How sleep startup Zeo started counting Zs - <AUTHOR> http://mobihealthnews.com/6205/how-sleep-startup-zeo-started-counting-zs/#more-6205

<comment><USER2> I have one, love it. Changed my sleep patterns, and, most importantly, I'm able to get by on 5 1/2 - 6 1/2 hours of sleep without waking up groggy.

Prior to MyZeo, if I wanted to wake up refreshed, and relaxed, without any effort, I'd have to get about 7 1/2 hours of sleep and let the sunlight coming in my window wake me up. But, I knew from experience, that depending on how I woke up - I could go for quite a while with about 6 hours of sleep and feel fine all day without that morning struggle to break through that "inertia."

That's the cool part of myZeo - you basically say "Here is a window when I want you to wake me up, but make sure I'm _just_ exiting REM sleep, so i'll wake up refreshed!"

For those that doubt the value of the device, ask yourself what you would pay to :

      A) Get back one hour each day (presuming you are
         okay getting 6 1/2 hours of sleep a night

      B) Exit sleep refreshed.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have one and I love it. My doc has never seen one of these, but I hope he learns a bit so that we can have actual data to discuss not my vague "I think I go to bed at midnight and fall asleep in 30 minutes". By the same token I love my WiThings wi-fi body scale - it keeps records automatically.

I love data.

</comment><comment><USER4> I predict this will fail.

1\. Too complicated

2\. Too expensive

3\. Uncomfortable to wear (especially for stomach sleepers)

<comment><USER3> Uhm. As a user I feel compelled to comment:

1\. It's no more complicated than an alarm clock in a hotel room. Most people can manage that.

2\. Depends on what you compare it to. It' about the same price as a game console (and could be as much fun), and is 4 times cheaper than a portable EEG machine (which is the only way to get the same quality of sleep data).

3\. I didn't have any problems with it - it's very light.

The only problem for me is that some day I just collapse on the bed and the last thing I think about is putting it on. So I have large gaps in my data. But I have data!

The only problem for the company is that there may be not enough people who care about the data. On the other hand doctors may be slow and reluctant to accept this device's data too, so this leaves not much point for most people in having one of these. It has a potential to end up being a geek toy with limited appeal.

<comment><USER5> I thought I read that there is some dispute over the data.... like the user doesn't own it, can't d/l to excel spreadsheet and you have to use their website and software to analyze and plot the date. The company side steps the issue because they are hoping to monetize the data of 1000's of users. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER3> Dunno haven't tried downloading data yet. Though all data is on SD card, short of public key crypto I don't see how they can stop me from getting it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Cult of the Complex - <AUTHOR> https://alistapart.com/article/cult-of-the-complex <comment><AUTHOR> > _[...] in a field where young straight white dudes take an overwhelming > majority of the jobs (including most of the management jobs) it's perhaps to > be expected that web making has lately become something of a dick measuring > competition._

Not sure if an opener like that is going to contribute to an on-topic discussion, I'd like to offer other explanations:

\- that millenials are raised under the impression that basically everything is broken and needs fixing

\- that Web dev basics are too simple and folks are flocking to complicated approaches as a purely intellectual challenge</comment>


Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in 'Naked Short Selling' - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-20120515 <comment><USER2> That naked short selling is allowed is an anachronism coupled with the lobbying of the self-interested. In the olden days, it was reasonable to give a time delay to deliver the physical paper that proved ownership. Now everything is electronic so _could_ be verified instantly. But there's a lot of money to be made by doing it and the government will covert catastrophic losses, so it should be expected that everyone does it.

Fortunately the solution is quite simple. Force short sellers to make the shares available instantly at the time of the short. They could be held in escrow by the exchange until settlement either way. Go go gadget SEC?

<comment><USER3> What's the problem with it, really? If A promises B to sell him something and then A can't deliver for some reason, then B will stand to be compensated by A for any damages resulting from that. Why would it be special for stock? Of course there is the risk that massive naked trades will influence the price of stocks, but that should just be priced in, like any other risk, no? What am I missing?

<comment><USER4> When you're selling something you don't own you're distorting the market's price discovery mechanisms. In many contexts I think most people would consider it fraudulent to sell something before you've bought it.

<comment><USER5> I've never got the impression that most economists think short selling distorts the market's price discovery mechanisms, and it's really dishearting that the GP is being downvoted for, plainly and clearly, stating what is economic orthodoxy.

Anyway, the futures market has functioned for centuries with people buying and selling what they don't own, and the big institutional buyers and sellers commonly use futures prices as their benchmark prices. It looks like the smart money isn't too concerned about negative effects on price discovery.

Also, let's not confuse playing by the clearly established rules of the market with "fraud". Moral objection is no excuse for equivocation.

<comment><USER4> Normal short selling doesn't distort price discovery. Khan Academy describes this quite well: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAkMhEqWFF0>.

However, with naked short selling it's a different story. When you're short selling something that you don't own you're in effect making it look like the supply is bigger than it actually is. This distorts the price discovery mechanism.

<comment><USER5> Naked short interest is almost certainly too ephermal to distort the price, but suppose it does due to illusory oversupply.

So what's the objection? If you buy, hold, and sell, you want prices to be overall lower. Selling low isn't bad if it means you were also buying low. In short, as Warren Buffet likes to point out, _low prices are good for investors._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Article lists a bunch of interesting details, and even is very careful to make sure the term 'muppets' gets incorporated twice, but doesn't quite connect the dots and explain just exactly how the naked shorting fucked the muppets. For example:

        More damning is an email from a Goldman, Sachs hedge fund client,
        who remarked that when wanting to "short an impossible name and
        fully expecting not to receive it" he would then be "shocked to
        learn that [Goldman's representative] could get it for us."

I mean, there are all sorts of reasons why naked shorting is bad, but the most damning thing we can say is "Goldman offered to make their customer happy"? That's what passes for screwing the 'muppets'?

<comment><USER7> I'm lost on the mechanics here, but doesn't this mean that any profit on the part of a short-selling customer was actually coming out of the pockets of GS?

I mean...where does the money to cover the customer's profit on a naked short come from?

<comment><USER8> Come on, you know it was not coming out of GS pockets. It was a heads I win tales you lose situation.

Evidently there is some amount of time between when a stock transaction is booked and when it clears - like a purchase made with a check. They were essentially writing bad checks by selling stock they didn't own. If the price of the stock went down, they would actually go out and buy the stock at the new lower price. If the stock went up they would say, sorry that stock transaction "failed" - darnedest thing, just happens sometimes.

"Instead, he preferred to just sell stock he didn't actually possess. That is what is meant by, "We want to fail them." Trafaglia was talking about creating "fails" or "failed trades," which is what happens when you don't actually locate and borrow the stock within the time the law allows for trades to be settled."

<comment><USER9> We want to fail them means we are going to issue a failure to deliver because it turns out that the stock we thought was available is not. If you fail on a trade, you don't cancel the trade, a trade is binding, it means you require the customer to buy the stock back to cover the short sale since the stock wasn't actually available. Since in this case the Goldman rep had told the client they could get the stock even though the client thought the stock was likely to be available, issuing a fail to deliver and requiring the client to buy the stock back would lead to egg on the face for whoever the client spoke to at Goldman. The other option for Goldman of course was to buy the stock to lend the customer and hedge out their risk maybe with a put option or to keep looking somewhere else for stock to borrow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This kind of aggressive shorting makes me start to wonder are these type of investors the real cancer behind the unemployment growth in this country? You read more and more about these kind of shenanigans and start to wonder what would happen if we actually started to lock-up/punish all of these crooks, what would be the aftermath? Would we see a slow growth in this countries GDP based on income growth from small & large businesses? Makes you wonder if we came swinging with large hammers and destroyed their worlds what kind of foundation would arise out of their financial destruction.

</comment><comment><USER11> Should the public have the right to see the full details of "fails"?

The SEC website says disclosing this info would put firms like GS at a competitive disadvantage.

But someone has to know which sales cleared and which did not.

How can we accurately set a market price for something based on historical sales data that may in part be false (i.e. sales that were never cleared)?

</comment><comment><USER12> Every time I read about complex wall street scams I get so unreasonably infuriated. At this point I can't help but unfairly assume that anyone who works at an investment bank is a complete douche. Just thinking about the bailouts gets me worked up.

<comment><USER13> The bailouts that have largely been paid back? At this point, even if you're a high income taxpayer, these guys lost very little money that you didn't choose to give them.

And really, getting your blood boiling is just about all Taibbi is good for.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure I'd say largely paid back. <http://projects.propublica.org/bailout/main/summary>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ok, here's the full quote:

      Last week, in response to an Overstock.com
      motion to unseal certain documents, the
      banks' lawyers, apparently accidentally,
      filed an unredacted version of Overstock's
      motion as an exhibit in their declaration
      of opposition to that motion. In doing so,
      they inadvertently entered into the public
      record a sort of greatest-hits selection of
      the very material they've been fighting for
      years to keep sealed.

And now let's parse it:

      Last week, the banks' lawyers filed an
      unredacted version of Overstock's motion
      as an exhibit in their declaration of
      opposition to that motion.

This means that Overstock's accusation is now public. This says nothing about the veracity of the accusation.

<comment><USER15> > This means that Overstock's accusation is now public. This says nothing > about the veracity of the accusation.

The information about this comes from _internal Goldman emails produced during discovery_ which admit to the practice. Emails that Goldman has fought in court to prevent the release of, only to have one of their own lawyers screw up by filing something not under seal.

