Law allows police to seize and sell cars of non-lawbreakers, keeping proceeds - <AUTHOR> https://kstp.com/news/controversial-law-allows-police-to-seize-and-sell-cars-of-non-lawbreakers-keeping-the-proceeds-august-24-2020/5838303/ <comment><USER2> > A controversial law that allows police in Minnesota to take and sell > someone's personal property is coming under more scrutiny after the state > patrol seized a woman's car during a drunk driving stop late last year, even > though she was not driving or charged with a crime.

> ...

> Troopers seized Dietrich's car under Minnesota's forfeiture law that has > allowed police agencies across the state to take close to 14,000 vehicles, > generating nearly $10 million for those departments in just three years, > according to a review of statewide data by 5 INVESTIGATES.

How can any patriotic American read something like this and not at least start to wonder what happened to this country?

The system of "checks and balances" that we're taught (maybe not anymore) has clearly failed here and in hundreds if not thousands of other cases, ranging from ravenous petty theft of private property owned by people charged with no crime:

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

to secret courts and clear violations of the constitution:

[https://www.npr.org/2019/12/22/790281142/scathing-report- put...](https://www.npr.org/2019/12/22/790281142/scathing-report-puts-secret- fisa-court-into-the-spotlight-will-congress-act)

This is not what freedom looks like. It resembles another system, though. One that gets trotted out pretty regularly to smear political candidates and organization that try to effect change.

<comment><USER3> Here's the issue that lots of people fail to understand. Once it's figured out, a lot of fixes can happen.

The "Police" are departments of city/state politicians. "Sheriff" is an elected offices for a county.

The current dialogue of "the police are doing XYZ" is extremely stupid and unproductive. The reality, "mayors/councilmen/governors/politicians are telling police to do XYZ".

Within a county, the sheriff has the highest law enforcement jurisdiction below the US Marshal cowboying in and taking away their badges. They can even arrest FBI, ATF and ignore Fed requests in general (limitations to this, especially due to paperwork, but the legal right is there). This is why you get plenty of Sheriffs saying, "I and my deputies will not enforce XYZ law".

Why?

Because the Sheriff reports directly to "the people" of the county. He/she is an elected official. Sometimes, they're not even prior law enforcement. But they have a direct dialogue with their voter base (most of the time) because they have a rather direct cause/effect of their time in "office". Also why it's called a Sheriff's Office instead of department (when people know what they're doing... some states are weird/dumb).

The "police" report to the politicians of their jurisdiction.

When certain mayors say, "The police are doing naughty things"... dude... they're on the mayor's orders. The chief can be instantly booted out by the mayor. "It's a travesty that police are overly patrolling certain sectors". YOU APPROVE THE SECTORS AND MADE THE LAWS FOR THEM TO DO SO! "The cops shouldn't be funded through forfeiture/tickets/etc." The politicians are the ones who put that system in place! Police don't make laws, they enforce them according to their hiring governing body... their city/town.

Please, people of the USA, for the love of all things good, learn about your local politicians and vote. Quit this crap of these mayors acting surprised and shifting the blame to the police. The politicians are the ones telling them what to do. Stop being surprised and ignorant.

In the end, the public is to blame for, "Politicians have our best interests at heart if we don't pay attention to what they're doing." I don't care what party you belong to, it's your responsibility to keep a politician in check, no matter their party as well.

<comment><USER4> > The current dialogue of "the police are doing XYZ" is extremely stupid and > unproductive. The reality, "mayors/councilmen/governors/politicians are > telling police to do XYZ".

If you actually follow local politics, you'll often find that, if the police are even following directions are all, that behind those directions, the most powerful interest group promoting those local policies and able to defeat politicians that displease them is...the police.

<comment><USER5> Only because people consistently vote with the police. So if we the voters stopped voting for whoever the police tell us to, things would get better.

I think there's a union component to this as well. A lot of people vote along with unions, especially public unions. This is an interesting case where the people most upset with the police are also the ones who tend to like unions (and where unions have political/voter influence), creating a bit of tension. I think this results in focusing on the police themselves, rather than the upstream causes that you're identifying.

Anyway, in case it wasn't clear - I'm totally agreeing with you :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My undertanding of asset forfeiture was that its original intent was to target criminal enterprises. If you bust a drug cartel, their (often significant) assets might as well go towards the common good.

And somehow, that turned into a system where cops can stop you and take your property according to mere _presumption_ of guilt, as in this stupefying example from a few years ago: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/30/drug-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/30/drug- cops-took-a-college-kids-life-savings-and-now-13-police-departments-want-a- cut/)

Any system with such a glaring conflict of interests and profound lack of accountability is going to be abused to the hilt, as this is. I don't have a problem with confiscating cars from habitual drunk drivers, but there has absolutely got to be more justification for it than this—to say nothing of due process—and it should go without saying that the confiscating agency should _not_ directly benefit from these actions.

<comment><USER7> The other part of it was to be able to 'chip away' at criminal enterprises. Especially in the past (i.e. before the age of digital surveillance, cheap/easy video, etc.) it was much more difficult to get enough evidence to catch some of the more-organized criminals. Remember, for a criminal act you are supposed to be considered guilty 'beyond a reasonable doubt'.

That's a huge part of why asset forfeiture is civil and based on 'presumption of guilt'. Remember, the only thing they every got a solid conviction on for Al Capone was Tax Evasion. Unfortunately it is a system that provides perverse incentives for law enforcement that have been abused more and more over time.

<comment><USER8> Presumption of innocence is a feature, not a bug. It is not there because thought it was cool to write it. It is a reaction of previous abuses.

Take a look at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760) (510 points | June 30, 2016 | 206 comments)

Now imagine that the cop says "I don't care if the judge thinks he is innocent, and I don't care that we can find no evidence. I believe he is guilty. Let's make his life miserable with extrajudicial punishment because we can use presumption of guilt. Let's seize his car, his home and whatever we can imagine."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think I'm more bothered by the misaligned incentives in this situation. Since the police department gets to keep the proceeds of the asset forfeitures, they will take as many cars as they can. Maybe a good fix would be to have proceeds go to education or social welfare. And the arresting officer shouldn't make the decision because it might lead to an abuse of power. An uninvolved third party should decide if they take the person's stuff. I'm not personally in favor of asset forfeiture but I do understand that enough people probably are that the law isn't likely to get repealed.

<comment><USER10> > asset forfeitures, they will take as many cars as they can. Maybe a good fix > would be to have proceeds go to education or social welfare.

Try public defenders and legal aid services instead. Seems like a fair balance to strike.

<comment><USER11> I like the idea but it's probably a conflict of interest. As a defense attorney, am I going to fight as hard to invalidate a warrant and get property returned to my client if I know otherwise the money will go to my office? Maybe, maybe not, but we aren't supposed to put ourselves in that position to begin with.

