers/cbi_newpalgrave.pdf)

[2] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy- idUSKBN18T0BT](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-idUSKBN18T0BT)

[3] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy- idUSKBN1810BZ](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-idUSKBN1810BZ)

<comment><USER17> I'll offer a point of clarification - and I do agree that the situation is a lot more complex than 4 dot points.

That said; point 4 can stand if (wages growth + unemployment drop) < (increase in the M2).

I haven't checked it in America, but in Australia the M2 is growing at about 8% p.a. I'm confident assuming total wages aren't growing that fast, because it would be very visible on the ground (people getting jobs left right and centre). The new money being created is mostly going elsewhere vs wages.

<comment><USER12> From 27 June 2016 to 12 June 2017, U.S. M2 grew about 5.2% [1]. From June 2016 to June 2017, total U.S. non-farm payrolls grew by about 3.3% [2]. Finally, from June 2016 to June 2017, total U.S. average hourly earnings for private employees rose by 2.5% [3].

(In case you're curious, median usual real wages and salaries for full-time employees in the United States, 16 and over, rose about 1.2% from Q1 2016 to Q1 2017 [4].)

Side note: these statistics were collected by economists.

[1] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2) _13514.5 / 12844.8_

[2] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS) _146404 thousand / 141742 thousand_

[3] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003) _26.25 / 25.62_

[4] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q) _350 / 346_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> South Park did an episode about this [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7OevEml84BI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7OevEml84BI)

</comment><comment><USER19> Suggested recently by Richard Wolff and many others before him: a possible solution out of this economy is worker coops aka democracy at work.

[https://youtu.be/ynbgMKclWWc](https://youtu.be/ynbgMKclWWc)

<comment><USER12> I tend to believe a diversity of systems is the healthiest state. Coöperative housing, for example, has a mixed history in New York. By removing price as a selection factor, they whitewashed "other* selection criteria, _e.g._ race [1].

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/nyregion/new-bill-seeks- to...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/nyregion/new-bill-seeks-to-curb- discrimination-by-co-op-boards.html)

<comment><USER19> Democracy itself is certainly not the best decision making process, but it tends to avoid some radical pitfalls of oligarchic and tyrannic processes.

<comment><USER12> Elections behave differently depending on scale [1]. This may be a function of the law of large numbers [2], or that the difficulty of coördinating scales exponentially with the number of people one must coördinate [3].

A small group of people with absolute authority to decide who does and doesn't get to live in a building can be more tyrannical than a large group of people forced to compete on just price. (And vice versa.)

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Southpark already explored this concept pretty well I think. Season 13 episode 3. Im gonna go watch that instead of read this :P

</comment><comment><USER21> Macroeconomics isn't so much a religion as it is a pantheon of religions. Religion and spirituality are really separate things. Jainism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism are religions, but they worship no deities. Religions just try to explain how the world works and how to make the existence of its members better. Communism, Keynesianism, and Nazism do the same thing.

Few Western economists think they know all the answers. Saying economists are wrong to try to estimate what the economy will do if some policy is enacted is like saying that biologists shouldn't try to estimate what will happen to a human body if a certain drug is administered. Of course, no one will know for sure how someone will react to the drug as there are a million different factors that influence such things. But, it's best to do your best to try to figure out if something is going to be poisonous based on all the things you know about the human body and chemistry before you give it to the patient, right? Economics is hard because you can't do repeated trials. Most economists acknowledge this, and they understand the pitfalls of their craft. There are plenty of instances of individual economists making outrageous predictions about the future that proved comically false. But these are the exception, not the rule.

The problem we have now is that politicians think they do have all the answers. The Republican party has decided all that is needed for economic growth is lower taxes (not low taxes, mind you--lowER taxes). The Democrats, likewise, think all you need to do is throw money at a problem, or regulate it, and it will be fixed. They KNOW the solution and they won't consider any other solution because they already have the answer. I wish just one politician would say "I don't know" and would ask economists what is likely to work under the circumstances.

<comment><USER22> Biologist here. Biologists don't try to predict whether a drug will have side effects before giving it to humans. They simply give it to mice. If we do have some strong reason to suspect it might be harmful to humans, we might do a primate trial, but usually not as those are expensive.