EDIT: If you want to quote the actual emails, I've added most of the quotes from them below:

"Fuck the compliance area – procedures, schmecedures," chirps Peter Melz, former president of Merrill Lynch Professional Clearing Corp. (a.k.a. Merrill Pro), when a subordinate worries about the company failing to comply with the rules governing short sales.

"He should be someone we can work with, especially if he sees that cooperation results in resources, both data and funding," the lobbyist writes, "while resistance results in isolation."

"We are NOT borrowing negatives… I have made that clear from the beginning. Why would we want to borrow them? We want to fail them."

"Two months ago 107% of the floating was short!"

"We have to be careful not to link locates to fails [because] we have told the regulators we can't," one executive is quoted as saying, in the document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone read the motion (available from an economist.com server)? This what the Rolling Stone article is based on.

Is the issue whether and how GS makes money from the practice of naked short selling? Maybe the issue is that feeding the market with info about short sales that are never actually cleared (but which the market assumes will be cleared), can destroy the value of a company's stock.

Obviously if you can sell something without ever having to own or deliver it (is that really a sale?), you can do a lot of selling; and you can exert considerable influence on the market for a stock.

Maybe what happened here is a company, Overstock, believes they got screwed by naked short selling.

I need to read the motion to get a better idea of what happened.

</comment><comment><USER16> I started reading Patrick Byrne's adventures in Naked Short Selling in the beginning but have since trailed off (this is like 10 years ago mind you). Perhaps his infamous "Miscreants Ball" diatribe kicked everything off which has been ridiculed since day one but begins to be prescient as more and more news of NSS surfaces. He now funds/participates in <http://www.deepcapture.com/> which is fun reading from time to time. It's been quite a ride; I must give him kudos for his stamina but having read his speech from Pan-Mass <http://www.pmc.org/articles.asp?ArticleID=110> regarding his life, one can't help but root for the guy.</comment>


The LaTeX Fetish (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/ <comment><USER2> I've switched from writing latex to writing pandoc markdown. I then convert it to latex and then to pdf. This gets the same result as latex, but is much easier to type for common stuff like, sections, emphasis and verbatim. It also allows you to type "&" symbols anywhere.

When I require "advanced" stuff like tables and figures you can easily fallback to inline latex commands within you're markdown. It really is a significant improvement over plain latex and I haven't looked back.

<comment><USER3> > you can easily fallback to inline latex commands within [your] markdown

How? This sounds like a very nice middle ground between easy formatting and advanced features.

<comment><USER2> By just writing it like normal LaTeX. Once you write \somecommand it will interpret it as latex. See the link one of your sibling comments posted for an example: [http://tech.lauritz.me/easy-latex-with-markdown- pandoc/](http://tech.lauritz.me/easy-latex-with-markdown-pandoc/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had a few things about TeX versus LaTeX. I think the reality is nobody really tries writing TeX.

But, ultimately my beef is the straw man that markup is bad because it is harder to read. That a graphical editor is superior because it is more readable. Instead, the advantage is that in the one you are only writing text and you are indicating special instructions to the computer. In the other, you only see what the computer is letting you see. Note that in both cases, all of those special instructions are still there. You just can't necessarily see them.

And this might sound like not a big deal. But the first time you find yourself unable to change the bold of one section of text (or centering/whatever), you will really wish you could just drop into a view that showed you why it was doing what it was doing. Which is ultimately just a markup language.

And heaven help you if you decide to upgrade word processor mid paper. Or go back and try to touch up a previous one. Markup wins because it is just plain text. And plain text wins because it is ubiquitous.

<comment><USER5> Also, he implies that LaTeX documents are always typeset in Computer Modern and the plain article template (which is ugly!). XeTeX can use all the same TTF/OTF fonts Word uses.

Oh, and let's not forget that Word's math renderer is gross.

<comment><USER6> You can use LaTeX in Word directly now [https://support.office.com/en- us/article/Linear-format-equat...](https://support.office.com/en- us/article/Linear-format-equations-using-UnicodeMath-and-LaTeX-in- Word-2E00618D-B1FD-49D8-8CB4-8D17F25754F8)

<comment><USER5> You can use the syntax. It still renders using Word's hideous math renderer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, to demonstrate how bad LaTeX is, he picks the single most markup heavy thing you do (barring tables) and compares it to plain text? Plain text, I'll point out, that doesn't format the same way. In practice, there _are_ a bunch of extra steps to get this working in Word, they're just not easy to express in a text document.

Then he goes on to show the example of trying to find a spelling error. Ignoring that this just demonstrates his editor support isn't as strong as word's. And completely elides the cascading nightmare that is what happens when Word formatting goes wrong.

Someone else has already pointed out how much superior a text based format is if you want to work with multiple people or track the history of a document.

WYSIWYG editing has, to my mind, one advantage only: it's easier to get started. LaTeX has its disadvantages (such as being a macro language) but being a markup language isn't one of them.

<comment><USER8> > work with multiple people or track the history of a document

I often proofread for my friends. I tell them that they must use Track Changes in Word. Is there a better tool that you recommend?

<comment><USER9> Google Docs supports multiple simultaneous editors and tracks revision histories. It was a lifesaver for group projects in college.

And while 'always online' is often a bad thing, it seems to be a lot more reliable than the alternatives of email chains with the attached Word document, appending -R3-edited-complete-final-done.docx to the filename, the manual merges when two people are working on the same thing, or the USB stick that gets passed around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One passage made me a bit mad:

"[...], but for now it is enough to observe that people who don't know how to use a particular tool very well are being told to throw that tool away and learn to use an entirely new one on the grounds that it will enable them to do things that they could have done at least as well with the old one – which is (when you think about it) a little peculiar if the aim is really to help people with their writing, and not (heaven forbid!) simply to evangelise for a community's preferred way of doing things."

I'm sorry, but this is a bad argument and the worst life advice in the article. It's the same students in school tell all the time, when they question why they should learn math, though they are set to become an artist or editor or anything that seemingly does not involve math. You particularly go to college or university to learn __NEW __things. Even if they are things you probably won 't need in the future and are seemingly obsolete.

While he does have a point that (La)TeX Users fetishize their tool of use, most of his arguments can be used on Word or any WISIWYG tool, too. The example he gives in point 4 is so arbitrarily chosen and his minimal example he thinks is better is just as ambigious and confusing as the LaTeX one. Most comments already mention what the author's real problem: Preference of tool.

<comment><USER11> Well, I don't agree with the author of the article in that I do think that Latex does offer an advantage in many of the use cases. In any case, any student in STEM is supposed to write some reports, and LaTeX is the only choice that makes sense, since there are not many other options with the same support for mathematical typesetting.

However, you're twisting his words a bit. He says that it's not good to learn a new tool if you have an old one which can do the job. Not that you should avoid things for which you need new tools.

I'm all for learning new skills and ideas. However, I hate learning new tools. The ideas in web development are not hard at all. However, there is an idiotic amount of trendy tools and programming languages, and that is something I would object to, because it costs a lot of people a lot of effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the best article titles I've ever seen on HN! I actually L'd OL.

I think the author's thesis could be summed up as 'I like WYSIWYG more than markup', which is purely a matter of preference. I also know there are several tools which let you do this (to varying degrees of success) with LaTeX as an output. My own preference is having a complete understanding of why everything is where it is in a layout. In my experience WYSIWYG UX has to compromise on its own flexibility and coherence in order to support intuitive and immediate operations around formatting. I have memories of superstitiously pushing bits of padding around when I had to sue word in high school. Editing complex proofs in a WYSIWYG editor seems like an exercise in frustration.

<comment><USER13> I think you could replace LaTeX with VIM, and WYSIWYG with an IDE and basically replicate the entire argument for IDEs that is often given.

It largely comes down to a ease-of-use vs power and clarity trade-off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree with the overall sentiment, but I don't think that any WYSIWYG alternative exists yet that:

\- Interacts well with version control: it is trivial to maintain a LaTeX document in a git repo, and the diffs are readable (especially with --color- words)

\- Makes it possible to programmatically generate formatted text, tables, graphs, possibly from external data sources, either with the internal macro language or through an external scripting language

\- Has reasonable separation of content and formatting. For example when submitting the same document to multiple conferences it is almost trivial to adapt the content to the required formats.

If writing mostly prose, these may not matter much, but for technical writing I would rather not do without them.

<comment><USER15> I believe that Google Docs actually handles all of those.

<comment><USER5> How would Google Docs update a graph in a document from an external graphics file?

All my graphs and tables are generated in some programming environment, and updated frequently. In Word, I would have to right-click every single graph, select new source file, adapt graph size... Could Google Docs do this?

<comment><USER16> Make it a link to the file in Word instead of embedding it. Then it auto- updates in the document as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author doesn't like writing using markup languages. Some of the rest of us do.

I'm with him to the extent that LaTeX evangelism can be oversold - when I'm talking to curious colleagues I tend to stress the vertical learning curve as much as the quality typesetting and convenient cross-referencing - but I do think most of his argument is simply a matter of personal preference.

For me, the fairly stiff default structure imposed by a LaTeX document class makes my writing easier, quite apart from any advantages at the publishing stage.

<comment><USER18> > For me, the fairly stiff default structure imposed by a LaTeX document class > makes my writing easier, quite apart from any advantages at the publishing > stage.

