Bob – A Tarsnap GUI client for OS X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/casperstorm/Bob

<comment><USER2> Warning that this doesn't detect errors properly. Reporting that it successfully backed up when it definitely did not.

> command.run(job) File "/Library/Python/2.7/site- > packages/tarsnapper-0.2.1-py2.7.egg/tarsnapper/script.py", line 347, in run > > OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

<comment><USER3> Thank you for reporting this.

Bob is still a very early project (development started 3 days ago). We just released version 0.1.2 which improves the error handling.

Feel free to open issues on the Github page if more things come up.

<comment><USER4> You should probably put that disclaimer on the GitHub README. Lots of folks will have no idea.

It's a testament to your good design that it looks finished though. Kudos! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anybody ever used Tarsnap to back up Time Machine sparseimages? I've wanted to try it out but I'm not sure if Tarsnap will handle the de-dup on all of the Time Machine snapshots properly. Will I end up with just the original plus deltas or hundreds of copies of the original?

<comment><USER6> Short answer: Tarsnap can back up a sparse image without messing up any de-dup properties of the contents of the sparse image.

I haven't tested Tarsnap with my Time Machine backups yet, but I've used non- Mac file systems as file servers to Mac OS X clients for more than 10 years now.

The only special bit of Time Machine backups is the hard-links to directories. This requires HFS+.

A sparseimage that is an image of an HFS+ file system can use that file system to hold Time Machine backups.

Such a sparse image can be copied to a non-HFS+ file system, without affecting the Time Machine backups on the sparse image.

Using a "sparsebundle" instead of a single-file sparse image will let you use non-Mac file systems such as FAT32 that limit the file size to less than 2 GB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tarsnap is really great service. It's obviously targeted at tech people, but if you are one, just check it out. I do not feel the need for any wrappers as the CLI is quite nice, but your mileage may vary.

What I'm backing up are a few true crypt containers. Not out of paranoia (well...), but because I use TC anyway to separate different kinds of context (by usage and importance). The nice thing is that incremental backups feature still works great. Compression is not really useful though. Currently I have ~70gb of data, ~20gb being unique.

The service is also priced quite reasonably. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER8> As a newcomer to the tarsnap family (started using a month ago)- I completely agree - I use Dropbox, Super Duper, Arq, Crashplan for various types of backup scenarios - but the tools that I use to snapshot my ultra critical (all Customer content - code, scripts, visio diagrams, network configs, site/RF surveys) 677 MB "customers" folder is tarsnap. It really is as simple as:

       tarsnap -cf customers-2014.05.12 ~/Dropbox/Customers

Wait for 15 seconds (if there haven't been many changed files) - and I have a snapshot of my files.

Even more tremendously wonderful - I deposited $20.00 a month ago, and I currently have a remaining balance of $19.826571509446676694.

I.E. Tarsnap charges me 0.173428490553323306/month to backup/snapshot _all_ of the content I've created in the previous 2 1/2 years.

(Note - Tarsnap users so many sigifnicant digits, that OS X calc, Excel, and Python all gave me three different answers for 20-19.826571509446676694.

      Calc: 0.17342849055332
      Python: 0.17342849055332366
      Excel: 0.173428490553398

I had to check by hand, and use the Python "decimal" module to get the "correct" answer of 0.173428490553323306.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh, that's neat. I was on the lookout for a Arq-like client for Tarsnap, this looks promising and I'll definitely give it a shot. At first I thought that's the one being posted on the Tarsnap mailing list [0] lately but it's not and looks easier to install than the other one.

[0] [https://github.com/arnt/tarsnap-gui](https://github.com/arnt/tarsnap-gui)

<comment><USER10> I wish arq supported tarsnap. That would be amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I fought the urge to want a GUI for Tarsnap and hand-wrote cronjob scripts that I'm very happy with now. It was part of the fun. Definitely non-ideal for everyone but I recommend it to any hackers to attempt the same.

One thing I learned as a result is becoming intimately with the unix/linux folder structure and being able to backup an entire OS deployment, reinstall the OS and just pull an old backup to recreate most of the important configs.

There might be a reason why there are a lack of good scripts, even on Github.

<comment><USER12> Most tarsnap wrappers do not add any special functionality. You can find hundred of tarsnap cron scripts or bash wrappers, or python wrappers... But truth is that they don't add nothing special. Most people using tarsnap can roll their own personalized solution easily if they require anything more than the binary offers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those wondering, here is a popular post on tarsnap from a year ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5767116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5767116)

</comment><comment><USER14> Can Bob backup Time Machine backups?</comment>


DoS vulnerability in #Varnish HTTP cache software. - <AUTHOR> https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-announce/2013-October/000686.html

<comment><USER2> This is really going to be more of a cache-flush issue, considering how quickly it will recover.

Bouncing the front-end is likely to expose the backend (say, a php site) to the traffic load usually handled by varnish. This is likely to bring that (and its db, etc) down very quickly.

But the good news is that all you need to do is ship a new vcl file and there's no need to patch/rebuild varnishd binaries.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Discuss here or on Twitter > [https://twitter.com/bsdphk/status/395605262024732672](https://twitter.com/bsdphk/status/395605262024732672)</comment>


Ask HN: Firefox extension for real-time notifications. Where do I start? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, thought I'd ask the HN community because this seems like a question others may be interested in.
I'd like to build a Firefox extension for my website that pushes an alert to a user when one of their friends does something on my site.
I imagine the easiest (but less scalable) method would be to have the extension poll my site for updates, but that's going to hurt performance if this thing takes off.
Would it make sense to setup a jabber server for this? Say 1,000 people have this extension installed and are currently online, how resource intensive would this be (would I need a bunch of jabber servers to handle all these connections)?
It would be awesome if there was a real-time notification APIs that would allow me to do something like this without running the jabber network myself.. even if it cost money.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> If users are going to have you webpage open in a tab anyway, I might suggest you take a look at Yip.

[http://abcdefu.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/introducing-yip- an-u...](http://abcdefu.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/introducing-yip-an-unified- notification-system-for-the-web/)

Rather than requiring a dedicated plugin, Yip uses the methods already in place for sending updates via Fluid or Prism.

If you want it to live entirely in the browser's chrome, you may need to do a full extension.

I can't speak to the resources needed- It depends on how heavy your backend is.. But if you have 1000 users all updating once few seconds, a single nginx box very well could cover your needs.

Serving static html takes substantially fewer resources than people suspect.</comment>


Vim speed is not really the point - <AUTHOR> http://wrongsideofmemphis.com/2013/03/27/vim-speed-is-not-really-the-point/

<comment><USER2> I'm a huge vim fan myself, but I haven't thrown IDE's out of the window entirely.

There are still 2 things that I can't give up that IDE's do better than vim (in my opinion):

1\. Refactoring operations. I have yet to find a vim plugin that has the extreme refactoring awareness I've become accustomed to in IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse. And writing a macro to do it for you is not the answer, because these tasks are non trivial to do a.) correctly, b.) in the general case, and c.) across an entire codebase. There's a reason people have sunk a gazillion years and R&D dollars in to creating IDE's, and some bullshit vim macro that I put together mid-day on a Thursday because I need to extract a method isn't going to compete.

2\. Super-powerful auto completions. I get that vim has code completion plugins, and most of them are _good_ (I'm currently using YouCompleteMe). But they aren't _great_. IntelliJ has it's legendary "index the world" mentality, and is really great at fuzzy match finding. Eclipse is a little clunkier, but its ability to drop in the entire method signature and provide tab-stops for quickly filling in the parameters is a boon.

The majority of my bias towards these features probably comes from the fact that I write Java code for a living at my day job, where the "documentation" is actually the code completion popup 90% of the time and most file operations or refactors are accompanied by some degree of boilerplate that is handily automated. Say what you will about verbose code and "enterprise" languages, but learning an API as you go by mindlessly mashing Ctrl+Space and skipping the inheritance/implementation rain dance is a huge productivity gain.

I do all of my C/C++, Haskell, HTML/CSS/JS, and Ruby in vim, where I have a pain-stakingly customized pathogen setup that I sync across all of my computers (personal and work). Code completion is good enough, between YouCompleteMe and ctags, but I still miss refactoring something fierce. But if FP Complete releases their Haskell IDE tomorrow and it isn't completely offensive to look at (Leksah!), has good refactoring, and has good code completion, I'd jump ship in a heartbeat.

I don't think that the whole IDE vs. vim/emacs war is real. I think that they're two completely different tools that are good at very different things; I will not argue that I am _way, way, way_ faster at just editing text in vim; EasyMotion, ctags, never having to use a mouse... I love these things. But anybody that writes off an IDE without fully understanding just how powerful the two features I mentioned above can be when dealing with multi-million loc codebases is being narrow minded.

<comment><USER3> Are there no good vim extensions for IntelliJ or Eclipse?

<comment><USER4> There's a good one for IntelliJ called IdeaVim.

I tried solutions for Eclipse back when I used it, but I couldn't find one that I liked.

<comment><USER5> When I was using eclipse, I found VRapper[0] a decent enough vim plugin. I also agree with you about IdeaVim, it's a good vim, and it's been open- sourced[1].