People do make statements like "Drug X has target Y, so its side effects should be limited to A, B, and C", but no one takes those claims seriously. It's too hard to predict what a drug will do, and in fact drugs are frequently used in practice without any knowledge of mechanism of action.

The point is that biology is fundamentally empirical here, because in complex systems it seems that rationalism/theory is not that useful.

> Economics is hard because you can't do repeated trials.

Yes. The problem is that they pretend they can predict results of interventions when they demonstrably cannot. Economists are simply used to justify policy decisions made on some other basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In the same way that a religion uses church to reinforce its doctrine at regular intervals, the school of economics leverages the media to reinforce its own doctrine at regular intervals. But unlike economic ideas, many religious ideas are so much at odds with observable reality that they need constant (weekly) reinforcement in order for people to keep believing them.

Like with religion though, the ideas spread by economic theory also have a certain uplifting (hopeful) quality which give people an incentive to believe in them.

The doctrine of economics promises that if you adhere to its rules, you will be rewarded with financial independence; this is not so different from the doctrine of religion which promises that if you adhere to its rules, you will be rewarded with eternal life - While the promised land of economic theory may not quite measure up; it makes up for this deficiency by being easier to reconcile with observable reality; especially for those who happen to be among the chosen few who actually get to see the promised land.

</comment><comment><USER24> For more in a similar vein, see

* _Debunking Economics_ by Steve Keen. It's rhetoric aside, it provides strong arguments that the basics of economics are simply...wrong.

* _Misbehaving_ by Richard Thaler. A history of and introduction to behavioral economics, it has many amusing stories about interactions with economists behaving badly.

</comment><comment><USER25> If anything has become a religion it is politics.

</comment><comment><USER26> This article goes well with the recent submission of an old Asimov article on the cult of ignorance. Science is a religion. Economics is a religion. Experts don't know anything. You can believe whatever you want!

edit: Just noticed that the page has it's own internal link to another guardian article 'the cult of the expert - and how it collapsed' so they know what they are doing.

</comment><comment><USER27> There's a good section in Harari's recent book Sapiens where he lumps ideologies with religion. Basically the common thing is a shared strong belief in some idea, the only difference being whether it involves supernatural creatures.

My own take on economics is I'm glad I studied it while also studying engineering. Taken with a proper science, you learn an awful lot about how how to think critically. If you only do science, you don't think too much about whether the conclusions are warranted. You gasp, but it's true. And it's because you can pursue the evidence in a very detailed way in sciences, and that has been done for you by the time you come to study it. So when you're learning, most of the time isn't spent on considering whether you believe in quantum tunnelling. Your time is mostly spent understanding the intricacies of the explanation, and calculating predictions based on the theory.

With economics, all my engineering friends would make a face when you talked about it. Law of one price? Really? Oh yeah, it's an idealised world. And in contrast to the frictionless, airless world in intro physics, we don't have much of a clue of how loosening the assumptions affects the model. For instance there are agent based models where you get multiple prices. Other unlikely things are where some consumer is meant to be optimizing some utility function. Most graduates will find this hard to do with a computer, so I'm not sure I believe the hand-wavy "they use a heuristic" explanation. Also, my parents ran a restaurant and despite having an economics degree I never saw my dad draw a nice supply and demand X to set prices.

That being said I still think there's a lot of value in economics, especially on the micro end. It's worthwhile having a simple market model in your head, where "market model" actually means a catalog of how markets can deviate from Econ 101. Mainly it' a collection of failures of information. Lemon problem, star-systems in employment, network externalities. Also game theoretic ideas are useful to have heard of, even though the actual models are incredibly complex.

With macro, I wondered whether anything was learned. A lot of it seems like mathfuscation. Econometric models can get very complicated. More complicated normally means it needs a lot of data to validate. But how is economic data gathered? Well it depends on what the economic theory of the time finds important. And it's not cheap or easy to gather, so you don't get terribly much data. A GDP print comes out maybe four times a year. And the economic regime has shifted over the years with various governments, so how do we draw any conclusions?

A lot of the political "lessons" in economics are badly reasoned. Especially when you chat with political types, you get a single example in support of some idea. (Print money? Weimar Republic!) It decays into storytelling, which is not science.

