Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist - <AUTHOR> http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm <comment><USER2> Oh boy from experience this is a very loaded discussion.

I personally like the Austrian framework because I find it aesthetically pleasing (I guess I'm a sucker for deduction). Some of the writing is simply intellectually interesting and also very scholastic for lack of a better word. For example, even if you completely disagree with the analysis I'd argue that "America's Great Depression" is a very good read simply from an intellectual point of view and "Man, Economy, State" is a very good tome that contains a framework of thought. I also enjoy the science theoretical musings quite a bit. The writing on Aristotelian ontology is very good for example.

There's also works where I constantly shake my head at the implications and political conclusions but intellectually I still love them. "The Ethics of Liberty" is probably the clearest example of this. Do I think that letting a baby starve to death because it is basically a parasite is morally desirable: no. Do I find the idea of trying to deduce an entire ethical framework from first principles fascinating and the way it is done interesting: yes

There are lots of things about AE that I find irking but the core theory and the science theoretical basis is very interesting/intriguing to read.

I also like that pretty much everything is readily available on mises.org. I wish all "schools of thought" would be this forward thinking.

<comment><USER3> I read the ethics of liberty as well and came to the conclusion that the deduction of its ethical framework is flawed (though interesting nonetheless). Here's a link for those interested in my write-up: [http://jcfrei.com/on-the- ethics-of-liberty/](http://jcfrei.com/on-the-ethics-of-liberty/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The five reasons given are IMO attributes of Rothbard and Mises but in my view neither of them is substantial to Austrian economic theory. They deal with modelling preferences (point 1-3), the influence of third parties (point 4) and a kind of ridiculous "you use 'subjectivism' so often, it sounds like you're implying we don't care about subjectivism" discussion (point 5).

Since none of the are integral to Austrian economic theory but a few of them are against opinions of Mises and Rothbard (and I wouldn't even disagree with the author's view points here), it's comparable to saying "Darwin said you should always explore distant nature in a naval vessel and he believed in God, therefore his theories are wrong".

To substantiate:

1\. Utility Functions vs. Value Scales

Everyone can use the _representation_ of utility he wants, it just has to be decided whether it's appropriate in the case he applies it to or not. I assume small quantities of every day items (say potatoes) are easier modeled in continuous well-defined functions while preferences for the quantity of shopping malls is much harder to model that way. Neither means the other is necessarily wrong but as always modelling is not the same as reality.

2\. Indifference

I can personally see how I am indifferent to a few things but it's unlikely you see it in my actions (other than watching me flip a coin). Now how is that again related to Austrian Economics?

3\. Continuity

Basically Mises and Rothbard are arguing against modelling various dimensions as continuous functions. I see how their claim can be true under some circumstances and how it can be useful under others.

So again how is that relevant to being (or not) an Austrian Economist?

4\. Welfare Economics

> Rothbard could only claim the welfare effects of government intervention > upon "social utility" are indeterminate

Agreed. Government is not necessarily bad.

The rest of the discussion there is about "assumptions": Whether and how a third party affects a voluntary exchange.

Again, this is not at all necessary for Austrian economics, and attacking it is an exercise in futility.

5\. Subjectivism

This argument is not an argument, it's about word usage frequencies and how they imply things. WTF

<comment><USER5> Whilst you're right that this is focused on Mises/Rothbard as Caplan acknowledges in his opening paragraph, it's fair to say that the economics of Mises/Rothbard is the strand of Austrianism that gets all the attention and funding; not many people describing themselves as Austrian economists are followers of Lachmann. So it's more akin to a criticism of Keynesianism which focuses on arguing most things Keynes, Hicks and the New Consensus macroeconomists said were wrong.

As for your points:

1\. The position that ordinal and cardinal representations of utility are both valid in certain circumstances and in practice identical economic models can often be derived from them is the mainstream economics one which the Mises strand of Austrianism rejected. If you believe that "neither means the other is necessarily wrong" you're rejecting one of their core assumptions.

2\. Indifference is pretty easily reflected in actions. Obvious example of a revealed preference of indifference between two items: "Which one?" "Either one" (sure, I'll accept that _in some cases_ a person might delegate a decision because they have a specific preference to give the delegate responsibility or to be surprised by the choice which is greater than their preference for one item over the other, but a lot of the time it's clearly genuine indifference between items. I'm not trying to impress the store clerk when I don't care _which_ no-name manufacturer my $1 widget comes from). If Austrian economists insist on (re)defining economics as a set of immutable laws of human action, it helps not to have such obvious counterexamples to one of their claims...

3\. Austrian Economists following the approach of Mises insist that modelling dimensions as continuous functions is never acceptable. ergo if you believe continuous dimensions are sometimes a useful modelling assumption, that's a pretty good reason not to be an Austrian economist (even if you think their objections to the representation of _some_ dimensions as continuous differentiable functions are valid; it's not like Austrian economists are the only people offering such critiques)

4\. Considering that the thrust of Mises/Rothbard's arguments is that government is [almost always] bad for allocation of resources, it's a pretty major shortcoming that based on their own foundational assumptions they can't actually argue that even the most egregious examples of government misallocation of resources actually are misallocation of resources.[1] (Many mainstream economists also argue against the validity of interpersonal comparisons of utility, but could at least have some grounds for argument that lesser quantities of output under a price-fixing regime are suboptimal on the grounds of Kaldor/Hicks inefficiency since they're willing to consider non- revealed preferences.)

5\. Caplan doesn't elaborate on this particularly well, but it's a standard claim by Austrian economists that mainstream approaches involving quantitative analysis aren't compatible with the concept that value is subjective. It's also pretty well established that many classes of quantitative mainstream model work pretty well with Austrian-style subjective preferences (viz. based on ordinal preferences within a budget constraint).

[1]obviously Austrians have lodged other objections like claiming that allocation of resources for production in the absence of a price system is "impossible" (clearly incorrect) rather than merely less efficient, and generally subscribe to ethical arguments that government intervention is "coercive" except when used to prevent people from using resources other people claim ownership over. But not being able to say "West Germany produced better economic outcomes for its citizens than East Germany, or even than medieval Prussia" is a pretty major disadvantage in an economic theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It was interesting to see his comments on Hayek.

Friedman had something similar to say about Hayek:

"[I am] an enormous admirer of Hayek, but not for his economics. I think Prices and Production is a very flawed book. I think his [Pure Theory of Capital] is unreadable. On the other hand, The Road to Serfdom is one of the great books of our time".

From [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek)

<comment><USER7> It's funny that modern Hayek adherents are so militant about preventing things that Hayek himself was completely fine with. He saw a government role in pricing externalities, banning poisons, preventing deforestation and pollution, limiting working hours or other manipulative labor contracts, preventing private fraud, and in wealthy societies, providing minimum food, clothing, housing and social insurance.

That list would make many at Mises scream bloody murder. Man our discourse is just so petty.

<comment><USER8> "That list would make many at Mises scream bloody murder" \- I would say only those who don't understand what Capitalism is. The common misconception is that Capitalism is the system where people are free to do whatever they want, especially those who has a lot of money. That's not true; the system that allows for that is called Feudalism. Obviously Hayek understood the difference.

It is interesting to analyze why so many people fail to understand what Capitalism is. My guess is that unfortunately many modern "western" countries are slowly moving away from Capitalism into some kind of modern version of Feudalism. And people with very deep pockets are indeed able to do what they want - last financial crisis is a good example, although multiple banks were behind it, they didn't go bankrupt, but were saved using taxpayers money.

The end result is that people think that "Capitalism is wrong", "Capitalism is not working", etc. They are just not aware that Capitalism is no longer here.

<comment><USER9> Feudalism is generally defined to be about a hierarchy of relationships linked to land ownership and associated payments or service.

e.g. Here in Scotland the last elements of feudalism were only removed in 2000:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc._\(Scotland\)_Act_2000)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Might consider adding (1997) to the title. Even tho the article isn't date stamped, the author indicates the approximate year:

> _I was able to attend the 1989 Mises Institute summer seminar at Stanford, > where I met Murray Rothbard and many of the leading Austrian economists for > the first time. It is now eight years later;_

<comment><USER11> He also writes: "I have just completed my Ph.D. in economics at Princeton, and will be joining the faculty of the economics department at George Mason in the fall." He joined GMU in 1997 according to [http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/cv.html](http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/cv.html) .

<comment><USER12> He also wrote "last week, as we were celebrating the summer solstice..." which puts the article probably sometime in late July.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Regarding points 1 and 2, I think any argument that relies on the concept of utility in some essential way is either false or trivial. Take for example the theorem that "utility-maximizing individuals equalize the marginal utilities of goods consumed divided by their prices".

Utility can't be measured directly, and must be inferred from a consumer's behaviour. It's begging the question to infer an agent's utility function from their behaviour and to simultaneously conclude that the behaviour maximises the utility function: that's true by construction.

On the other hand, we can assume a functional form for an agent's utiilty for a given basket of goods. I guarantee that real-world preferences are more complicated than any function we can write down, so any prediction we make about an agent's preferences will almost certainly be wrong.

All in all, utilities are a nice toy, but aren't really any use outside of the world of theory.