<comment><USER12> The bar wouldn't be sufficient motivation to prevent this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whenever I see a story pop up like this, and given the amount of advocacy I see on other topics discussed here on HN, I think it's fair to point out some charitable organizations that have been fighting this fight where it matters: in the courts.

The Institute for Justice has long long fought against unjust takings such as described here: [https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil- forfeiture/](https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/)

The Pacific Legal Foundation is also involved in this fight: [https://pacificlegal.org/civil-asset-forfeiture-resist- refor...](https://pacificlegal.org/civil-asset-forfeiture-resist-reform- repeal/)

Of the charitable giving that I do, these organizations are at the top of my list. If you're in the U.S., I would urge you to consider contributing as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> And people wonder why there are massive anti-police protests all across the US.

</comment><comment><USER15> between this, qualified immunity, and their unions - its hard not to see how cops are nothing more than state protected racketeers

</comment><comment><USER16> Confiscation\Destruction of items used in crimes irrespective of ownership is pretty standard, even a little old fashioned. Owner\Lender beware is the principle here. Sometimes laws even specifically ban the loaning of items (say guns) to give added culpability. The point being, that you're at least somewhat responsible for the things people do with what you lend them...

<comment><USER17> I think you are missing the bigger point of civil asset forfeiture. 1) there does not have to be criminal action involved 2) this isn't about seizing the property of one person's possession from a criminal that has possession of them, but your assets can be seized and kept by the dept taking them, if you can not prove that those assets weren't intended for criminal purposes. 3) There is a massive conflict of interest that exist when a police department keep assets they take from people who haven't been convicted of a crime.

<comment><USER16> The articles case isn't civil asset forfeiture. It's criminal. I agree about civil asset forfeiture.

The vehicle owner tried a reverse civil asset process to get the car back, so that's interesting but a bit of an aside...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What if the car is a lease?

<comment><USER19> Guarantee there's probably some obscure clause in lease agreements that allow the dealership to sue you (or allow them to seize collateral from you) if you can't produce the car at the end.

<comment> kube-system You don't need an obscure clause for that. Leases have a term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hmm - shouldn't the title be like: "Law in the US ..."?

</comment><comment><USER21> I often compare law enforcement to the Matrix. The government is the machines, and the citizens are the humans whose energy is being siphoned off, only in this case it's money, not energy.

It's unethical and unconscionable, and yet they still do it.

<comment><USER22> money is (in an indicrect and rough sense) a form of energy

energy is all about the capacity to do work.

how do you make humans do work? you give them money

so money is all about the capacity to make humans do work.

<comment><USER23> > how do you make humans do work? you give them money

I don't know if I buy this argument.

Think pre-Columbus Native Americans in North America. Members of tribes still did work without money.

What about people with the most money? Do they do the most work? We need to define what "most work" or "capacity" for work is.

Money is a tool/technology that acts as a bridge between two quantities/qualities. More simple, money is a common means of exchange.

Money is only an incentive to work for poor people because they will die without it. But this has to do with the capitalist system we live in, and it is not inherent to money itself.

<comment><USER24> Money is when I conspire with a few thugs to block access to the only source of water in town and demand special tokens for access and when people ask where they can get those tokens, I tell that they can earn some by doing some work, like building a house for me or cooking some food.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The reality is we need fewer, higher paid police with an extremely high barrier to entry. They should be required to go through the kind of training the military goes through for months so you see how they react under pressure. They should have people constantly giving them an opportunity to lie, cheat, steal and abuse their position of power to test if they are corrupt in any way. They should be monitored 24/7 and if they do anything that remotely looks suspicious they should be removed from their position of power. They should be required to go through intense training annually to see if they are still psychologically fit to do the job. Finally they should start as peace officers for several years and be required to communicate with people in difficult situations until it is possible to determine if they can be trusted. Everyone else should be put on peace officer duty with no weapons and no authority to do anything but observe and report information. The police don't need the amount of authority and power they have.

<comment><USER26> Or just revoke qualified immunity and force them to pay for their own malpractice insurance. The most dangerous will be priced out.

<comment><USER25> I'm not in favor of removing qualified immunity because I have former classmates who are police officers and some of them work in places where they are constantly dealing with violent crime and they occasionally have to things that appear criminal but aren't. They have to spend weeks justifying why they made certain decisions and if they have a pattern of behavior they will lose their jobs. If you speak to really good police officers in an environment where they don't have to worry about retaliation they will tell you directly they don't trust most of the police force where they work. Some of them are more afraid of their co-workers than the people they encounter on the street.

<comment><USER27> I genuinely do not understand the sentiment behind your first sentence after reading your last.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > She was in the passenger seat when a state trooper clocked her car at 118 > miles per hour on I-94 in St. Paul.

So she lets someone else drive her car at felony reckless driving speeds while she sits in the passenger seat? I mean... this law sounds like it has some problems but I'm not sure this is the case that proves it.

Surely she bears some responsibility here? Additionally, the car was used in a crime. Should you get your gun back if you loan it out and it's used to shoot somebody?

<comment><USER29> > Surely she bears some responsibility here?

If you're sitting in the passenger seat of a car driving an insane speed, what do you do? Hit the e-break? You're almost certainly going to die. Call thew police? The person is driving that crazy and you're in a locked room. You do the math.

There is absolutely nothing a passenger can do.

<comment><USER30> From the details given, it sounds like she should bear some responsibility. But the story is lacking in details.

Perhaps her coworker claimed to be sober and had not been visibly drinking at the work party. Perhaps she pleaded with him to slow down.

Regardless, she clearly made an error in judgement when she decided to allow this person to drive her car. Should she lose her car over it? No, I don't think so. But if they had been involved in a car accident, should she bear some portion of blame? Definitely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This particular case is not nearly as bad as it sounds. Someone used a car to commit a crime, so the state seized the car. The car was owned by another person, who had lent it to the person who committed the crime. This sounds like a powerful deterrent to allowing your car to be used to commit crimes.

> "You're asking one drunk person to determine whether another person is fit > to drive. That's absurd," said attorney Chuck Ramsay.

No, it's not. Just assume they aren't. What's the alternative? Merrily lend your car to someone who might be drunk, and not bear any consequences?

<comment><USER32> "It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.

But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever."

\- John Adams

<comment><USER33> A wonderful quote.

I can't help but see the similarity between this quote and the words of a 90 year old BLM protester that I met in Seattle recently: "No, I don't really care about the looters. Let them take what they want. Because it doesn't matter. Nothing matters anymore. Because guilty or innocent, if they're black, they're gonna end up in prison at some point before they die. Just like I did. For 24 years."

<comment><USER34> So he was innocent and spent 24 years in prison? Or was he just trying to downplay his own responsibility?

<comment><USER33> He claimed he was innocent, and I think I believe him.