Post uni, I've had an interesting journey. At one stage I saw a lot of value in libertarian ideas. I was always wary of certain people I knew who just swallowed it whole. They're very loud, and somewhat articulate, but the more confident someone was, the less likely it was they knew the evidence. For instance you'll sometimes run into someone who denies that monopolies have ever existed. They can explain away everything with their model: the invisible hand was trying, but mankind got in the way. Usually a red mankind.

And that brings me back to religion. A lot of people who don't know what they're talking about will confidently tell you their version of economics is the right one. Even when you have counterexamples, which you will because you're a graduate, they will wave it off generically (X is actually misunderstood / X is not that important). Some of these people are actually intelligent fools, and they'll create elaborate and technically sophisticated explanations for their world view. It's often impossible to get them to see any light, because your objections will not cause them to overturn their world view.

How do you know it is fruitless? With ideology as with religion, nothing is ever explained simply. Find the right professor and he'll explain in a way you will understand why a plane flies. Find a religious person or ideologue, and the explanation is elusive. It's part of god's plan, or it's the hand again _. If you get the feeling the emperor has no clothes, you 're right.

_ I actually like Adam Smith, his explanations were simple and not trying to take things to extremes. For instance he talked about how what the market wanted might not be good for the people in it, because if you specialise in some aspect of pinmaking you might find it boring. It's a bit unfortunate how he's been characterised over the years.

<comment><USER28> Beautifully written, sir

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> People are prone to religion. If they don't have an organized faith, they will look for it elsewhere.

That's why progressives (who are generally atheists or agnostics) seem to treat non-religious things like the environment as a religion.

</comment><comment><USER30> Economics is fundamentally based on the fallacy of statistics to say anything meaningful about society. However as someone once noticed, statistically humans have one testicle. It's statistically true but pragmatically useless.

Economics is in reality a study of history sometimes a social science rather than a study of the future. And all economic models are based on historical knowledge.

Economy in itself is pretty harmless but when it's combined with politicians who use it to steer public discourse it's catastrophic.

And so we have economist with no model for factoring in technologys' effect on society advising and informing politicians about public policy.

It is my guess that Economics in the future in many ways will be seen the same way many of us sees astrology. As something which is really good at finding correlation but very bad at exposing any causation.

<comment><USER7> > statistically humans have one testicle. It's statistically true but > pragmatically useless.

A funny quip that highlights more misapplication of statistics than a deep truth of the quantitative realm. Yes, the mean is a statistic. But bi-modality is also something good statisticians (and economists!) pay attention to.

<comment><USER28> The widely-used representative agent paradigm more or less does assume that everyone has one testicle.

<comment><USER7> Meh, thus the push for expressing heterogeneity over the past few decades in the literature. Sample papers: [0] [1]

[0] [http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/JDSAntmanMc...](http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/JDSAntmanMcKenzieRevised.pdf)

[1] [http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/bitstream/handle/10915/3512/Docume...](http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/bitstream/handle/10915/3512/Documento_completo.pdf?sequence=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Gonna leave this here:

[https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen](https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen)

Yeah, it seems dodgy. But he moved to focus on his Patreon page as his older blog got spam flooded.

</comment><comment><USER32> If economic theory was so bad as it is often implied any idiot could come up with a better theory and replace the one that we have now. The fact that this doesn't happen would suggest that it isn't that bad.

<comment><USER33> All you've established is that economics is better than some random idiot. Hardly sufficient reason to accept the opinions of economists as hard science.

The fact of the matter is, as many economists themselves will admit, economic theories suffer from both poor predictive power and poor falsifiability.

This is by no means a knock against economists. They can still provide valuable insight. But they don't have automatic authority over a reasonably informed layman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So it looks that pretty much everybody here actually graduated in theology instead of science (as claimed). If not, are you sure to know enough of theology to call upon it ?

</comment><comment><USER35> Anything too large and too diffuse is religion IMO. Technology, growth based capitalism etc .. It's what people holds as an entity to respect by "all" means.

</comment><comment><USER36> I studied economics through the backdoor, starting with game theory, then (around 2008, because "no one saw it coming") generalizing to economics, political economics and politics.

If you go that way, you will inevitably end up subscribing Austrian economics (and also libertarian justice/politics) which is basically a non-existent area in mainstream economics but is the only consistent theory and kind of automagically leads to many of Taleb's criticisms (e.g., second order effects).