<comment><USER14> in econ 101 utility is measured in "utils"

eg 1 banana = 10 utils, 1 apple = 5 utils, 1 car = 100 utils, etc

utils are just a proxy for money and/or time which are interchangeable through wages paid for labor

money is our real world way of valuing the utility of goods, labor, and more generally time (the scarcest resource of them all)

utility functions will never describe an individuals preferences perfectly (hell you couldn't perfectly describe the utility of any of the transactions you make) but they're useful when describing and predicting aggregate behavior, especially when fed a lot of consumer data (higher confidence)

all of game theory also uses the concept of utility to weigh payoffs and there are many many real world applications of game theory

its not perfect but no models are perfect, that's why we have statistics and probability theory to guide us as well

<comment><USER15> Except you can't compare the utility of things from different classes like bananas, hammers, cars, overcoats and paintings. It just doesn't make any sense. Finally "utility" is a different way to formulate the same thing as "use value" as opposed to "exchange value".

In Marginalism, you compare utility from agent to agent but you can never attribute an absolute value.

<comment><USER14> say i pay you $1000 in wages this month

how do you decide how to allocate it between rent, food, savings, entertainment, etc.

most rational people would use some type of internal or subconscious utility calculation to decide what how to budget their income

i dont know what marginalism is or why its useful when you can simply approximate a value by looking at the price of the good/service and use that to compare with other goods and services

<comment><USER16> There's nothing wrong with the idea of an _internal_ utility calculation. The problem comes in when people try to compare or sum utility across multiple individuals. I might have a personal utility function which says an apple has higher utility to me than an orange, while your personal utility function says just the opposite. It makes no sense to try to mix these together in an attempt to estimate just how much apples or oranges are worth to the two of us collectively.

Money is a reasonable approximation of "aggregate utility" most of the time, but that holds only so long as interactions between individuals remain voluntary and there is enough trade in similar items to establish a "customary price". It doesn't work well for goods which are not customarily traded for money, or as a basis for orchestrating involuntary interference in the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "(...)Mises alone, and perhaps Rothbard, who stumbled upon Operationalism in economics, but instead of comprehending that a truthful proposition must be BOTH externally correspondent, and existentially possible to construct via a series of rationally testable operations, attempted to somehow conflate Jewish Law, and Mathematical Logic and instead, created the pseudoscience of 'praxeology' under which they claim all economics must be produced by a sequence of operations.

This left Mises respected but a laughing stock without a position. Unfortunately he did not understand what he had stumbled upon, and he could have reformed economics. But he failed. He failed because he was committed to his dogma, and committed to his error."

[https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-criticisms-of-the- Austri...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-criticisms-of-the-Austrian- school-of-economic-thought/answer/Curt-Doolittle)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not convinced by the way the author argues. For example, he gives _U=a_ ln(quantity of apples)+(1-a) _ln(quantity of oranges)_ as an example of a utility function and in the very same section claims that neoclassical economists only use ordinal scales, hence the criticism of presuming cardinal utility doesn't apply.

But does it really make sense to use a nonlinear function to represent ordinal preferences?

As a philosopher working in the so-called theory of value structure - basically, about the meaning of 'better than' \- my criticism of preference modelling would be different and applies to both camps. First, if the modelling is descriptive we know that people have e.g. non-transitive preferences and completeness also doesn't hold. Second, there are also pretty good arguments against the transitivity of 'better than' from a normative perspective that at least need to be defused somehow. IMHO, the right solution points towards conditional preferences and/or lexicographic decision procedures. In a nutshell, multiple criteria interact in complicated ways and the assumption that the outcome of aggregating them is a neat complete preorder is generally not warranted. (And there is plenty of work on nontraditional decision theory by e.g. Fishburn to support alternatives.) Third, there are good arguments why some of our evaluative comparisons between items are cardinal, at least on an interval scale, whereas others are purely ordinal. I understand why this would be an undesirable point of view for an economist, though, since there is no known rationally and normatively justifiable way of aggregating ordinal and cardinal utilities into a meaningful overall assessment. From a measurement-theoretic perspective, an overall ordinal utility is the best you can get in this case. There seems to be a certain tendency of economists to dismiss certain plausible views because they are technically undesirable rather than on the basis of substantive arguments.

Another thing is that as far as I can see, economists who presume ordinal utilities do not seem to care enough about Arrow's Theorem in contexts with multiple attributes. At least they should make clear that IIA ought not hold when ordinal preferences are aggregated.

<comment><USER13> I think I agree with the crux of what you have to say, but do you have an example of people having non-transitive preferences?

I can't think of one off the top of my head, and the classical economic argument is that non-transitive preferences would create a 'happiness pump' where I get stuck in a loop trading one thing for another and feeling good about the trade every time.

<comment><USER18> These are called Spectrum Cases in the metaethical literature and have been discussed by Larry Temkin, Stuart Rachels, and others. Here is an example:

A_1: One year of intense pleasure.

A_2: Two years of slighly less intense pleasure than A_1.

A_3: Four years of slightly less intense pleasure than A_2.

. . .

A_n: 2048 years of very low pleasure (slightly less intense than A_{n-1}).

In every pairwise comparison we judge that A_{i+1} is better than A_i. However, we also judge that for some A_j in the spectrum, A_1 is better than A_j. Repeated applications of transitivity would contradict this, hence "better than" cannot be transitive.

Before you dwell on the example, note that the same construction can be made with well-being and it may be made as realistic as you desire. As the size of his book already hints, Temkin (2012) discusses a vast number of variants in many evaluative domains.

Money pumps under certainty are one argument against this. The problem is to explain what's wrong with your judgements in Spectrum Cases then. There are many other replies. John Broome suggests that "better than" is simply transitive by virtue of its meaning, but that misses Temkin's point and he's perfectly aware of this reply. You can also get away with giving up completeness, but the solution is not very convincing. It boils down to claiming that two adjacent items are incomparable somewhere in the spectrum, which is extremely implausible. In my personal opinion the only viable solution is a lexicographic approach that takes into account that two or more dimensions at play. I'll spare you the details, though.

On a side note, there is an older tradition of arguing against the transitivity of "better than" based on measurement errors or the indistinguishability of adjacent items. This started with Luce (1956). In these cases, only the transitivity of "equally good" fails but "strict better than" remains transitive, hence this can be modelled with semiorders or interval orders. The representation theorems for utility representations change, but this is well-explored and not a problem. Spectrum Cases are much worse, if you buy into them, because they show that "strict better than" is not transitive.

<comment><USER13> That's really interesting, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Since this is trending, you might be interested in the responses from the Austrians themselves:

[https://mises.org/wire/caplan-and-responses](https://mises.org/wire/caplan- and-responses)

Note Caplan replies to some of this and it's linked in the same place. Reader beware - I do not recall the jist of it all as it's been some time (~10 yrs) since I last saw this. Interestingly, Caplan has a profile on Mises.org: [https://mises.org/profile/bryan-caplan](https://mises.org/profile/bryan- caplan)

Cheers.

Edit, more Caplan stuff I find worth linking [http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm#part18](http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm#part18)

</comment><comment><USER20> re "I conclude that while self-labeled Austrian economists have some valid contributions to make to economics, these are simply not distinctive enough to sustain a school of thought"

This seems a little crazy to me. I think there is a world of difference between current economic philosophy that runs the US-centered world and Austrian Economics as depicted on the Mises web site.

I am not an economist but I do sometimes read the Mises.org web site and until recently I made monthly contributions to support the site.

I credit Mises.org with information that led me to divest my retirement accounts out of the stock market in 1997. That saved me a lot of money.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure I understand your argument, the Mises Institute could make valid contributions to the field of economics without being a distinctive school of thought. I mean the paragraph you've quoted says exactly as much, in full:

>I conclude that while self-labeled Austrian economists have some valid contributions to make to economics, these are simply not distinctive enough to sustain a school of thought. The task of developing an alternate Austrian paradigm has largely failed, producing an abundance of meta-economics (philosophy, methodology, and history of thought), but few substantive results. Whatever Austrian economists have that is worth saying should be simply be addressed to the broader economics profession, which (in spite of itself) remains eager for original, true, and substantive ideas.

He doesn't say that Austrian economists are always wrong, he says that even when they're right their works do not justify a completely different economic paradigm. The fact that anecdotally you saved some money by following their advice doesn't really contradict that IMO.

<comment><USER22> I don't even see how he saved money. If he'd stayed in the market, he would've made tons of returns by now. It's more like he avoided short-term loss and long-term profit. Unless for some reason he was invested in companies like stufffordogs.com.

<comment><USER20> I waited a few years and returned to investing in the stock market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Koch brothers gave money to the GMU economics department and played a hand at picking professorships.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/george- mason-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/george-mason- president-some-donations-fall-short-of-academic- standards/2018/04/28/bb927576-4af0-11e8-8b5a-3b1697adcc2a_story.html)

<comment><USER13> Finally, an explanation for the existence of Tyler Cowen!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For people interested in learning more about the author's (Bryan Caplan) background and views: [http://thepolitic.org/an-interview-with-bryan-caplan- profess...](http://thepolitic.org/an-interview-with-bryan-caplan-professor-of- economics-at-george-mason-university/)

<comment><USER24> I don't agree with Prof Caplan on a lot of things but generallly respect his intellect. But I was very surprised and disappointed to read his views here on alcoholism being a matter of choosing "a beverage over one's family" rather than a legitimate medical issue.

<comment><USER25> I believe the professor is discussing the implications of choosing A over B, not examining why the choice was made.

