Programming with proportional fonts is great - <AUTHOR> http://m-mz.posterous.com/programming-with-proportional <comment><USER2> I can't stand proportional fonts for programming. Aside from it being harder for me to read, inability to use any sort of ASCII art, etc, it just feels sacrilegious.

Not to mention my editor of choice (TextMate) fails horribly with proportional fonts.

But then again, I used to feel the same way about anti-aliased programming fonts, and have since switched.

Currently Inconsolata 16pt anti-aliased is my font of choice. It helps to have a big screen...

<comment><USER3> > inability to use any sort of ASCII art

That actually makes me support the idea of using proportional fonts even more.

\- If something's that complex you need a diagram to support it, that probably doesn't belong in your code - you should maintain documentation in documentation format, and doc updates shouldn't mean new code revisions. Throw a URL to the documentation in as the comment.

\- Diagrams could be illustrated much better with an actual diagram rather than an ASCII visualization of one.

<comment><USER4> Design documents and complex diagrams don't belong in code, but a simple ASCII diagram right there in the code to illustrate how the transformation tree is created:

\- is always within easy reach of the eye.

\- is harder to forget about when changing the code.

\- doesn't require you to download, install, register and fire up Visio Community Edition 2008 to add a new FileLogger node to the illustration of the data transformation tree.

<comment><USER3> Simple and complex diagrams can be made in any decent graphics app (Inkscape or Keynote are fantastic) and easily exported to PNG or SVG.

Personally I also have a lot of trouble reading ASCII diagrams. Knowing that pipe-slash-dash is a curved line, when the line is broken and the ends don't line up properly.

On a separate note, I suggest whoever moderated me to zero should read the HN guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "more text in an eye fixation" is not necessarily a good thing for reading code, because code is semantically more dense than regular text. I think one will not be able to absorb all information and therefore not get a faster reading experience due to re-reading. I find the fixed-width font example easier to read, because it appears not as cramped as the proportional-width example, and I can easier get an overview of what the code does.

<comment><USER6> Agreed - I don't think the speed-limiting factor when reading code is how fast it transfers from screen to brain. That's totally different with prose, where you often skip over almost 90% of the characters because the choice of words that fit the context comes naturally - not quite the same for function call arguments...

A possible benefit of fixed-width: say you take a for-loop (which you can probably recognise even skipping over 95% of the characters) - now your brain wants to extract the indices at which it starts and ends: it seems to me a fixed-width font makes it easier to predict where you'll find the indices in the given line. (Not sure if that's how my eye-coordination really works, but it feels like it does...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i don't know. Taking a clojure example :

        (defn say [word]
          (println "You said"
                   word))

This wouldn't be possible without fixed width. Now a lot of languages don't use that kind of indenting a lot, but in lisps it's mandatory.

Also fixed width ensures that you can write code and it will lay in the same way on other computers, regardless of what other fixed width font they're using. That's a big big point i think, since code is most of the time a collaborative effort

<comment><USER8> I agree, but I think it would be possible to have proportional text aligned properly if you are working above the level of raw text, as in with sexps in paredit.

<comment><USER9> There are good heuristics for checking whether spaces are being used for indentation. You can look at where they appear in the line, for one thing, and whether they're in clumps of two or more for another. In those cases it would be simple enough to make them align perfectly with the characters above/below them.

Of course, you'd have to decide which to do - above or below. There are reasonable heuristics for that, but they're probably more complicated and less accurate.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that it degrades perfectly when the code is viewed in fixed-width (which is good for tools and other developers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Or how about a font with proportions made for code?

I would imagine special proportions for markers like (){}[] and punctuation marks and fixed proportions for numbers. At one point the difference between that and syntax highlighting and automatic indentation blurs.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe for a fortress program [http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community/wiki/Integ...](http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community/wiki/IntegerSquareRoot) my brain will allow proportional fonts, but for anything else it is actually wired in such a convoluted way by now that it expects monospace!

</comment><comment><USER12> I switched to a proportional font by mistake when I started using acme as my primary editor. A few months later I realized what had happened and tested how things looked in fixed width. Turns out I like proportional better.

A big difference was probably the fact that the codebase I was editing used tabs for indenting and had non-ascii art indenting rules (basically just indent the next line).

<comment><USER13> Acme works very well with proportional fonts, although it doesn't do relative indentation well as a result (think lining function arguments up on the left paren). Still a really brilliant editor in many ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I honestly think fixed width fonts are only used because of fixed terminal widths, and when repeating instructions on separate lines was common enough that the shape of a line being different was a kind of proto syntax highlighting to show you'd done something wrong.

Ultimately, a space is a space in whatever font, so everything still lines up along the left margin nicely.

</comment><comment><USER14> Bjarne Stroustrup's _The C++ Programming Language_ has all the code set in a proportional font: bold italic Times. I found it at least as readable as any other programming book. The ideal typeface is different for print than for screen, of course.