[0]: <http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/>

[1]: <https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is definitely a good way to explain the appeal of vim, but this is _exactly_ what IDEs let you do.

In intelliJ: oh I need to introduce a new parameter here, cmd-f6 -> add a new parameter, set a default and it does it across the entire codebase.

Another key press and it runs all the tests again.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. It's all about 'declarative' editing. I want to be able to declare my action and let editor take care of the 'details'.

But, IntelliJ (or Resharper which I use) is only good for the language they are written for. There are quite a few times where Resharper doesn't have what I am looking to do OR I am working on language/text where there is no Resharper or equivalent [especially for dynamic languages]. In such cases, Vim is a god send. And the best part is that once you know the Vim language, it can be used to edit any text (programming or non programming).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So in other words: it is not the speed, it is the latency. I can agree with that.

As an aside...I always sucked at the speed part. I have always been a 2, maybe 3 finger typer, throwing in a pinky for CTRL and a thumb for the space bar. While my vimming is pretty fast, typing long segments is embarrassingly slow. Have any of you overcome this after > 10 years of bad habits? How did you do it?

<comment><USER9> You do realize there are actually courses in a technique called touch typing? Fortunately, it won't clash with your bad habits. I can hunt and peck on mobile keyboards yet my brain uses a whole different part of my memory to keep my touch typing sharp and untainted from the lazy use of iOS' autocomplete, never confusing the two.

<comment><USER8> I don't have the problem with needing to watch my hands press the keys. It is more that my hands hover needlessly high above the keyboard because the fingers need to move more.

<comment><USER10> Typing with 3 fingers is not touch typing, even if you don't look at the keys. Lean to touch type.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The real power of vim is its proven staying power. It is worth the investment to learn it. It's been around for a long time and is likely to be around for much longer. Newer, hip editors that depend on one person or small company to make a living maintaining their product cannot provide such assurances. Some have suggested open sourcing the application, but I am not sure that has worked for Text-Mate 2.

Vim has been around, will be around, and is available pretty much every where and has a giant community. That's the point.

<comment><USER12> you can replace vim with eclipse and all you said still stands valid.

<comment><USER13> To add some figures: * vi is 36 years old, vim is 21 years old * Eclipse is 12 years old

vim is on pretty much every linux box. Eclipse isn't.

<comment><USER12> it is on mine and it's all that counts. unless what you mean is that it doesn't work without an X session on remote hosts, but in general I don't work on live code.

'The real power of vim is its proven staying power' is a non-argument, today I work on stuff that didn't even exist 10 years ago, there is no guarantee vim will be even usable for the sort of work you will be doing in a decade, and for sure there is no guarantee it will be the best choice. both vim and eclipse are here to stay for the next years and both have a lot of support.

there are lots of reasons to learn/use vim, but a 10 years longer historical consistency isn't one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sometimes, the IDE way of doing things seems to assume that your project is one of the "lifetime employment" variety -- that this is the only project and/or language you will ever work in the rest of your career, so you can take an "infinite" amount of time and setup customizing operations to just that one language and project, vs get in, hit hard, get out and move on.

</comment><comment><USER15> > I was also forcing myself into improving my usage.

I can understand that people "force" themselves to go to the gym because there are obvious benefits to it, but I keep wondering why developers "force" themselves to use Vim. It's like playing and mastering a very hard videogame, except it's not a game and it's not that much fun to learn.

<comment><USER16> I like to think there are obvious benefits to Vim, too. Why do developers force themselves to touch-type? Because hopefully it will increase your productivity, in the long run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I rolled my own 'text editing version 2.0' with an eye toward both speed and logical commands for ease of use (and to ease the mental demand).

At first I found that the speed and ease allowed me to code faster and longer. Later I realized I was making mistakes more often, because of how little thought I needed to put into editing. I think there is a fundamental limit to how fast I can get ideas from my brain into code, and the limiting factor has never been my input method. I still prefer working with an advanced input system, but I now treat it the way the OP does: like a Samurai with his sword. Sit back, relax, think, then strike. Afterward take a moment to read over what just happened and make sure it is correct.

<comment><USER17> Is this a reason to do things awkwardly, that it is slower to do it awkwardly forcing you to think more? If so, where does this reasoning stop? Should editors intentionally make things awkward?</comment></comment>


Japan's commercial whaling to restart July 1 after 3-decade hiatus - <AUTHOR> https://japantoday.com/category/national/update1-japan%27s-commercial-whaling-to-restart-july-1-after-3-decade-hiatus <comment><USER2> Sigh... I blame Greenpeace. Really. Japan was slowly moving away from whale meat. The only people who ate it were older people who nostalgically ate it because it used to be in their school lunches 50 years ago. Everyone I ever talked to said that they didn't like it the few times they ate it. "The Cove" was aired and it moved public perception of eating dolphin meat and whale meat into something embarrassing. It was almost certainly going to disappear.

And then Greenpeace decided it would be a good idea to confront Japanese whaling ships and throw rancid butter onto the decks. It hit all the big news outlets in Japan. From that point on, all I heard was, "What are these people children? Why are they doing such anti-social things to our fishermen?" It put _everybody 's_ backs up. In defiance, a few izakayas started featuring whale meat. It still wasn't popular but there was this idea of "This is our cultural identity and it's under attack". So people ate it.

Now whale and dolphin meat are in every supermarket I've been to in the last few months. It's so incredibly stupid. On top of that, I'm hearing people talk about tuna stocks and say, "All those foreigners are eating sushi now and the tuna is disappearing. It's not _their_ culture. Why does Japan have to suffer from the selfishness of others?" Of course, the average Shunsuke in the street has no idea that Japan takes 80% of the tuna catch and that it's been unsustainable for decades.

It is so frustrating when I see people make such hamfisted efforts on such important issues. If you want to convince Japanese people, you _can 't_ use the tactics you used in other cultures. You need to understand Japanese culture and you need to be very careful because if you get it wrong it _will_ backfire spectacularly.

<comment><USER3> You're generalizing a bit, though. IIRC, you're in Shizuoka prefecture, which has a history of dolphin fishing (I don't know about whales).

I live in the adjacent prefecture, Aichi, and I've never seen dolphin or whale meat in supermarkets.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. It is not common at all in most of Japan.

My own anecdotal experience, but for reference, I believe horse meat is orders of magnitude easier to find and consume in EU countries than whale in Japan. And yet I'd argue most Europeans wouldn't consider horse meat common at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems a little overblown when put into context...

Commercial fishing kills 300k cetaceans annually. [1] For contrast, at the peak of Japanese whaling, less than 40k were killed per annum[2]

China alone, in 2010, had 8.8 million metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste came from China with an estimated 3.53 million metric tons of it ending up in the ocean. [3] What happens when cetaceans lose their only environment to pollution?

I'm a conservationist, myself, but I feel so much energy of conservationists is misdirected at things of little consequence (banning plastic straws is an international debate among first world countries), whereas many of the big issues (unsustainable fossil fuel use and farming techniques) is ignored.

1\. [http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?281850/Bycatch-is-the- biggest...](http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?281850/Bycatch-is-the-biggest- killer-of-whales)

2\. [https://www.organicauthority.com/energetic- health/commercial...](https://www.organicauthority.com/energetic- health/commercial-fishing-killing-whales)

3\. [https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries- polluting...](https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting- the-oceans-the-most/)

<comment><USER5> Things like this are more a reflect of a general spirit, and fought as a symbol.

<comment><USER6> Or outright diversions from the real issues. But more often just plain ignorance among the public. Among journalists too, but if a narrative is not rooted in public conceptions then it dies. On a deeper level, probably an effect of click-chasing web news. Or at least seriously exasperated by.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please keep in mind, Japanese consider cetaceans just another fish. They simply don't understand all the anti-whaling rhetoric.

The other thing to keep in mind is the demand for whale meat has sharply decreased. Japanese would rather eat beef. If you want to eliminate whaling, do so with economic tools. I.e. cheap beef.

Lastly, if you find you are anti-whaling but love a juicy steak, I consider you a hypocrite. They're both mammals. I've never seen any conclusive evidence that whales are any better than cattle. All the 'intelligent' behavior I've ever seen reported of is comparable to other animals 'intelligent' behavior that most have no issues of eating.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Japanese consider cetaceans just another fish._

And Japanese are short, can't speak English, too ?

We don't eat whale at home, never have, nobody we know eats whale, neither can you see whale on display as a matter of course around you in Japan. Sure, you can find it if you want it. Also, even children as a rule can usually explain what a whale is, and how is different compared to, say, tuna or mackerel. Schools are a wonderful thing.

That said, your other point is quite apropos on the massive hypocrisy in general when it comes to meat and fish consumption.

The horrific process that brings chicken or beef to people's plates would be something to consider way before looking at whaling.

( Edit : Not vegetarian or vegan, by the way. )

( Edit 2 : And for clarity's sake : Not in favour of whaling for any reason, myself. )

<comment><USER8> I've never gotten the impression that a majority of Japanese support whaling. I don't think I've ever met someone who was in favour of it; mostly Japanese seem ambiguous about it, and some against.