My therapist does some work in the state prison system, and he told me once that most prisoners go through the full 5 stages of grief usually within a couple of months. And by the end of those stages of grief, it is no longer painful for them to accept and openly admit that they committed a crime. He can only recall two long term prisoners that he worked with that refused to admit guilt after a year in prison...one of them has already been fully exonerated (not commuted, but actually cleared of all guilt), and the other was recently granted a retrial. Anecdotal, sure, but I find it believable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


John Clements: Rust Macros Talk - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KgXy7jnwhY

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a lightning presentation (11:36) on hygienic macros in the Rust programming language. It also provides a nice, succinct overview of what the language is about at the beginning, so it's worth a watch if you have no idea what Rust is and are curious.

[http://rust-lang.org/](http://rust-lang.org/)</comment>


Ask HN: Swag on a budget? - <AUTHOR>

Can anyone suggest good sources of branded swag (giveaway stuff) for a startup on a budget, for someone ordering less than a hundred? Ideally this would bee geek targeted swag, and easy to ship across the Canada/US border.<p>Or even better... is there such a thing as swag on demand? I upload my logo design, and place drop-ship orders one at a time to send to people? <comment><USER2> Browse Etsy <http://www.etsy.com/category/geekery>

</comment><comment><USER3> just sent some swag on a buget to a consultant who went out of his way.

\-- XKCD comic book \-- LHC tshirt (havent printed our own yet) \-- cookies and chocolate with our logo</comment>


Facebook CFO Fumbled Number of Shares Offered in IPO - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304019404577420660698374718.html

<comment><USER2> Ebersman really killed the FB IPO... Once FB matches the PE ratio of it's peers (Google, Yahoo, etc) the stock price is going to the single digits.

Issuing more shares at the last minute only made this problem worse.

</comment><comment><USER3> Article is behind a paywall/log-in wall. Can anyone post the juiciest quotes?

</comment><comment><USER4> Alternative take: <http://uncrunched.com/2012/05/23/meet-facebooks-fall-guy/></comment>


Sortition - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition <comment><USER2> I've thought a bit about sortition. My favourite way of explaining it: Suppose a billionaire is looking for someone to marry. They want a partner who is interested in them for more than just a paycheque. Say gold-diggers represent just a very small fraction of the population but are extremely good at feigning fascination in pursuit of their goals and finding themselves in the company of billionaires. In fact they are so good at ingratiating themselves with billionaires that any potential partner this billionaire picks from the people he or she knows is likely to be a gold digger. What is a good but non- optimal solution? The billionaire should pick 1000 random people of the gender he/she prefers and make their selection from this pack. This cuts out the influence of the adverse selection effects the billionaire experiences just from being a billionaire. If all they're looking for in a partner is someone in at most in the ~99th percentile of people this approach will work with little cost, as candidates can then be selected from this pool using conventional means. This would not work if gold-digging is a reaction to circumstance rather than an in-built characteristic - the same is true of corruption.

For politics, one approach would be sortition applied to those in the 99th percentile on a widely used standardized test like the SATs -it's important that this test be used outside politics, too. Sortition would then be applied to narrow down the pool from ~160000 (about the number of people with sufficient scores over a 10 year time-span) to say a few hundred, a few dozen, or less and then a conventional election from there. Though, you may need very attractive salaries to ensure those elected choose to serve as most don't have an interest in politics - perhaps a ridiculous pension for life after a few years of service.

<comment><USER3> I'd replace the SAT score with some small, fixed amount of people vouching for you so that you could enter the lottery. (After all, there might be someone capable who because of some good reasons didn't manage to take SAT, and the system should be just and fair for them, too.)

The amount should not be so large that you'd need the gigantic ad campaigns you need today to be elected, but large enough that you need support outside your immediate family. Maybe ~20. Gathering their 'votes' demonstrates that you're at least interested in the job, and the element of trust is still there (someone trusts you would do a good job, and not doing that would be a betrayal).

<comment><USER2> I think standardized tests are vastly underrated.

One of the nice properties of sortition is it combines well with many other forms of selection. However, this seems to ruin the point:

>Gathering their 'votes' demonstrates that you're at least interested in the job, and the element of trust is still there (someone trusts you would do a good job, and not doing that would be a betrayal).

A big plus of sortition is it does not maximally select for the people most interested in political power. Having to be elected or self-selected in such a fashion would mar this.

<comment><USER4> I agree, tests have their uses. Like any kind of constraint, they can be used to diminish the search space to increase the desired yield. When devised and administered fairly, they can go a long way toward leveling a playing field (or excluding the crazies).

For example, if we want to exclude congress(wo)men who are powermad egomaniacs, we start by asking knowledgable sources to rank candidates by lust, greed, and vanity, then exclude from random selection all those who fall below a certain threshold. Voila, no more psychos (golddiggers) joining the the Washington Elite.

The lovely part of Sortition is that with a large number of fair & knowledgable 'rankers' (or 'standardized tests') it's basically impossible to game the system.

So I vote 'yea' for Sortition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Taleb talks about this (though he doesn't use the term Sortition) in Antifragile: "instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients—again, those ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system."

<comment><USER6> I haven't read any Taleb, but an an analogy between sortition and simulated annealing sounds like an igon value moment to me.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for that - I'd never heard of the Igon Value Problem and love the concept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." (Aristotle, Politics 4.1294be)

<comment><USER9> It's a practice done by many Lutheran churches - each person writing who they'd like for leadership roles and writing it on a slip of paper, and then drawing one of those slips randomly.

From a theological point of view it allows for the Holy Spirit to act among us.

From a personal standpoint it works well as it allows candidates to put their names forward without the embarrassment of losing based on popularity.

<comment><USER10> I suspect this sort of belief is what legitimated sortition in the classical world: the choice is made by unknown or supernatural powers. Sortition and "casting of lots" is better known today for divination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've also wondered lately if we shouldn't add some random element to the way we fund scientific research. Right now, as I understand it, researchers write grant proposals and funding institutions evaluate them and pick the best ones to fund.

Presumably then, the researchers who get the most funding would be the ones who are the best at writing grant proposals, and they may or may not be doing the best research or researching the most important things. In theory, there could be brilliant researchers working on important things who don't get any money because they lack the ability to persuade people to give it to them.

One of my "if I had a billion dollars" dreams is to set up a foundation that would randomly award research grants to field of qualified applicants.

I think it's the same problem with elections. Governing and campaigning are two different skills. Elections elect people who are good at campaigning, but may or may not be good at governing.

<comment><USER12> The one missing part of your understanding: grants are generally reviewed by researcher-peers, not really "funding institutions". Your proposal is read by other researches, scores are given to the grant and then a cutoff score is determined. All grants above that score are funded, those below are not.