True, and if you write a lot of documentation or articles that require similar formatting, it's actually not that hard once you understand LaTeX to set up your own class that builds on one of the built in ones to make things look nicer or work in slightly different ways. You can get really nice, consistent documents without doing any extra formatting work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have spent countless hours fiddling with both LaTeX and Word trying to get them to do what I want. The difference between the two is, once I had figured out how to make LaTeX do what I want, the steps were all documented and reproducible. With Word I had no such record of all the menu items, settings, and button clicks that had given me what I wanted.

<comment><USER20> > The difference between the two is, once I had figured out how to make LaTeX > do what I want, the steps were all documented and reproducible.

I would add that once anyone figures out what they want LaTeX to do, they can simply create their custom document class and use it transparently anywhere they want, and share it with the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does this post contain any other argument than "I think it is too hard"?

Except for handwriting based solutions like the very cool Nebo app, I really don't think there is a better way to enter formulas, and it can be learnt in a matter of hours.

Writing complete documents in LaTeX is perhaps a bit more verbose, but then he can use some of the methods suggested here, like pandoc.

Spellchecking he can have if he wants, and even WYSIWYG.

It's worth noting also that if you're aiming for a career in math or physics, not learning LaTeX isn't really an option.

EDIT: I referred to the Nebo app as 'MathPad', which is an older incarnation of the same idea, Nebo is MUCH better.

<comment><USER22> I really think Racket's Scribble has a chance to over take Latex. [https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/](https://docs.racket- lang.org/scribble/)

Scribble is well designed to be a more readable Latex with the ability to be beautifully type set.

Example:

#lang scribble/base

@title{On the Cookie-Eating Habits of Mice}

If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk.

Pandoc is a great tool to use if all you need is Math. [http://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#math](http://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#math)

<comment><USER23> Wow, thanks for the resource... going to give this a go on a current project of mine. Does anyone know of a solution that solves having fairly complex Excel tables? It seems like all of these Latex solutions just have basic text tables...

<comment><USER22> > Excel Tables?

Are you meaning just having nice looking tables?

If your going more then just nice looking tables I HIGHLY recommend RMarkdown.

[http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/lesson-7.html](http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/lesson-7.html)

Using RStudio with RMarkdown makes amazing looking tables with the package Stargazer.

[http://www.jakeruss.com/cheatsheets/stargazer/](http://www.jakeruss.com/cheatsheets/stargazer/)

<comment><USER23> Thank you! Will check out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am currently writing my first print book, and honestly feel that LaTeX is the best solution. I want precise control over a 250+ page book. I have never seen a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't make that a royal PITA.

Different gutters on left and right pages, chapters always starting on a right hand page, consistent and great justification, fine control over how chapter headings appear (and quick to update) etc. etc.

On a side note, is anyone aware of a good way to convert LaTeX (or the produced pdf) into an ePub?

<comment><USER25> You can compile from LaTeX to HTML with pandoc and then repackage the HTML into an epub using a tool like epubmaker[0].

YMMV though with pandoc, not sure how well it handles more fancy latex macros and packages.

The simplest thing to do might be start with a more HTML-based solution (e.g. Markdown with extensions, RST) and then compile that into whatever layout you intend for the physical/pdf form.

[0]: [https://github.com/setanta/ebookmaker](https://github.com/setanta/ebookmaker)

<comment><USER26> HTML doesn't have a notion of multiple pages within the same document though?

<comment><USER27> > HTML doesn't have a notion of multiple pages within the same document > though?

HTML is at a higher level of abstraction, but the HTML/CSS stack supports paged rendering, and browsers tend to support this for print (pre-Blink Opera did for on-screen use, though I don't know if current browsers do.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Deep down in section 7 is the author's own TLDR:

 _I think you'll probably agree that the LaTeX version looks better than the word processor export version. Whether it looks sufficiently better to justify the additional effort is a judgement call that you'll have to make for yourself._

LaTeX is indeed a typesetting tool, in the sense that the user writes _content_ , LaTeX transforms it into _typeset content_. I'm not sure why the author goes through the same usual criticisms of LaTeX: 1) it's not for everyone; 2) it's good only for researchers; 3) it has a steep learning curve; etc. These have been known and discussed about for years.

The coder analogy (i.e. the type/compile loop) is close to my heart: I use Emacs both for coding+debugging and for writing content with LaTeX. A strong linking point between the two is TikZ-PGF. I'll consider alternatives to LaTeX when somebody comes up with something as powerful as TikZ-PGF.

</comment><comment><USER29> The author misses one very important feature of LaTeX that is the reason why I keep a lot of my notes in it. LaTeX exposes two mechanisms for easily making replacements all across a document. One is with macros, which you can change the definition of when necessary. The other is the simple search-and-replace, which is very powerful since you can involve macro and formatting syntax in it. Traditional word-processing and note-taking software like Word and OneNote simply don't expose such powerful functionality for making edits across the entire document.

<comment><USER30> Probably word processors don't have an analgoue to LaTeX macros, but surely they do have search and replace, don't they?

<comment><USER31> But in WYSIWYG editors, you can only search for raw text correct? For instance, if I want to search for all bold text, its trivial to do so using a markup language, but I don't think there is really a way to do that with conventional word processors.

<comment><USER32> You use the style system built into the word processor. Then when you change the style, it changes all other instances of it. You can also trivially add new styles as you need.

In Microsoft Word for Windows it's the "Styles" bar, and on MacOS it's the "Styles Pane".

<comment><USER33> It requires huge discipline to use styles properly all the time, because the options to just tweak your formatting "a little" are made more prominent in every WYSIWYG word processor I've used. And if you have to collaborate on a document with others, no chance at all.

It would be interesting to see a word processor that enforced style usage...

<comment><USER16> Actually, ever since introduction of the Ribbon in Office 2007 I found the styles to be much more prominent than the presentational formatting. Not that it stops anyone who doesn't want to learn how to use Word properly to still use the latter, but simply by size and visual importance in the UI styles are far more into your face than the other formatting options.

And sure, it takes some discipline to use styles, but that goes for any other option as well (apart from things like Docbook maybe). You're supposed to use \em in LaTeX instead of \textit for the same reasons you're supposed to use an Emphasis style in Word instead of italic text. The only difference is that the mechanism is the same in LaTeX (type a few characters – which is pretty much why for any given macro you'd be hard-pressed to actually decide whether it's semantic or presentational), while in Word it's a separate feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm one of those guys. I used to write my university philosophy papers in LaTeX (which I learned from physics+maths classes), and dealing with citations was definitely a lot easier. A more understated advantage of using markup was that I was trivially able to nondestructively comment out sections or leave comments on important points or paragraphs in a paper, not unlike what one would do in code. Once I got used to that I couldn't go back to WYSIWYG. Now, if I don't have time to deal with LaTeX, I'll just use Markdown or whatever format that isn't proprietary.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have only three gripes about LaTex and friends.

First, LaTeX was intended for physical publication, so there's no native notion of text reflow or "responsiveness". Worse, everyone distributes their documents as PDFs, which are a PITA to read on a smaller device or ereader. At best, an author could utilize something like pandoc to distribute an HTML version, but alas, publishers never give a damn.

Second, I have been spoiled into expecting that I can modify the way a document looks to _my_ liking, not yours. I can't invert the colors at night. I can't change the font size, line height, or margins--and my God do people use some huge margins with LaTeX.

Then comes the math syntax... Yes it's very powerful, but its a noisy mess to read and write. I really wish we had a simpler syntax akin to ASCIIMath[0].

LaTeX: (\left(\frac{1}{2}\right))

ASCIIMath: (1/2)

[0]: [http://asciimath.org/](http://asciimath.org/)

<comment><USER35> It's been quite a while since I wrote any LaTeX, but you could compile a LaTeX document into ePub if you wanted to. In essence, LaTeX is the source code for the document, and the output is whatever target it is compiled to. So, if it is compiled to pdf, that is what you get, but nothing fundamental prevents it from compiling to other formats, given that someone writes the compiler.

<comment><USER36> I've just been writing HTML/ePubs directly, with [http://www.bluegriffon.org/](http://www.bluegriffon.org/). What do you use instead of LaTeX?

<comment><USER35> I mainly used LaTeX when going through university, but after that my use is so casual that Word is more than good enough (think short letters and the like to parents or boardmembers). For documentation and notes Markdown works very well, and certainly much simpler. At work I use a mix of Word because that's what the other non tech people use, and Markdown for documentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm surprised the author does not mention another reason that've heard in favour of using Latex: scale and predictability.

A LaTeX Document will always behave the same whatever its size and content. Whereas word processors may unexpectedly change formatting without anyone noticing, for example in the case where you share a file with someone and this person update the text and sends it back. The text written might not belong to the same formatting family as the rest of the text but shares the same appearance and this change will go unnoticed until the original owner changes the appearance of the formatting family.

Not to mention versionning. Having your thesis in Latex in a git repo will consistently work. Whereas you will struggle sharing a single .docx file across multiple system or even different word versions. And you lose any possibility to roll back, inspect the history or show diffs.

</comment><comment><USER38> I feel offended by the omission of my personal favorite, reStructuredText (reST). It's a very robust and readable markup language, and can easily generate documents in HTML, Linux man, latex, pdf, odt and more.

If readability of LaTeX bothers you so much, use reST. Best of both worlds, really. I only roll up my sleeves with LaTeX when I need precise control over appearance, like writing a CV or a board game manual.

<comment><USER38> Some good points for reST instead of markdown:

      * Markdown has many flavors, reST is standarized
      * reST is extensible
      * reST is semantic, Markdown is just text.