Environmentalism is fairly strong in Japan though. Is there so little political opposition to whaling?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is little political opposition to the present government, which explains why a leader with such lousy support among the population at large ( Abe's administration has been riddled in corruption scandals almost non-stop, and has been hovering between a 30% and at best 50% in polls ) is about to become the longest serving Prime Minister.

The opposition is fragmented, weak in all respects, hasn't had a plan when in power, doesn't have one now, was mercilessly attacked when in power because of their handling of Fukushima among other things, and people have no real choice when it comes to voting.

Yuriko Koike took Tokyo Metropolis by storm and raised the prospect of a strong alternative political force to the ever in power LDP and the broken opposition, but then quickly fizzled out and renounced national ambitions.

This new whaling push seems to be just a political statement from the Abe administration, in essence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The hiatus provided cheap large fishing vessels to other countries, does this imply a boom in new fishing vessel orders?

<comment><USER10> Paragraph 2: "A fleet of five vessels belonging to six whaling operators from Abashiri in Hokkaido Prefecture, Ishimaki in Miyagi Prefecture, Minamiboso in Chiba Prefecture and Taiji in Wakayama Prefecture, who have been conducting the last round of Japan's so-called scientific whaling around Abashiri port since June 1, will embark on the mission."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You sick fucks.</comment>


Make your program slower with threads - <AUTHOR> http://brooker.co.za/blog/2014/12/06/random.html

<comment><USER2> Uh, you can't just drop in 'random_r' in place of 'random'. If you do that, what will happen is that you'll get _the same sequence of random numbers in every thread_ , making the whole multithreading exercise useless!

You have to be sure to seed the generator differently in each thread, before calling 'random_r'.

<comment><USER3> Moreover, he probably improved the single threaded version, and should re- check the scaling curve. There should be a `1 with random_r`, `2 with random_r`, and `3 with random_r`.

<comment><USER4> It's unlikely the single-threaded version was improved noticeably. Futexes are nearly zero-cost when not contended.

<comment><USER5> I left the random_r numbers with single threads out of the post for exactly this reason. Performance with random_r on a single thread was less than 3% faster, with a slightly higher variance (which I can't explain, to be honest).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It should be kept in mind that standard memory (e.g. DDR3) doesn't actually support concurrent accesses (and at least on x86, one or two cores at most can easily saturate the full bandwidth), so anytime you have shared data accessed by multiple threads it's actually serialised and that part does not perform any better than the single-threaded case; the biggest speedup occurs when the majority of the time the multiple threads are running in their own caches and not sharing any data.

<comment><USER7> While you are kind of correct in that a memory channel doesn't do multiple concurrent transfers, single-threaded memory-bound workloads definitely leave significant main memory performance on the table in most cases. (And if not memory-bound, then of course a lot more still)

Main memory is high-latency, and single threads usually don't saturate the bandwidth because they are not issuing back to back pipelined requests to memory. The CPU has a single shared memory controller and it sees requests from all cores/SMTs. A desktop x86 might support 16 outstanding cache misses that might come from different cores or SMT "threads", and is designed to keep the memory channels busy and request pipelines full by scheduling in work from all the cores/SMTs, doing prefetching according to the big picture etc.

Even multiple threads accessing the same data doesn't actually look different from the DIMM point of view, all the x86 synchronization takes place inside the CPU caches and is invisible in the main memory traffic/requests. (This is true even on multi-socket systems, the caches just talk to each other using an inter-CPU bus).

Also, desktop/server systems typically have more than one independent memory channel, in beefy servers a whole lot of them

<comment><USER8> > _While you are kind of correct in that a memory channel doesn 't do multiple > concurrent transfers, single-threaded memory-bound workloads definitely > leave significant main memory performance on the table in most cases._

You have to distinguish between memory- _latency_ -bound and memory- _throughput_ -bound. If your program has a simple, regular access pattern (which the CPU's prefetcher recognizes), then it's not that hard to saturate the memory bandwidth of a typical two-channel, DDR3-1600 system (25.6 GB/s peak throughput) with a single thread.

<comment><USER9> In order to get maximum throughput, you also might need to do SIMD loads (and stores).

On Haswell this means two AVX loads, 64 bytes per clock cycle (two 32 byte loads). I think with with scalar code, you get only 16 bytes per cycle (two 8 byte loads), and 32 bytes per cycle with SSE.

So a single Haswell core at 3 GHz can load about 178 GB/s!

On Ivy Bridge, SSE is enough to saturate memory bus.

Regardless, that's quite a bit more than what lower cache levels and DRAM can supply. It's not very hard to saturate whole CPU-local memory bus with just one core.

<comment><USER10> _So a single Haswell core at 3 GHz can load about 178 GB /s! On Ivy Bridge, SSE is enough to saturate memory bus._

I'd claim instead that it's surprisingly hard to saturate the memory bus with a single core[1]. Presuming your math is right, you've given the rate at which Haswell can load from L1 to registers if we can ignore latency and concurrency. That is, the CPU can sustain this number only if the latency is low enough relative to the number of "requests in flight". In practice, these prevent a single core from saturating the memory bus except for the case of dual-channel memory, perfect prediction and prefetching, and no TLB misses.

More commonly, the latency of the read from memory combined with the limited number (10) of "line fill buffers" reduces the throughput from RAM. The formula for actual bandwidth is known as "Little's Law": Concurrency = Latency * Bandwidth. Considering it's fundamental importance in gauging actual performance, it's strikingly rare to see it discussed in CS theory. John McCalpin, the author of the Stream benchmark has an excellent explanation of how it applies to memory bandwidth: [http://sites.utexas.edu/jdm4372/2010/11/03/optimizing-amd- op...](http://sites.utexas.edu/jdm4372/2010/11/03/optimizing-amd-opteron- memory-bandwidth-part-1-single-thread-read-only/)

[1] Here's my write up of trying to do so on Sandy Bridge: [https://software.intel.com/en- us/forums/topic/480004](https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/topic/480004)

<comment><USER9> Your write up was pretty interesting. Especially the instruction mixes, LFENCEs of all things helped?! Thanks.

I haven't tried optimize fill / copy rate since late nineties. Getting the last 10-20% appears to be rather tricky. Luckily maximum bandwidth per core is seldom an issue.

Sometimes I've thought about designs of having one core do memory prefetching ahead of loosely synchronized other core doing actual computation, to get maximal serial computational throughput. The idea is, that the computational core would fetch data from shared L2/L3 at all times. For those times, when the access patterns are not predictable for hardware prefetcher etc.

<comment><USER10> _LFENCEs of all things helped_

I don't really understand what was happening here, but it was a definite positive effect. I think the issue is that the early preloads filled the queue, preventing the stores from happening. The bright side is that getting good performance on Haswell is easier, as it supports 2 loads and 1 store per cycle (although note that address generation is still a bottleneck unless you make sure that the store is using a "simple" address).

 _I 've thought about designs of having one core do memory prefetching ahead of loosely synchronized other core doing actual computation_

I'm interested in this approach too, but haven't really tried it out. "srean" suggested this also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711626)

I think it could would work well if you know your access patterns in advance, the hard part would be keeping the cores in sync. In the absence of real-time synchronization, you'd need a really high throughput queue to make this work. Interesting write up and links here: [http://www.infoq.com/articles/High- Performance-Java-Inter-Th...](http://www.infoq.com/articles/High-Performance- Java-Inter-Thread-Communications) It's a much easier problem if you can batch up the preloads rather than doing them one at a time.

I have had success with a somewhat similar technique within a single core by issuing a batch of prefetches, then do processing on the previous data, then a batch of loads corresponding to the prefetches, then repeat. You can get 2-3x improvement of throughput on random access if you are able to tolerate the slightly increased latency. The key is figuring out how to keep the maximum number of requests in flight at all times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have some experience in this domain and I agree with the author: threads are not a performance cure-all. Many naïve implementations will actually hurt performance[1]. It takes careful thought, experimentation, measurement, and quite a bit of elbow grease to get the expected speedup.

The more general lesson is this: Just because you have very good reasons to believe a change will improve performance, that doesn't mean it will actually improve performance! Benchmark. Profile. Fix the bottleneck. Repeat. That's the only reliable way to make something faster.

1\. [http://geoff.greer.fm/2012/09/07/the-silver-searcher- adding-...](http://geoff.greer.fm/2012/09/07/the-silver-searcher-adding- pthreads/)

<comment><USER12> We're in a strange place with optimization. Hardware folks build very complex memory access paths (multiple caches/multiple accessors) to try and speed up the average case of unoptimized code. Then we try to trick that mechanism into performing for our particular computations. Maybe some programmable architecture would help here? Maybe not.

<comment><USER13> IOW, programmers assume hardware is simpler than it really is whereas hardware designers assume software is simpler than it really is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _" It's little more than a tight loop around a pseudo-random number generator."_ One locked against concurrent access.

Yes, put a lock and context switch in a tight inner loop, and your performance will suck.