This doesn't really change your conclusion, that grant writing is an important skill for acquiring funding but it's not about impressing the funding institution, it's about impressing fellow scientists.

<comment><USER13> The only problem is the scoring system is highly biased towards track record of the grant applicant not the actual grant content. On top of this once you get the grant you can in practice spend the money doing whatever you want.

More fundamentally the peer review process can't actually accurately sort good proposals from outstanding proposals, but we only have the money to fund a fraction of the outstanding proposals. Under these conditions just being honest and moving to a system where all good proposals are put into a lottery and funded by chance would be better approach.

<comment> semi-extrinsic See also [http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also called random sample voting.

[http://cdd.stanford.edu/](http://cdd.stanford.edu/)

[http://rsvoting.org/](http://rsvoting.org/)

>Random-sample voting can be used locally, nationally, regionally, or even globally, with results that are more irrefutable than with current elections but at less than one-thousandth of the cost.

<comment><USER15> Random-sample voting, as proposed in those links, is a very specific _application_ of sortition, it is not identical to the broader concept of sortition in the same way that the system currently used for electing the President of the United States is an example, but not identical to the broader concept, of election.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really thought this was going to be some obscure implementation of Quicksort.

<comment><USER17> I was expecting it to be a portmanteau of sort and partition.

<comment><USER18> A partition algorithm that actually has some stronger almost-sorted condition on its output than a regular partition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The biggest risk of sortition is moving the balance of power from representatives to the appointed/hired bureaucracy. I suspect that non- politicians are much easier to "manage up" against - I fear having it wind up as political lottery winners getting "advised" into going a certain direction.

<comment><USER15> > The biggest risk of sortition is moving the balance of power from > representatives to the appointed/hired bureaucracy.

That's a risk, but I don't think its the biggest even within the "balance of power between officeholders and _X_ " category of risks; I think the biggest in that category is the shift in the balance of power between office holders and professional interest group influencers (lobbyists _et al._ ) who aren't going to be randomly selected short-timers that get swapped out every few years, they are going to be long-term career professionals representing entities with lots of resources, durable interests, and a commitment to achieving them.

OTOH, sortition doesn't have to be a wholesale replacement for elections, either; it can complement them (as it does now, you just expand the scale.)

Say, have an additional house of the (state or federal, though some of these powers would be more familiar and perhaps appropriate at the state level) legislature (the "House of Citizens", say) selected by sortition, and given it some or all of the following powers: (1) To take any bill passed by the other house(s) and delay it by putting a hold of up to 90-days on it, after which the other houses must pass it again before it can move forward for executive signature or veto (if there are any changes to the version passed later, its treated as a new bill, and goes back to the House of Citizens again),

(2) To, instead of #1, invoke the power of _referendum_ against any bill passed by the other house(s), such that if it is approved by the executive (or passed over executive veto), it is referred to a vote of the electorate at large who must approve it before it goes into effect,

(3) To directly initiate an _initiative_ measure, that would go directly to a vote of the electorate at large, and become law with their support, without the need for approval of the other house(s) or the legislature,

(4) To (for a federal "House of Citizens"), on a supermajority vote, propose to the State legislatures amendments to the Constitution, without the other houses (the normal thresholds for ratification would still be required.)

Note that #2 and #3 are powers of the people in many states, but usually require an expensive process of gathering signatures on petitions to invoke, making them more accessible to well-funded groups; a sortition-selected body as an additional avenue could provide an alternate filter that might be less cost-driven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Athenian democracy is the model people point to, but the worm in the apple is Athenian citizenship rules. The reason selection by lot could work is that a large number of people were excluded from the pool.

"Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens. The percentage of the population that actually participated in the government was 10 to 20% of the total number of inhabitants, but this varied from the fifth to the fourth century BC. This excluded a majority of the population: slaves, freed slaves, children, women and metics (foreigners resident in Athens). The women had limited rights and privileges, had restricted movement in public, and were very segregated from the men. Also excluded from voting were citizens whose rights were under suspension (typically for failure to pay a debt to the city: see atimia); for some Athenians this amounted to permanent (and in fact inheritable) disqualification." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Citizenship...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Citizenship_in_Athens)

"In regards to Greek mythology, the ephebe was a young man or initiate, around the ages of 17-18, who was put through a period of isolation from his prior community, usually the world of his mother, where he was a child in the community. The ephebe would need to hunt, rely on his senses, on aggression, stealth, and trickery to survive. At the end of the initiation, the ephebe was reincorporated back into society as a man." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebos)

<comment><USER15> > The reason selection by lot could work is that a large number of people were > excluded from the pool.

Its clear that Athens excluded large numbers of people from the pool of sortition (just as most democracies before the 20th Century excluded lots of people from the pool of electors), but its not clear to me how you get from that to the conclusion that exclusion is necessary for sortition any more than it is necessary for election.

<comment><USER10> I meant _could_ work, as in the place where it actually did work. I wouldn't yet argue that mass exclusion is necessary so that it _can_ work.

Whether sortition _can_ work in a large, inclusive, and diverse society is an interesting question. Democracy can only work in a high-trust environment where people don't expect their political rivals to say, have them murdered or nationalize major industries. The expansion of enfranchisement in the U.S. (at least) has also coincided with the marginalization of very extreme political movements, like Communism.

Say you have an electorate with a very radical far-left or far-right minority that is anathema to the rest of the citizenry? In an electoral democracy, the minority would be excluded in elections (in a first-past-the-post system) or by inclusion as a clear minority (in proportional representation). In a sortitive democracy, it seems like they would have to be excluded from citizenship, or the government would have to have to be large and diffuse enough that the damage of insane or dangerous people could be constrained by the rest of society.

When people are introduced to the idea of sortition, mostly they are shocked by the idea. Because what if you randomly choose a schizophrenic or Hitler to put in charge of the nuclear weapons? I think you have to encourage this tactic at a more familiar level—rather than a group of friends voting on a restaurant, allowing one person to pick after drawing straws. Which, surely, is not at all like giving them a professional military.

<comment><USER15> > I meant could work, as in the place where it actually did work.

You are still leaping without justification from the way it was implemented and what was necessary for it to work; this is a form of _post hoc ergo propter hoc_.

Yes, it was implemented that way in Athens.

That doesn't establish that it _had to be_ implemented that way to work, even in that environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problem of randomly select citizens for office is that they are as vulnerable to be corrupted as the current elected officials.

But, I would like an approach where we randomly select "electors". They are sequestered, listen to the arguments of the candidates, hold several election rounds and finally come out with he elected officials. Like a jury. They would be dismissed after that.

<comment><USER21> I'd argue they are not. For a start, there'll be no campaign contributions to deal about later, and no seeking of campaign funding.