For the interested I recommend as an introduction:

\- Atlas shrugged (A. Rand, for those who have time) \- Economics in one lesson (H. Hazlitt, for those who don't have time)

<comment><USER37> > you will inevitably end up subscribing Austrian economics (and also > libertarian justice/politics)

How do you account for all the people who did subscribe to it at some point in the past, but no longer do?

Case in point: I used to be an ancap. I've read "Atlas Shrugged" many times, and I worshiped Rothbard.

That was many years ago. In this past election, I supported Sanders.

<comment><USER36> Hmm, it's a minefield for _me_ to speculate about _your_ reasons :)

Maybe you can elaborate a little more what changed your mind?

One good reason for your vote would be however that DT and HC were close to 0 on most scales you could think of (economic understanding, morality, diplomacy, consistency) so you were in a hard position to begin with.

Hell, I would've probably voted the same.

Btw I also feel that I softened my stance due to

\- a much better financial position (e.g., if you earn 20k p.a. then 30% tax is a lot; but the same tax rate affects you much less if you earn 80k)

\- kids and other things to care for and worry about

<comment><USER37> For the most part, based on my observations, I have realized that libertarian economics is not going to create an _ethical_ society - the one that I would want to live in myself, for example.

I still apply the same basic principles in my politics - i.e. that personal freedom and lack of regulation is a good thing in and of itself, but regulations can be a necessary lesser evil to mitigate some greater evil. Thus, society should have "just enough government", and no more than that. I just draw the line on what is "enough" much further to the left than I used to - enough so to firmly identify as left-wing by now on the basis of policies that I end up supporting with this justification (e.g. socialized healthcare, UBI, some anti-discrimination laws).

As far as tax rates, I'm not sure I get it... who pays a 30% tax off $20k annual income? Unless you include all taxes, such as sales. But then the logical response would be to replace sales taxes with income or property taxes (i.e. make the tax system less regressive), not necessarily to campaign for lower taxes overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This thread has very low quality discussion. MOst of you have no clue of what you're talking about.

</comment><comment><USER39> Just 3% is cash in the economy; Everything else is debt, debt and damn statistics; [http://www.positivemoney.org/our-proposals/debt-based- money-...](http://www.positivemoney.org/our-proposals/debt-based-money-vs- sovereign-money-infographic/)

<comment><USER12> > _for every pound in your bank account someone else must have a pound of > debt_

This is called double-entry bookkeeping [1]. Every pound in your bank account is a debt _on the bank 's balance sheet_. If it weren't, you wouldn't have any claim to exercise when you walked into the bank to demand your deposits.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double- entry_bookkeeping_syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double- entry_bookkeeping_system)

<comment><USER40> That's true except fractional reserve banking means the lending of those "debts" out by the bank multiple times. Doesn't seem really like a _liability_ in the normal sense.

<comment><USER12> > _Doesn't seem really like a liability in the normal sense_

Banks borrow from depositors and lend to borrowers. Deposits are a liability in that if the bank can't pay them back, the bank's assets are seized the firm put under conservatorship (or even liquidated, _e.g._ Lehman Brothers).

Note that eliminating fractional-reserve banking, _i.e._ switching to a full- money system [1] per the Chicago Plan [2] is not a free lunch. It shifts a lot of power from de-centralised actors to the state. That, in turn, makes central-bank independence even more important [3]. (Note that implementing the Chicago Plan would maintain double-entry bookkeeping, and so the persistent Internet meme about us being in a debt-denominated economy.)

[1] [https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2016/01/27/is- this-t...](https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2016/01/27/is-this-the-end- of-fractional-reserve-banking/)

[2] [http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12202.pdf](http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12202.pdf)

[3] [https://people.ucsc.edu/~walshc/MyPapers/cbi_newpalgrave.pdf](https://people.ucsc.edu/~walshc/MyPapers/cbi_newpalgrave.pdf)

<comment><USER31> [http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte...](http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q102.pdf)

<comment><USER40> That article was really excellent, thanks for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39>
      $1.54 trillion is CASH.
      $19.96 trillion is DEBT.

[http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm](http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm)

</comment><comment><USER41> > Over time, successive economists slid into the role we had removed from the > churchmen: giving us guidance on how to reach a promised land of material > abundance and endless contentment.

I don't think the author understands Christianity at all.