<comment><USER15> I think the point is that he didn't know there was a lock. His closing argument seems to be that when you're writing muli-threaded code, you have to not only think about what your own code is doing, but also about what all the library and system calls you use are doing. Which is one of the many reasons multi-threaded code is harder to write than single threaded.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I thought rand()'s self-locking was pretty common knowledge, but it is a good example to teach the perils of multithreading because its signature gives no indication that anything bad will happen. strtok() is even worse.

C++11's excellent <random> library represents the PRNG as an object like it should. Besides making the statefulness of PRNGs explicit, its API encourages correct usage - it would be _more_ work to share a PRNG between threads.

<comment><USER14> _strtok() is even worse._ (Because it has global state)

There are a lot of C standard library functions from the 1970s that should have been moved to a "deprecated" library around 1990 or so and phased out by now.

<comment><USER9> Throw zero-terminated strings away too, please. Scanning sequential bytes is very slow and has caused so many bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author writes that this is a contrived case but I was doing Monte Carlo simulations 10 years ago, i.e. I wanted _exactly_ this case.

In the end, I just let them run on one thread and could never work out how they could be 10x slower with threading - until today. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER18> This exact problem had me worried when I heard about OpenBSD's arc4random, and how they've been promoting a pervasive use of it. I haven't taken the time to look at how they solve the problem of contention, while still maximizing the unpredictability of the random number generator's state by using it.

<comment><USER19> Aren't you supposed to use arc4random once to seed a high-quality pseudorandom generator? From what I understand, seeding a high-quality PRNG with good source of randomness is really all you need.

<comment><USER20> arc4random _is_ their high-quality pseudorandom generator that's seeded from a good source of randomness (namely, the getentropy system call).

<comment><USER21> Yes, but like urandom the general intent (at least when performance is desired) is you use it to seed your own PRNG and avoid making system calls every time you need random data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The author's multithreaded random_r version has the benefit of performance, but has the problem of, well, brokenness. Without locking the internal state of random_r(), it will be corrupted, and the results won't be meaningful.

<comment><USER5> Can you explain more? My understanding (which seems to be backed up by the implementation) is that I can call initstate_r in each thread to initialize thread-local state, then call random_r without synchronization from each thread as long as I used that thread's thread-local state.

random_r's internal state is all, from what I can see of the implementation, entirely passed in by the caller. Implementation here: [https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=stdlib/rand...](https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=stdlib/random_r.c;h=87cfdc285c0f6e4a4911eac0f6dd5efa2c3fb8b6;hb=9752c3cdbce2b3b8338abf09c8b9dd9e78908b8a)

<comment><USER2> You are correct, and 'fche is mistaken. Each 'random_data' object is accessed only from a single thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> what about using OpenMP?

My recollection is that I wrote a similar program (statistical bootstrapping, essentially a loop around random() ) and using OpenMP on a 4-core machine definitely produced a speedup (not x4 but close)

Does OpenMP somehow sidestep this issue of shared access? (or is my memory wrong)

<comment><USER10> My first thought was that this was a silly question, that there is nothing magic about OpenMP, and that the throughput would be the same. But thinking more, this would be a good thing to benchmark.

The difference is that OpenMP will be using multiple processes instead of multiple threads. Since the bottleneck in this case is access to memory in common between the threads, and since different processes won't be sharing this memory, I think OpenMP would indeed have a 4x speedup on this problem on a 4 (physical) core machine if the runtime was long enough to offset the cost of launching the processes with OpenMP.

More generally, it would be worthwhile to benchmark the performance difference between multiple processes with created with fork() versus multiple threads pthread_create(). If there is no need to write to the same memory (as with a bootstrap) the shared-nothing process based approach is going to more likely to get a linear speedup and is usually easier to reason about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't really see the point of using multithreading for speed up if you have less than 10 cores. that program example might run faster with opencl.</comment>


Ask HN: What kind of contract do I need my contractor to sign? - <AUTHOR>

So I just hired a 3rd party contractor for the first time via odesk. (If it matters, he is located in Asia, my company is in the US.) What kind of legal contract should I get him to sign to protect my rights to the work? Any templates out there I can use without paying a lawyer? :) <comment><USER2> I like the contracts in this book

[http://www.nolo.com/products/contracts- ctrct.html](http://www.nolo.com/products/contracts-ctrct.html)

These cover most of the situations you'll end up in with business. You can probably do better if you hire a lawyer, but more than once I've talked with a judge about a contract written by a lawyer that had non-sequitors in it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Rocket Lawyer's pretty good for basic contracts, and if your work's straightforward, you shouldn't need more than that: [https://www.rocketlawyer.com/](https://www.rocketlawyer.com/)

Like logn said, you probably would struggle to sue someone in another country, so hopefully you've picked someone on odesk with decent reviews!

</comment><comment><USER4> The oDesk terms of service do have clauses which give you ownership of the work done. Realistically, though, what are you going to do if he's in Asia? It's hard enough just suing someone in a different US state.

(not legal advice)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops guess I should have read those ToS for once. :) And I agree essentially with your other point, but mostly wanted to protect myself from being sued.

<comment><USER4> That makes sense. You might want to actually get a signature on paper to back up the oDesk contractor's agreement. Maybe a copyright assignment form? E.g., [http://www.techrepublic.com/article/contracts-for-every- occa...](http://www.techrepublic.com/article/contracts-for-every-occasion- total-assignment-of-copyright/)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Bookmarks manager – Fastbmk.com - <AUTHOR> http://fastbmk.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello all! I built Fastbmk.com as a fast, lightweight and reliable bookmarking service. You can create bookmarks with tags and notes. List bookmarks by tag. Search bookmarks. Import and export bookmarks.

Browser addon is available for Firefox and Chrome. Using addon, you can create bookmark and check if the current page is already bookmarked.

I intentionally used a minimal set of web technologies to create a tool for everyday use, which doesn't waste resources of client's computer.

Minimalistic design Low CPU/Memory usage Quick server responses

I already use the service on a daily basis and it works just fine. So I invite you to try it too :) Currently the service is more like a minimum viable product. A lot of features are planned to be implemented in the future.

So your opinion, questions, suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated :)

<comment><USER2> Looks similar to [https://pinboard.in/](https://pinboard.in/) which is generally liked on HN, might be a good idea to give some pros and cons (I don't use either)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, for starters, it's free :)

<comment><USER2> You FAQ says it will not be free once out of beta?

Not saying there can't be multiple similar sites, just wondering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now it's free. Use your chance :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Almost Nothingware: Phil Greenspun on Vignette StoryServer (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/vignette-old

<comment><USER2> Oh the horror stories I could tell you about Vignette from back in the 90's working for the big dotcom factories in NYC.

This post pretty much nails it on the head.

</comment><comment><USER3> While this was a very incisive and accurate article in 1999, what on earth is it doing on Hacker News in 2010?</comment>


Ask HN: How do I get over my 100k wall? - <AUTHOR> First post, let me know if I'm doing something wrong.
I work as a "freelancer" / contractor for design agencies in the US doing web development. I've been doing it for close to 5 years, and each year until the last 2 have been growing:
1st year was 24k
2nd was 48k
3rd was 65k
4th was 98k
5th (this year) is 100k
I feel like I'm running out of steam though. I feel like I can't raise my rates, and my client base is fantastic all around. Great people, quick turnarounds, etc..
But I don't want to stop at 100k. I just don't know where to go from here. Has anyone else gone through this and overcome it? <comment><USER2> Assuming you want to stay a solo contractor, Alan Weiss' "Million Dollar Consulting" is a great book to read on this subject. It's written for soft- skill consulting (management, HR, etc) but is highly applicable for developers and technical consultants too.

His main angle is to shift towards "value based pricing" and becoming a true partner to your clients, focusing on producing business value (rather than code). This mode of thinking was a huge shift for me in how I thought about my work, choosing clients, and helped me get over that wall.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you charged twice as much, and half your clients quit, you would make just as much and work half as much.

</comment><comment><USER4> If I may misquote patio11: "Double your price!" :)

You can get some ideas from the real patio11 in:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/10/10/kalzumeus- podcast-3-grow...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/10/10/kalzumeus- podcast-3-growing-consulting-practices-with-brennan-dunn/)

[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1)

<comment><USER5> I like this gem I saw on StackExchange: "In consulting deals always ask for at least twice as much $/hour as you think is ridiculous!" ([http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/162002/#comme...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/162002/#comment309993_162028))

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> To chime in on what others have already said here as well, despite your own personal feelings on the matter it appears you most certainly can and should be increasing your rates.

One of the main obstacles I think you are likely to face however is that you are working through a middleman here where you are bound by the rates that they are in turn charging their clients.

With that in mind my advice would be to learn some basic sales skills and start working with these clients directly. That will be the single quickest way to increase your rates I would immagine.

Additionally, have you thought about branching out into other things than purely just straight dev work for clients? Is there anything stopping you from going down the path of say selling templates / code on places such as Themeforest or Codecanyon? That can turn into a nice source of recurring revenue for you potentially with minimal ongoing time investment.