<comment><USER4> Right. I'd argue that most of the distortion in US governance is due not to incompetance but malice (like bias that serves moneyed interests), and this malice is deliberate. Random selection alone would cause the 'malice factor' to diminish to the mean. Thus future governors would be no more malevolent (or incompetent) than the average Joe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An interesting mixture of the existing election systems with sortition might be the following: Elections for seats in the parliament are done in the usual fashion. However the number of seats selected by vote in the parliament is only equal to the percentage of voters. The other seats, basically representing the non-voters, are selected by lot.

On can justify this by arguing that non-voters are on the one hand not satisfied with the given choices and on the other hand indifferent to who is ruling them. So selecting the seats by lot might actually represent the will of the non-voters best.

</comment><comment><USER22> I can't find the link, but there was a good article about this recently (maybe in the last year) that spent quite a bit of time talking about the selection of the Doge of Venice. IIRC, they had a very complicated process that included sortition, nomination, election, and alternating large and small groups that allow them to select qualified officeholders while simultaneously limiting many of the problems with direct elections.

Does anyone have a link?

<comment><USER23> Was it this article by Nick Szabo on Unpredictable Elections? He talks a bit about the Venetian method: [http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable- elect...](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable- elections.html)

<comment><USER22> I don't think that was the one I read, but it's just as good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd like to restore the state appointment of Senators, preserve the House and add a third house, consisting of representatives chosen by sortition from the states, with representation allocated by (federal taxes paid - federal dollars spent), and with the odds of each citizen's selection proportional to the amount he pays in taxes. Legislation would need to pass all three houses.

It'll never happen, of course.

</comment><comment><USER25> What are chlorite machines?

</comment><comment><USER26> The justification for sortition is equity. We all have an equal right to have our views taken into account on all issues. Sortition permits the formation of a truly representative chamber of parliament. Elections do not, for a raft of reasons.

Representation is necessary because direct democracy is unworkable in large modern states, and because no-one has the time to study and understand every issue, particularly as many are highly technical and complex.

It would be absurd to choose one person, or even a small group, by sortition (or elections!), and give them legislative authority. The group chosen must be reasonably large, since a small group cannot be representative.

Regarding sortition and tests: Any test is designed to exclude some people. Who has the right to say that these people should be excluded?

A common idea is that by excluding the stupid, crazy, corrupt, ambitious, malicious… one will get "better" decisions, "better" legislation. But for any decision to be "good" it must first be equitable. Any exclusion renders the chosen group unrepresentative, and hence is inequitable. Better far to include these "undesirables": they will be relatively few in number, just as they are in society, and they will not vote as a unified block when decisions are made. Further, the more diverse the group, the better the quality of decisions (when this can be measured). It is not necessary for all the members of a group to be intelligent or well-intentioned for the group to make intelligent choices.

As for corruption and the undue influence of multinationals, lobbies, religious groups, and bureaucrats, I believe it is possible to greatly reduce or eliminate this with good design of the institutions.

For a fuller discussion of these issues and a proposal for a government based on sortition, you might be interested to read "Down with Elections!", available as an e-book on Smashwords, Amazon and Apple's iTunes bookstore, for about $1. (A blatant plug for my own work).

[https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/570431](https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/570431) [http://www.amazon.com/DOWN-ELECTIONS-C-Wallace- ebook/dp/B014...](http://www.amazon.com/DOWN-ELECTIONS-C-Wallace- ebook/dp/B0148T4EWI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1440520516&sr=1-1) [https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/down-with- elections!/id1032...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/down-with- elections!/id1032451324?mt=11)

Or you can have it for free as a PDF (less convenient): [https://www.dropbox.com/s/7oqo5paiwmwatsp/DWE_PDF.pdf?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/7oqo5paiwmwatsp/DWE_PDF.pdf?dl=0)

</comment><comment><USER27> I've long been interested in the use of sortition in political decision making, and it always surprises me how little it has been seriously studied and considered compared to the potential it seems to have.

Much of the information there is is of pretty low quality. It might of course just be such a bad idea that everybody smart enough to give high quality contributions on the topic does not want to waste their time with the idea. But if this is the case it is totally non obvious to me, and most criticism I've read seem to be from people that do not have a clear understanding of the potential advantages sortition might have.

Very briefly, for the uninitiated, the main potential advantage of sortition is that it would make political decision making a lot more democratic. People representative of the population at large would actually discuss to make the decision, instead of the citizens making their choice by casting one vote every few years among a set of very similar parties (I know, this simplifies the debate a lot, but it is the main idea). This is very interesting if you are of the opinion (as I am) that lack of democracy is a big problem of our political systems. I believe that most time politicians go agains the will of people they do so for the wrong reasons and with the wrong goals, and way too often.

The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited and predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary factors that can greatly influence the results.

Of course sortition in practice might have a number of problem often brought up, but none seems unsolvable to the point where it's not even worth exploring the idea further.

How do you separate expertise from decision power, while still being able to make proper use of the expertise? How to implement sortition in practice? Would they ever let us? Would people be able to handle the pressure? Would they accept the position? And all criticism to democracy in general applies even more to sortition.

I think however that if you talked about elections to somebody who never heard about it, you could come up with just as a big number of potential problems. I don't know if sortition really is a better idea, but maybe it's an idea worth thinking about.

I recently read this article on sortition that appeared on the Atlantic which I think is really good: [http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/the- cas...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-a- college-admissions-lottery/361585/)

Another good starting point for further exploration is the blog Equality by Lot: [https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/](https://equalitybylot.wordpress.com/)

<comment><USER15> > The law of large number makes sure the randomness in sortition is limited > and predictable. Whereas with elections there is a big number of arbitrary > factors that greatly can influence the results.

With elections, there are constraints which make deviations from the preference of the electorate less likely the greater the salience of the issue is. Sortition distributes the _issues_ on which the decisionmakers deviate from the represented population randomly, which means that salience of the issue does not affect the likelihood of deviation between the decisionmakers and the represented population.

This is a significant weakness in sortition compared to elections, that needs to be weighed against whatever advantages are identified for it.

<comment><USER28> Why not use both? Select a random sample of candidates and then hold an election. By adjusting the number of candidates you can have the process act more like pure sortition (low number) or pure election (high number).

<comment><USER4> That's a grand idea, but because most of the random lot would be unknowns, I think it would quickly devolve into electing the outlier -- either the one person we do know, or the one who had the superficial traits that the electorate favors most. We'd choose on the basis of celebrity and beauty, since those skills needed for leadership (e.g. good ideas, fairness, capable at delegation, and courage) are too subtle to be detected by a popularity contest, 95% of which takes place only on TV.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


1Password will alert you if your password has been leaked - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/23/17044106/1password-feature-password-leaked <comment><USER2> Good seeing Troy's list implemented by a product used by many.

I do wish that these lists were subjected to more due diligence / fact checking, however.