<comment><USER24> But that is the point. Most addiction experts don't describe alcohol dependence in terms of choice, but as a physical addiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I enjoyed this article because it provided a level-headed and analytical critique of a topic that is mired in politically charged emotion.

For example, sections 2.1 and 2.2 resonated with me because, as a mathematician, because I can plainly see how the algebraic structure chosen by Rothbard for representing utility is going to severely impact the reasonableness of his models.

There are several other compelling examples, where anyone who has done a bit of mathematical modeling can see that the neoclassical school of thought is simply providing better tools for achieving the desired outcomes.

</comment><comment><USER27> > while Hayek turned almost entirely to philosophy, law, and intellectual > history after the 1930's

If he's claiming The Use of Knowledge in Society (1942) isn't about economics, then you have a very narrow view of economics. I mention it only because this essay was such a major contribution.

<comment><USER26> _> If he's claiming_

He's not.

To take your example, Section 3.1 critiques _The Use of Knowledge in Society_ via a critique of _Human Action_ (which was published by Mises nearly a decade after 1942). Many of the observations in Section 3 (and 3.1 especially) are directly relevant to _The Use of Knowledge in Society_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder about Modern Money Theory Economcs..often thought of as the polar opposite of Austrian Economics. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory)

<comment><USER29> Some thoughts about MMT:

0) If you, as a layman (and why not, if you're an expert as well), are going to have an informed opinion on economic issues, you owe it to yourself as well as whoever you're going to discuss it with, to educate yourself broadly and study both sides of an issue. Seems that too many people who discuss on the internet happened for some random reason to read a book, then (maybe) continue to read books in the same vein, and are subsequently unable to look out of the ideological pigeonhole they have jumped into. Don't become that old bore that rants endlessly about "libtards/global financial capitalism/whatever" at xmas dinner, while the rest of your family sits there in an embarrassed silence wishing you to drop dead or at least STFU so that the kids can have their presents! For some background that explains the thought behind MMT, I can recommend Mitchell & Fazi, Reclaiming the State.

1) I don't understand the obsession with the gold standard that some in the Austrian school seem to have. Or if not gold, some other valuable commodity, energy, basket of commodities etc. Whatever. Bretton Woods is over, deal with it. The only underlying reason I've been able to find is that to people who dream of a nightwatchman-state, the notion of a state with fiscal and monetary power is poison.

2) The core of MMT, namely the description of the macroeconomics of a sovereign government with a monopoly on issuing its own floating fiat currency, is not new per se, but it's explained maybe slightly differently than usual, but it explains it pretty well. And given how confused people seem to be about macroeconomics, fiscal policy, and fiat currencies, being able to explain it clearly is a big deal.

3) As for the policy implications of MMT. MMT teaches us that in terms of monetary and fiscal policy governments are not as constrained as is commonly thought (the usual anti-MMT slurs of "printing your way to Nirvana" and subsequent hyperinflation tells more about the ignorance of whoever is presenting those). Now, most of the MMT proponents are pretty left-leaning, so they tend to want to use that extra fiscal space for various social programs, but one has to keep in mind that's a policy choice and not something inherent in the theory itself. Another policy choice would be to buy weapons and engage in various foreign policy adventures, but again, nothing that MMT per se prescribes.

<comment><USER28> To be clear, I've read a number of articles, primers, and research manuscripts about multiple economic theories, though often focusing on MMT, so I am not one of those that hears things like 'national debt' and goes howling at the moon and agro at the dinner table, and indeed am a step away from the common person in terms of education on the matter, but I am a neuroscientists, not an economist, and this is HN where there is almost always someone else that knows a whole lot more about something than yourself.

<comment><USER29> My point #0 wasn't specifically aimed at you, but at the general state of the economic policy discourse. Sorry about that.

Coming from a STEM field myself, the state of economics with wildly different schools of thought is quite perplexing. But I guess that comes with the territory, considering that you can't really do society-wide experiments on different economic models, and even if you could, societies are so complex it's very difficult to discern the effect of a single measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Any economic school of thought holds the answer to unknowns in other economic school of thoughts. The idea of following a specific school always struck be as desparate. Any economics thinker worth their salt would never subscribe to just one school as they would know, at least today, that the world isnt predictable and there are fare more externalities to considder. This is also why i am a big opponent of policy guided by economists. They should serve as advisors not policy makers which is often the case today.

<comment><USER31> Instead of listening to people who know a little, we should listen to people who know nothing at all ?

Surely I'm misunderstanding something here.

<comment><USER30> The questions is what it is they know.

You can be very wrong even though you are completely logical all the way down to your premise.

All policy decisions have consequences sooner or later. Economist can neither predict, save or create the financial market.

The things economists can say something useful about are different than what they are being used for. We should ask economists to calculate how public spending is going to be affected by various policies but the idea that they should be asked for advice on fundamental questions and thus what to implement as policy and not is simply a misguided idea to begin with.

People make the economy not economists. Economists should be treated as custodians not psychics which is happening all to often today IMO.

<comment><USER31> I wonder who you would suggest does better ?

> Economist can neither predict, save or create the financial market.

I would argue the problem is much more than the government selects economists based on what exactly they predict. For example:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/02/trump-picks-jerome-powell- to...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/02/trump-picks-jerome-powell-to-succeed- yellen-as-fed-chair.html)

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/09/obama- janet...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/09/obama-janet-yellen- us-federal-reserve)

In both cases the selection procedure gave up what these people did to get selected. Janet Yellen had strong academic credentials and a theory on how to prevent economic crashes, which clearly Obama was partial to. Of course we just pretend she wasn't Vice Chair in 2011, because that would be a definite fly in the soup. Powell seems to have been selected on a promise to take the market into account (ie. to try to preserve the inflated prices of stocks), which Trump seems to like, or at least he used to.

The point is, both people were selected based on their opinions. To say that their actions represent economists is stupid. They represent Obama's and Trump's philosophies, not economists.

<comment><USER30> You can't look at economics like that. Consequences of decisions made at one point sometimes take decades to manifest themselves.

The point is that the idea that you can steer the economy through economical theory is what is wrong here.

<comment><USER31> > The point is that the idea that you can steer the economy through economical > theory is what is wrong here.

I don't understand. That statement is so obvious I would call it a tautology. Of course you can.

<comment><USER30> ... and think you can forsee the consequences.

<comment><USER31> You keep avoiding the question I ask about who CAN foresee the consequences ...

Do you think the same about all the sciences btw ? I mean, there are plenty of systems much more complex than the economy. Climate, for example. Are they entirely unpredictable too ?

<comment><USER30> I don't avoid anything I am telling you that I don't believe economy is a science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Imagine you're the President and the economy just collapsed. You have two economists in your office offering advice. One tells you to spend a lot of money and go into debt to get the economy working again and the other tells you to cut back on spending and otherwise do nothing. Which one are you going to listen to? Obviously the first one's advice would be a lot more popular than the second.

If we begin with the assumption that politicians are selfless servants of the people who only want to do what's best for society at large in the long run, then you would conclude that politicians will carefully examine the theories and methods of the two economists' schools of thought. If we begin with the assumption that everyone, including politicians, is primarily self-interested, then you would conclude that a politician would just do what's popular with no regard for how the two economists arrived at their advice.

I believe people are primarily self-interested. From that perspective none of this discussion about economic theories matters because politicians are just going to do what's popular anyway.

The proposition that people are primarily self-interested is therefore in my opinion the only idea of value that's come out of the study of economics, which is the study of human behavior after all.

</comment><comment><USER33> As a layman, I think Austrian school lacks of quantitive ways to do repetitive applied work for fields and industries compared to the mainstream schools. And many of the tools and information sources were not available at Mises' time. Our society is based on calculation. Economics as a tool for management teams has to provide effective calculation for as many things as possible. People communicate and make decisions based on the calculation framework and the results. The world's economic states are modelled in a more or less approximate way. The school that can offer more "fact-based" and measurable data and results are welcomed by decision makers and the people work for them. Organizations need them. When many of organizations are using similar frameworks, the can communicate with other similar parties. It's easier for parties to make their data and results compatible to their own system. Just some random thoughts from a layman. And yes, I love Mises' work. But the tooling is missing for a lot of applications. There can be very limited actionable decision you can make if you adopt it. I'm probably misinformed, misunderstood and biased. Just some of my observations and thoughts.

<comment><USER34> You make good points, the main reason these tools don't exist , however, is that I thought Mises and others felt that economics was about logical deduction from the axioms of human action - Praexology. and thus there was no need for math or empiricism to validate the theories - they were Prima facie correct.

<comment><USER35> Indeed. And it is a good thing in my layman's point of view because we better explain things in a simpler way and reach conclusions with math only if it is really required. It's like qualitative vs. quantitative.

That said, no one would judge you for doing math. However, the important pieces (axioms) don't require it.

Lack of math doesn't mean anything bad. See Frédéric Bastiat and Gustave de Molinari. Both are amazing and no math required :)

<comment><USER36> Everything boils down to mathematics one way or another, even logic.

The trouble with praxeology is not the lack of math, though; it is the notion that results need not be validated empirically because they're based on logic. However, your assumptions (i.e. axioms) need not hold in nature and any number of mistakes could had been made in the reasoning process. This is why being based on logic does not make a model magically free of errors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The Mises quote is completely anti-science:

> But the main fact is that there are no constant relations. > Economics is > not, as ignorant positivists repeat again and > again, backward because it > is not "quantitative." > It is not quantitative because there are no > constants. > Statistical figures referring to economic events are historical > data. They tell us what happened in a nonrepeatable historical case.[27]

<comment><USER38> It doesn't strike me as anti-science, more like anti bad science?