The other obvious avenue for someone such as yourself is going through the training path. Putting together a course on any number of topics is potentially extremely lucrative as a number of others here on HN can already tell you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just wanted to say thinks, this hits it perfectly:

>One of the main obstacles I think you are likely to face however is that you are working through a middleman here

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "I feel like I can't raise my rates"

Why not? Almost by definition, if you have a fully booked schedule at your current rate, you can charge more. That's simple supply/demand labor economics.

Keep charging your current clients your current rate. But for all new clients, double your rate. As new clients start to pay you this premium, fire your worst clients and replace them with the new ones. Rinse and repeat for each new client, until you're about to drop your most loyal ones. Then you can kindly inform them that they either need to pay you more, or find another contractor, because you have clients paying 2x their rate.

If you've got a full schedule and client base already, I don't see why you wouldn't advertise a 2x rate to new clients. It's a no-loss scenario.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's all about the residual income my friend (in addition to the great advice you've already received about upping your prices, although I get that saying it versus doing it are two different things).

When we create a website and/or webapp for a client we always charge 10% of the total cost of the build per annum for the hosting (if required), support and maintenance of that site. This means that each time we complete a project, we're topping up our residual income ad infinitum. This baseline of income is essential to my sanity, as it means we're not 100% reliant on project work to make money.

Happy to share more info, oh and props for growing your contracting gig to 100k - that's no small feat so don't be too hard on yourself.

</comment><comment><USER9> Have you considered pursuing larger-scale government / corporate / academic contracts?

If you can stomach a bit of bureaucracy and long wait-times, competing for those kinds of contracts might be worth your time. Half the work is finding where the RFP's (requests for proposals) are being listed. Once you find some good sources, you might find that there is little domestic competition for many of the RFPs, and that you can get well-paying contracts that require relatively little work on your end.

Just a thought, hope it's helpful.

</comment><comment><USER10> Rather than increasing your income you could look at lowering your costs. I am not sure how viable this is for you, but living in a lower cost location will have the same effect on your overall financial well-being as raising your income.

The ceiling you have run into in likely to be the result of the niche you are in. My guess is you are at the top of your niche - the way to raise your income is to look at moving into a higher paying niche.

</comment><comment><USER11> You can't. Your skill set is ultimately a commodity, the price of which is governed by the market.

To go further you'll need to learn a new skill that is in shorter supply and/or greater demand.

Or start selling a _product_ not tied to your hourly labor input.

<comment><USER12> Or recruit a network of subcontractors that you can farm work out to, earn money from brokering their labor, so you can do more projects with less personal time invested in each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> First, let me say that you've done great! Not giving up after your first and second year, seeing it through till this moment. Congrats dude :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It was tough but well worth it. Had (still have) a wife and a newborn to support, so you can imagine I was working night and day for a long time to get our dreams realized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Charge more, get more customers, set up retainers.</comment>


Good Alternatives to Plastic Straws - <AUTHOR> https://greenthatlife.com/reusable-alternatives-to-plastic-straws/ <comment><USER2> A lot of the fast food restaurants around where I live use waxed paper straws. They aren't recyclable because of the wax coating (which otherwise keeps them from getting soggy too quickly in use), but they biodegrade rapidly and leave significantly less behind.

</comment><comment><USER3> I rarely have anything useful to add to coding posts since I know nothing, but I do have some experience with drinking from straws:

I used to be a metal straw user, but was always somewhat scared of the potential for accidents, and haven't been able to bring myself to use them ever since that woman died because she fell on one and it stabbed thru her eye and into her brain[1]

Knives, etc. are usually held facing down or laid flat, straws unfortunately are specifically designed to point upwards and be aimed at the face.

They are also unsuitable for hot beverages, and if you accidentally bite it or touch it to your teeth it's quite unpleasant

Altho I'd much prefer them to plastic, I do find the paper straws McDonald's uses in the UK to be usable but quite flimsy - they get crushed and soggy quite easily for what they are.

I was going to try silicon straws next, of course until I find out that they harbour awful brain eating parasites and bacteria, or... something

I initially believe that drinking carbonated or sugary beverages with a straw protected the teeth to some extent, but I can't find a source for this

[1][https://www.livescience.com/65925-metal-straw- death.html](https://www.livescience.com/65925-metal-straw-death.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> IKEA has metal straws.

</comment><comment><USER5> What about no straw and just drink from the glass.</comment>


Matt Cutts Was 'Trying To Decide How Sassy To Be When Answering This Question'  - <AUTHOR> http://www.huskyseo.co.uk/blog/matt-cutts-trying-decide-sassy-answering-question/

<comment><USER2> What a dick, I would not expect "average Joe plumber" to understand SEO, so he hires someone else.

Since there is no governing body or public standards set out by Google and other search engine companies, what chance does he have?

Granted, this person could just have been caught out, but I have heard too many stories of people who are uninformed, and in the end it isn't all their fault. Google is so tight lipped about how it all works. If their spam engine is getting so much better, how about some guidelines so people actually know what they should expect?

I may not know much about plumbing, but I know my plumber should be doing his work in the bathroom. Where is my SEO-wizz meant to be working?</comment>


In Britain, even jails have a class system - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/02/jails-britain-chris-atkins-book/606730/ <comment><USER2> > Lewis: Tell me about "spice," which seems to have become the British > prisoner's drug of choice.

> Atkins: It was so ubiquitous. You could tell straightaway if someone was on > it, they'd be zombified, with glazed eyes. They'd just be lying on their bed > in a vegetative state.

> I think [spice users] are used to smoking strong cannabis. And you can't > really get away with that, because of the smell. But spice doesn't smell. > The sniffer dogs can't get it.

> It's the law of unintended consequences. An older screw [prisoner officer] > said, it used to be that inmates would smoke weed. But then [jails] brought > in drug testing, and marijuana stays in the system for a month. So they > stopped doing that, and started to do spice, which makes people vegetative > and violent.

There's hundreds of laws like this outside of prison. You take one thing away [with good intention] and then people find a new thing. But the new thing leaves society worse off (in this case crazy and violent off spice).

I personally believe the whole obsession with prison time for punishment in the US is a good example of this. The general public gets very vindictive, then you send them to con-college and they come out a worse criminal. With difficulty finding a job but plenty of new friends in the criminal world and a reputation as a tough-guy.

Consequently the whole war on drugs is the perfect example of unintended side- effects. Creating a hundred-billion dollar black market funding the worst cartels and street gangs. And hey we have thousands of tough guys coming out of prison in need of work.

Zoning laws are another good example of something that sounds like a good idea that ultimately hurts communities more than it helps - resulting in the mass suburbanization of America and urban ghettos [1]. Now people are moving back to cities with a serious lack of housing density, food deserts [2], driving to work becomes mandatory, etc etc. Then there's the War on Terrorism.....

I could go on.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation- Transportation-M...](https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation- Transportation-Metropolitan/dp/1933115157/)

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

<comment><USER3> This misses the elephant in the room: How can they "find" anything in prison?

The only answer is corruption of the prison staff. That has to be the root cause.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/01/rise-in- pris...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/01/rise-in-prison- officers-contraband-smuggling)

<comment><USER4> In a minimum security facility there are often no fences. I was at Morgantown and you could get anything you wanted for approximately 4x the retail value. It was so fucking hot there guys would have their families buy a "prison" issue fan on Amazon and send it to someone who's family lived in Morgantown. Then they'd run out and bring it back in the middle of the night. Cigarettes were $2 each or $20 for a pack. Dip is like $12 a can for the Kayak brand with a 99c sticker on it.

There were over 800 of us and around 10 staff on actual security detail at a time. There were maybe 40 searches a week and they were normally targeted on the people that they had suspicions about. It happened to me one time and they guy found my camel crush. Thankfully I had been there less than 3 weeks so he just assumed someone stashed it there since I moved into an empty bunk. After that I never had another issue.

Spice is horrible. We'd have people vomiting regularly. They'd get "stuck" outside when we got called back into the units. It's really gnarly stuff that I would not willingly ingest. The most popular drug was definitely suboxone. The drug tests were not working for subs when I was still there. Supposedly they were just starting to come out with some for it that the BOP used.

Every thing went in a cycle. One guy would run most of the smuggling for the white people. I'm not going to name names here, but his balance sheet showed about $75k in profit over a rolling 6 month period. Another ran it for most of the African Americans. Eventually runners would get caught or the ring leader would get busted with a cell phone. That gives you an immediate upgrade to the next highest level facility. Prices would jump until someone was crazy enough to start it all back up again.

Right before I left the biggest person got caught with a sim card. Prices for cigarettes went up to nearly $15 each. That was if you were remotely lucky enough to find one. A guy came back on probation violation and luckily enough I was his bunk mate. Things went back to regular within a couple of weeks. He made more in Morgantown than he did on the street...

Subs/meth/vape juices could be applied to paper inside of books or letters. Anything liquid and dried usually could come in that way, but in a minimum it's not even worth the hassle.

<comment><USER5> I've heard stories about people improvising "hooch" by letting apple or orange juice sit around and ferment and using that as a trade item for the other usual stuff. When I got stuck in a similar minimum security facility (no cells, just half-walls between groups of 4 beds so there was lots of socializing going on), people would trade their prescribed Seroquels and other such meds similarly.