Though I consider Troy to be trustworthy, a savvy marketer could theoretically build such a hashed list from rockyou.txt and pad it with billions of extra "passwords" in order to promote a blog as having the Largest List Ever.

An independent audit of his sources, cleaning methods, who he's given access to unhashed, and OPSEC in securing such a massive trove of people's sensitive information would be a great gesture from him.

Let's hope these credentials aren't sitting unencrypted on an external drive in a security researcher's briefcase, for example.</comment>


Refurbishing Classic Quad Electrostatic Loudspeakers - <AUTHOR> https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/refurbishing-classic-quad-electrostatic-loudspeakers <comment> dan-robertson Electrostatic speakers seem like a great idea. Just like condenser microphones can give better recordings (although it matters less with microphones as the diaphragm is smaller).

Unfortunately they can be sensitive to the environment (pressure, humidity etc), and require moving parts close together with a large difference in potential between them, leading to a risk of short-circuiting, sparking, or catching fire, and requiring much more technical expertise for maintenance.

Nevertheless they are reasonably commonly used for headphones in studios (where there is mains power which is necessary). I think electrostatic loudspeakers (requiring much more power than headphones) are very uncommon in homes (although I suppose loudspeakers in general aren't super common). Quad still make electrostatic speakers as do other companies.

I wonder if this sort of speaker is used much in more commercial settings

<comment><USER2> I googled for the response curve, and it's pretty impressive.

As I understand things, during the 50s, amplifier power was at a premium. 25 Watts was a lot! So it made sense to design highly efficient speakers, hence the large radiating area of the Quad. Today, amplifier power is dirt cheap and tiny, so you can throw a lot of power into a less efficient speaker, and still get decent sound plus possibly better off-axis response in a multi-way system. This gives the advantage to cone speakers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I noticed a few days ago that Joey has a pair of Electrostatic speakers in his apartment. These ones, apparently:

[https://www.martinlogan.com/en/product/aeriusi](https://www.martinlogan.com/en/product/aeriusi)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd heard of electrostatic headphones, but never seen the design turned into a loudspeaker. Has anyone hear heard these or something similar to them?

<comment><USER5> I remember listening to these at someone's dads place many many years ago. Incomparable to anything else I've heard before or since.

<comment><USER6> Incomparable in what way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> onethingaudio.org - they are not kidding</comment>


Ask HN: Best Small Company (~25-50 Users) Router Setup? - <AUTHOR>

Without resulting to hiring an IT consultant, what would be a good wireless routing hardware setup for a company in a single office with around 25-50 employees? <comment><USER2> Are you looking to just bridge people wireless -> wired connections or do you want something akin to a home router setup that handles DHCP and firewalling?

Either way, having too many devices connected to the same (single) radio can make it hard for any traffic to get through. A brief overview on airtime is here: [http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wi-fi- performance,2985-1...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wi-fi- performance,2985-14.html) \-- in your situation, a minimum of two access points would be a good idea.

If you're looking for just access points, then I'd recommend a 3-pack of Ubiquiti UAP-Pros, spaced out relatively evenly around your work environment: [http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Networks-UniFi-Enterprise- Sys...](http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Networks-UniFi-Enterprise- System/dp/B005EORRBW/ref=sr_1_2/179-7464592-6881757?ie=UTF8&qid=1440441047&sr=8-2&keywords=3-pack+uap+pro&pebp=1440441054430&perid=1S7NYFRMRZ1MEKJM033B) \-- configuring them requires free server software, but once they're up and running, the server software can be shut down and the devices can run independently.

I recommend these as a Ubiquiti enterprise certified person with a current deployment of 30 UAP-ACs, on my way up to about 80 devices in total. I have one auditorium room with about 200 seats that, so far, 3 access points seem to cover without trouble.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Ruckus (3 AP) in the office and the performance is good for 50+ people. Remember that every person at least bring two devices (laptop + mobile phone) to the office, some of them bring 2 mobile phones plus tablet. make sure you count that too when sizing the WiFi.

Meraki is easy to setup and manage, it does not use any controller on premise since the AP connect to Meraki Cloud. You can manage all your Meraki AP from single dashboard even if you have separate physical location. This including user management so you don't have to only rely on WPA2 for WiFi security

Regarding the AP itself, if budget allowed make sure the device support 802.11 AC, most new devices support this (CMIIW) this run on 5Ghz band which on most places less crowded than 2.4Ghz. Usually this kind of device support dual band with 2,4Ghz to also support

At the very least make sure the AP you will buy support dual band 5Ghz (802.11 N) and also 2.4Ghz (b/g/n).

Most dual band support feature like band steering (this might be ruckus term, but others should have similar feature). Basically the AP will offer the 5Ghz to any device want to connect to them first, if the device can't connect then they will offer 2.4Ghz band. Having people connected to 5Ghz band is improving the network performance that people get because less inteference in this band.

</comment><comment><USER4> What's the area of the office and what barriers exist between employees? Concrete or internal metal/plaster walls? Other offices / businesses near by where the employees pick up the SSID's with full or near full strength?

I've found older Apple Airport Extreme's work really well and are easy to setup and manage. I can't personally comment on the current version.

</comment><comment><USER5> If we're just talking about access points then check out Meraki's from Cisco.

</comment><comment><USER6> Mikrotik Routers.

Ubiquiti APs (and routers, if you like, but they're way more limited)

Or Meraki, if you have lots of money.</comment>


The Fallacy of Execution, or Why Mark Doesn't Talk About Facebook's Origins - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/sex-and-the-fallacy-of-ex_b_309304.html

<comment><USER2> It's somewhat sad to see someone so obviously talented waste that talent on building a career focused on the resentful reliving of being ill-done by. No matter how successful the ill-doer became.

Aaron, don't let the facebook that got away be the defining chapter in your life; build something new and amazing that you will be remembered for.

<comment><USER3> I echo that sentiment. Enough with the Facebook envy. Whether right or wrong in this from a moral standpoint, there _has_ to be something more productive worth doing with your time than to keep harping on about this sorry issue for the rest of your life.

Maybe you should have "won". Maybe not. We can debate this until kingdom come, to our collective embarrassment. The fact remains, Mark Zuckerberg _is_ Facebook's CEO and you're not. Get over it. Start another company. Are you a one-idea man? Was this the only idea you were capable of having in your lifetime?

I make no judgement on the claims of idea theft (as porous as the very idea of idea theft might be), but leave you with an extract from this little big poem ([http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Rudyard_Kipling/kipl...](http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Rudyard_Kipling/kipling_if.htm)):

      (...)

      If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
      Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
      Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
      And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

      If you can make one heap of all your winnings
      And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
      And lose, and start again at your beginnings
      And never breath a word about your loss;

      (...)

      Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
      And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Time wasting fluff. If by some miracle you came here to the comments before reading the piece, skip it.