</comment><comment><USER15> When I tried this I liked it, too, but after a week or two gave it up: I write code for others to read, and, sadly, _they_ will be reading it in a fixed- width font.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure I understand. Was using a proportional font changing the way you chose to format the code to such a degree that it annoyed people?

<comment><USER17> Leading spaces aren't much of a problem, but aligning comments on the right- side is much harder due to the variable widths of each line. And even if you align them in your editor, they'll be misaligned for people who use fixed- width fonts. Does that make any sense?

<comment><USER18> Use a word processor (or a text editor that allows for fixed tab stops). This will also allow insertion of diagrams and other non-textual stuff (think clickable buttons, for compilation and testing, for example) into source code.

See, for an example implementation, BlackBox Component Pascal - Windows only, but runs moderately well under Wine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think this is one of those "religious" wars things - although us proportional fonts people are much the minority.

I've used proportional fonts since the early nineties and written thousands and thousands of lines of code since then in a proportional font. I have occasionally tried to go back to a fixed width font but I can't be bothered trying to get past the "it makes my head" hurt stage. (and likewise I can't imagine a lot of fixed width people getting past that stage going in the other direction).

We can rationalise our choices all we like but I doubt that there is any serious advantage or disadvantage in either.

</comment><comment><USER20> In my experience, proportional typefaces only work for code if the IDE/editor is using a pretty-printer that uses word-processor style indentation. (That is, it uses tab stops as opposed to just inserting spaces/tabs in the text.)

The only IDEs I've seen work this way was the old THINK Pascal from the 68k Mac era, and its predecessor Instant Pascal for the Apple II. Anybody else seen a more recent example in the wild?

<comment><USER21> Maybe not an IDE, but the AppleScript Editor in Mac OS X (and Classic, IIRC) has you enter text in fixed width by default, but then changes it to a proportional font after syntax-checking.

<comment><USER20> Yup, completely forgot about the Script Editor. Though, as you say, it doesn't really hew purely to monospaced type, but more of a hybrid. (Hypercard was similar, IIRC.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22>
        Tomato  vs. Tomahto
        Bug     vs. Feature
        Tabs    vs.  Spaces

Either approach introduces about as many problems as it solves. I personally like being able to line things up with a few extra spaces to give some hints to my future self regarding the structure of my code.

<comment><USER23> Except for Tabs, obviously. All those problems are space-specific ;)

<comment><USER22> You didn't notice I right justified then. My peeve with embedded tabs is they are editor-defined and generally too wide.

        i       = 0.0;
        Tomato  vs.     Tomahto
        Integer vs. Doubles
        Integrals       vs.     Derivatives

<comment><USER24> Are you really using an editor that doesn't let you define your tab widths? I couldn't name a single modern IDE that lacks that feature.

(and extra points to the grandparent for the ironically mis-spaced "tabs vs. spaces" chart!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The second comment on the post:

Of course proportional fonts can be read faster. That's not the point. Programming uses lots of non-standard glyphs, has meaningful syntax (eg. parens, brackets), and often meaningful whitespace. You can real _words_ faster in proportional font, but (arguably) not _code_.

I agree completely.

</comment><comment><USER26> gvim hates proportional fonts:

      E596: Invalid font(s)

I just can't bring myself to use emacs.

<comment><USER27> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)>

Available for Lunix (Linux / Unixes / etc)

<http://swtch.com/plan9port/>

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure I'm smart enough to use it, much less understand it. I can understand that it's mouse based though, and I can't grasp how that would be more efficient for the way I code. I am intrigued by the idea of no built-in commands, relying instead on making external commands easy.. I guess I should look at Oberon again too.

<http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/>

<comment><USER27> It works best with the plumber, which is to pattern matching as file name extensions are many file browsers. Plumb a uri and it opens the browser, unless you added a more specific rule to follow a different action.

<http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man4/plumber.html>

For instance in Plan 9 I mount the file system of my webserver (across the internet), tail -f /n/remote/var/log/httpd/error_log.

An example error would be

[Thu Nov 26 15:28:15 2009] [error] PHP Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /staging/php/restricted.class on line 286

For which I have a plumbing rule

        type is text
        data matches '(/staging/[^ ]+) on line ([0-9]+)?'
        data set	/n/remote/var/www/$1
        attr add	addr=$2
        plumb to edit
        plumb client $editor

My apache is chrooted so I set the un-chrooted path with relation to my plan 9 (the remote server is mounted at /n/remote)

So in Acme I plumb the error message and Acme opens the file (if it isn't open) and scrolls to the appropriate line.

Ok this is nothing amazing in and of itself, other editors can do similar things - EditPlus on Windows can scan error messages) but combining simple things like this makes a bigger system.

Typing your own menus is also a great feature. You can whip up an awk script and apply it to selected text.

Here's a little one

<http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/maht/rc/exe>

If I type 'exe doit' in the current window, select the text and middle click it creates the file (in the pwd of that window) , chmods it, adds the hash bang and opens it in new window.

Again, not amazing on it's own but one builds up such things over time and there is no restriction on what language to use, I even have a few that ssh into a remote server and run them there.

There is no best editor, but Acme is the best for me.