If you can't reliably reproduce an experiment, you can't make statistical inference from it.

The reproducibility crisis in the humanities is very well known.

<comment><USER5> Mises' argument was that even a systematic pattern of results in economics should always be understood as merely a set of discrete observations dependent on historical context and unobservable phenomena and therefore no valid conclusions could be reached from induction, not even falsification of a claim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Last year, I finished The Great Transformation by Karl Polyani, published in 1944 (the same year Hayek published The Road to Serfdom), Judea Pearl's The Book of Why and Mastering Metrics by Angrist and Pischke.

The methodology of Austrian economics seems completely unscientific, I believe a part of praxeology is disregarding empirical evidence(?). Reminds me of something like Ayn Rand's egoism. It just seems to me you can't persuasively argue a philosophical theory without empirical justification

I have a more favorable view towards Polyani's methodology, who largely draws on historical sources. The historical approach seems at least some what grounded compared to the pure theory used in much of economics

Economic theory and statistics can't answer questions like "How much of an effect can we expect if we were to raise minimum wage by one dollar an hour".

A randomized control trial is the gold standard, and the way forward seems to be more experiments like the RAND Health Insurance Experience and the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment. Even these results and their policy implications are subject to debate, so how could pure theory even get close?

However, randomized experiments in the social sciences often aren't feasible for cost or ethical reasons. So econometrics has developed tools to work on natural experiments, or even observational data, like Differences-in- Differences, Instrumental Variables, Regression Discontinuity designs.

Even a brief skim of methodological considerations in economics reveals how much uncertainty there is. I am only a fan of economics (only high school and college microeconomics) so I'm likely wrong

<comment><USER40> >The methodology of Austrian economics seems completely unscientific, I believe a part of praxeology is disregarding empirical evidence.

That's exactly it, it's more of a religion you have to accept on faith as opposed to a useful model for governing a society.

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

>Austrians argue that that empirical data itself is insufficient to describe economics; that consequently empirical data cannot falsify economic theory; that logical positivism cannot predict or explain human action; and that the methodological requirements of logical positivism are impossible to obtain for economic questions. Ludwig von Mises in particular argued against empiricist approaches to the social sciences in general, because human events are unique and "unrepeatable".

<comment><USER2> I'd call it an axiomatic system rather than a religion. Austrians distinguish between theory and history (pretty bad name). Theory is basically the action axiom and what you can derive from it and history is the application of this theory to the analysis of the empirical world. Explaining the great depression through the lense of the theoretical framework would be an example of history for example. As far as I know there's nothing wrong with trying to predict the future through this theoretical framework but you might be wrong. This is basically Austrian entrepreneurship (sort of forward oriented history).

The way I see it from a science theoretical POV is that the action axiom and what you derive is basically the "hard core" of the research program (at least Lakatos makes the most sense for me with regards to science theory).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Good article, but a bit too long for me to participate into discussion. Will read the rest of it later.

This debate between neoclassicals and austrians reminds me of logicians and people from static typing systems endlessly arguing about which logic or type system is the best and complete, without flaws, inconsistencies and paradoxes. They are trying to reconstruct the world from axioms but get stuck at the very bottom in these petty debates.

In the meantime we have people which just whip out Python or other dynamic language, accept its flaws, but produce some real working software which powers the world. Similarly in logic, people just infer generalizations from examples (inductive reasoning) instead trying to build axiomatic truth so that they can reason deductively.

My 'real world' comments to that economic debate.

1\. subjectivity. Humans share 99% of DNA not only among themselves but also with pigs. It's evident that some people have subjective preferences, but vast majority of human needs are similar. Housing and food are obviously the largest markets out there

2\. welfare, ie. connecting micro to macro When you observe microparticles of gas (motion, collisions, velocity) you don't get macro (temperature, pressure, density) values until you put the gas into a container, ie. introduce a boundary condition. Similarly for economics, you can observe individual collisions (transactions) but unless you observe what happens at the boundary (scarcity of certain goods) you won't make it to macro values (wealth distribution, poverty)

3\. monopoly. You get monopoly when you constrain supply of certain good in the economy. This can happen artificially (pharma industry preventing other companies from entering the market because of inexperience and safety). Or naturally (network effects - all utility (electricity, gas, water, railroad, internet providers, law and justice) companies eventually merging into one). Because of natural monopolies you need a government, but only for those.

The last point about monopolies is the georgist (Henry George) critique of both neoclassicals and austrians. The monopolies are the cause of poverty and unequal wealth distribution, because in the money eventually ends up in the black holes (monopolies) and rarely make it out. The biggest market of all - housing - is a perfect example. All the money ends up parked in real estate.

George back then proposed a remedy. To price 'private property' as a service. The private property owners are those consuming the government services. Eg. Houses require guarding by firefighters, police against squatters and court system to resolve disputes. These services should be financed from taxes based on property then. But nowadays they are financed from taxes on labor (income tax) and consumption (vat, sales taxes). In other words those people that don't own anything pay for the services of those that do own.

It's likely no conspiracy, it's just one of those cases where people measure the thing which is easier to measure, not the one which is important to measure.

</comment><comment><USER42> I have posted it already but I will post it again (as a former Austrian).

1\. Mises, who did not work one day in his whole live in a private free market enterprise, has fundamentally not understood capitalism. He describes free market barter economies, e.g. in the middle ages, that have nothing to do with capitalism. At least he describes them very good, including, why interest exits etc.

2\. He fundamentally does not understand the need to pre-finance industrial production. The pressure to recover the debt gives capitalism its impressive dynamic. But in the end it is basically a ponzi scheme that relies on a) ever increasing debt, because previous debt is settled with new debt. b) a growing economy that allows the creation of more debt.

Mises got the idea, while thinking very hard on a desk in an academic environment, that companies "save money to make investments". This can not be observed in reality. Very few companies are able to do this (e.g. IT companies like google). Most companies take shitloads of loans to pre-finance new production in the expectation that this loans can be repaid,recoverd with future economic growth. e.g. selling more cars.

Gail Trevberg touches some of this ideas (I got it from a German book from 1998) in this blog post: [https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no- steady-sta...](https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state- economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/)

3\. Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump." — Ludwig von Mises

This is his biggest joke since it is a tautology. Every boom goes with a credit expansion and every credit expansion goes with a boom. It is the principle of a debt based society. He is correct that a boom always ends in a bust. But this is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.

This is how capitalism works: [https://i.ibb.co/9nms8xK/Net- Worth.jpg](https://i.ibb.co/9nms8xK/Net-Worth.jpg)

<comment><USER43> > Mises got the idea, while thinking very hard on a desk in an academic > environment, that companies "save money to make investments". This can not > be observed in reality. Very few companies are able to do this (e.g. IT > companies like google). Most companies take shitloads of loans to pre- > finance new production in the expectation that this loans can be > repaid,recoverd with future economic growth. e.g. selling more cars.

If I understand correctly (and I may not), Mises' position was closer to true in his day than it is today. The debt-based investment is a more recent phenomenon.

<comment><USER42> Yes, as "recent" as capitalism. The need to pre-finance industrial production. Basically I would not call anything before the industrial revolution capitalism. Free market economy maybe, but this is something else.

<comment><USER43> I'm not saying that it didn't happen before, say, 1970. But financing expansion by either capital (stock) or retained earnings was more the norm. Debt-based expansion became more popular starting around 1970 +/\- 10. (Or so I read recently, IIRC, here on HN. Can't cite a source immediately.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Secretary of Polk County Iowa Libertarians here.

It's an information theory issue. Information travels at the speed of light or less.

Hayek married his cousin, but he was right that information transfer over large distances creates huge latencies in CAP theorem analysis of Markets. To me, Austrian just means don't pretend information latency is zero or bandwidth is infinite.

<comment><USER39> The author (rightly in my view) doesn't group Hayek under Austrian.

What you're talking about sounds like transaction costs and information asymmetry, which are interesting. Hayek's work is interesting to me, even as someone who would self describe as a socialist.

His decentralized market solution to the economic calculation problem, the information from prices (price signals) tell producers and consumers to increase/decrease supply and demand.

But markets aren't perfectly competitive, there are monopolies. Markets are embedded in societies, they don't exist outside of them. Markets don't guarantee an optimal equilibrium. 50% of R&D spending is by the government.

He also did early work on neural networks, published The Sensory Order in 1952, 3 years after Hebb's The Organization of Behavior

<comment><USER44> It's deeper than transaction costs. CAP theorem, C being consistency, has many information processing frameworks as "not efficient" in that there is information asymmetry. Add on top this that market information is many times communicated over noisy channels, and that many channels don't have the bandwidth to communicate more than approximations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Long and interesting read, still working through it. He has numerous logical errors and he fails at refuting any of Mises' arguments so far in my reading. Perhaps Mises and his followers have not been able to construct as elaborate machinery as the neoclassicalists, perhaps it is not possible. Either way it doesn't matter, policy and action should and do follow moral (or immoral) principles. Modern economic theory is just the theology justifying it.