<comment><USER5> I usually read the HN comments before the article and so I didn't read this piece, but... I already bought and read Aaron's _Authoritas_ book so have read 200+ pages of this sort of stuff before. Oops.. :) (Oddly, though, I'd still recommend the book. I couldn't put it down - it was like watching a car crash in slow motion.)

<comment><USER6> Out of interest, do you take any steps to ensure your viewpoint isn't biased by the comments before reading a linked piece?

<comment><USER5> Luckily, most of the posts on Hacker News that I find interesting don't lend themselves to biases (i.e. the non political or evangelical posts).

With the more political or evanglical posts, though, I think the human mind is wired to defend its initial opinion for a certain amount of time no matter what it reads ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _...of all the business clichés in the world, there is none that I hear more, and that I hate more, than the vague, poorly-defined and generally ill- conceived notion that "execution" is more important than "the idea."_

Oh, how the truth hurts. I actually got this far before I bothered to read the name of the author. If Mark Zuckerberg made this point it would have weight, but as it stands it's just another bunch of sour grapes.

<comment><USER8> It can be both sour grapes and the truth.

<comment><USER9> I personally wouldn't suggest that you can get by with great execution on a crappy idea (or crappy execution of a great idea), but given the author's past history, one could easily make the conclusion that it's mostly just sour grapes. And while reading about truth is a good thing, I find it's not worth the read if the truth is wrapped in overblown angst and already-beaten-to- death accusations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow the author obviously doesn't get "execution."

Of course "idea" and "execution" should be defined properly. When people say "execution is more important than the idea," the idea is what you come up with your unaided intelligence, and execution is your ability to refine that idea and stay objective towards your goals. In this case the "idea" is not important because when you "execute" it, any one idea will morph and change constantly. Even if considering the ideas you come up with collectively, it's still less important because improving an idea is always possible even if they are small improvements.

The author apparently doesn't really understand what "idea" means. So if I was dumb enough to try a disposable jumble jet, the original idea doesn't matter because after I try to create such a product and fail, I will choose to ditch that idea. Eventually my idea will get better as I continuously hit brick walls if they suck. The rate at which I can learn from mistakes and avoid brick walls is execution. While you can still improve your innate execution ability, it's much harder to improve that than the idea. For this reason, idea is less important than execution.

Simply put, the idea is the formula you come up with before testing it, and the execution is your ability to adapt your idea to reality. Your formulae will be plenty and disposable, your ability to be objective and adapt your formulae is much more important because it is the engine to which your formulae power.

</comment><comment><USER11> Don't forget (and this is probably more important in this case than usual) _luck_. The nature of social networks favors one network that "everyone is on". Which one gets chosen probably has more to do with luck than the execution of the site. All it took was a few random people to stumble upon it and _"but all my friends are on facebook"_ took it from there.

If you'd like a counterpoint that favors execution, I hear that you can do pretty well just selling shoes...

<comment><USER12> I believe personality is more important then luck, although some things are just lucky (pentyoffish.com) but people who have great personalities, you just like them but you don't know why, they usually succeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The reason execution is stressed over ideas is that non-businesspersons frequently think, "I've got this idea that's going to make me rich!"

It's actually incredibly common. Anyone that's been on the business side of a business doesn't think that way, and most engineering people don't think that way, but people that don't work hands-on with the grimy, mucky, slogging reality of business believe in the myth of a great idea.

Ideas without execution = nothing. Execution of even a mildly valuable idea = quite valuable. Most of the people I know who built large fortunes didn't invent something new or crazy. Lots of real estate and development, turning one space in the world into a more valuable space. One gentleman I know buys properties in high rent areas that are normally not profitable, and converts them into vacation/short term rental properties for businessmen staying in town who want a more "homey" place. So he's able to turn traditionally cashflow-neutral or negative properties into profitable ones with a just a bit of added active management and marketing.

Brilliant idea? Meh, not so much. Great execution.

There's lots more. I have one acquaintance who is investing and working on various technologies for spaceflight, so maybe he'll do some breakthrough crazy stuff later, but most of the wealthy people I know don't do anything so flashy or remarkable. It's just all execution of ages old ideas, like buy a space and renovate it into a nicer, more valuable space. Provide a service lots of people use for cheaper. Provide a higher quality service that is currently well used that people are dissatisfied with. Make people's lives more convenient, happy, or healthy. These aren't such new ideas. If I had to guess the ratio of a person that goes self made to holding more than $5 million in assets, I'd guess 95 to 98% old ideas with great execution, 2 to 5% new ideas. We lose sight of that in technology because we keep hearing about the new cool hotness, but most fortunes are built by fixing something in the world that you're using and aren't happy about the quality of. Hence, almost all execution, not so much having great ideas.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, ideas are mostly worthless.

Facebook's success certainly cannot be attributed to their "idea": the online community thing had been done thousands of times before. Just never executed well enough.

Google's success cannot be attributed to their idea, as there were numerous search engines before them. Execution is what propelled them to the forefront. Their search engine actually showed good results.

Amazon. They sell books. Not the most novel idea out there. They just did it better than anyone else. Zappos. They sell shoes.

For all the time people spend comparing their startups to the biggest players, it's quite odd that so few realize that it's not about the idea. It's about the execution.

<comment><USER15> An idea can be completely unoriginal and still be a good idea – an idea is still good even after it's been copied. So the article's contention that there can be no success without both good execution and a good idea is completely accurate. Selling books is a good idea, selling dead leaves isn't.

Also, I think you oversimplify the ideas of Amazon, Google, Zappo and Facebook. I would argue that Amazon's idea was more "selling a massive range of books online via a simple interface" not just "selling books". And there are many variations of the "online community thing". The idea for Facebook wasn't the same as the idea for Friends Reunited and it's easy to see how that helped one to prosper and the other to fail.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but even with your definitions of their ideas, they're not super-unique, certainly their ideas aren't the most valuable thing in the mix.

To illustrate my point; there was no need for either of the mentioned successful startups to keep their "idea" a secret until launch, in fear of someone "stealing" it.

What I mean is that had someone heard of their "idea" before launch, it would have changed nothing. It's all about the execution.

Conversely, many would-be startup founders I've talked to seem to think that their idea is _the most valuable thing they have_. That they need to keep their super-unique idea under wraps, for fear of it getting out and someone else doing it instead.

<comment><USER16> Good ideas can often be subtle. Boiled down to utter simplicity the difference between facebook and myspace may seem to be tiny. But that's not the case. Another term for subtlety may be "precision". The difference between facebook and some other seemingly similar site may seem subtle but by the same token it may actually be a difference in precision, with facebook hitting a tiny target (a correct mix of complexly interacting features and design) that others missed.