Oh and if you middle click Font it switches between the two specified fonts (sans and mono by default).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's hard to keep code within the 80 char per line limit of PEP8 without using fixed-width.

<comment><USER29> then again, that's probably the most obsolete recommendation in PEP8

<comment><USER30> I really like having two 80-char wide Emacs buffers side by side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> ugh, syntax highlighting

this is what I use, it's available for Lunix too

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)>

<comment><USER22> > ugh, syntax highlighting

Care to explain? I didn't know there was debate on this point.

<comment><USER27> There is no debate on my personal preferences. But do you actually think that _everyone_ uses syntax highlighting?

Obviously Dennis Ritchie and Rob Pike didn't need it and though I don't in any way pretend I'm in that league of programmers, I am in that league of editor users.

<comment><USER31> As crazy as it sounds, for the longest time I used notepad as my primary editor. Then I switched to Notepad+ (still no highlighting). I'm now on TextMate (mostly due to my switch to OSX), but I find the syntax highlighting to help in quickly scrolling through and finding segments of code. If I'm looking for a variable, I just look for that color, etc.

<comment><USER24> You're on your way... Come join the rest of us in the world of IDEs. Once you've seen your "editor" autocomplete a member from another class (in a namespace you haven't even imported), there's no going back.

<comment><USER32> I can do that in Vim...

<comment><USER24> Sweet. My Vim sessions generally consist of issuing a dozen random commands before I happen to type an "I", followed by exiting, restarting, and cursing. Glad to hear you're having more success!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Game theory's cure for corruption - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/society/game-theorys-cure-for-corruption-make-us-all-cops/ <comment><USER2>
      > In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order.
      > They were everybody.

Attributed to John Peel in his establishment of London Metropolitan Police: "To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to _the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police_ , the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."¹

¹ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles)

<comment><USER3> > _In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. They were > everybody_.

Also in totalitarian dystopias.

The thing is, before you get to who the police is (and it being everybody can be OK), it's more important to know what to police for and what is considered an offense.

<comment><USER4> Hunter-gatherer societies that did fit this model could be considered to be the ultimate totalitarian organizations. Extremely strict rules controlling every aspect of the life of the members, from birth to death, and no deviation ever tolerated, under pain of banishment or even death.

<comment><USER5> Over most of human hunter-gatherer prehistory, the population was not _generally_ resource-constrained. (Rather, it was constrained over the long term by catastrophes, which could be related to resources, diseases, genetics, culture, or some combination.) Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation. One just walked for some time, until one was alone or in more accepting company, and then started hunting and gathering wherever one found oneself. This actually leads me to wonder whether "banishment" could even have been an actual threat, before the advent of agriculture. What if the tribe "banished" some people, and then a year later found itself migrating into wherever they had settled? Would it "banish" them again, if it could?

<comment><USER6> "Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation."

Do you have a reference for that? It doesn't jibe with my understanding of banishment, but my readings are from agricultural traditions. More specifically, outlawry under Germanic law, where someone was judge to be outside of the protection of the law. Full outlawry on Iceland effectively meant banishment from Iceland or death. (See [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/09-...](https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/09-10/0910hirschicelandicoutlaw.pdf) .)

I found [https://books.google.com/books?id=9ZkIAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA81&ots=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=9ZkIAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA81&ots=mcBgq8sJ5P&dq=banishment&hl=sv&pg=PA81#v=onepage&q=banishment&f=false) which says:

> By the end of the last ice age .... To be cast out of a band .. usually > meant total banishment from the society and eventual death, either by > starvation or as a result of aggression by members of another society > (Salisbury, 1962).

And here's a reference concerning Aboriginal use of banishment, from [http://www.ajic.mb.ca/volumel/chapter2.html](http://www.ajic.mb.ca/volumel/chapter2.html) :

> As in European societies, some crimes required the complete removal of the > criminal from society. In most Aboriginal societies, this meant banishment. > In such close, family-oriented societies, where survival depended upon > communal cooperation, such sanctions were considered a humane alternative to > death, no matter how traumatic they may have been to the offender.

Further, [http://rsc2012hscls.wikispaces.com/file/view/Law+Reform+Coun...](http://rsc2012hscls.wikispaces.com/file/view/Law+Reform+Council+-+Customary+Law.pdf) :

> Exile or banishment has been described as an extremely harsh punishment and > was not embraced by all Aboriginal societies.

This does not sound compatible with your conjecture that pre-agricultural era banishment was not a real threat.

Further, I do not follow the logic to "Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation".

Consider this non-real scenario. Humans can survive only be eating buffalo meat. There are huge numbers of buffalo compared to humans, so there is a food surplus. However, it takes 10 people to kill one buffalo. In that scenario, exiling someone leads to certain death as a lone human cannot hunt a buffalo. While the human species is not resource-constrained, a single human is.

Similarly, in Intuit cultures there were strong specializations between male and female roles. For example, it was women who were trained in how to sew the skins to make clothes against the harsh weather, while the men learned hunting skills. If a male were banished, I wonder if he might not have the skills to survive on his own.