[http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use- markdown-f...](http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-for- technical-docs/)

reST is marginally harder than markdowns, so is it really worth sticking with MD ?

<comment><USER39> That margin is huge. I've worked with rST, and it's just not fun to write in the way that Markdown is; even a little friction makes a huge difference to the writing experience.

<comment><USER16> Asciidoc is a viable alternative, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I write LaTeX mostly because it works _and_ looks nice, everywhere. Reading the document is easy, because it renders every time I save, which is very frequently. I also use it because it let's me do sweet stuff when I want to, but I fully appreciate that that's just overhead for most people.

I mean look at the title on the screenshot rendered by Writer! It's horrific! I've found things improve when you move to a 15" 4k screen, but on my 1080p desktop monitors at work Writer is barely readable. You seem to be in luck you're using a Mac, since it's even worse on Linux in my experience.

> I know where it is because I put it there, but looking for it is hurting my > eyes.

Perchance the fault is with your text editor. It hurts my eyes, too, but the problem disappears when I use my local editor.

</comment><comment><USER41> I just switch my consulting company to have all our documents (Statement of Work, proposals, NDA, MSA, etc) in LaTeX.

It has worked amazing well. For a few reasons:

1\. We easily can typeset all our documents the same and if we do something like change the letterhead we can easily update them all.

2\. Auto-generating documents (forms letters) is a snap.

3\. Everything is source controlled.

3a. If a client needs customizations we can give them their own branch and easily diff the branch with master. Very useful for documents that have legal side effects.

<comment><USER42> Curious about clients that ask you to execute these items in their own templates? We run into this fairly often.

<comment><USER41> Unfortunately we're stuck with whatever format they use in that case. Haven't found a good way around it yet. Fortunately for our documentation system, Git does allow binary files.

<comment><USER42> Thanks. I was hoping you'd have the magic answer to that, as we face the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I disagree with the premise.

A few years ago, my brothers were simultaneously writng their Masters theses (in civil engineering, where LaTeX is not exactly common).

One of them decided to plunge into LaTeX. It took him a week or so to get productive, but once everything was set up, it "just worked" and he could focus on his thesis.

The other one decided to stick to the conventional choice, Microsoft Word. He started writing immediately because Word is what he's familiar with, but when the deadline neared, he descended into near-madness as he fought Word's hobby of breaking the entire layout whenever a new character is inserted.

In the end, you're always going to have to invest some amount of time for the typesetting of a thesis or paper. But LaTeX has the advantage of letting you plan when to pay that cost. (Up to a certain point, of course. The final layout is "final" for a reason.)

<comment><USER44> When the deadline neared, [I] descended into near-madness trying to get LaTeX put the correct page numbers where I wanted them, don't have empty blocks of whitespace in arbitrary places and actually render citations as it did all the weeks before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> So use LyX. It's a LaTeX word processor. I've used it for years to avoid having to directly write LaTeX.

</comment><comment><USER46> I just write in emacs org mode and call latex (or any other language) when needed. Then I often export to latex+pdf for that nice latex look.

</comment><comment><USER47> I've spent a lot of time in both Word and LaTeX writing papers and reports in grad school, and nowadays, strictly use LaTeX. I feel like the author missed some crucial elements as to why people use the latter. First, references, cross-references, and citations. These are all shockingly simple in LaTeX. \ref or \cite is all you have to think about to cite papers or reference figures, tables, etc. In Word, I have used Mendeley's citation system, and the built in cross reference system to the same task, but when it comes to the editing process between multiple people and having different files sent around, it invariably breaks, leading to hours of extra work either doing it manually (have fun updating figure numbers if you add another one, or citation superscript), or reinserting all the necessary cross references. With a LaTeX file, this is pretty hard to break.

Secondly, LaTeX handles figures 10000x better than Word, in that you just let it figure out placement inline. Captions are as simple as possible. Meanwhile, have you ever had that Word document with 10 figures in which you move one inline image, and every figure jumps to a different page, leading to spam clicking Ctrl+z? Or how about adding figure captions? Inline you have to use the caption tool, which isn't fantastic and often creates a text box that isn't strictly tied to the figure. The method I found best was just to have another document simply for figures and write the captions in regular text. This both looks bad, and during the editing process, requires you to switch between files to keep track of the figures that are being referenced in the text. Additionally, automatic figure numbering depends on where the figure anchor is, often leading to improper numbering. Again, referencing figures by number in Word is a nightmare that LaTeX handles amazingly.

Third, I agree, setting up LaTeX on a machine isn't fun, and I have always been bad at it. However, I don't do it anymore. ShareLaTeX has solved all of those problems for me. All packages are available, you don't have the funny "compile three times to get reference numbering correct", it's amazing at collaboration with both git-like diffs as well as Word-like track changes/commenting system, and has tons of templates so the pain of setting up your document's preamble is done for you.

One tip I have is if someone you work with doesn't know LaTeX and can't be convinced to learn it, still write in LaTeX, compile to pdf, and use Acrobat to convert to Word. That works surprisingly well. The Lyx version conversion does not work nearly as well. I can't say I've tried pandoc though, I would like to try that next.

<comment><USER48> Looks like paddock has pretty decent support for docx - have you tried it and found going via pdf is better?:

[https://jabranham.com/blog/2016/11/using-pandoc-export-to- wo...](https://jabranham.com/blog/2016/11/using-pandoc-export-to-word/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think many academics write in LaTeX because it is easier to switch between document formatting styles. If you submit to multiple journals that all have their own poorly made Word 2007 templates, even the pain of LaTeX is not so bad.

<comment><USER13> I think a lot of it is math type-setting. LaTeX just has great support because of age. Word is getting good, but there's no parity yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> While the difficulty of reading markup vs a compiled document is subjective, there are tools such as texstudio [1] that allow real-time preview of the document synchronized with the code [2].

[1]: [http://www.texstudio.org](http://www.texstudio.org) [2]: [https://i1.wp.com/gauravtiwari.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/0...](https://i1.wp.com/gauravtiwari.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/03/Screenshot-116.png)

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't know know if I missed it, it seems like author was really trying to cover all the arguments, but the Tex family languages are for hardcore typesetting automation. Author said all Latex docs have a characteristic look. And most typeset examples that I've seen on the web fit that description. Because for the most part they use the default settings, default libraries, and default fonts, etc. Maybe with some variation.

We can agree that everything that needs to be pinched and squeezed can be pinched and squeezed with Latex. So, creating stylish modern looking tables, full page width graphics overlayed with expensive commercial fonts, custom vector graphics and diagrams, is feasible. You would never even recognize it was done with latex. This makes sense at corporate scale painting reports, white papers, invoices, in company colors, logos, and styles. Churning hundreds of styled docs. That's the use case I see for Latex, but no one goes around showing these off, I assume because making styles like this is a job, and the styles themselves assets.

</comment><comment><USER52> The 2gig TeXLive installation is quite an elephant. I often wish that I could just pick what I really needed; but that requires me to understand the dependency of those packages and suspect the end solution may point to re- engineer the whole thing. Yesterday I independently had this resolution that I shall experiment using plain TeX + my own meta-layer macros and see how far I could go.

The font installation and selection is something I wish to have a GUI interface as simple as a word drop-down. Maybe I should find/or make such simple tool (ideally it should load the .tex file and provide WYSIWYG interface).

The edit-compile-debug cycle is the simple way of dealing with complexity. The text form (markup or code) decomposes the complexity into abstract parts that we can focus on one part a time and the feedback loop provides a progressive path to perfection. I believe at some point, programming skill should be as common just as literacy today, at which point this edit-compile-debug cycle will be accepted just as we learn to accept a book without pictures.

</comment><comment> Ar-Curunir The author talks about word processors being better because of ease of use, modern features, etc., but you can get these same features if you use software like TexShop or TexStudio or whatever the modern equivalent is. You'll get pleasing spell checking, and you won't have an awful colour scheme like the author uses in emacs.

</comment><comment><USER53> I agree that at the draft stage it's not desirable to use LaTeX, or when you need to collaborate with non academic users. But Libre Office is really not a serious alternative to LaTeX (please don't ask why). Use markdown in the beginning, and when you have enough materials, you can export to LaTeX and do the final editing.

</comment><comment><USER54> I disagree that the LaTeX pdf looks better than the LibreOffice pdf, because fully justified text is less legible. If you take your eyes off the text for a moment then it's harder to find your place again. It's all one featureless block with nothing to guide your eyes. The uneven right edge of the LibreOffice version makes it easy to distinguish individual lines. This is especially important if you're skim reading.

But I recognize that some readers prefer the fully justified version. This suggests that the real problem is designing for a fixed page layout. It would be better to publish in something like EPUB, where you can display it however you like. Everybody I know who reads scientific papers reads mostly on screens now, and I think this is common. The printed paper version is more for archival than actual reading, so it doesn't make sense to prioritize paper based typography.

<comment><USER55>
      \usepackage[document]{ragged2e}

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Pretty measured essay. I went through my own LaTex fetish phase. The typesetting can get in the way of the writing. I've found it easier to first write in a text editor and then start typesetting once I'm pretty much sure of the content.

</comment><comment><USER57> I don't use LaTeX any more.

I used it for my undergrad dissertation. It was great.

I used it for my PhD thesis. It was great.

In between the two, I used it for a research paper. I ended up bringing a couple of extra coauthors onto the paper. They weren't familiar with LaTeX. Guess who ended up doing their editing for them?