</comment><comment><USER46> This article didn't need to be written. No serious economist is an 'Austrian' economist. No one identifies themselves by the labels that modern day 'Austrians' argue about. The field has moved on. It's all about quantitative modelling, maths, observation, etc... Past Austrian school economists have contributed things, but the modern day 'Austrians' are basically neckbeards who argue on the internet about Hayek and Mises and contribute nothing new to the field.

<comment><USER47> Note that the article is from approximately 20 years ago.

<comment><USER5> It's also probably _increased_ in relevance since then, given that Mises-style Austrian economics has been much more successful in establishing itself as an important theory on the internet than it ever has been in academia.

Above all, it's a well-reasoned piece from someone who was sympathetic and proximate to leading contemporary Austrian economists.</comment></comment></comment>


Current Status of World-wide Dating Site Industry -- Markus Frind - <AUTHOR> http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/05/22/the-winds-of-change/ <comment><USER2> It's too bad it's such an ugly looking site.</comment>


Google Apps Now Supports Multiple Domains - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/06/google-apps-now-supports-multi.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 <comment><USER2> Thanks a lot for pointing this out, I've wanted this ability for years. My last company decided to change names and it caused me endless headaches migrating mail accounts.</comment>


Stanford CS 161: Design and Analysis of Algorithms – Spring 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs161/ <comment><USER2> has anyone here taken this course? any comments/opinions?</comment>


Congrats SpaceX on landing Falcon suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/679116636310360067 <comment><USER2> I sort of felt this was in poor taste. I get that Bezos feels that Elon gets more than his fair share of publicity but it's Bezos' fault for being so damn secretive that nobody knows what Blue Origin is doing or why. I really lost a lot of respect for Jeff today.

<comment><USER3> I thought it was pretty public that they are making an amusement ride for rich tourists.</comment></comment>


Carrot2 Clustering Engine - <AUTHOR> http://search.carrot2.org/stable/search

<comment><USER2> I did extensive research on this thing when I was doing my last start-up. It's a clustering engine, but it is limited in that it is specifically tuned to cluster search results. For example, it returns poor clustering results if you input a set of long text documents; it works much better when its input consists of a query string and a set of titles and short snippets.

<comment><USER3> where can I find publications, how this thing is doing the term selection for the topic description?

<comment><USER2> All of the publications related to the project are locate at

<http://project.carrot2.org/publications.html#ieee-lingo>

but I am no longer sure what the exact publication that would answer that question is

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only person that thinks the visualization is the smart part (and wonders why it's not the front page)?

<comment><USER5> both are smart. i definitely agree that this is the first search visualization that looked like more than eye candy. i mean, it is fun to use, but it also seems to be useful.

i love the tabs, too. news v web v images etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nothing to do with "Clustering"; it's a multi search-engine result filter, albeit a fancy one.

<comment><USER7> How do you think they generate the left side bar?

Maybe this page is more useful to you: <http://project.carrot2.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> grrr damn web designers .... I need to READ not to watch nice shadows everywhere!

... aw a Cmd+ resolve this, but the whole design do to hell nicely :)

<comment><USER5> huh? i was unable to parse anything after "grrr damn web designers."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is really cool. One of the most useful search engines I've seen in a long time, not to mention open source.

</comment><comment><USER5> impressive user iteraction, and fake queries seem to return good results. i'll use the engine throughout the day and see if the results are good 'nuff.</comment>


Marvin Minsky – Web of Stories - <AUTHOR> http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/1 <comment><USER2> You can see the zero bandwidth video phone at Nicholas Negroponte TED talk "A 30-year history of the future" \- [https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_a_30_year_hist...](https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_a_30_year_history_of_the_future?language=en#t-352192)

<comment><USER3> That actually sounds like a cool idea for a new wave of mobile apps...

Anyone remember the "emotion wheel" from that Microsoft Comic Chat [1] app of old? If I recall correctly, when you typed something like "lol" it would automatically pick the laughing image, and so on.

Something like that, with reconstructions of your actual face based on how your voice sounds (after you've trained it with a few expressions) should be possible with current tech.

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

<comment><USER4> Google Hangouts has a feature that sounds a bit like Comic Chat. When you type in certain phrases an animation will briefly play at the bottom of the window. Certain triggers I've noticed are "merry christmas", "happy birthday", "happy new year", and "lolol".</comment></comment></comment>


The IMF confirms that 'trickle-down' economics is, indeed, a joke - <AUTHOR> https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke <comment><USER2> No economist has ever described something he believed in as "trickle-down economics".

Many economists support policies that people who don't understand economics would describe as benefiting only investors, like lowering corporate taxes. But the reason for this is not a belief that the wealth will "trickle down" but to encourage investment and growth.

</comment><comment><USER3> My country is currently attempting trickle up economy. It gave monthly payments to mothers of two or more children (sometimes even one). It's a fixed amount per child. They hoped to boost fertility rates. Of course they didn't because people don't work like that. What it did is allow a lot of poor women to stop working some minimum wage jobs and spend more time with their children. Prices of basic goods predictably started to rise.

Now a new idea is under way. They are going to raise minimal wage to be around 60% of national average wage. There might be regions where this will be such a high boost up that 80% of people there will earn new high minimum wage. This will be of course financed directly by employers. Also they will bear some additional cost of increased monthly social security payments due to higher salaries.

What I think will happen is that this forcibly spread money will trickle up to the owners of companies that sell and manufacture goods that will be bought more by poor people. You definitely want to sell your stuff in Poland in the next couple of years. You probably would want to avoid hiring anyone for simple jobs there.

<comment><USER4> The thing is you cannot avoid hiring people for simple jobs, as they're local, physical and cannot be outsourced.

Especially with the latest changes to contracts. The only way here is illegal work, and of course it's illegal and risky for both parties.

Women taking care of children is precisely the desired (by the political party) and expected social result of this policy.

<comment><USER2> > The thing is you cannot avoid hiring people for simple jobs, as they're > local, physical and cannot be outsourced.

You wouldn't believe what jobs can be outsourced. There are hospitals and nursing homes in germany that send their laundry to poland because wages are lower there. There are restaurants in San Francisco that import sliced cucumbers from places that have a lower minimum wage.

<comment><USER4> Both of these share an important characteristic called volume. (Including due to regularity.)

Anything else would be already outsourced and/or centralized if labour costs dominate over transport. Polish labour costs are not even close to Chinese or say Romanian, while the hike is not big enough to overcome sunk costs in most other cases.

If you think aforementioned outsourced jobs would evaporate, your right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What did Americans think of Trickle Down Economics and Ronald Reagan at the time?

Reagan was re-elected by winning 49 states. (He lost only Minnesota, home state of his opponent. Reagan said he did not campaign there, as it was not kind.)

Make no mistake-- Americans heartily approved of the way the country was run. It lasted even one more election, as the older George Bush (Reagan's vice president) won.

Then the economy soured briefly and Bill Clinton swept into office. Clinton ran the economy well, too, which was another age of prosperity.

</comment><comment><USER6> The beginning and end peaks for the top 0.1% on the last chart are quite similar. If there were more macro data, would we see that sort of high concentration as the norm across history, and more income equality as an anomaly?</comment>


Thousands of Netgear routers are at risk of getting hacked: What to do - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomsguide.com/news/netgear-security-firmware-patches <comment><USER2> I bought a D7000v2 second hand recently to replace the piece of crap ISP router I had. Of course it's got a critical vuln and of course it can't really run openwrt

</comment><comment><USER3> This is why I run OpenWrt on all my routers.</comment>


What's your favorite distro, and why? Nov-2015 - <AUTHOR> The first distro that I used full-time was Fedora. That was a good experience. Until Fedora started pushing the "mobile" interface so I switched my laptops and desktops to Crunchbang. (My servers are now CentOS, which I don't have any issues with.)
Since Crunchhbang is no longer maintained, it's getting more difficult to keep up with Debian. The whole concept of "pinning" sources is a little crazy. There was a point where I wasn't sure if my dist-upgrade was completely botched. I was able to get Jessie, but the UI is starting to degrade.
A good friend of mine seems to enjoy Mate + Ubuntu. It seems like a popular OS with a strong community, but I don't really like the idea of Ubuntu using a weird package manager. I'm posting this because I'm at a point where I'm open to suggestions.
Will I continue on with Debian and the continuation of Crunchbang aka Bunsen Labs? https://www.bunsenlabs.org/ Or will I jump on the Ubuntu bandwagon? Or is there something else you recommend that I should look at? I'm mostly thinking about my desktop system, because I have a feeling my next laptop will just be a plain Chromebook. FWIW I like to skin my UI so that everything is "thin" and minimal.
Also, this is not a high priority, but I would like a distro that supports Flash for "TV" shows. Recently my Hulu stopped working because Flash is deprecated or whatever. I followed several tutorials to fix my Flash support for Hulu and nothing worked. But as it's time to overhaul my system anyway, I'll just wait till I switch operating systems. <comment><USER2> NixOS. I'm not interested in any other distro except Guix, which is similar. I've used Slackware, Red Hat, Gentoo, Arch, Debian, and Ubuntu in the past. NixOS won't botch your dist-upgrades; you can even Ctrl-C any time in the middle to immediately and completely abort, since upgrades are _atomic._ You can also choose to only download everything and only do the actual upgrade steps at reboot time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm on Arch with i3wm.

Arch has support for Flash, and despite its rolling-release nature, I've found it to be reasonably stable for a casual desktop user. Arch and i3wm probably also fit your methodology with regards to being "thin", "bare bones", and minimal. You may want to try Arch out, even if you don't end up using i3wm.