<comment><USER42> Sounds like the televangelist form of Christianity, or the various offshoots dealing with prosperity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> To be fair, they're mostly talking about macroeconomics.

</comment><comment><USER44> _Yet if history teaches anything, it's that whenever economists feel certain that they have found the holy grail of endless peace and prosperity, the end of the present regime is nigh. On the eve of the 1929 Wall Street crash, the American economist Irving Fisher advised people to go out and buy shares; in the 1960s, Keynesian economists said there would never be another recession because they had perfected the tools of demand management._

 _2008 crash was no different. Five years earlier, on 4 January 2003, the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas had delivered a triumphal presidential address to the American Economics Association. Reminding his colleagues that macroeconomics had been born in the depression precisely to try to prevent another such disaster ever recurring, he declared that he and his colleagues had reached their own end of history: "Macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded," he instructed the conclave. "Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved."_

Sigh...it seems like every month there is new article that degenerates economics by comparing to a religion or astrology.

Economists don't need to be able to predict [http://greyenlightenment.com/why- economists-dont-need-to-be-...](http://greyenlightenment.com/why-economists- dont-need-to-be-able-to-predict/)

A doctor cannot predict with 100% certainty when or if someone will get sick.

A car mechanic cannot predict with 100% certainty when someone's car will fail.

Economics models such as the Black Scholes equation do an adequate at describing reality. Are they perfect/ no, but in most instances good enough. When such models fail, they can be modified, but that does mean having to do away with models altogether. In the past few decades, very sophistical financial models have been developed that can account for nearly everything. I agree that over-reliance on models can be problematic, but models are descriptive, not just prescriptive. Just saying "We don't know" and ending it there means scientific progress stalls.

The 2008 bank bailout, in retrospect , although maligned, was a success by infusing liquidity to the weakest parts of the economy (financial institutions, housing, etc.) so that the healthier parts (retail, tech, payment processing) would bot be hurt too much by contagion. The post-2008 bull market and ecoomic expansion is the longest ever, and programs such as TARP helped in that regard, but also the strength of the private sector, exports, technology, and consumer spending.

 _No sooner do we persuade ourselves that the economic priesthood has finally broken the old curse than it comes back to haunt us all: pride always goes before a fall. Since the crash of 2008, most of us have watched our living standards decline. Meanwhile, the priesthood seemed to withdraw to the cloisters, bickering over who got it wrong. Not surprisingly, our faith in the "experts" has dissipated._

The S&P 500 is 60% higher than it was in 2008. After factoring in dividends, it's 80% higher. Profits & earnings have also grown considerably. Dwelling on the mistakes and crisis of the past means one overlooks how things have improved.

 _For decades, neoliberal evangelists replied to such objections by saying it was incumbent on us all to adapt to the model, which was held to be immutable – one recalls Bill Clinton's depiction of neoliberal globalisation, for instance, as a "force of nature". And yet, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the consequent recession, there has been a turn against globalisation across much of the west. More broadly, there has been a wide repudiation of the "experts", most notably in the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum._

I agree that many experts who predicted a bear market and recession as a consequences of Brexit and Trump were dead wrong, but that goes to show how hard predicting is (but I'm sure personal political biases also played a role). But economics is also descriptive: the US economy did not enter recession, simply because Brexit and Trump failed to have any negative impact on earnings.

<comment><USER45> >> Economists don't need to be able to predict

Then perhaps they shouldn't? There are always economists sticking their oar in on all sorts of predictive matters, often sounding really quite certain that their predictions of doom or transcendent joy are inevitable. 6 months down the line, when nothing of the sort occurs, they are nowhere to be seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> A personal anecdote about Economics...

A friend was doing a Masters in Nuclear Physics at the same time as myself. She decided she didn't like it, and went to do a Masters in Economics. 4 months later, she was back in Physics.

Over a beer, she told me that the comment which did it for her was a professor who claimed "The math you're learning now is more complex than nuclear physics." Uh.... right. She showed me her notes (math, no explanation), and I correctly identified it as Bayesian probability calculations.

It's hard to have respect for a field when they're don't know what they're doing, and still think they're better than everyone else.

I'm sure there's lots of things in economics which are real and useful, but there's a _lot_ of woo in it, too.

<comment><USER44> If you go on Arxiv and Journal of Finance, the quant papers there are very technical (very advanced statistical and PDE methods). Not saying it's harder than physics, but it's not a walk in the park either.