I stick to Word these days for anything there's a chance I will have to collaborate on with others. Awkwardness working with people who can't use LaTeX is a risk I'm not going to take. Plus, Word (and associated referencing tools like Zotero) have come on a lot since I first used LaTeX 16 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER58> Incidentally, I saw yesterday a document - part of a thesis (the printer named and spit these pages afterwards).

300 pages in Word, this was really painful to read. It was pure text, with a few quotes. My first thought was it would have been so much easier in LaTeX - both for the author and the readers.

I wrote my thesis in LaTeX and convinced my wife to write hers in LaTeX as well (~1998). This was not because LaTeX is "better" but the fact that it is plain text, so always useable a way or another, not so with Word

</comment><comment><USER59> I like writing in a Jupyter notebook. You can use Markdown, write equations with Python and use a module like SymPy to transform to LaTeX, create graphs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER60> Just a data point: LaTeX is used in math-oriented stackexchanges, like [https://scicomp.stackexchange.com](https://scicomp.stackexchange.com) Albeit for mathematical notation, not typesetting a complete document.

One might claim it's just catering to the dominant delusional cultist hierarchy... but it sure makes the math a hell of a lot more readable.

</comment><comment><USER21> It just doesn't seem right to discuss LaTeX alternatives and solutions without mentioning Overleaf, where you can edit and compile from the browser. They also seem to have great collaboration tools, but I haven't used them.

[https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com)

</comment><comment><USER61> It's true, LaTex is for smarter people with better tooling. Sorry you missed the boat on that one. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER62> LaTeX is only good for one thing, and one thing only: create same-looking two- column PDFs for research/scholarly publications. And it's barely good at that.

Things may have changed slightly since I last used it (cca 2008), but: combining several languages in one document (Turkish + Russian, anyone?), tables that properly span several pages, inline images, a different layout (that doesn't break languages, or tables, or images, or even works, or doesn't look like shit)? All that is nigh impossible unless you're willing to spend countless hours digging through obscure error messages and arcane setup rules.

I managed to produce this in the end: [https://www.scribd.com/doc/31019289/Система- полуавтоматическ...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/31019289/Система- полуавтоматического-управления-туристическими-ресурсами-СПАУТР)

My verdict: LaTeX? Never again.

<comment><USER63> > combining several languages in one document (Turkish + Russian

what's the problem with this ? just encode as UTF-8 and type however you like.

<comment><USER64> The hyphenation algorithm, I guess, needs some knowledge of the language. Probably a lot more issues as well.

<comment><USER65> Currently works perfectly for me with English and German where I place \selectlanguage{UKenglish} and \selectlanguage{ngerman} in front of the appropriate paragraphs. Hyphenation then simply works.

<comment><USER62> > Currently works perfectly for me with English and German

Both fit neatly into the same codepage, latin-1, so no possible conflicts there

> I place \selectlanguage{UKenglish} and \selectlanguage{ngerman} in front of > the appropriate paragraphs

What about mixing two languages within the same paragraph? \selectlanguage before and after each word?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Try [https://github.com/hplgit/doconce](https://github.com/hplgit/doconce) .

</comment><comment><USER67> This guy gets it. I could not agree more. LaTeX is a cult.

</comment><comment><USER68> Note: The article is from 2016.

<comment><USER69> > Note: The article is from 2016.

Appending "(2016)" to the title would not detract from the article. But, as far as I could tell, none of the assertions in the article have changed in the past year since the post was published. LaTeX and WYSIWYG editing haven't undergone fundamental changes on that short of a time frame. So the article's modest age doesn't really imply anything about its relevance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Yeah, try to open those WYSIWYG editor docs, say, 20 years from now, and let us know how well this worked out for you.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do I need server code in 2014? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,<p>I am building a web app looking to sharpen my skills and do my dissertation. Can someone explain to me why do I need server side ruby/java/node.js when I can have a db with a restful api automagically and angular? Am I missing something? Is authentication the only issue? <comment><USER2> "Client" and "server" are overloaded words with multiple meanings. Let's break this down a little.

The important distinction is between "a machine that runs code you control" and "a machine that runs code controlled by someone else". In general, if the code is running on someone else's computer, you don't control it. This is _very_ true for browser Javascript, which visitors can alter at will, but even signed iOS applications are vulnerable to determined attackers.

In practice, 99.9% of users won't do this. Especially if the only thing at stake is your dissertation. But in many cases the 0.1% would be enough to potentially bankrupt you. That simple "RESTful API" can be used to delete your database, or (far worse, in many cases) insert fraudulent data… unless the database is protected by authorization logic that you control.

(Authorization logic is no laughing matter. It's generally application- specific. Is it okay for an arbitrary user to add 1 to this database column? Depends on whether the column represents "number of visits per day" or "number of dogecoin paid out per second". Repeat this design exercise for every possible permutation of every transaction. Then watch what happens when you accidentally let user X publish unsanitized text to a column which will eventually be printed verbatim on HTML page Y containing script Z...)

To control a piece of code, you have to run it on a machine that is physically secure, and that nobody but you ever touches. If it is networked, the machine must sit at a documented, permanent location on that network (i.e. "have an SSL certificate vouching for its IP address"), and be behind a network firewall to keep the attack surface down. At which point, no matter what it looks like or what ports it listens on, this machine is going to be called "a server".

And once you've accepted a server into your system you may as well take advantage of it: You can use programming languages besides Javascript, runtimes other than a browser, APIs that browsers don't have, hardware that browsers can't access, and much richer interfaces to your data than REST.

It is also true that the boxes we call "servers" are designed to run 24/7, have more durable and redundant network connectivity, have redundant power, have fast pipes connecting them to other servers, and be rented by the hour for a few cents. But, compared to the issues of ownership and control, these are implementation details.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depending on what you're doing, you can perhaps have an authenticated client do things which are not authorized. This can mean that you have to do things server-side to enforce business rules.

Example: I had an inadvertent trust-the-client situation where I let Javascript decide if someone's credit card was going to be charged. I did not anticipate that anyone's computer would ever be hit by a lightning bolt during a transaction, and as a consequence my server got 24 callbacks and dutifully charged the client's card 24 times.

Sometimes authenticated clients can abuse the system intentionally, depending on what you're doing with it.

You will likely discover at some point that your service has to interact with other services, which may or may not be easily doable with a particular client orchestrating all of the work itself.

Depending on your problem domain, you may need to do things on behalf of a client when that client is not connected to the service/the Internet/etc. This counsels having a non-dumb server side piece available.

There exist many other reasons one could name. What are you thinking of doing in your dissertation?

</comment><comment><USER4> Also interested in answers - posting as a lazy bookmark! :)

<comment><USER5> No need for placeholder comments, instead:

1\. Click the up arrow on the submission.

2\. Click on your username in upper right hand corner.

3\. Click on "saved stories". The upvoted story should be there.

<comment><USER4> Thank you - will do this next time :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> after spending nights awake I found this closest to my liking and I will give it a try [https://www.arangodb.org/foxx](https://www.arangodb.org/foxx)</comment>


Optimizing long-running queries with New Relic - <AUTHOR> http://devblog.thinkthroughmath.com/blog/2013/02/27/optimizing-long-running-queries-with-new-relic/ <comment><USER2> full disclosure: (I work for New Relic now)

I've also used New Relic developer mode to identify requests that have too many queries, and optimize them. At my last job I cut the queries on the homepage by 75% this way. I also used it to look at GC, tuned that, and cut the total response time by about 80%</comment>


Ask YC: Founders and Paradoxes (Paradoxen?) - <AUTHOR>

Dear YC,
I'm trying to figure out how to resolve the following paradoxes.
It's difficult to find a cofounder without funding. It's difficult to find funding with a cofounder (apparently).
Projects are unlikely to succeed without brilliant people. Brilliant people are likely to be very busy with their own projects.
For a few weeks, talking to people and getting them interested has been a full-time commitment. I've heard universal expressions of support, and many, many people have offered to help, but thus far I haven't managed to get anyone to commit. The brilliant people are almost all fighting their own worthy battles (or are tied down in Canada, where I come from), while some of the others have impressively bad ideas they treat as sacred.
I have some inkling that it might be more effective to secure some seed funding first (and not necessarily through YC), and try to find cofounders thereafter. For example, there are specific people that I'd love to have onboard -- experts in computer vision. However, they're busy enough that I suspect they'd be unwilling to participate is business things, and could only be lured to work with actual cash.
What do you think? Should I try to apply alone to YC? Should I forget about the 11th deadline and just treat YC as another potential source of funding? Or, might you suggest I aim with full force toward finding the perfect cofounder, hopefully by that deadline?
--Dani <comment><USER2> Well, to quote PG, if you can't convince at least one other person to commit to your idea then perhaps your idea is not that great (or you haven't talked to right people). I wouldn't call myself "great" but while I'm always busy working on something I'm willing to drop everything else and stick to something if I believe in the potential of the idea. The only times I turn something down is if I'm working on something that I believe has a higher chance of success (or that I enjoy a lot more).

Perhaps you need to work at your idea more and get something that you can show potential co-founders. Be careful however of picking just anyone as friction between founders can be fatal. It might not be a bad idea to get someone to help out part time for a mix of cash and equity (I'm guessing more equity than cash since you say you need funding). Once this person gets more familiar with what you are doing he/she might become interested in joining you full-time and at that point you will have had a chance to evaluate how valuable of a co- founder this person would be.