I also found out about "making spread" and was amazed at the ingenuity of some folks and what they could do with ramen, water, some crumbled up cheetos and a pound cake. And how this was used in the internal economy. Fascinating stuff.

On the negative side, most of the people were in there for petty drug offenses, e.g. victimless crimes not involving violence which upset me greatly. Such a shame since most of these guys were obviously above-average IQ and otherwise nice, sometimes charismatic people. What a waste of tax dollars and lives.

So many stories just from my short stay there.

<comment><USER4> That was not very popular at Morgantown. You could just buy actual alcohol from the street. It was usually 10 or 20 dollars for a peanut butter jar full of vodka, normally Grey Goose. It sounds "racial", but a lot of things were based on stereotypical vices. We had Newports and Grey Goose. You could request something specific, but then you'd be paying the 4x premium. You could usually get a better deal because they'd be bringing in entire cartons of Newports, etc.

There was one night nurse who didn't watch you take your pills so tightly. Most people who had the prescription didn't share it.

There is a lot of creative food. I don't know if I'd eat the cheesecake on the street, but it is good when you haven't had anything for a while. We'd occasionally get street food inside, but it was like McDonald's breakfast, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, or chicken wings.

There was not a lot of petty criminals at Morgantown. Simple possession rarely lands you in federal prison. The worst of the worst is conspiracy. It doesn't take much for you to be linked to a conspiracy. The mandatory minimums don't make sense for that kind of crime. There's a lot of marijuana + money laundering. I'd say around 15% of people really had no business having anywhere near their actual sentence length.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> _A December 2017 parliamentary report said up to 90 percent of prisoners have mental-health problems, and 12 percent turn to self-harm or attempt suicide multiple times._

How could it be otherwise? Even ignoring the likely correlation between psychological problems and incarceration... Prison is a terrible environment by its nature and by design.

Would we be surprised if concentration camp or gulag inhabitants had mental health issues?

Effectively, psychological injury is part of the punishment.

It's strange to think that prisons are relatively new.

<comment><USER7> > Prison is a terrible environment by its nature and by design.

Usually, yes. But not necessarily.

A prison _could_ be more like a residential college or a boarding school.

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

<comment><USER8> New Zealand appears to be doing a reasonable job of youth detention, where the facilities are more like high schools than prisons.

 _Wandering through New Zealand 's Korowai Manaaki youth detention centre, you can't help but notice the basketball court, veggie patch and classrooms — it feels more like a high school than a prison._

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-27/nz-youth-detention- ce...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-27/nz-youth-detention-centres- different-to-australia/11321582)

<comment><USER9> Sadly it seems that most have gone the opposite direction with making schools more like prisons. Metal detectors, visitors watched with suspision, high ratio of supervised to supervisees resulting in effective partial rule by them. Am I talking about prisons or schools? Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can strongly recommend _" A Bit of a Stretch"_ \- I read it after reading _" The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken"_ which is pretty terrifying.

<comment><USER6> An honest look at criminal justice is actually terrifying, even moreso because we don't even have a lead on alternatives.

<comment><USER11> Decriminalization of non violent drug use and a prison system focused on rehabilitation would be a start.

<comment><USER12> This is politically very difficult to do though. It will be seen as being soft on crime. A system focused on rehabilitation requires the public to not be as bloodthirsty as they are in the US. They need to given former felons a chance after they've carried out their punishment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thank God for that, it would be absurd and harmful to mix tax evaders and murderers. And more expensive since the entire prison needs to be safe enough for its most violent inmate.

</comment><comment><USER14> The _visibility_ of the class system is one thing that surprised me about the UK. It seems to be a very visibly stratified society. Unlike in the US where everyone likes to pretend they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and assumes there's ample social mobility (which there isn't as much as they think), in the UK most folks seem to know exactly where they belong, and they seem to be more content with their position in the class hierarchy. Or at least that's the perception from spending a month in London and vicinity. I'm sure someone will argue vehemently against it.

<comment><USER15> "class" means something different in the UK than it does in the US. Wealth is often a side-effect but there are plenty of aristocrats without money who would still be considered upper-class.

It's more a combination of social graces and breeding. In the USA, someone like Donald Trump would be considered upper class but would never be considered so in the UK.

<comment><USER14> Probably more "breeding" than "social graces" though, if Prince Andrew is any indication.

<comment><USER15> One can definitely have no money and still have class, or vice versa (as Andrew demonstrates).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The "class system" in the title reminded me of a report I read yesterday that Harvey Weinstein hired a "prison consultant" a while ago to prepare him for a potential (and now highly likely) imprisonment.

</comment><comment><USER17> A fictionalized example is in the original (1969) film "The Italian Job".

<comment><USER18> And also the UK TV series Porridge - which probably never got shown on US television.

<comment><USER19> Great TV show/comedy, but for a more realistic insight into prisons of the time, the film Scum(1979) seems more on the nail.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079871/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079871/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Spice, in case anyone isn't familiar: [https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/synthetic-c...](https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/synthetic- cannabinoids-k2spice)

</comment><comment><USER21> YANML so I shall remain anonymous, and we will agree that what is below is a work of imaginative fiction:

I was presented with the temptation to commit the same crime that sent this guy to jail.

I made a movie with my brother and dad. We figured, how different could this be from software? (it wasn't really) Things got financially very complex, when more money got spent than we had. (I was not the one that spent it) Things got even more complex when my dad signed a deal with a production company to get us out of the hole (without my brother or I agreeing he could do this) They put in some money to pay invoices, and agreed to pay us ~$300,000 but as I recall being told, when it came to paying the money they wanted invoices for about a million worth of fake spend.

according to one of their staff members, they themselves were in the hole after making a movie with an oscar winner who'd who'd spent the whole shoot blitzed on coke. I didn't speak to them ever again after a confrontation on the last day of the shoot. I heard they were shocked when we refused to provide fake invoices, incredulous, that we wouldn't do something they considered film industry normal. (it's common, it's not normal)

What happened after that I can only piece together from rumours, which as I understand were:

They had assumed that we would provide the invoices and already submitted tax claims for film producer tax incentive payouts.

These supporting invoices were requested and they fled the country.

Every now and then someone tells me that they recognise me from tv.

TLDR: I got no money, but I didn't go to jail

</comment><comment><USER22> > _People of the prisoner class have really, really bought into the capitalist > dream. But they were too unlucky, ill-educated, unfortunate, or born in the > wrong place to have all the things that society has told them they should > have. They were taught from a very early age: You can have it all, not just > the wealth but the stuff. Trainers [sneakers] are a big deal, watches are a > big deal, cars are a big deal._

This almost nails it. The reality is that the British lower classes can have all the stuff they want; trainers, watches, cars are within the grasp of anyone above the poverty line. But wealth is almost unattianble for the lower classes in the UK. It just doesn't go in that direction.

<comment><USER23> > are within the grasp of anyone above the poverty line

...often supplied with predatory loans.

PS4 Pro, 1TB, Fortnite edition: £799 ($1033 USD) over 108 weeks. [https://www.perfecthome.co.uk/detail/index/sArticle/3170](https://www.perfecthome.co.uk/detail/index/sArticle/3170)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Atkins: People of the prisoner class have really, really bought into the > capitalist dream. But they were too unlucky, ill-educated, unfortunate, or > born in the wrong place to have all the things that society has told them > they should have. They were taught from a very early age: You can have it > all, not just the wealth but the stuff.

My favorite part. They don't realize that capitalism itself is regressing to a class-based system. People like Trump, Johnson, Cameron can fake invoices, but the interviewer, just an ordinary member of the public has to play by the rules.

<comment><USER25> > ... capitalism itself is regressing to a class-based system.

Capitalism has _always_ been a class-based system. There's the people who work for wages, and the people who live off rents from their capital.

<comment><USER24> Capitalism is primarily about private property ownership to incentivize enterprise. It is more class-based when more private-property starts off in the hands of people by birth. It is more meritocratic the more that property migrates into the hands of people that work to benefit society more.

Examples of class-based systems. India's caste-system that disadvantages lower-castes. Pre-civil war America's racially implemented Constitution that disadvantaged non-whites (and women?). Fundamentalist Sharia Law systems that disadvantage non-muslims and women. You can tell you live in a more class- based capital system when the top slots are occupied more by birthright vs other systems.

BTW I think it's clearer to narrow talk to specific policies that make a system more class-based vs more meritocratic, and to remember to define them in terms of which particular groups of people they target. Because then we can see that meritocratic capitalism, boosted by the major revolutions we celebrate around the world, slowly gets eroded by things like redlining in the States, or low inheritance taxes etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Did he have to slop out?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm confused by why this is a surprise. It has literally been a cliche in the US for decades. Although prison in UK does sound marginally better than in the US despite having the same budget issues.

Oddly, this quote seemed appealing: "Prison moves at a glacial pace. As you adapt to the environment, you start moving at a glacial pace." Probably because I'm not rich.

</comment><comment><USER28> > In June 2016 [...] He was sentenced to five years in prison and sent to > Wandsworth

> He was released in December 2018.