<comment><USER3> > _This does not sound compatible with your conjecture that pre-agricultural > era banishment was not a real threat._

It doesn't have to be a real threat to be considered "extremely harsh".

That is, it's not just physical damage or potential danger that's "harsh". Isolation from the community you belong too could be considered just as harsh, from a social standpoint.

<comment><USER6> I do not understand your comment. I was asking for clarification as the statement did not match my understanding of banishment across several cultures, nor does the logic used to reach the conclusion make sense.

In this context I used "threat" as a short-hand for the previous poster's "Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation". I did not mean it as a purely physical threat. Indeed, the link I gave to Aboriginal customary law uses 'threat' for both physical and non-physical punishments ("In addition to the threat of being killed for a breach of customary law it has been reported that in some cases the threat also involved the denial of mortuary rites"), so my broader use does not appear to be unusual.

Therefore, I agree with your comment, as it is a restatement of mine. But my experience is that comments with similar structure to yours are meant to point out incorrect or incomplete statement. Yet I don't see how that's the case here.

Would you kindly elaborate the intent behind your response?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> " _Imagine a city where police commit blatant traffic violations and never ticket one another. The authorities could decrease power inequalities by developing an online system in which all citizens are able to anonymously report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included._ "

This makes sense to me. It infuriates me as a biker and pedestrian when police dangerously disobey the traffic laws. I see them do rolling stops, putting on their lights briefly to get through a red light, or speed up and pass me on the left as I'm making a left turn.

One way to do this would be to allow anyone to report traffic violations that they caught on video. So if I record the video of someone committing a violation, I upload the video to the town's website, they send the owner of the license plate a ticket.

That said, I thought that most of this article was pretty weak, a lot of meandering, incoherence, and conflation of different ideas.

One of the best articles I read on morality, game theory and evolution was here: [http://jim.com/rights.html](http://jim.com/rights.html) The author derives a theory of natural rights from game theory, and it makes a lot of sense.

<comment><USER8> The trick is still: who does the investigation?

<comment><USER2> A past idea of mine is: everyone. Every vehicle registration accumulates points at the rate of one per week. Fingering another vehicle deducts 5 points from their total and (to deter false reports) one from yours. If your total is negative, you can't drive/ride.

There's probably a great deal wrong with this.

<comment><USER9> This would de-incentivize the reporting of infractions, which is the opposite of what you want.

You want to incentivize the reporting of verified infractions, while de- incentivize false reports. A consensus system could be used to "verify" a report.

<comment><USER10> In this kind of system, I think the negative points are to remove the burden of confirming infractions. It's in an individual's best interest to both keep driving AND to remove poor drivers. Hitting the correct ratio is the key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have everyone empowered to dispense justice is an interesting proposition, but there's a big difference between insects and people.

People aren't all logical, analytic creatures, especially when they operate in groups. They tend to act on emotion rather than logic and it often isn't clear which information is factual and which is rumor. People tend to be susceptible to groupthink, and often go with the crowd.

Having everyone dealing out justice might work if everyone was calm, rational, logical, and well-educated, which is often what game theory supposes, but that's not how things work. In reality, I would think that such a system would result in mob violence, sometimes triggered by good information, but often triggered by hearsay and rumors.

Not everyone agrees what is correct behavior and what isn't, so what would be acceptable to one person would not be acceptable to another. We'd get a lot of uncertainty whether our behavior is acceptable or not.

If we had a system where a mass of people decided via some sort of upvoting/downvoting, it would be a "tyranny of the majority", where minorities would be oppressed by majorities just because they had different standards of what is acceptable behavior. Goodbye civil rights, because those would count for nothing if a member of the minority did something that offended the majority.

It seems to me that this is what happens in anarchical places in the world where authority has broken down. Anyone can and will dispense justice. Violence because someone was offended by someone else's behavior (which I find completely non-offensive) is common and mob violence is common.

Strong authority often breeds corruption but a lack of authority can also breed disorder and chaos, an environment where people who can gather followers become a strong authority and become corrupt. It's bad either way.

<comment><USER12> _> If we had a system where a mass of people decided via some sort of upvoting/downvoting, it would be a "tyranny of the majority", where minorities would be oppressed..._

Maybe. But isn't it an experiment worth trying? Does anyone really know what would happen in a modern, secular, money-driven society if you gave people more authority to enforce the law?

<comment><USER13> This happens in cyberspace all the time (just look at any HN discussion about airport security): what reason do we have to believe that in meatspace people would behave differently?

<comment><USER14> People behave very differently online and offline

<comment><USER15> No, not exactly. People behave differently when they believe there will be consequences for their actions. I may troll because there is almost zero repercussions to the action online. You see the same action in large crowds. A few people in a large crowd can easily start a riot by realizing their individual actions are not likely to be punished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk This article, like many, mentions the idea of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) but does not convincingly connect it to the particular nature of police corruption.