I wouldn't worry about the October 11th deadline, focus on your idea, you can always apply next time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really get the impression, from reading this site, reading PG, listening to the interview with Jessica, that they are much happier if you have a co founder that you've known for a while, so just finding someone to plug into that role isn't as likely to work, even if they're good.

Maybe I'm wrong though, because my mind reading abilities leave a lot to be desired.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be my choice as well. It's just really fairly to get someone to join in a cofounder capacity, because the people I know well are all on the east coast or Canada, and I have a lot of pull them away from.

I've had a lot of people willing to work part time. It's just all of the people who are likely to be interested in my project are also likely to be very, very busy -- part time is all I think I can get in the short term.

On the other hand, in the design stages many companies (Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, for example) had only one person working on things. Turning it into a business before a prototype emerges might be premature.

<comment><USER4> Apple had Jobs and Woz. Microsoft had Bill and Paul. Yahoo had Jerry Yang and David Filo. Dani and ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Woz did the Cream Soda Computer, and the Apple I and II on his own (though he had Job's support after Apple I). Bill did BASIC for the Altair on his own, and Yahoo was just David's list, to start.

There's a distinction between the seed stage and the regular early stage that I'm trying to point to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's possible to find a cofounder without funding. Almost everyone does. Keep looking for folks.

You need to convince brilliant people that your idea rocks enough to have them leave whatever they're doing. I doubt this is as hard as it would sound, since most brilliant people are wasting their talent.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if fortune decided to smile upon me or what, but since I posted this the three people I've been trying to get to join me all spontaneously decided to do it.

Thanks for the encouragement =)</comment>


Unprivileged Docker Builds – A Proof of Concept - <AUTHOR> https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/04/23/unprivileged-docker-builds-a-proof-of-concept/ <comment><USER2> I think the key distinction here is unprivileged builds outside a container. Kaniko was aimed at an actually-quite-large problem, which is performing unprivileged building inside a container in a shared cluster.

This matters a lot, because otherwise CI/CD is a serious weak point in your overall security model. _Especially_ if you will run PRs that folks send you -- ie, run sight-unseen 3rd-party code in a privileged container.

In terms of the OpenShift vs local development experience, we heard something very similar about Cloud Foundry too, so now there's `cf local`[0].

Essentially, Stephen Levine extracted buildpack staging into standalone container images (which now use Kaniko) along with a little CLI tool to help you make the local development experience more like the `cf push` one.

As it happens there is a lot of cooperation happening in this space right now -- folks from Google, Pivotal and Red Hat have been comparing notes about container building in the past few months. It's something we share a common interest in improving.

At Pivotal we have also begun closer cooperation with Heroku on buildpacks, which is really exciting. The buildpacks model lends itself to some really cool optimisations around image rebasing[1].

Folks heading to Kubecon this week who are interested in container builds should make sure to see the joint presentations by Ben Parees (Red Hat), Steve Speicher (Red Hat) and Matt Moore (Google).

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal.

[0] [https://github.com/cloudfoundry- incubator/cflocal](https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/cflocal)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsNY4OP3IrE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsNY4OP3IrE)

<comment><USER3> Heh. I wonder if anyone has ever opened a bunch of PRs with bitcoin miners in them, just to see if they could get them to run on someone else's CI.

<comment><USER2> Yep: [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzkxgm/bitcoin- mi...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzkxgm/bitcoin-mining- github-open-source-bots)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not getting root on your own machine as a developer? That's ridiculous. I left a company where I was the lead developer because I got tired of waiting two weeks for the outside networking consultants to get resources provisioned on AWS. Our own internal network people had to wait on them.

Now I work for a much smaller company and they gave me full admin access to the AWS console from day one and I am "just" a senior developer.

<comment><USER5> You know what developers do with root?

They install bitcoin miners.

They install malware.

They install all sorts of shit.

It's unfortunate but it's true, I've seen it 100x.

We let our devs have local admin at my company but please don't misunderstand the serious risks involved in that decision. We take great measures to ensure that we can do that while still keeping our customers safe.

We would never allow admin AWS access, that's absurd. An attacker on your box would be able to own prod. Sorry that it's an inconvenience! When you manage to solve infosec, hit your ops/sec team up, they'll be happy to hand you the keys after that point.

<comment><USER4> Trust but verify. AWS has plenty of logging capabilities. I'm not saying that _all_ developers should have unfettered access. But someone has to be trusted.

<comment><USER6> Logging doesn't help you when you business has to shut down because someone took over you account and deleted everything.

Separation of access is important and _required_. Developers don't need access to prod, admins maintaining the infrastructure don't need access to the directory, IDM doesn't need access to either QA or prod.

Developers do need full access in an environment to properly test - but that environment should be basically hermetically sealed from the rest of the companies infrastructure. So even if they do screw up the whole business won't be affected.

<comment><USER7> If someone took over your account and deleted _everything_ , and you couldn't get any of it back, you weren't taking care of the "availability" third of security. I agree that developers don't need access to everything, but I completely disagree that they should have no access to prod.

The games of phone tag and "try typing this" that happens during prod issues is a waste of everybody's time, and I fully believe that the people who write the code should be the ones with both the responsibility of the pagers and the ability to fix the code they've deployed. Everybody is happier, and the job gets done more quickly, when the job gets done by the people most qualified to do it (because they wrote it), and when they bear the consequences of writing bad code.

The environment needs to be set up to be forgiving of mistakes, yes, but that's easily done these days and should never result in loss of data if the infrastructure is properly automated. If giving production access means your developers can screw something up, then your admins can just as easily screw something up. Create environments that forgive these failures because they'll happen one way or another.

<comment><USER8> There are already examples companies which have folded overnight after losing creds and having everything deleted.

Removing root is not a trust issue - it's a security surface area issue. You increase the number of audit points and attack options by at least an order of magnitude (1 admin : 10 devs).

In a small shop this might be acceptable, however in a large org it's plain old insane.

If you believe that devs require root then that's an indicator that your build/test/deploy/monitor pipeline is not operating correctly.

<comment><USER7> > If you believe that devs require root then that's an indicator that your > build/test/deploy/monitor pipeline is not operating correctly.

For one, I never said anything about root. I'm not sure _anybody_ should have root in production, depending on the threat model. What I _am_ saying is that the people who wrote the proprietary software being operated should be the ones on the hook for supporting it, and should be given the tools to do so, since they're the most aware of its quirks, design trade-offs, etc.

That means not just CI/CD and monitoring output, but machine access, network access, anything that would be necessary to diagnose and rapidly respond to incidents. That almost never requires root.

<comment><USER8> I completely agree. Very well said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe its me, but I don't see what the restrictions would be to make an __image __which had a root FS inside it, without privileges. The "bits" which make it be a root FS don't need you to "mount" it as a root process and run chflags, you can dd into the image, change things, do math, change checksums. Sure, its a lot _harder_ but the principle of what an image is, is: its a stream of bits. If you can modify the stream of bits, you don't need root to mark it as a region which has magic root properties be it a chflags FS state, or a setuid bit of whatever.

Also, again it may just be me, but if you are running a hypervisor limited VM image on a stream of bits, and you can modify those bits outside that state, restricting this VM not to have root runtime is slightly odd.

This reads like a proscriptive "no root" rule has been metasploited into "we will wake you at 3am to check if your dream, you are running as root" type extremism.

<comment><USER2> It's less about "could I write a program to modify bits directly?" and more about "what can I get that I won't have to support myself for the rest of time?".

Nothing stops anyone from writing code to interpret Dockerfiles or to directly fiddle with image layers. But taking the cost:value ratio proportional to everything else you need to be doing, it's probably a poor investment of time.

Google has economies of scale around this exact problem, which is why they've been pumping out work in this area -- Kaniko, Skaffold, image-rebase, FTL, rules_docker, Jib etc.

<comment><USER9> So his story reduces down to the real problem: what tooling can I find, which runs without root, but makes images which include root outcomes, for the set of things I need in an image which can't run un-privileged, and those tools need to work without running setuid() or seteuid() to root.

Thats a good story btw. I have people working near me who probably want the same thing from a lower driver, but nonetheless interest in non-root required builds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Related to this, so pardon my pitch: We [Azure] literally just launched Azure Container Registry Build. [1]

With one command you can build your container in the cloud and have it stored in your registry. Either push the source code from local or have it use a remote git repository.

> $ az acr build --registry $ACR_NAME --image $IMAGE_NAME:$TAG_NAME --context > .

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/container- registry/containe...](https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/container- registry/container-registry-tutorial-quick-build)

<comment><USER11> Yes! now I can ditch my full-fat-vm vsts build agents! Thanks to your team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is interesting, but I'm not sure if I'd stay at a company that refused me root access to my own machine. A culture where such a lack of trust exists is not one that sounds attractive to me.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough, but there are cases where allowing that while also meeting the web of regulatory requirements that beset some industries is difficult if not practically impossible.

<comment><USER14> In layman terms, expect banks, defense, government and healthcare to have a dedicated operation team with root access. Developers do not have it.

<comment><USER15> Can you run VirtualBox and use it as your working machine instead?

<comment><USER16> If the VM is on the corporate network then it's the same as connecting an unmanaged device - defeats the purpose of locking down machines. Developer VMs should be on their own VLAN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The big unanswered question in my mind is "why on earth does being in the docker group give root access?". The relevant section from the Docker manual is

> First of all, only trusted users should be allowed to control your Docker > daemon. This is a direct consequence of some powerful Docker features. > Specifically, Docker allows you to share a directory between the Docker host > and a guest container; and it allows you to do so without limiting the > access rights of the container. This means that you can start a container > where the /host directory is the / directory on your host; and the container > can alter your host filesystem without any restriction.