Theses 5 years were pretty fast

<comment><USER29> He was arrested in 2012 already and probably spend a significant amount of time in prison before he was sentenced.

<comment><USER30> No, that was almost certainly on bail

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm guessing any group of humanity will naturally form hierarchies. Seems like part of human nature.

<comment><USER32> Sure. Humans are also naturally violent. We naturally get tuberculosis, too. As conscious beings, it's up to us to decide the good and bad in our natural heritage. To amplify the former and mitigate the latter.

<comment><USER33> What's wrong with hierarchies?

<comment><USER32> I am having trouble taking this as a sincere question. You've honestly never seen or heard of hierarchical power being misused? I mean, just to pick one enormous historical trend, there's a reason the world has mostly gotten rid of monarchies, and it's not because we thought crowns and scepters were maybe a bit tacky.

<comment><USER34> > I mean, just to pick one enormous historical trend, there's a reason the > world has mostly gotten rid of monarchies, and it's not because we thought > crowns and scepters were maybe a bit tacky.

How did that work out for them?

* The abolition of the English monarchy led to the brutal military dictatorship of Cromwell, which ended only with the reestablishment of the monarchy.

* The abolition of the French monarchy led to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, which ended in a cataclysmic continent-wide war and the reestablishment of the Bourbon monarchy.

* The abolition of the German and Austrian monarchies led to Hitler.

* The abolition of the Russian monarchy led to the Soviet Union and the mass murder of tens of millions.

* The abolition of the Chinese imperial monarchy led to a half-century-long civil war between Nationalist, Communist, and warlord factions, leading ultimately to a Communist dictatorship and the mass murder of tens of millions.

Hierarchical power is a human universal, and trying to abolish it without recognizing this fact only leads to its reemergence in even more violent forms within the space of a few years, decades if you're lucky.

<comment><USER35> The Rhetoric of Reaction Albert O. Hirschman [1]

Hirschman describes the reactionary narratives thus:

\- According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

\- The futility thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to "make a dent."

\- Finally, the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

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

<comment><USER34> Which is not what I'm doing at all.

If we're going to talk about the abolition of monarchies, how is it that some of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world today are constitutional monarchies? Norway, Australia, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Japan, Luxembourg, and Spain all rank within the top 25 of countries by HDI as well as the top 25 of countries by Democracy Index. All of those countries are monarchies.

And you still haven't addressed the historical fact that the styles of radicalism that led to the abolition of monarchies in England, France, and Russia utterly failed to make things better and, in fact, largely made things worse. That doesn't mean it's futile or counterproductive to improve society, but merely removing the existing hierarchy and attempting to install something bespoke in its place has historically been a failing proposition, while reforming and improving an existing system has historically been much more successful.

<comment><USER32> When I said "mostly gotten rid of monarchies", I include constitutional monarchies in that. The monarchs in at least most of those countries have approximately zero power compared with their historical antecedents.

If anything, they're a fine example of the kind of dealing realistically with our heritage I'm talking about. Actual monarchies have a track record I would generously call mixed, and perhaps more properly call horrific. But being half-evolved primates, humans seem to like having an officially recognized big monkey to rally around. So we keep the Queen of England around as something akin to a hood ornament on the car of that nation. It works, even if it's not particularly rational. But then, neither are we.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> No, American jails have a class system.

British ones contain one.

<comment><USER37> Please elaborate. As it is, this flew over my head.

<comment><USER38> It's to do with British English vs. American English. In the USA, a TV remote control has batteries; in the UK, a telly clicker contains batteries.

<comment><USER39> My remotes have batteries. The box I bought the batteries in contained them. Now they're in use, they're not contained as that's a temporary state before use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "People of the prisoner class have really, really bought into the capitalist dream. But they were too unlucky, ill-educated, unfortunate, or born in the wrong place to have all the things that society has told them they should have. They were taught from a very early age: You can have it all, not just the wealth but the stuff. Trainers [sneakers] are a big deal, watches are a big deal, cars are a big deal."

I'd say this is fraudulent writing but it would be stating the obvious since written by someone literally convicted of fraud. The "stuff" comes _before_ wealth for most people in all systems but it is actually in socialist societies where personal wealth does not generally exist that the acquisition of basic consumer goods is given central significance, gifting them becomes an accepted and expected way to get people dispensing nominally free or fixed- cost social services to deliver first preferential and later merely adequate service.

</comment><comment><USER40> So the Atlantic/Hellen Lewis consider it a negative that non-violent and mentally healthy people aren't housed together with violent and mentally ill ones ? Isn't this basically what the US prison reform advocates want to see their system make its way _up_ to ?

<comment><USER41> No, the article didn't say that at all.

<comment><USER40> It kinda does, the "lower class" here is violent and mentally unstable, the "white-collar club" is non-violent and functional in the prison environment, in spite of their best attempts to try and to throw in a racial aspect no evidence is brought that it plays a role, no hints or accusations that money is used to bribe guards or prison authorities.

Anyone with basic penology background will consider it a textbook success on progressive grounds - the default in most places is that the prison "upper class" are the violent career criminals who keep the population in check for the prison guards as the white-collar prisoners pay them protection money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> In the US, this is called "minimum security" (see Orange is the New Black) and "Club Fed" for posh accommodations for high status people.

The Atlantic's breathless headline is misleading as usual.

<comment><USER10> It seems to me that it is referring to the "class" system _within_ Wandsworth prison.</comment></comment>


How Badly Must a C.E.O. Behave Before Pay Is Clawed Back? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/business/united-airlines-ceo-scandal-lawsuit.html <comment><USER2> As a novice programmer, I once declined a position that had a contract that stated I would be responsible for all monetary harm if I were to leak information about the project.

As I was being paid peanuts, and the project was worth millions, I knew I couldn't take any chances with that. I looked into insurance, but it would have cost over half the pay that was already peanuts.

The problem wasn't that I was worried I'd slip up, or that I'd do something unethical. My worry was that the company would do something unethical and blame it on me somehow.

If I were applying for a CEO position and saw a clause like this, I'd refuse to sign that contract, too. So United isn't wrong... There are definitely people who would refuse to work for them if they put that clause in the contract.

<comment><USER3> > _that stated I would be responsible for all monetary harm if I were to leak > information about the project_

> _If I were applying for a CEO position and saw a clause like this, I 'd > refuse to sign that contract, too. So United isn't wrong..._

I might be reading it incorrectly, but I think there is a very big difference between capped and _uncapped_ liability/penalty clauses. What you seem to be describing facing sounds like the latter, and yes that should give absolutely anyone, anywhere, in any situation, the screaming hibbie-jibbies. I think looking for that sort of clause, which can be subtle, is probably one of the more important things when going over any contract. As long as liability is limited the rest can be planned out, but of course nobody can sanely deal with infinities. On a larger level that's the fundamental point behind limited liability corporations, the bankruptcy code, hard learned principles regarding the non-inheritability of debt, and so forth.

But I don't think that's the same thing as a pay clawback, which is fundamentally capped. "You break the law, you face a maximum (with us) penalty of your salary for those years" doesn't seem unreasonable at all at c-level. They're not being asked to take retroactive responsibility for something amorphous like "failure", nor is the sum unbounded or affecting their personal net worth before taking the job, or even for that matter touching any money they made using their holding of that salary before the clawback like interest/investments. It feels like a reasonable deal: don't commit and (company related at least) felonies while on the job, if you do then your contract of employment was voided at that time and the company wants its money back. Again looking to corporate liability limitations, they don't apply if someone purposefully pierces the corporate veil for example. It's not supposed to be a shield against serious breaking of the law.

I can see how some clawback terms could go way too far, with trigger clauses being too fuzzy, penalties not bearing reasonable relation to the violation, or both, but I'm not sure the concept itself is theoretically bankrupt.

<comment><USER4> Maybe it is "fair". But the problem is that the market doesn't care about "fair".

Personally, I would absolutely refuse to sign such an agreement.

You can't force people to accept your contract. If all the good CEOs look at your contract and run away.... well now you are stuck with only bad CEOs who were desperate enough to agree to your contract. That is the market speaking.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like the lawsuit against United focuses on payments from a bonus program and a severance package.

If you have ever taken a job, you have signed an agreement that limits payments of performance bonuses and severance packages in the case of gross misconduct.

I suspect the employment agreements for the executives in this case included such clauses. The board failed to enforce them at an expense of millions of dollars. The investors are right to sue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >In a letter to the pension fund, a lawyer for United explained that it would harm the company to give the board "unfettered discretion to recoup compensation" in cases involving wrongdoing. "Where such discretion is out of step with industry norms," the letter said, it would "make it difficult for United to recruit and retain top talent, particularly at the senior management level."

So United thinks that the threat of "punishment" (or really, not getting a huge payout) because of breaking the law would make them an unattractive company to people at the senior management level.

Barring the morality of it, is this statement true for anyone who qualifies as senior management? Would this deter you from taking a job at United?

If this statement is true, we likely need to do a major overhaul of the type of people we allow into senior management. If it's not true, I'm thinking this is another harmful practice brought about by the incestuous nature of board members and senior management across companies. Which is again, something else that needs a major overhaul.