You see this sort of importance of precision/subtlety everywhere. The difference between the best selling automobile and the 20th best selling automobile in the same class is often a long list of subtle, yet important differences. Also, what may seem like subtle, some might say inconsequential, differences on casual inspection may in fact be jarring, fundamentally important distinctions. The addition of 1 tablespoon of salt to a bowl of soup instead of merely a pinch changes the flavor dramatically, even though in either case the salt is only just a tiny, tiny fraction of the ingredients.

<comment><USER14> Those subtle differences are _execution_. The idea is to build a better car.

<comment><USER15> In the end we come down to an unfruitful debate on the distinction between 'idea' and 'execution'. If you've got every last detail for a website planned out in your head but nothing implemented, that's still an idea, not execution.

In my opinion it goes like this:

* A bad idea is less than worthless

* Unoriginal good ideas are worthless

* Original but vague good ideas are worth very little

* Original and detailed good ideas are worth a lot, but still useless without fantastic excecution too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a developer I think I'm quick to shoot down ideas faster than most. Usually, we enjoy pragmatic thinking and GTD attitude towards problems. I didn't really think about ideas (not problem ideas, ideas ideas) until a met an artist on a train. We were talking and she asked me what I thought about a project she had envisioned. Naturally, I pointed out all the technical and financial pitfalls of her idea. This seemed to shut her down.

My wife, instead, asked me what it would take to do it and, quite naturally, I was able to list all the equipment and technical skills needed for such a project. It wasn't until I finished that I realized that the project was reasonable and doable.

It's very easy to dismiss ideas, even good ones. Dumb ideas can be as good as brilliant ones if executed right

</comment><comment><USER18> Isn't "execution" the implementation of a combination of varying "ideas"? If not, then I guess most services wouldn't have competitive advantages and Facebook wouldn't be what it is today.

</comment><comment><USER19> Actually, there are such stupid arguments in biology, namely nature versus nurture. Of course, most biologists are over that now, but the public certainly isn't.

</comment><comment><USER20> The problem here is that the author is arguing with himself.

Execution means having lots of ideas and modifying them as conditions change and you learn more.

We talk about ideas vs. execution because big exciting ideas are all over the place (I know the author doesn't agree but from experience I've seen and heard a lot of really great ideas). What's missing is all the little ideas that come from those big ideas. Lots of folks have some vague, big-pictured idea. Not many people have the three thousand little ideas that support the big one. Execution means finding all those little ideas and testing them to see which ones work.

If I remember correctly, FaceBook didn't really take off until the FriendFeed feature was added. Once folks started getting real-time updates of their friends, it became addictive. Sure the big idea was there and succeeding, but it's those little tweaks that end up doing the trick.

That's just my opinion, of course. Your mileage may vary. It's definitely a discussion worth having.

<comment><USER21> > FaceBook didn't really take off until the FriendFeed feature was added

Well that isn't quite true, but the news feed was an important innovation, which did add a lot of momentum. Facebook actually had that before FriendFeed came along (which everyone seems to forget when they accuse Facebook of copying FriendFeed's features)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel like the author basically contradicts himself in the end. He talks about how there were plenty of "face books" at various colleges and how this idea is certainly not new. So why did Zuckerberg's Facebook get so big and popular wen the others are small and obscure? Execution, maybe?

</comment><comment><USER22> this guy must be a glutton for punishment to submit this here. i've lost count of the number of times this subject has come up and been quickly _put down_. each time, the author comes off looking worse than the last time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Thank you or abridging "sex" from the title. It's appreciated.</comment>


Ask HN: Should web services recycle usernames after 120 days of inactivity? - <AUTHOR>

If a user does not log into their account for 120 days why don't providers strip the user of their handle and release it?
I've noticed many twitter (and other services) handles are claimed but not in use.
Is it time for major providers to implement a 'use it or lose it' philosophy if a user doesn't log in every 4 months!
Kudos to Github! A few months ago I noticed a handle was taken but not in use for couple of years (no repository). Within minutes of investigating, they assigned it to me. They get it! <comment><USER2> If someone is looking for a specific name, it's typically because the name is publicly displayed on the service. This presents a couple of major issues.

1\. Let's say someone wants your HN username, _andrewhillman_. You've been inactive for a few months. What do we do with your old posts and comments? Deleting all the data for inactive users seems like an awful approach. If we keep the data, you lost your username, so what's displayed beside your comments? Do we just replace your username with the word, _inactive_? What about your profile? If I come across your old comments, enjoy them, and want to see your profile, I obviously can't go to [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andrewhillman](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andrewhillman) any more, so where is your profile moved to?

2\. People expect their identity to remain consistent. What happens if you take a season off HN since you're busy at school? Meanwhile, you have links to [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andrewhillman](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andrewhillman) on your linkedin profile, or your website, or maybe you have business cards or flyers printed with that URL. Uh oh, you come back to HN, and that profile now belongs to someone else. All those great contacts you recently made, and gave business cards to, they're browsing the HN profile for someone else, believing their opinions are your own.

Ok, now printing your HN profile URL is unlikely, but what about your Twitter? Or Facebook? Or Gmail? This could be a disaster if you have hundreds of links to your Twitter account in blog posts and comments around the internet, then you decide to abandon Twitter. Someone else takes the account name, and has a less than stellar reputation. Lots of communities will not allow you to edit posts past a certain date, so you're out of luck, and all your old data is asking people to follow you on Twitter, _andrewhillman_. Meanwhile, that account now belongs to someone posting NSFW images.

As someone else said, it depends on the service. In some situations you might be able to allow non-unique usernames, so you wouldn't have this problem to begin with. Another solution could be unique usernames, but linking profiles to IDs, instead of specific names. That way old links still function properly and don't change with usernames. Of course, it makes for longer and ugly URLs.

120 days seems incredibly short though. I'd say 1 year minimum before declaring an account inactive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was referring to accounts that were active but clearly not being used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hotmail used to do this (they might still). It was horrible.

About once a year or so, I'd log in to my creaky old hotmail account from the 90s to find that they'd deactivated my username for inactivity. It's still the 2nd contact for some old accounts, and the only way into MSDN, so that's not cool. The only way to turn it back on is to upgrade to whatever their current flavor of "pro" is, pay $10 for the month, then immediately cancel it.

They take the further step of completely wiping all your old email while they're at it, so you come back to an empty inbox with no hope of finding that old email you were hoping to fish out.

Rows in your database are free. Don't do this.

</comment><comment><USER4> I kind of like this idea. I think it's terrible to have to succumb to a username like mankhool48723 when you really want something, better. If you were creating a new service today, how would you handle usernames, not about just the use-it-or-lose-it issue, but about username creation and uniqueness? Logan 6 identify please.

</comment><comment><USER5> github does that ? a username is inactive for like 3 years but they won't give me the handle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. It was a while ago. I contacted support, made my request and minutes later I received it. I was shocked but realised they get it!

<comment><USER5> Thanks dude changed mine too :)</comment></comment></comment>