[https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/security/#control- gr...](https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/security/#control-groups)

This does not seem like a necessary consequence of setting up a daemon for building disk images. What am I missing here? Is this an engineering oversight on the part of Docker or is there some technical reason that forces it to be like this?

<comment><USER18> Basically docker group exists because it's a lot easier to get people to just add themselves to that group than to type 'sudo' over and over again. Sad but true.

It's not mandatory to use the docker group though. That's completely optional and you could definitely just 'sudo' whenever you do a 'docker' command. The docker _daemon_ needs to run as root because it needs to be able to do all kinds of privileged system calls to actually set up the containers. But if everyone who interacts with the docker daemon is a sudoer, that's not a problem.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the reply. The docs say "only trusted users should be allowed to control your Docker daemon". Presumably this means that the Docker daemon can be coerced into doing all sorts of nasty stuff. Is that right? If so, doesn't that imply that it's badly written?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://github.com/genuinetools/img](https://github.com/genuinetools/img)

<comment><USER20> _" Building Container Images Securely on Kubernetes:"_ _" Standalone, daemon- less, unprivileged Dockerfile and OCI compatible container image builder."_ _" TLDR; will work unprivileged on your host not in a container til we work out some kinks."_ [https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/building-container-images- sec...](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/building-container-images-securely-on- kubernetes/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Author here. I worked at a place that had full root for everyone everywhere and introduced docker back in 2014. It was fun. Then I moved to finance where regulatory requirements mean that root is unacceptable. Whatever we think of that (and I now build openshift clusters at home to test, which I'll blog on soonish) it is a reality for a lot of people. Don't get me started on trying to use git on Windows either...

Also, I have no admin access to uat or production envs or codebase. It's a challenge.

<comment><USER21> PS I work in infra now, no longer as a dev. It's the same for us. The sec team, on the other hand...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unpaid advert: LXD supports unprivileged containers quite well.

<comment><USER23> Yup. I implemented the rootless containers support in runc and I love working with the LXC folks when it comes to topics related to low-level container implementation.

It should be noted though that by default LXC does require some privileged (suid) helpers (for networking and cgroups) -- though you can disable them as well. runc by default doesn't, though that's just a matter of defaults and what use-cases we were targeting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A PoC was shown of how to do this with buildkit several weeks ago in [0], but in your words - it's also not for the faint of heart (involving patching the Kernel). This is the way of the future - Docker image builds should not need to be privileged (they often are for mounting filesystems)

[https://github.com/genuinetools/img](https://github.com/genuinetools/img) [0] Similar: [https://github.com/AkihiroSuda/runrootless](https://github.com/AkihiroSuda/runrootless)

<comment><USER23> > A PoC was shown of how to do this with buildkit several weeks ago in [0], > but in your words - it's also not for the faint of heart (involving patching > the Kernel).

Rootless builds work without kernel patches (the "rawproc" stuff mentioned in issues is not going to be merged into the kernel and there are other ways of fixing the issue -- like mounting an empty /proc into the container). I can do builds right now on my machine with orca-build.

The main reason it's for the faint of heart is that we don't really have nice wrappers around all of these technologies (runc works perfectly fine, as does umoci, as does orca-build, as does proot, as does ...). Jess's project is quite nice because it takes advantage of the cache stuff BuildKit has, though I personally prefer umoci's way of doing storage and unprivileged building (though I am quite biased ofc). I'm going to port orca-build to Go and probably will take some inspiration from "img" as to how to use Docker's internal Dockerfile parsing library.

For more information you can take a look at [https://rootlesscontaine.rs/](https://rootlesscontaine.rs/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> devs can't get root on their own machine? Is this common?

<comment><USER26> I may depend upon the company. I work at a company what writes software for smart phones [1] and we don't have such restrictions. Yet our parent company (we were bought out several years ago) does deal with financial transactions and has all sorts of regulatory restrictions what can and can't be done with computers.

Unfortunately, for some obscure reason, it's only _now_ that we might have to conform to the regulatory compliance issues (no one has been able to answer me "Why now? Why not when we first got bought years ago?") We're trying to fight it but the fix seems to be in.

[1] Enhanced caller ID. Part of our software lives on the cell phone. Part lives on the phone network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Access to large compute farms in most enterprises requires that users do not have root access to the nodes. Being able to run Docker containers on the farm would be fantastic. This is a great article that I will investigate further. Thanks!

<comment><USER28> Not just on compute farms in enterprises; in academia as well.

<comment><USER23> I was actually part of a university research group when I discovered the need for this, and started working on rootless containers as a result -- I gave a talk about this last year[1] (though quite a few things have changed since then).

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6EcUyamu94](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6EcUyamu94)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is hopefully something that buildah can achieve: [https://github.com/projectatomic/buildah/issues/171](https://github.com/projectatomic/buildah/issues/171)

</comment><comment><USER30> What does this approach have that openshift doesn't provide?

<comment><USER23> Doesn't require running anything as root. Almost all of OpenShift runs as root.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> According to the author's Linkedin [0] he's "Lead OpenShift Architect at Barclays"

I get the security risks and the fear of malicious insiders at a company such as this. But having expensive, fairly high level employees work around not having root access on their own machines strikes me as odd. The guy does docker for a living and can't run docker on his own machine.

Also, recall that he has physical access to said machine (I hope) so if he really was a malicious insider, he could already pretty much own it. Then again, maybe he doesn't.

[0]: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian- miell-694496/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-miell-694496/)

<comment><USER32> Unfortunately I think these types of restrictions are fairly common in large organizations, even non-financial.

Speaking as someone in a Fortune 500, sometimes the bureaucratic hoops one must jump through to develop in a VM or with docker on ones own machine isn't even worth it.

<comment><USER33> At a company I interned at, even getting _Linux_ on a laptop was a multi-week process. I ended up running a Linux VM on virtualbox on Windows, used cmder to ssh into it, and used a shared folder to edit code natively while running it on Linux.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, it makes no sense for the company to allow any desktop on Linux. The desktop wouldn't have the centralized authentication, the system updates, office or the drivers for the printer that are well integrated only on their windows machines.

<comment><USER34> Did you mean Linux on a desktop?

Umm, you can do all of those things with Linux... I can't remember the last time I had any issues with printing on Linux at all.

<comment><USER35> So take a major financial insititue you probably have an account with - 300,000 employees each of whom has at least one PC age ranged upto a decade. Including servers and routers they probably have as many machines as AWS, but in several _thousand_ "data centres" some of which get unplugged by the cleaners vacuum.

The management headaches for this kind of distributed computing is off the scale, and banning Linux and locking down senior devs workstations is just table stakes. Everyone is heading to a thin client running citrix to a data centre for pretty much this reason

<comment><USER34> None of it has to be complicated, it is because people want to make it complicated, and make computers some magical box.

Lets firs talk about removing root privileges on personal workstations or laptops. This is pointless. Anything that might be bad for root to do on a single user system is going to be just as bad running as a user. The second you allow any custom code to run as a user on any system you should treat it as potentially compromised -- adding root in to the mix really does not change things -- on a single user system. Worried about root user getting access to some customer data on the system? To bad, if the data was on the system it is more than likely the user level account (windows or linux for that matter) had access to the data therefor any intruder will also have access, just at the user level. The same goes for just about any other issue you can run in to. Am I suggesting running things as root? No, because there really is no need for most things -- at the same time if your developer needs to have root level access so they can test or work with technologies that require it when deployed to production then it really should be a non issue for sysadmins. The problem is sysadmins are mostly scared to be outed for doing nothing for most organizations these days. These sort of power sweeps are often used to justify big budgets and teams of people who tell you to "reboot" when it does not work right. There is also a bit if power hungry attitude associated with it too.

You state that Linux makes it harder, I can't see how and you did not show me anything convincing. Bold statements without any details into facts can just be tossed into the trash can as far as I am concerned.

Now lets talk about citrix. How does that help? All that does is move any real or perceived problem to a different system. If any of these VMs get accessed by bad actors they will still be able to own any of the information on them that the user had access too.

In any case I did not really come here to argue any of this, your comment is just sort of out of place with relation to what I said.

If you can't trust your employees don't hire them, or just pay them and tell them to sit in a dark room so they can't hurt anything.

<comment><USER35> hmmmmm. I may have drunk too much corporate kool-aid over the recent years. You have many valid points.

<comment><USER14> Your first comment was on point. It's a massive hassle to manage the many environments that come with a hundred thousand computers.

The last poster has zero argument and is just ignoring the problem. Go setup a thousand printers for ten thousand employees in a hundred locations. They all have to work flawlessly and on all OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The zoo of build tools and scripts on top of Docker and "orchestration" tools sure reaks of incidental complexity. Could someone explain to me what material problem Docker is solving that couldn't be solved using a statically linked binary as demon?

<comment><USER37> Great now deploy that demon and updates across an entire fleet of servers a few times a day. And make sure you have metrics for it, and that you're efficiently using cpu and memory resources across your cloud footprint.

<comment><USER36> Docker doesn't do these things neither for you.

<comment><USER38> It does 1 and 2 well, and 3 can be built using it</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paul Carr resigns from TC - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/16/last-post/

<comment><USER2> Getting sick of this melodrama.

Where can I find _tech news_?