<comment><USER47> It's also worth noting that a lot of quants have a pure maths/physics background rather than economics

<comment><USER48> Yes, "quants" tend to have undergrad math/physics backgrounds, but "quants" aren't the ones writing academic papers in the Journal of Finance. You, and many others in this thread, seem to have a painful lack of awareness that there are things called PhD programs, and that they select and train students to specifically do research. Here's an analogy: a random comp-sci undergrad/master's isn't going to be publishing in a conference any time soon. Most of you have no chance of getting into a PhD comp-sci program, just as most random econ students have no chance of getting into a PhD econ program. Both of these select heavily from mathematics.

Here's the editorial board of the Journal of Finance:

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-62...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/\(ISSN\)1540-6261/homepage/EditorialBoard.html)

You can feel free to check their affiliations for yourself, but almost every single person has a PhD in Economics or a PhD in Finance/Financial-Economics from a top department. PhD Finance programs are structured like PhD econ programs (you take the usual micro/macro/metrics), and were historically rooted in economics departments. And for what it's worth, almost all of them will have a bachelor's in mathematics, or a master's in mathematics, or in the case of international students, a master's in economics.

The topic of this thread is about academic economics, yet you and everyone else are attacking it by citing the irrelevance of undergrad economics in the U.S.. Which we're all painfully familiar with. But believe it or not, the best aspiring comp-sci academics in the United States rarely take a full major of comp-sci courses at the undergrad level either, because U.S liberal arts majors are frankly geared towards students who have no interest in academia. This does not imply a single thing about graduate-level comp-sci, economics or finance research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Economics has always been more of a religion than anything else. It has no predictive aspects. It is purely reflective. And the entire system has a group of "ideologies/leaders/etc" that adherents cling to and worship.

Economics is what Feynman calls a "pseudoscience" ( aka social sciences ).

[https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo](https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo)

One sect of economists will argue with another sect of economists and neither side can ever win. Just like muslims and jews will argue with each other and never get anywhere.

<comment><USER50> _It has no predictive aspects._

While economics has issues, this is an unfair assessment. Entire nations base economic policy based on much economic theory. That is as predictive as you can get, betting with real stakes. Some nations succeed. Some don't. There is fairly solid agreement as to why certain countries perennially have extremely poor economic performance while others are not bad. There is fairly certain agreement as to why Germany experienced hyperinflation. Choosing good or poor economic policy results in predictions either way.

<comment><USER37> How often do the nations that base their economic policy on economic theory succeed, and how often do they fail? That's the crucial data that would tell us whether it has predictive value or not, and if so, to what extent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The Guardian is a notorious proponent of central economic planning, which is the most hubristic economic ideology there is. It presumes a small group of economists, using macroeconomic data, can plan the activities of millions of people better than they can themselves using vast stores of localized private knowledge that's diffused across society. Moreover, it advocates that the government should give these economists the right to override an individual's own decisions on what to do with their life and property, in order to force them to comply with said plan.

Every other article from them promotes basic income, prohibitions on 'dangerous' free market interaction (e.g. Uber), conspiracy theories about the wealthy promoting the free market ideology, or some other bullshit economic fad based almost entirely on conjecture from anecdotal evidence that satisfies its ideological biases.

<comment><USER52> The Guardian is a (social) liberal newspaper, not a socialist one. I've never seen them argue for central planning in an editorial, and I've been reading them on and off for nearly 30 years. Not is it particularly fond of economists.

They do generally object to laissez-faire capitalism. But frankly, a dislike of Uber is nothing at all to do with a penchant for 5-year plans.

<comment><USER51> All social democratic policies are forms of central economic planning. Central economic planning is not limited to full-scale communism.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This thread has become laughing stock for economists

[https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/the-coders-over-at- hacke...](https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/the-coders-over-at-hackernews- are-attacking-my-friends-on-ejmr?replies=17#post-3631832)</comment>


Guessing the Online Customer's Next Want  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/technology/19recommend.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin <comment><USER2> Easiest thing to do is to install Greasemonkey if you are using Firefox and then apply this script: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039>

It allows you to block by site. Just add <http://*nytimes.com./*> to the block list. And add <http://*forbes.com/*> while you're at it!