An interesting article; still, I tire of seeing so many articles introduce and anchor game theory based on the PD or one particular configuration of it. The PD is frequently overblown, misunderstood, and misapplied. Game theory is much more than the PD.

I think it is also worth mentioning that game theory isn't the only game or theory in town when it comes to thinking about society and collective action. For example, systems dynamics is also quite interesting; see Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows.

To get a handle for police corruption, I'd argue a theory probably should explain how and why:

      * corrupt police do/don't get caught
      * corrupt police do/don't rat each other out
      * police are/aren't monitored
      * police are/aren't incentivized

<comment><USER16> The Prisoner's Dilemma is frequently mentioned because it is one of the most fundamental building blocks of game theory. Almost everything else that we think of as game theory is either a variant of it, built on top of it, or is an attempt to tweak it.

The simplest version of the Prisoner's Dilemma succinctly explains both (1) why rational beings feel compelled to have a moral code in the first place, and (2) why they so often disobey the moral code that they themselves believe in. It's best for everyone to cooperate; but in the absence of a guarantee that everyone else will, it's in my best interest to defect.

Of course, you can't get from PD to police corruption in a single step. Lots of intermediate steps and computer modeling is needed to get there. But most of that is probably too technical for an Aeon article, so the article only mentions the first and last steps. A more detailed account of the models they used would be very interesting, but that's probably the job of actual scientific papers.

<comment><USER17> But the PD is faulty at it's core, because it doesn't take into account external factors. What if the criminals are in a gang that treats snitches very harshly? Or not in a gang but in a culture of 'omerta'? What if the criminals' career prospects are affected more harshly by a long vs short sentence? What if admitting guilt fast-tracks the criminal into a drug rehab course that the criminal is interested in? What if one police interrogator reads criminal A better and thus phrases the deal in a more attractive way? What if the criminal is on the third strike in a 'three strikes' location? What if the criminal is a devoted father, and can't possibly entertain the option of being away from his child for the term of the long sentence? What if the criminal is an institutionalised homeless person, and the idea of prison is attractive?

There are heaps of external factors that can affect this decision, from subtle to severe, and the PD doesn't model them well at all. As a base building block, it's not very solid.

<comment><USER16> All the complications you mentioned can be, and usually are, modeled as additional constraints on PD.

You can add arbitrary constraints on PD, such as a 50% chance that a third party will punish you for defecting. More importantly, you can play PD many times in a row and have each round's incentive structure depends on the result of previous rounds, sort of like encrypting in CBC mode.

The rewards and penalties don't need to be jail time, either. You can gamble with money, your life, or anything else you value. Usually it's done with some representation of money, because money is easy to measure and more intuitive to people who've never been in a prison.

The iterated (many rounds) variant is extremely powerful, as it allows researchers to simulate all sorts of complicated constraints. For example, other players might become more likely to defect on you if you defect on them three times in a row (three strikes). Certain players (the mob boss) might be much more interested in your performance than others, and defect on you much more severely when disappointed. You might be given an opportunity to reset your records (rehab or pardon) after a certain pattern of defection and cooperation, or maybe it will be game over (death sentence) after a different pattern. Iterate a few million times, and you've got a pretty damn accurate picture of how effective each policy will be in discouraging defection (crime).

Iterated PD also allows researchers to study whether a given incentive structure is stable, i.e. doesn't change much over thousands of iterations. According to the article, the incentives that give rise to police corruption are stable, but tweaking the constraints in a certain way can disrupt them.

More information on iterated PD:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoners.27_dilemma)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We don't have to speculate about how widespread power of prosecution might work out; there's history. [http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./Englan...](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./England_18thc.html) [http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html)

<comment><USER19> TLDR: despite Friedman's best attempts to spin otherwise, not very well, unless you have a particular fondness for punishments being either extremely draconian or purely financial and think justice is improved if the likelihood of punishment is more closely related to the wealth and connections of the accuser.

<comment><USER5> _...justice is improved if the likelihood of punishment is more closely related to the wealth and connections of the accuser._

Eh, modern justice systems have their fair share of that.

<comment><USER19> I haven't argued otherwise. But modern accusers aren't expected to pay for the costs of the prosecution and the witnesses, or enforce fine collection via escalating blood feud, and relatively few people would argue reverting to such a system would improve the chances of the likelihood and level of punishment being closely associated with actual guilt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems like the ubiquity of small recording devices that nearly anyone could own and use (like a cellphone) will have a larger impact on corruption than anything else we could do.

You may not have any direct power over the cop that just shook you down for a few hundred, but discretely recording that interaction and posting it on YouTube is likely to end his career in any society.

<comment><USER21> It seems like many of the cops who are filmed brutalizing people end up on brief suspension, and then back at their jobs shortly after.

For filming police to be effective, we need more regularly enforced punishments (like actually being fired) for police brutality.

<comment><USER22> Those who are actually fired are sometimes discovered working as a cop in another nearby jurisdiction shortly thereafter.

If you really want to punish a rotten cop, you need to prevent him from being rehired.