<comment><USER3> It's tech news news. In contrast to your melodramatic comment, Paul Carr actually reported some interesting facts.

Update: I apologize for this comment. It was unnecessarily inflammatory.

<comment><USER2> It seems like TechCrunch posts have been nothing but crying over how AOL's treating the poor writers for the past two weeks. I haven't gotten a good grip of the actual circumstances since I simply don't care--I just want news about tech startups and advances (with the majority being non-Twitter related). It seems TC can't deliver that anymore.

No worries. After browsing the Internet for two decades I no longer get offended by anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This guy Paul is good for writing sensational hollywood stories. "Sneaky editor conspires with Lady Evil to overthrow St. Arrington". His TC column was always sub-par self-promotion. His Guardian column was better. You 'd think writers get better with time.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't have any personal vindication towards any of these journalists, but I don't understand why it's a big deal that the editor of TechCrunch resides in New York. Didn't Arrington himself move to Seattle before the sale?

</comment><comment><USER6> In the end, Paul seems to me just another pawn who doesn't understand the game he's in—not even who's on whose team.

There are two teams in this game: Team Multimillionaires On Their Way To Be Billionaires and team Clueless Minions. Guess which team Mike and Arianna are on?

On second thought, chances are Paul just understood what it was all about and found his way out as a fake kamikaze who gets to leave with all the suicide bomber honours and yet stay alive and well—which I wish him he does.

</comment><comment><USER7> Erick's rebuttal post was pathetic. I'm not sure why editorial independence matters when the voice of TC is that of a teenage girl's diary.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pastebin'd in case of redaction [1]

[1] - <http://pastebin.com/qhuHiCzh>

</comment><comment><USER9> Eric's response: "I accept your resignation @paulcarr. Nice timing to post that while I am on a plane. You are a misinformed coward."

[http://twitter.com/#!/erickschonfeld/status/1148394701839441...](http://twitter.com/#!/erickschonfeld/status/114839470183944193)

The saga rolls on..

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry but I've watched and seen Schonfield a couple of times now and do a bunch of interviews, but there is just something off about the guy. And at this point, no matter how he responds he comes off looking like a loser. The smartest thing he can do is shut his mouth. Especially if MG leaves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This ain't tech/startup/hacker news

</comment><comment><USER12> Will all the old writers leave to form another site, like the Engadget team did?

<comment><USER13> Almost certainly, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> MG leaves in 5...4...3

</comment><comment><USER14> TechCrunch: I don't read it much but Arrington and Co. did seem like a bunch with good things to say.

Has it now been defanged or?

</comment><comment><USER15> Sigh... I had so much respect for Erick but I am not too sure anymore...</comment>


Samsung Unveils Galaxy S6 Edge - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/samsung-unveils-galaxy-s6-edge-note5-big-curvy/story?id=33063960 <comment><AUTHOR> Samsugn is one of the world's largest distributor in terms of smartphone shipments --- but, it's quarterly profits have been down for the past 5 quarters. So, I wonder where they could focus on to reverse that trend.</comment>


Ask HN:  Is Search in the footer broken? - <AUTHOR>

Doesn't matter what I search for using the link at the bottom of the HN page, but all I see is that god-awful spinning icon eternally.  No search results ever return. <comment><USER2> Already asked - apparently yes.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2864487>

<comment><AUTHOR> So it was, thanks!</comment></comment>


Show HN: End-to-End encrypted chat using Firebase and WebCrypto API - <AUTHOR> https://chat-a9892.firebaseapp.com <comment><AUTHOR> OP here: this is a day old project, so expect rough edges and some bugs here and there.

Any/all feedback is appreciated.</comment>


Coding with EFF - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/08/coding-with-eff

<comment><USER2> IPFS, the interplanetary file system, is a project that the EFF should consider promoting: [https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs](https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs)

There are two implementations in progress, a Go version and a NodeJS version.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a place where we can pitch new project ideas?

<comment><USER4> I suggest sending e-mail to staff technologists at EFF.

[https://www.eff.org/about/staff](https://www.eff.org/about/staff)

Maybe rather than e-mailing every technologist, pick 1-3 of us whose previous or current work seems most related to what you want to suggest. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> EFF is fun to work with.

<comment><USER6> In what way?

<comment><USER5> One way, is learning. This week I learned several ways to increase the security of websites, just from architecture & code reviews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >We're also hiring a full-time Staff Technologist or Senior Staff Technologist. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.

Calling out women and minorities like this doesn't sit right with me.

<comment><USER8> Me neither. Calling out any group , in my opinion, creates a stronger feeling of separation between that group and whoever else is lumped into the deal.

It's becoming standard practice, but I feel like it's at best a positive P.R. stunt about X company's diverse hiring practice, and at worst mildly counter- productive towards the whole "people one-ness" (sorry, can't think of a good term) goal.

The only time I'm okay with such statements is when there are extraneous circumstances which allow for a group which wouldn't normally be considered. Example : "Teens between 13 and 18 welcome!" referring to an event that takes place at a venue that is normally 18+ only.

<comment><USER9> > It's becoming standard practice

Its been a common practice for, I think, about half a century. Its certainly not "becoming a standard practice" _now_.</comment></comment></comment>


Incarceration as Incapacitation: An Intellectual History - barry-cotter https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/08/incarceration-as-incapacitation-an-intellectual-history/ <comment><AUTHOR> Two overlooked areas that explain the rise of the high-throughput prosecutor:

 _1\. The war on drugs_

If you look at the statistics, the biggest surprise is how many offenders aren't in prison for drugs, and how many of them are in for violent offenses. It doesn't square with the romanticism that most prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders.

We saw a similar spike in crime during prohibition, where alcohol wasn't obviously involved, but the fact it was illegal gave rise to the violent crime. The overlooked fact is that the drug war makes for a lot of violent crime, even though "drugs" never shows up on the police report or indictment.

 _2\. Plea bargaining, or how to be a used car salesman_

Picture yourself in trouble. Maybe you robbed somebody or killed somebody. And now the system has you. You face up to life in prison. With anticipation, the prosecutor gives you a plea offer. Plead guilty, you get 15-20 years. Plead not guilty, she'll add in more charges to put you away for good.

Or at least that's what she says will happen. If you're like 99% of people in that boat, you'll never find out, because that 15-20 sounds a helluva lot better than life.

But no one ever studies that 1% of the population that tells the prosecutor to pound sand with her deal. For this edge case, there's a nonzero chance the prosecutor will dismiss the counts the day right before the trial begins because the evidence or witnesses didn't materialize. Or even if you're found guilty, and the prosecutor is livid they had to spend 3 weeks in court convincing a jury you're guilty on all counts, the judge might see some mitigating circumstances or simply be in a good mood when it's time for you to be sentenced. Maybe you'll get life, or maybe you'll only get 5 years because the victim was unsympathetic and there were mitigating circumstances.

When plea bargaining was a novelty, prosecutors didn't know about demand-based pricing. They'd handicap the most likely outcome and discount it in order to save themselves the work.

Nowadays, they're just like used car salespeople. What they'd get at trial no longer factors into their offers. Like any other monopoly, the highest offer you'd take is what you'll have to pay in order to avoid trial.

The information asymmetry makes it all possible. If a disinterested professional, not a prosecutor, not a defense attorney, appraised your case at 12.3 years if taken to trial, you'd tell the prosecutor to take her 20 year offer and shove it.

But no disinterested professionals exist. So we send people away for longer and longer periods, swelling our prison population.

Behold the unreasonable effectiveness of information asymmetry.

This doesn't explain the full effect- we're not just seeing longer sentences but more prisoners. Here's how this happens: the prisoner boom comes from the increased idle time prosecutors can achieve through ubiquitous plea bargaining. No longer having to triage which cases they have time to take to trial, they can write 100 plea deals in the time it takes to get one trial done. If society were to curtail plea deals, even some minor aspect like refusing to allow bargainers to waive appellate rights, the numbers would start reverting to lower levels immediately.

If you think everybody accused deserves to be punished harshly, you'd probably think this system works well. If you think the lowest quality cases ought not be prosecuted and we should have fewer prisoners serving less time, then it thus becomes an act of altruism for a guilty individual to plead not guilty and take it to trial.

<comment><USER2> There are counties in the US that have not heard a jury say "not guilty" for decades. Dont assume prosecutors cannot win even a very shaky case. Bargaining is the better bet.

<comment><AUTHOR> By the time it gets to a jury, it's typically a lock.

But prosecutors lose plenty of cases by surrendering before it gets to a jury. Doesn't count against their sky-high conviction rate, either.

For that vanishingly small number of people who refused to take a plea and walked, go tell them bargaining was the better bet.

Bargaining wasn't the better bet in my case either, no matter how many lawyers pressured me to take one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are there any differences on "prisoner" and "slave" ?

<comment><USER4> Prisoners have probably done something to deserve it?

<comment><USER5> Putting aside innocent people in jail, what about the people in for drug crimes, immigration issues, and non-violent offenses? Actually putting _that_ aside, what exactly does someone need to do to "deserve" slavery? What's the bar? I also don't see any reformstive power to slavery, and the penal system is supposed to be at least partly about reform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> American Affairs is a really interesting journal</comment>


TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington Launches A New Blog, Uncrunched - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/23/techcrunch-founder-michael-arrington-launches-a-new-blog-uncrunched

<comment><USER2> Flagging anything with Arrington in it since he's a cancer and needs to disappear from the web.</comment>