<comment><USER4> i3 is a brilliant DE for hacking, but I found it rather wanting for "normal" use, so I went back to Unity on Ubuntu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can't say I've had a good experience with ubuntu on a laptop. Very buggy with sleep/wakes. Often wifi and/or sound refuses to work after a wake up. Lately it's refusing to go to sleep at all when on battery but not when plugged in (!).

I've had good experience with both Manjaro (Arch-based) and OpenSUSE, though not on a laptop. One thing I have found important is to use a distro which has a good selection of third-party packages. AUR is perhaps to absolute best out there for this, OBS is also pretty good.

Honestly, for the pc I'm currently building, I'll be running W10, with a few linux VMs for hobbies. One of the biggest irritants of every single linux distro I've tried is the f'ing screen going to sleep while watching netflix/youtube/web videos of any sort. I've spent many hours googling for a solution to this, apparently it's one of the great technical issues of our era.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's funny about the screensaver. I had the same problem. My solution was to reinstall XScreenSaver and set the timeout to a long period of time. Of course, there's various energy-saving apps that might dim the screen and there's various places where things autostart from a reboot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was used to run Arch Linux, living on the bleeding edge and on the constant moving and packages churning that a rolling release distro provides.

For some months now, I am using Debian Stable on my desktops, and the experience is being very interesting. I don't use any apt pining, and just some packages from jessie-backports (eg: LibreOffice and Intel Video Driver), besides the official stable repos.

This distro is SOLID. My desktop runs very fine, and using a stable distribution means that it will keep running fine for months (years?), instead of that constant discomfort that a rolling release creates as your machine stability and usage potentially changes each day.

Of course, things start to stay a little old, but in the end of the day, it doesn't matter for the vast majority of packages. And you can always compile and install on /usr/local some applications that you need more recent versions.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm using Mint with Cinnamon on my main laptop. It works reasonably out of the box including rather great multimedia support.

I've used Debian for more than fifteen years and I wouldn't go back, at least on desktop. These new distros made me terribly lazy.

</comment><comment><USER8> You should probably specify that you're talking about a distro for _Desktop_ use.

I use Debian on a daily basis for servers, but I haven't bothered with a Linux desktop since about 2005.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really did consider that. If this was StackExchange, I would have been more specific, but I didn't want to rule out a great tangent conversation about Linux servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm using Xubuntu 15.04 (going to upgrade to 15.10, but holding off for compat testing for a week or two). I've gone through a ton of distros and I've liked this one the best.

I ran Arch awhile ago, got tired of things breaking, then switched to, in series, Linux Mint, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and then finally Xubuntu, which I actually like the look of. I'm considering switching to NixOS with AwesomeWM at some point, but everything's working pretty well for me under Xubuntu right now.

</comment><comment><USER4> Currently running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It has served me well, but I am planning to migrate to elementaryOS later this week. (I want to try something new, and I love the beautiful design of eOS.) I've tried out Arch on an old laptop, and while I really like the total control you have over your (bleeding-edge) system, I find it would require too much admin work to use on my main computer.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been using Linux as my main OS for about two years. I wound up biting the bullet last April, going with standard Ubuntu, and learning the Unity interface. It's actually pretty good...but I have migrated to Xmonad. The pain of working around a few missing utilities in exchange for tiling windows.

Love me some tiling windows.

Anyway, AskUbuntu on StackExchange is the killer feature for me. Beats a wiki or a forum all day everyday.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER11> Personally, I'm using Ubuntu with i3wm, and I'm extremely happy with it. It was my first distro, it works well, both on my laptop and on the server, and does everything I want it to do.

I don't have any experience with others, so this might not be an opinion you're very interested in, but I thought I'd add my 2 cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll keep i3wm in mind, the screenshots look similar to what I'm using now, pytyle2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ubuntu. Arch.

In that order. Ubuntu - getting things done. Arch - satisfying the desire for bleeding edge.

</comment><comment><USER13> No love for Elementary OS? It's based on Ubuntu so you'll get to use most of the Ubuntu-related assistance on the internet, and it's well near as pretty as you can get with Linux!

</comment><comment><USER14> Linux Mint on three laptops in this house, two running Cinnamon and one running Xfce desktop. Ubuntu package base. Meets my needs, hassle free, good community support.

</comment><comment><USER15> Puppy Linux!

</comment><comment><USER16> Debian sid. Rolling release like arch but doesn't break when you upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER17> debian with dwm.</comment>


An Open Letter (The DAO Attacker) - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/CcGUBgDG <comment><USER2> signature fails to validate here:

        $ helpeth verifySig 0xaf9e302a664122389d17ee0fa4394d0c24c33236143c1f26faed97ebbd017d0e 0x5f91152a2382b4acfdbfe8ad3c6c8cde45f73f6147d39b072c81637fe81006061603908f692dc15a1b6ead217785cf5e07fb496708d129645f3370a28922136a32
        Message hash (keccak): 0xaf9e302a664122389d17ee0fa4394d0c24c33236143c1f26faed97ebbd017d0e

        node_modules/helpeth/node_modules/ethereumjs-util/index.js:403
            throw new Error('Invalid signature v value')

<comment><USER3> Japp, troll.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The answer, an open letter to the attacker: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oo3ud/an_open_le...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oo3ud/an_open_letter_to_the_attacker/)

And according to this [1] (based on the signatures) the open letter from the attacker is fake.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oo1io/an_open_le...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oo1io/an_open_letter_from_the_hacker/d4e7efq)

</comment><comment><USER5> This letter is fake. Signatures do not match. Flag and move on.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oo1io/an_open_le...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oo1io/an_open_letter_from_the_hacker/d4e7efq)

<comment><USER6> Even if it is fake it raises interesting issues worthy of discussion, so I'd say note that it is fake, don't flag, and let's discuss those issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find this whole situation has an interesting parallel to international law. Unlike other kinds of law that are backed by the power of individual states, international law exists in this weird zone where it's kind of law, but kind of also the United States can do whatever they want because they own all the aircraft carriers and what are you going to do about it punk?

That's why it's funny to see Sealand, Hutt River Province, Liberland and other nation-hacking experiments say things like "The Law says this is our nation!". The law is an illusion that exists only in the shade of power, specifically power to provide enforcement. That illusion just doesn't work on the world stage. Any sufficiently powerful actual nation could come and take your island and no other nation would bat an eye. The only reason they don't is because it usually doesn't matter enough to even be worth the bad press.

Ultimately, The illusion of law in Ethereum is implemented on top of the power of the miners involved. The miners can and possibly will eradicate The Attacker's carefully grifted money if it suits their interests. Power trumps law.

This open letter is being written for two reasons: firstly, the power of the miners can be swayed by appealing to their ideals. Secondly, because this whole virtual legal playpen is still subject to real-world laws and, thus, state power.

It's fascinating to see how quickly this smart contract experiment has turned into a struggle between these multiple levels of political power, with really nothing at all to do with the letter of the law as laid out in the contract. Well worth the price of admission, in my opinion.

<comment><USER8> _> this weird zone where it's kind of law, but kind of also the United States can do whatever they want because they own all the aircraft carriers and what are you going to do about it punk?_

That definition should go on university books, seriously. A lot of what we talk about when we discuss "international law" is a contorted way of making this or that nation prominence as morally justified.

 _> and no other nation would bat an eye_

... however, this is a bit too cynical. The UK definitely did "bat an eye" when Hitler seized Gdańsk/Danzig. Russia is currently under sanctions after its Crimea annexation. Just because we don't constantly respond to crisis with full military force, it doesn't mean that we don't care.

I personally don't see the equivalence between this situation and international law, because this _can_ really be resolved by a higher power (the State), if necessary by suppressing ethereum altogether. In international relations, there is simply no higher power.

<comment><USER9> >> Russia is currently under sanctions after its Crimea annexation.

Aye. And who's going to sanction the US for Iraq and Afghanistan? Russia?

The fact that sanctions are imposed one-sidedly, only to the designated adversaries of the US is a testament to the fact that "international law" is just the will of whoever can enforce it (currently the US, duh).

<comment><USER10> While you could say that the invasions of Afganistan and Iraq were misguided or detrimental, they are in a different legal category than outright annexation or territory, which also violated a specific clause in an agreement signed between Ukriane and Russia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One important point here, whether the letter is genuinely from the attacker or not, is the nice summary, in "showing not telling" fashion, of the issue here: if the "The DAO's code controls and sets forth all terms of The DAO Creation," and the way to undo/mitigate what happened (forking) undermines trust in Ethereum, then we're between a rock and a hard place. I.e., I'd just like to call out the efficient and compelling rhetoric this letter represents.

<comment><USER12> The rhetoric of the letter falls flat to me.

It misses the point that the "contract" is also code, and contained a legitimate bug. Exploitation of that bug in most places would be a crime.

If I figure out that an ATM spits out hundred dollar bills every time I type in a certain pin, that's a crime. I don't get to make the claim that I was rightfully using the ATM.

The quote that "The DAO's code controls and sets forth all terms of The DAO Creation" is a disclaimer that is meant to protect the DAO from those who would seek to imply some sort of guarantee or warranty from the organization. In other words if the attacker makes off with the funds, and the DAO decides to keep the code as is, then as an investor I have no recourse against the DAO.