<comment><USER23> I'm not generally in favour of occupational bans, but I think that's a great example for an occupation you should be able to get banned from if you are found to abuse your position of power (much like caretakers). You wouldn't want to see a rapist nurse be employed as a nurse or a molesting teacher work in a school, so why should police brutality be treated any different? You abuse a privileged position, you lose the privilege for a reasonable amount of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> to be relevant, this same author writes a very interesting piece about pregnancy seen as a war of conflict between mom and infant

[http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a- battleground-...](http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-battleground- between-mother-father-and-baby/)

<comment><USER25> That was a fantastic read -thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > The results were startling. _By making a few alterations to the composition > of the justice system, corrupt societies could be made to transition to a > state called 'righteousness'_. In righteous societies, police were not a > separate, elite order. They were everybody. When virtually all of society > stood ready to defend the common good, corruption didn't pay.

Is this saying that the justice system _is_ the problem, not law-enforcement?

<comment><USER27> Righteousness is a problem in of itself at times, and the vision of "common good" enforced by the citizens in general will not necessarily be good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can someone tl;dr this? I skimmed it but the florid prose and the lack of any, you know, concrete suggestion (that I could find) really, really put me off (and I'm normally a huge fan of aeon).

<comment><USER28> Game theory predicts that corruption is inevitable when only a subset of the population is empowered to enforce societal norms. Hence, the only way to eliminate corruption is by empowering all of the members of a society to enforce societal norms.

<comment><USER12> Thank you. I really like that idea!

<comment><USER29> You really need to read the article in order to have an informed opinion of it. At the very least, you should take into account the author's own caveats around her conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe I'm cynical, but I can't shake the thought that this will simply lead to the formation of gangs/clans.

<comment><USER31> I think social media is a somewhat relevant corollary, where it self-polices content.

I'd say sometimes--like HN--it's a success. Good behavior is encouraged & enforced. Bad behavior is punished.

Other times--like reddit--not a success. The hive-mind is real there, and in particular well-mannered disagreement that is misaligned with the norm is punished pretty strongly there.

Plus we all have heard how their investigations of real-life events have turned out--witch hunts.

I think reddit's population is more reflective of the general population, unfortunately. I don't think self-policing would end well at all.

<comment><USER32> Reddit is actually quite a complex ecosystem nowadays. There's a lot of HN- quality subreddits focused on particular topics. I'd risk saying that most topical subreddits are sort-of OK. The rule of thumb I'm seeing is: the more niche the interest, the better the community. It's only when you start dealing with "normals" that you see the worst parts of humanity.

<comment><USER30> As a general (no just limited to Reddit) observation, the easier a topic can be opinionated the more noise there will be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This only works if all members of the population share the exact same set of values. Even then, it might be undesirable.

Mob stoning individuals for extra martial sex is an example of this behavior.

I don't think that would be desirable ..

<comment><USER34> There could easily be modern manifestations of this too. Mob beatings for a 1 percenter that they deemed corrupt. Humanity will always find a way to get too outraged over something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What is funny is that, if we sum it up with another article of this site : [http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/when-bad-behaviour- does-a...](http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/when-bad-behaviour-does-a-good- turn/) we conclude that a society without corruption (where every bad or coward behaviour are punish) is also a society without creativity !

By the way, this is one of the greatest article I have ever read in hacker news. Loved it.

</comment><comment><USER36> This article has interesting implications for the current attempts to revive community policing, which promotes the idea of police getting more involved and integrated into the communities in which they work, with the hope that they become more trusted and aware of the social landscape in which they are operating.

By integrating themselves with the community, they would necessarily fall under the influences of some of the community's norms, and perhaps be better tuned, and also more accountable, to it's norms of righteousness.

That may work in many cases, but the article seems to assume that most individuals in any community will promote righteousness in the community's interest.

What happens if the community lacks the social norms to enforce righteousness, especially with respect to the property rights and justification of violence? What happens when the "community" is hardly a community at all, but, due to its socioeconomic circumstances, is a place where suspicions of neighbors and incentives to cheat the community are pervasive?

Whose job is it to establish the norms of righteousness where they are lacking, or significantly degraded?

</comment><comment><USER37> On a very similar theme I was discussing the merits of requiring police to have personal professional insurance that pays out for a portion of any civil liabilities and is priced accordingly.

It seems somewhat perverse at first glance, but might actually be a good incentive if carefully structured and actuaries are also one group of people that might actually get somewhere with demanding actual figures from police.

<comment><USER38> I'm for this. I think it would get the same pushback that most good ideas for policing routinely gets: They'll say it might make cops timid. As if they're already too timid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Long story short: If you enable every member of a society to punish abuse, you get a righteous community.

But this has been known for quite some time: Transparency can fight corruption. That's why it may be a good Idea to put cameras on policemen, and that publishing public budgets is an inevitable step towards reducing corruption.

</comment><comment><USER40> Game theory as a subject is something I wish was taught as standard curiculum. It contains so many answers to so many deep and vexing questions and problems of our age, and it holds the promise of so many more. It is among the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century.