</comment><comment><USER3> login to read ftl.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best TV series, Movies you watched in 2016? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Stranger Things on Netflix would have to be one of my favorites for the year.</comment>


'Juul-Alikes' Are Filling Shelves with Sweet, Teen-Friendly Nicotine Flavors - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/health/juul-flavors-nicotine.html <comment><USER2> Don't let the article's title fool you: none of these products are new, they have been available for a long time. The only difference is that the Juul was/is most popular with teens, so they were the ones punished.

</comment><comment><USER3> Every parent scared to death of finding out their kid is vaping should ask themselves this: What if they were using actual cigarettes, or god forbid Vanilla cream flavored vodka.

Sensationalism is cancer.

</comment><comment><USER4> But it doesn't fill lungs with water so all is good, right??</comment>


US plummets on World Press Freedom Index, from 27th to 47th - <AUTHOR> http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/26/2315249/us-plummets-on-world-press-freedom-ranking <comment><USER2> This strikes me as a bit odd:

 _"Hungary fell 17 rungs to 40th place after adopting a law giving the ruling party direct control over the media and amending its constitution in December."_

 _"In the space of two months in the United States, more than 25 were subjected to arrests and beatings at the hands of police"_ reducing the US to 47th place.

<comment><USER3> How many reporters were _beaten_ in Hungary?

Really no need to pass laws restricting reporters when you can just hit them instead.

<comment><USER2> Obviously, restricting press freedom with laws and with beatings are both bad. However, I don't think 25 beatings in a country as large as the U.S. constitutes a systematic or widespread attack on press freedom.

<comment><USER3> The thought that it's not systematic disturbs me even more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It should be noted that they changed their algorithm this year. They are giving more weight to good actions.

So this change in ranking is partially due to good countries getting more credit for stuff they were already doing, as well as new bad actions in the USA.

Nothing to feel proud about as this probably means the USA would have ranked pretty low anyway in 2010, were it calculated by 2011 standards.

</comment><comment><USER5> I did not personally agree with the political goals of the occupy protests. Moreover, many of those protests were marred by violence from protesters or from folks just finding an opportunity for mayhem.

However, none of that excuses the very real abuses of power by police that occurred. Non-violent protesters were beaten and arrested. Reporters were harassed, abused, and prevented from covering events by police. Many mainstream reporters simply agreed to comply with police requests to stay out of an area and avoid covering the protests and arrests.

I am ashamed for my country in the way these protests evolved and in the police and critical response to them. Tribalism is still alive and well in this country, the response one has to abuse of power and the support one has for legal protections of individual liberty should have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not one shares a cultural or social bond with the victim. I have a feeling that if the ACLU attempted to defend the free speech rights of neo-NAZIs today they would receive even less public support than they did 4 decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER6> The first two top-level comments I see here amount to:

a) Beating bloggers, especially hippies, doesn't count

b) If we had only prevented the protests, we'd be doing better

Still more reasons America is in a slump in these rankings

<comment><USER7> Explaining why the methodology used by the "press freedom index" is solid instead of making ad-hominem attacks would go a lot further in winning people over.

<comment><USER8> > Explaining why the methodology used by the "press freedom index" is solid > instead of making ad-hominem attacks would go a lot further in winning > people over.

Why, do you find its methodology hard to understand?

I'll keep that in mind when evaluating the merit of your comments elsewhere in this thread ... "does not actually understand the methodology used in the article".

Talk about quality of discussion, indeed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Flagged. _Please_ keep things like this on reddit.

</comment><comment><USER10> The key seems to be, in order to be high on the list do not have protests and uprisings in your country.

<comment><USER11> Or you can have protests but not use force against them. Or more specifically do not use force against the journalists. Of course one goes with the other, if you want to beat up some peaceful protesters you have to beat up the journalists covering your original beating too.

The occupy protests were peaceful and they generally did not break shops and vandalize things. There was no reason to treat them that way.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry, the Occupy protests have NOT been peaceful. Just last week in SF, a couple police officers ended up in the hospital. Nevermind the amount of property they managed to trash. They were also lucky they didn't kill anyone, they were throwing bricks and objects off an abandoned hotel near where I live.