Ultimately the letter misses the main point. The DAO token holders are free to amend the contract code as they see fit thru consensus. The disclaimer never states the contract can't change. And even if it did, the idea that their would be some legal recourse for the attacker, should the community decide to fork, is hilarious.

So the letter comes across to me as something an immature troller would write. I'd be suprised if most sophisticated DAO token holders took it seriously.

<comment><USER13> But they so explicitly point to the code as the source of truth for the contract. Banking and trading firms use teams of lawyers to find loopholes in contracts and laws all the time. Why would digital contracts (code) not have the same level of scrutiny / unscrupulous behaviour? Guaranteed if big money is at play in the system non-code based exploits will be used by firms just as often.

<comment><USER12> The parties of any contract are free to amend the contract. You're referring to a situation in which one party of a two party contract seeks to exploit the terms.

In this case, which has an enourmas number of parties to the contract, 99.9% agree to amend the contract.

I don't thinks much legal precedent for a contract with thousands of parties, but it also means that there's no simple legal "source of truth" to the contract.

<comment><USER14> The parties of any contract are also free to exploit the contract's terms.

<comment><USER12> What does that matter if the terms are changed?? The attacker exploited a contract that will be given new terms by the vast majority of the parties involved, which prevents his exploit.

You could possibly claim that the contract requires 100% of all parties involved to amend, but I don't think a contract with such a larger number of parties has ever been dealt with by any legal system.

Add to that, that the attacker almost certainly committed computer fraud, and the attacker seems to have little ground to stand on. Contracts (or loopholes in them) don't give you the right to break other laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A fork doesn't deprive the hacker of anything. In a fork scenario, the hacker keeps 100% of the Ether he obtained, without interference. Every smart contract has been honored in full. It's just that everyone else has decided to start using a new cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER16> So much for confidence in future smart contracts in ethereum.

You have invested in an experimental 'organization' that is defined by the contract that is its code. The code supersedes any other interpretation of the contract. You have agreed to this. Now something didn't go the way you wanted it to, yet fully in line with the code, and you want to fork the entire currency to steal this 'attacker's' property.

Good luck with your fork, it will mark the official end of ethereum.

<comment><USER17> > You have invested in an experimental 'organization' that is defined by the > contract that is its code.

Greed trumps contracts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tend to agree with the letter. I'd probably feel differently if I was a DAO token holder, but I think forking the blockchain would be a severe compromise of the principles laid out by Ethereum and the DAO: the code is the contract.

Just like it was unethical for the banks to get bailed out from bad, risky mortgage-backed securities, it's unethical for the DAO to get bailed out for writing bad, risky code.

<comment><USER19> The banks needed to be bailed out or else there would've been a massive bank run on the scale of the Great Depression.

The people who made those MBS trades should have gone to jail, and they didn't. That's where the injustice stems from.

<comment><USER20> Then that is what needed to happen. Banks failed, therefore they should go away and be replaced with something else. It literally is that simple. By bailing them out we shifted away from capitalism. Which may not be bad, but let's call it what it is. Once we use our own capital to reinforce dead/dying businesses we give them incentive to get too big to fail, make all the cash they can while doing it, and screw everyone along the way. People would have been better off with prepaid cards and cash. We should have used that bailout money to make sure people got their money from banks. This is where the injustice lies. If we didn't send them to prison, we didn't have to PAY them for being criminals. Ugh they even paid themselves huge bonuses with the money we the customers gave them to continue screwing us. Remember them not loaning money though we just GAVE them tons, even though it was a provision of said bailouts? Saying it "wasn't their problem"?

Sorry, I'm jaded but when I see people say stuff like that it just makes me so resigned to the fact this is not the place I grew up in, in the 80's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Many legitimate companies take advantage of poorly written contracts for monetary gain. The terms state the DAO's code is the contract. It's just as if he was a lawyer or analyst, who did his due diligence, carefully reading the contract and finding a (legal) loophole. English may be imprecise, and a paper contract could be challenged in a courtroom, but with smart contracts, there is no need for a court, since the contracts are governed by the laws of physics (the VM).

When the stakes are real and consequences real, more money and smart people will be attracted to the platform, and over time smart contracts will become more robust. Without real consequences, what is the incentive to participate if the rules can change when they don't always go in your favor?

<comment><USER22> Yes, wording can be twisted. But the other side can mount the legal argument that this was not the meaning of the original contract. From [http://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/trialevide...](http://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/trialevidence/articles/spring2014-0614-demise- meeting-of-minds-contract-law.html)

      Strict construction might be the appropriate
      approach if we lived in a society where language
      was so formal, standardized, and known that every
      contracting party would use precisely the same
      words to describe an agreement.

<comment><USER23> That's more tricky, ethereum claims anything permitted by the code is the contract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Setting aside the question of whether the letter is genuine, the attacker is perfectly free to enjoy the ether he stole.

However, the rest of us are also perfectly free to adopt a fork if we wish.

<comment><USER25> Yes, but that would be breach of contract.

<comment><USER26> Can you clarify who would be breaching which contract?

<comment><USER25> The attackers claim (assuming that's who wrote the message) that he merely took advantage of the contract as written is at first reading a plausible one. To change a contract after it has been written and executed and to try to 'undo' a done deal based on actions the contract and its context fairly explicitly ruled out prior to the execution would seem to me to be against both the letter and the spirit of the contract.

I get why everybody is upset, but this was pretty much bound to happen. Security of this kind is an all-or-nothing item, you have to get it 100% right or it might just as well not happen at all. So all this backpedaling and fixing does absolutely nothing in my view to strengthen the concept.

The only way forward would be to declare this version a total loss and to do a reboot with a better core and then to see how long that one will stand up.

Rinse and repeat until one really stands (by then confidence will likely be quite low) and accept that it could _still_ go down at any point in the future.

A bit like the Monty Python sketch about the castle built on swampland.

Anything less will not do, either the contract is all there is or it is pointless.

<comment><USER26> Legally this all seems very esoteric and shaky.

Philosophically I wonder about this "the exact code defines the semantics of the DAO" clause because, well, nobody's suggesting to change the code; the fork proposals would just change how the code is interpreted.

Kind of like "this exact Java code defines the terms of the contract" but then a new version of Java makes that code behave differently...

So the clause depends not only on the Solidity code but also on the Ethereum virtual machine's interpretation of that code, and the question now is whether that interpretation is constant or mutable.

And, like, what's even the legal status of the [https://daohub.org/explainer.html](https://daohub.org/explainer.html) document? It has a list of things to which anyone who interacts with "The DAO" supposedly agrees, which seems like a typical groundless EULA and anyone who "invested" could just say "uh, I didn't agree to any of that stuff".

I'm not really making an argument, I just find it bewildering to even imagine how any of this stuff would be interpreted by lawyers.

<comment><USER25> > I just find it bewildering to even imagine how any of this stuff would be > interpreted by lawyers.

Agreed, and that's essentially what we're seeing here, some kind of rough equivalent between lawywers hacking human language and programmers hacking code. A 'smart' lawyer is equivalent to a hacker, finding a loophole in the law to enforce some novel interpretation of the letter rather than the intent of the law.

Trying to do an end-run around a whole bunch of established systems all to end up with re-inventing the exact problems of those systems that you were trying to get away from in the first place, it's kind of funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I assume this is fake.

To me, it doesn't follow that forking Ethereum to change it's behaviour would constitute "seizure of ... ether". There's no law to stop the Ethereum Foundation from changing their software protocol in arbitrary ways. It's theirs, they can do what they want.

There's money involved, but in that case it's similar to the scenario if Supercell decided to remove IAP from Clash of Clans and users couldn't use their gems.

<comment><USER25> It could be a fake, but that has no bearing on whether or not what is written there is factually correct. Judge the document contents on their merits or lack thereof, not by their provenance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It is signed - has anyone checked the signature?

<comment><USER15> It's useless unless you know who signed it; have a public key. Fake.

The real "hacker" made millions shorting ETH before the attack.

<comment><USER29> This is actually brilliant and is almost a no lose situation.

* Outcome 1: ETH is forked -> ETH value goes to 0, the shorted currency is pure profit minus interest

* Outcome 2: ETH is not forked -> Hacker gets $50 million

These are only the technical outcomes but the only social outcome I can see is a lot of suing going on. My suspicion is that it is unlikely that anyone will succeed in a legal challenge, but I'm not a lawyer.

<comment><USER15> Of course legal challenge won't be fruitful. In the eyes of the law using an exploit on an vulnerability found in a contract will still be interpreted as malicious or even criminal and thus illegal,

<comment><USER30> I don't understand your certainty - the point about law is that there is an exception to every rule.

Courts enforce contracts that contain unfavorable terms all the time. And malciousness is not a part of contract law. It's true that contracts can be set-aside (though not always) when they have a criminal basis, but it's not at all clear that this is the case here.

There was an unequivocal and unilateral offer made to the world in the text - that will be hard to read down as anything other than an intention to contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This whole ordeal has made me look at cryto currencies in a less optimistic way I guess, it's all Utopian this Utopian that, freedom freedom this that, until people realise that in the real world things are not as perfect as they imagine.

</comment><comment><USER32> How funny would it be if it turns out this was written by someone high up/heavily invested in eTH/DAO to push users to support the fork (which didn't seem anywhere near majority yesterday)

</comment><comment><USER33> " to the extent you believe there to be any conflict or discrepancy between the descriptions offered here and the functionality of The DAO's code at 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413, The DAO's code controls and sets forth all terms of The DAO Creation."