<comment><USER41> I will teach my son first Game Theory and Statistics and only then economics and law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If your mental model for something is so malleable that it can explain cancer and police corruption the same way, maybe it's not actually providing any insight and all you've done is distort reality to fit it. Just saying... Game theory is so easy to invoke

<comment><USER43> Or maybe it suggests underlying order?

[https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence?language=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> tl;dr

The main strategy:

Here's how it might look in practice. Imagine a city where police commit blatant traffic violations and never ticket one another. The authorities could decrease power inequalities by developing an online system in which all citizens are able to anonymously report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included. This sounds almost laughably simple, and yet the model indicates that it ought to do the trick. It is, after all, essentially the same system used by many online communities.

<comment><USER45> I'm not entirely sure I like that. Ever hear of brigading on Reddit, or "your personal army" on 4chan /b/ ?

That's the bad end of what we have to deal with. And it is easy to imagine every officer getting more votes than the city has residents... and we're back to square 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I thought the article was too lengthy/wordy, so I didn't read it all. I was curious if it described the same anti-corruption approach that I know was once suggested in India: "legalize one side of the corruption". That makes those in a corruption scheme think twice (or more) -- now both sides are equally punishable (thus create a bond by bribing/taking-bribe).

That's also a game-theory approach to corruption!

<comment><USER47> I would love to hear more about this "legalize one side of the corruption" proposed solution. Can you elaborate?

The article is lengthy but ultimately boils down to what one of the other comments mentioned: Game theory predicts that corruption is inevitable when only a subset of the population is empowered to enforce societal norms. Hence, the only way to eliminate corruption is by empowering all of the members of a society to enforce societal norms.

<comment><USER19> A logical consequence of legalising one side of the corruption is that a mutual incentive to conceal its occurrence no longer exists, which makes corrupt agreements more difficult to reach as well as more likely to be exposed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Pretty sure cops see other cops break laws far more serious than speeding and say nothing, every single week.

How can you expect any cop to be honest if they watch others break the law and say nothing?

You'll never change bad behavior if there is no penalty for that behavior.

<comment><USER49> That's a big part of what the article is about; so long as only the police can levy penalties against people for breaking the law, there will be police corruption.

<comment><USER50> What I would like to see is serious incentives for police officers to turn in their colleagues and give IAB unlimited power to spy on every aspect of officers' lives.

<comment><USER49> There are good game-theoretic reasons why that is just a band-aid solution, compared to empowering citizens to apply some form of pressure to officers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Did anyone else read this and think about the ending of The Stand? It's the same problem; as society scales, policing scales and problems start to arise.

</comment><comment><USER52> So, the world might actually work if all of us self-police ourselves from self-corruption.</comment>


The beauty of Git in Dropbox - <AUTHOR> I have been debating with friends about the power of git merged to the simplicity of Dropbox.
Hear me out. I can see a very cool feature when using git within a dropbox folder.
Imagine you are working on several computers (one at home, one at work, one laptop). With git, you can (obviously) pull to get the latest version of your branch on all your devices. But if you put your git repo on dropbox, you just fire your laptop on and your project will be up to date !
What do you think about this workflow ? Would you do this ? Do you see any problems with this usage ? I would love to hear more. <comment><USER3> This has been discussed before as a bad idea. Unless Dropbox has improved, you'd likely run into syncing issues like I did 6 months ago.

On the other hand, the top voted answer on this SO question demonstrates how one might use a Dropbox directory as a git remote, so that you can push code there intermittently, preventing the trouble with constant writes to the Dropbox.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1960799/using-git-and- dro...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1960799/using-git-and-dropbox- together-effectively)

<comment><USER4> I don't understand. Were you trying to put your repository _and your working directory_ in Dropbox? That does, indeed, sound like a very bad idea.

Putting just `.git` in Dropbox seems like it would be fine, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not a good idea. Dropbox has its own notion of how to resolve conflicts, while git spreads its repository over several files; if you commit from two machines at the same time it is entirely plausible it will corrupt your repository. If your only goal is to have your git repository "autopull" it'd be pretty easy, and much safer, to script that

</comment><comment><USER6> I have for about a year now done all my work out of Dropbox (via a symlink from ~/src) it works great for multiple machines and has added advantages, eg. I never worry about deleting files that aren't staged anymore, as I can undo the delete from Dropbox's website.

Git is for long-term version control, working out of Dropbox is like having a script running that stashes and unstashes every change you make so that its in the git-reflog.

<comment><USER7> I also do this, it's a great workflow I think.

There are occasionally conflicts, but I've never actually gotten a corrupted repository. All I ever do is go with the latest version of things using 'find' to delete the conflicts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been doing something similar for the last couple of years (SVN and Ubuntu One rather than Git and Dropbox). In general it works very well but you need to ensure that both computers have properly synced before you switch working between them or you risk issues with conflicts and/or corrupted files. Also you should have a backup plan in case things go wrong. In my setup I only keep the working copy in Ubuntu One with the repo somewhere safer. This means if something doesn't work properly I can simply create a new working copy. I realise Git works a little differently but it is always worth ensuring you can recover from failure as Dropbox and equivalents are all slightly less reliable than traditional file storage. The final thing to bear in mind is that if this is for work, some employers will be unhappy about their proprietary code being hosted on the "cloud" rather than on computers they control.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've created bare git repositories on Dropbox before and haven't had any problems using them as git remotes. They've only been used by me though, so things might get more tricky if you need multi-user access.