<comment><USER12> Upvoted (back to 1) for being able to give an example, but though there have been a few violent incidents associated with Occupy, for the most part they've been remarkably restrained - more so than I would have guessed. To the extent that police violence is justified by what Occupiers do we should ignore it[1], but was a single one of those 25 incidents of violence against reporters justified? Certainly few if any.

[1] e.g. if you surround a group of police and tell them you aren't going to let them leave until they release their prisoners, I'm not going to cry over you getting tear-gassed. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhPdH3wE0_Y>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a stunt that does more to take away from the legitmacy of Reporters Without Borders than anything else.

If they dropped the US's press freemdom ranking because of the cozy relationships between government officials and mainstream media, or the manipulative behavior of the government towards the press, or any of a dozen other factors, I'd be interested.

But they didn't -- instead, they made some vague remark about the oppression of the occupy people. The occupy movement is a joke that is either imploding or getting hijacked by the local activist union movements.

<comment><USER14> The report states that there were over 25 instances in a two-month period in which journalists in the US were beaten and/or arrested while on the job, with charges such as "public nuisance." That seems pretty clear to me, and consistent with their reasoning for ranking other countries.

<comment><USER13> Are you referring to bona-fide journalists, or the advocates with cameraphones?

I got stuck in the middle of our local occupy grop as they broke up and did a spontaneous march through rush hour traffic when I was walking to the bus. The newspaper and other reporters were clearly distinguishable from the mob, but there were plenty of wannabe "journalists" broadcasting from cameraphones. Those folks were more like PR flacks than journalists. I saw similar stuff in NYC as well.

I'm speaking from the perspective of my experience. If cops somewhere else are cracking the heads of reporters (vs. participants), I'm not aware of it.

<comment><USER15> So you're saying that 'wannabes' shouldn't have the same freedom of speech, and implying that it's okay to beat or arrest them?

Sounds like a shining beacon of free speech to me.

<comment><USER2> He's saying that if someone's throwing bricks or similar, it doesn't matter whether or not they've got a cameraphone.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


80legs is hiring full-time developers and interns - <AUTHOR> http://www.80legs.com/jobs.html

<comment><USER2> For those without a valid work visa or citizenship: they will not be able to obtain a new work visa for you. (there, spared some of you 30min).

</comment><comment><USER3> AWESOME! In the meantime I'm still waiting to get invited to the beta...

(please invite me on your own time, not because I posted this to HN)

<comment><AUTHOR> lol.. I'll see what I can do :)</comment></comment>


Straight Talk on Event Loops - <AUTHOR> http://teddziuba.com/2011/10/straight-talk-on-event-loops.html

<comment><USER2> Most of the computation and work thrown at JavaScript on the client side is trivial. I mean, really, absolutely nothing. On top of that, that client is sporting some crazy-super-duper-intel-voodoo cpu with gigabytes of RAM. That's why things fly. On the server side, you're running on an instance with limited RAM and a CPU that is being cut into a multitude of pieces through virtualization. On top of that, the server is trying to provide for a multitude of clients at the same time. That's why you have to be careful.

But we all know this stuff already.

We know you can't brute-force things on the server side. You are working with very limited resources.

Any blocking operation will destroy an event loop and the process model will crumble. Threads are more resistant to this. The offending thread will block, the other threads will keep going. So what?

If you multiply processes with a balancer to try to avoid this, you've reinvented threading, in a really bad way. We know that too.

Please pay attention. Things are changing.

Remember what I started with? That lopsided _power_ divide between client and server. _We know this_. That's why we're moving the heavy lifting from the server to the client.

Ryan, you're wrong. I'm not going to send the video encryption job to a different process. I'm going to send it to the client or to some distributed cloud thingie. My server can't handle it no matter how you skin that cat.

Ted, you're wrong. My server doesn't block on the CPU. Because there's not much of a CPU there to begin with. Threads won't make my barely-there-cpu any more present. What isn't there, isn't there.

All my server does is store data and retrieve data. It does nothing else. NodeJS, PHP, Python, Java, etc. etc. that entire layer has become just that. A layer. A layer that facilitates access to the data. That's it.

 _It doesn't matter what you use or how you use it, as long as you don't touch the CPU._

Because on the server, that CPU isn't really there and no magical model will make it appear. Do your computation somewhere else. Like on the client's computer, who is using his marvel of engineering for playing solitare.

</comment><comment><USER3> any more insight guys?</comment>