You can't say on the one hand that the code that lives on the blockchain is the absolute source of truth and then claim when someone uses that code contained in that contract to get rewarded for doing due-diligence that it was wrong. The DAOs hubris is what got the investors into this mess. I was for the forks until I read it. Game Over for the DAO.

In fact, the attacker has already won as he could also attack the other fallacy still standing - that decentralization somehow leads to a less corrupt system. Don't believe me? The attacker should simply be less greedy and offer 9 million dollars USD to each of the 4 largest mining pools to NOT observe the fork. He still walks with about 4 million.

dwarfpool 9.7% 1882 30.7 1.1 TH/s f2pool 12.8% 904 14.7 557.0 GH/s ethermine 12.4% 701 11.4 431.1 GH/s ethpool 12.5% 511 8.3 313.6 GH/s

This would give him the majority and incentivize the miners to not go along with the will of the DAO creators. And consensus still wins. Bought and paid for with money gained from investors who didn't understand or do due diligence before dumping money into a new untested type of organization. Maybe proof of stake will fix this mess. The attacker has already won by showing the hubris and lack of research on the part of investors and DAO creators. The DAO creators can't have it both ways.

</comment><comment><USER34> Touché

What the attacker claims seems reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER35> I have no stake in this so perhaps it is easy for me to make comments but here it is: if nobody agrees that there is any value in this currency then there is no value even if real money is involved. I could have written this a little bit better, I know.

So a hard fork is in essence the community saying that they do not accept that there is any value for them beyond a certain point. Nobody breaks any laws. The "attacker" can retain what they gained. Nothing changes. The community simply moves on to another island - it is as simple as that.

I am not a lawyer but I cannot see how someone can sue you for not wanting to do business with them purely from value perspective. Perhaps this is a bit of an extreme example but it is also as if I start suing everyone because they do not accept doing business with me while I pay them with seashells (once perhaps considered a valid tender).

<comment><USER36> so, the DAO contract is the only authority, and everything is on the blockchain, except when the collective decides it's not? you say "nothing changes", but something obviously would - "the attacker" would lose their money. and not because any smart contract decided so, but rather >1/2 of the involved participants.

of course, he's a thief and should not get the money, but maybe the DAO was flying a bit too high too quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, I know next to nothing about the DAO and Ether, but could some please explain this to me? The way I read this is that someone just proved that all code has bugs and if you use code as a contract, people will inevitably find ways to exploit its bugs and take your money (or, whatever, ether).

Is that what just happened?

<comment><USER37> Yeah. And it proves that ether is valuable. And that it is important to debug and beta test in small scale.

<comment><USER38> How does it prove any value?

<comment><USER39> If ether had no value there would be no talk of undoing the transaction. That's my guess at least.

<comment><USER37> Yes. And the fact that people are trying to steal them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am reminded of the engineering triangle, and like most code, the DAO code looks FC optimized.

There is a logistical asymmetry. DAO had to allocate resources between engineering the software and selling the idea to investors.

There is also an economic asymmetry. DAO can only use a small portion of the total fund to cover the expenses related to code quality. Funds for future projects have to be retained. Returns on investment have to be provided. Conversely, the attacker can potentially cover their expenses with all of the DAO funds. For the DAO, $1,000,000 of defense is a significant portion of operating expenses and has low marginal return. For the attacker, $1,000,000 is an investment in potential 70x return.

That's enough to attract sophisticated actors even up into the state level. But even ordinary fintech could pull it off.

</comment><comment><USER41> Well played.

</comment><comment><USER42> Mods, could you please indicate in the title that the validity of this letter has not yet been verified. The attribution in the title: "(The DAO hacker)" assumes that this is an authentic letter.

<comment><USER43> I find it ironic that blockchains promote the idea of anonymity while the community spends a considerable amount of time discussing who did this or that. It seems the hunt for Satoshis is an unexpected social consequence of blockchains.

<comment><USER44> But it's trivial to prove that it was the attacker, they can just sign this message with the public key used for the transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think Levine did a good job debunking the idea that a bit of disclaimer in the Terms of Service would preclude a court of law from considering facts beyond just the [exploitable] code of the smart contract. In the real world courts are fully equipped to handle situations like a faulty contract being exploited by insiders and outsiders alike. Fortunately the law is not a Turing machine. I think if the hacker who exploited this bug ever was uncovered it would not go well for them.

But the idea that any miner choosing a fork which blacklists this recursive split exploit is liable for damages to the hacker, that's just laughable. Can you imagine a universe where miners are legally bound to continue investing their hashrate in a particular fork?

The entire system is predicated on miners independently choosing whichever fork they want to support. The attacker is welcome to mine as much as they want on their preferred fork, just as any miner is free to do the same.

In any case, the market will decide how much the Eth on either fork should be worth. You can argue which fork you would value more, or which universe you would rather live in, but what's neat is ultimately the miners and the market will decide.

Whatever direction the Eth ultimately goes, one thing we can be sure of is that blacklisting is always possible to the extent that miners are willing or able to be compelled into implementing them. A campaign against blacklisting this particular address seems to me to be misplaced, because other than enriching the hacker it accomplishes nothing. Miners upgrade their code to express their preferences all the time. Miners can run "official releases" or variations on the same at any time. I think arguing that loading or not loading a particular commit proves anything about the future nature of Etherium is pretty speculative. You can blacklist an address today and not blacklist tomorrow. You can not blacklist today and blacklist tomorrow.

My own opinion is that Eth is very much still in Beta (or Alpha) and the community is still in Kindergarden learning how to write secure contracts in Solidity. We should expect these contracts to fail like this more often than not. If the miners vote for a "redo" on this particular bug in this particular contract I think it doesn't matter much either way. The reality is that Eth has a very long road before it can be safely used for its intended purpose, and that realization (whether it should have been obvious or not) will have a larger economic impact than this particular hack being rolled back or not. It's not like this is the _only_ bug in "The DAO" code.

</comment><comment><USER46> He can sue, but who and for what? Essentially the community is showing him a finger even if he didn't break the law. He will keep the money, but they simply won't be doing any business with him.

<comment><USER47> He can try to sue (in the US)

Next thing the IRS will go after him for the corresponding taxes on millions of dollars of crypto currency

<comment><USER39> So they pay the taxes. There should still be quite a bit left.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> So that's just over 50 million dollars?

<comment><USER49> 50 million Internet dollars. He needs to sell them for real dollars, I believe.

<comment><USER50> He knew what he was doing, and when it would be done. If you know this, you can short the currency and make a mint without spending the stolen currency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> When Ethereum was first announced, there was a lot of fanciful talk about trustless economies (much of it still easily available). I briefly tried to get a discussion going about the difficulty of verifying Turing-equivalent code, but the zealots thought I was trolling.

</comment><comment><USER52> I like this guy

</comment><comment><USER53> haha it's unavoidable they're going to sue him. But he seems ready :)

<comment><USER54> Ready and with $50M to defend himself?

I have no idea how you get actual money out of it, but if he does get it, that's a lot of money for lawyers...</comment></comment>


Is Apache Mesos a Threat to Virtual Machines? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/06/09/mesosphere-emerges-with-10-5m-in-quest-to-kill-more-fail-whales/

<comment><USER2> Yes</comment>


Creating a Planet Lisp mobile app in 15 minutes with mocl [video] - <AUTHOR> https://wukix.com/pl-screencast

<comment><USER2> Nice video demo.

I spent some time using mocl last June and wrote about the experience ([http://markwatson.com/blog/2013-06/interesting-product- mocl....](http://markwatson.com/blog/2013-06/interesting-product-mocl.html)) - very cool tool.

The sweet spot for mocl would be, I think, apps with relatively simple UIs, but with a lot of functionality that you wanted to implement in Common Lisp. My reason for this opinion is that mocl lets you create both Android and iOS (and now, I think, OS X) apps but the UI is specific to each platform. You would get the most benefit if most of the complexity in your project was non- UI code that could be reused across platforms.

<comment><USER3> Something I'm toying with the idea of doing is to write a common interface in HTML5 and having that in a webview, then using an evented architecture to communicate with a common lisp backend. This way your logic is native/portable and your UI is portable (although not as fast as native UI most likely).

This saves the pain of having to do some more complicated logic in JS where there's a significant speed penalty (especially in older native browsers) with things like crypto, but still lets you have a common interface/logic.

The only thing you'd have to write for each platform is the glue that sends events between the web view and lisp. I guess it'd be a bit like Phonegap on steroids if I can pull it off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess I should be happy that there's a (seemingly) profitable CL project. But I wish there was a free "Hobbyist License" (probably with some restriction like not being allowed to publish in app stores).

It looks like a very appealing choice for a side project I'm about to start, and a really fantastic project in general. But I can't justify dropping $200 just to check it out.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, this looks cool as hell, but I can't justify the expense to mess around with it on my own time. You guys should consider another pricing tier for hobbyist and/or non-commercial use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How much of CL does it implement? Which of the big libraries do NOT run on mocl?

<comment><USER7> It implements quite a lot of CL.

But it generates a static application. only a simple eval, no compile, no compile-file, no load, most code information is gone, etc. etc.

If the code makes use of various dynamic features of CL, then it won't run. Thus you have to port/write to a static variant of CL. But that's the purpose: small, static, efficient applications.</comment></comment>