<comment><USER7> You're not wrong, but if you are a top Senior Level exec being recruited and only one company threatened you with compensation clawback, would you be more or less likely to take that job over others?

<comment><USER8> If a regular employee said they'd only work if the possibility of "firing for cause" was taken off the table, would you think they were qualified?

<comment><USER9> I imagine it's a little difficult to compare the two because there is a difference in bargaining power between a regular employee (who is closer to a commodity) and a CEO candidate (for which the applicant pool is much smaller, and company fit very important).

Secondly, a CEO, being the head of the company, could technically be held 'accountable' for hundreds of millions of dollars, and it'd be reasonable for someone to want to shield themselves from such a liability, which might not necessarily arise out of a violation of their own, but rather of the company.

<comment><USER10> In government, C-level people make less than $200k, usually a lot less, yet seem to be able to competently lead organizations consisting of tens of thousands of people. One commissioner of a multi-billion dollar agency that I knew drove a late 90s Accord a few years ago.

They are also subject to invasive and strict ethics and disclosure rules revolving door policies.

CEOs mint money because of social connections, not value to the business. The board members who implicitly endorse graft should themselves be subject to criminal sanction.

<comment><USER11> > CEOs mint money because of social connections, not value to the business.

Sure, the CEOs are themselves often on the boards of other corporations. The incestuous nature of this top level is bordering on the absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apparently United won't take back bonuses even when it's CEO stepped down during a federal corruption investigation, and claims it's because it's not the normal industry practice and would make it hard to recruit top talent.

I'd think top talent would, you know, behave ethically, and not, for example create a special mostly empty flight that's convenient for a politician just to get a hanger in Newark approved.

<comment><USER13> > I'd think top talent would, you know, behave ethically

That's more likely a projection of how'd you'd behave in that situation that it is a reality.

<comment><USER12> I'd want hiring and compensation tied to behaving ethically, if I was on United's Board. I consider someone a better CEO if they don't become the subject of a federal corruption investigation and have to step down.

He also seems to have tanked customer satisfaction ratings. He was CEO of UAL from the beginning of the continental united merger in October 2010 to September 8, 2015. Here's a relevant article. [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/business/despite-shake- up...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/business/despite-shake-up-at-top- united-faces-steep-climb.html)

Just because more CEOs are psychopaths doesn't mean that psychopaths are better at doing the work of CEOs.

Frankly many CEOs seem to favor short term gains that benefit themselves and their stock option grants over improving quality and long term growth. I don't know that this guy is a psychopath, but I'm not interested in flying United if I can help it.

<comment><USER13> I didn't mention psychopaths, however you implied a positive correlation between ethical behavior of CEO's and being top talent; my questioning that implication doesn't imply the opposite, it could be there is no correlation in either direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This may sound strange - but I don't think what the CEO of United did should be a crime or is at all unethical - the unethical conduct was the demand of what amounts to a defacto bribe by the head of the Port Authority.

Even then - 50 years ago it was commonplace to use cross-subsidization to fund routes like this - the ICC would do it - "Okay, so you want to offer a route from Newark to Los Angeles? Sure, we'll grant it, but you have to offer service between Los Angeles and Tuscon, Santa Fe and Flagstaff as well."

Now admittedly, this doesn't pass the smell test - because the demanded service was probably not in the public interest - but this kind of thinking was used in the transportation industry for quite some time.

<comment><USER15> In order to establish a set of norms in a community, it's not enough to punish people who violate the norms; you need to punish people who don't punish people who violate the norms. In other words, you need to watch the watchers.

To reframe that principle in this context, it's not enough to punish people who ask for bribes. You need to punish people who answer those asks, rather than reporting them.

<comment><USER16> What we really want is to create incentives against corruption. If a public servant asks you for a bribe, it should be legal to pay it. You are then in the clear to turn around and report them. But making both parties equally guilty leads to the initiator having power over the other. When that happens, neither want to disclose except as part of mutual assured destruction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Faced with egregious executive behavior, directors should at minimum claw back bonuses. Not to do so sends the message that there is impunity for improper behavior at the top."

American exceptionalism at its finest, where the more exceptional you are, the more your behavior is excepted. If you really screw up, you may have to be put under house arrest.

The only thing we will not except is stealing from the rich and powerful. Madoff learned that the hard way.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you set a precedent of taking back pay from executives convicted of bribery and other crimes, you won't be as competitive when hiring other criminals in the future. That's essentially United's argument here. Gotta stay attractive to future, potential criminals, after all.

<comment><USER19> Given recent studies about the economic costs of ethical behavior, I think you could make a pretty ironclad case that criminals are more likely to generate profit for the company under current conditions than ethical 'good' people would.

As such, the larger the company and the more capital it's responsible for, the MORE necessary it becomes to the company to find the most evil, biggest most psychopathic criminal to guide it, given that profit is the only measurable feature and the only thing that concerns the company in any way.

It's just the system. This is what you get, and betting against it is like betting against the tide. They do in fact have to be competitive about hiring bigger criminals because failing to do so can be fatal to the company, when it's set against other companies with no such compunctions.

<comment><USER18> So in other words, the law fails us once again. If we had serious criminal penalties for taking bribes (and other executive "white collar" crimes) this wouldn't be the case. Since we can't and won't implement reasonable criminal justice policies in the US, how about a mandatory minimum of 10 (or 20, who's counting at this point?) years in jail for any executive taking a bribe without the possibility of parole? For every violation. And three strikes, you're out. I guarantee you'd see a change quickly. Or, at least, more rich white men in prison. And some would go in for life from the start (3 strikes). It goes without saying that upon such a conviction, _all_ assets would be seized and these people would not be allowed even a dollar to go towards their lawyers. Just in case you had thoughts they'd get off because of high-priced lawyers ... And just to top it all off, when you can't prove the case against the executive who took bribes, you throw his wife in jail for 20-30 years because she doesn't know what's going on and can't rat out the higher ups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I worked for a toxic CEO roughly three years ago, and, to answer the article's rhetorical question - he/she has to behave badly enough to hurt long time investors' pockets.

I only made it a year under a micromanaged, 'everything is urgent' environment. It all stemmed from the CEO. He was in every meeting, including dev initiatives. Not only did he have no significant technical knowledge -- he also lacked in areas where I would expect most CEOs to excel: market strategy, branding, and finance management.

My exit was a large blow to the company, as a lot of co-workers saw me as the unicorn who would 'fight the good fights' for everyone else. And, I did -- until my health started to decline from the stress.

The story ends with me perusing LinkedIn one day, after five+ former co- workers had left, with him stepping down as CEO. He would have never made this decision on his own (pride, control), so I know that external investors definitely dictated this.

So, I would say pay gets clawed back when CEO's consistently make poor business decisions and over promise/ under deliver to investors in order to obtain more funding.

</comment><comment><USER21> Even in the egregious Wells Fargo case, the executives whose pay was clawed back were still money ahead to the tune of 8 figures (Tolstedt) or 9 figures (Stumpf). Thousands of low-level employees were ruined, though.

Accountability is for the little people.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am more concerned that a public figure can basically coerce if not blackmail anyone and get a free year confinement in their own vacation home. that is simple astounding.

</comment><comment><USER23> Responding to title, he has to wrong the elites that gave him that position enough for them to take action. The elites are usually the board composed of other people who benefit from overpaying CEO's. It's a club that helps each other out. Piss off the club and you're gone. Same goes with Congress and regulators to a degree.

<comment><USER19> What regulators?

<comment><USER23> An example would be how the SEC often ignores big players or gives them fines that barely matter. However, they and everyone else will pile on a CEO that pissed off big players in government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I want more companies to try something: take a random guy from your existing non-management workers, pay him a nice but not exorbitant wage ($100k?), and make him CEO. Then see if he can really do any more damage, or make any poorer decision, than one of these hot-shot CEOs. Seriously, what do they have to lose? Some CEOs seem to screw up everything imaginable and leave in 6 months; isn't 6 months of $100k (i.e. $50k) worth the experiment instead?

</comment><comment><USER25> If a C.E.O. behaves badly enough, and the board had knowledge in there ledgers- and did approve, because they did not read carefully enough- they have become accomplices in a crime. Thus, compadres if you want for the omerta to hold, you better dont want the paycheck to fold. We all paddle on in this boat, or drown holding one anothers throat- thats the choice.

Its the same mechanism that holds together corruption networks, basically everyone has the gun trained on everyone - a giant Ponzi scheme, where every new member can expect money, and the originators have to come up with ever greater sum to silence the mexican standoff.

</comment><comment><USER26> The have a board member who's an exec at the well-known NGO Partners In Health. It's hard to imagine a better-run org. Maybe the disgraced executives should consider making large-scale donations to PIH.

Of course, that doesn't make the shareholders whole.

As for the "hard to recruit and retain top talent" argument ... that's the oldest and most miserable excuse in the book for tolerating bad execs.

</comment><comment><USER27> I thought Trump said he was waving his pay.

</comment><comment><USER28> Like `this`.</comment>