A few have mentioned syncing issues, so if you try the Dropbox approach, think about what the worst that could happen might be? If you can live with that, then give it a go. You can always setup other git remotes for GitHub and / or Bitbucket as well, in addition to a Dropbox remote, if you worried about syncing issues (although you'd obviously have to manually push / pull to these).

</comment><comment><USER10> When you save to Dropbox, you're just saving to your local machine. Then the Dropbox app pushes the changes to the Dropbox server. When you wake up or turn on another authorized computer, the Dropbox app on that machine polls the Dropbox server, and pulls the changes.

Conceptually, it's the same as using a hosted git remote repo, like Github. The only thing it saves you is having to type the git push and pull commands...not a huge savings IMO.

Besides that, the only advantage I can see is that the Dropbox process is private by default, whereas Github repos are public unless you pay.

</comment><comment><USER11> You might also be interested in SparkleShare which replicates the functionality of Dropbox using Git <http://sparkleshare.org/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I keep my personal repos in Dropbox (then my working directory elsewhere) - <USER2> still have to push and pull when switching computers (and make sure Dropbox syncs), but it's worked out fairly well for me. You can share the Dropbox folder as a sort of poor man's private Github repo, but you need some sort of out-of-band communication to ensure that you don't push to it simultaneously.

</comment><comment><USER13> Have you seen <http://git-annex.branchable.com/>?

</comment><comment><USER14> I use a similar workflow with SVN to great effect. I have never had a sync issue - whether this is luck or that the repository structure is more robust in this setting than Git's, I don't know. I would strongly recommend against using this as a collaboration tool, though!

</comment><comment><USER15> I find that as long as you save files and make sure dropbox is "synced" before starting work on another machine, this setup works fantastically. I occasionally have Dropbox "conflict" files, but have never had an issue figuring out which versions to keep.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've used Mercurial over Dropbox before and would caution against it. Somehow the repository got corrupted (I'm betting on a bad Dropbox sync) and then all the repositories got corrupted. Since then moved to bitbucket.

</comment><comment><USER17> I used this approach for my class projects a couple of years ago. It served the purpose pretty well. I used github to mainly collaborate with others while dropbox to use on different(lab/home) machines of mine.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sounds quite an interesting idea... make a git client that acts like dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER19> The convergence of dropbox and git was some of the initial inspiration for <http://projectmeadow.com> .

</comment><comment><USER20> I already successfully use this method between my work laptop (Windows 7) and my home laptop (Ubuntu 11.04) and haven't run into any problems yet!

</comment><comment><USER21> I do exactly that (syncing multiple computers with my work-in-progress files and data) with bitbucket.org.

Not sure why would i need to add dropbox to equation?

</comment><comment><USER22> It is also worth noting that Dropbox saves its own revision history automatically, just like Google Docs.

<comment><USER23> Only with Pro + Packrat:

 _Packrat is a Dropbox Pro add-on feature that saves your file history indefinitely.

Dropbox saves a history of all deleted and earlier versions of files for 30 days for all Dropbox accounts by default. If you have the Packrat add-on, Dropbox saves those files for as long as you have the Packrat add-on. With Packrat, you never have to worry about losing an old version of a file._

<https://www.dropbox.com/help/113/en>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I do this for several years with lots of repos. Not a single problem ever.

<comment><USER24> And I use different OSes – Mac OS X, Windows 7 and XP, sometimes different git versions. And still no problems.

<comment><USER25> So you never see conflict messages or conflicted files in your Dropbox? In the few cases I've tried a git working copy on Dropbox -- which is what I believe the author is discussing -- I've had conflicts.

For example:

        $ ls -1 .git/index*

        index
        index (blacktip.esquimaux.org's conflicted copy 2013-04-09)
        index (hammerhead's conflicted copy 2012-01-30)
        index (holodeck's conflicted copy 2012-01-26 (1))
        index (holodeck's conflicted copy 2012-01-26)
        index (holodeck's conflicted copy 2013-04-09)

It was only the index file and not anything irreplaceable (not that git does a lot of _mutating_ of files in general). But it rapidly ended my experiment with git on Dropbox.

<comment><USER26> I ran into this too. It was annoying enough that I ended up just using bitbucket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm confused, how is this better than just using github or bitbucket?

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically you don't have to pull anymore. An example of what happens to me every day: My laptop is connected to Internet all day long, and I work on my computer iMac. I keep pushing about every hour, and when the day is over, I just close my laptop and can go on working in the train (no Internet there).

If I hadn't been using Dropbox, before leaving work, I would have to pull, and sometimes I just don't have time.

(This is one example out of many)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Use a similar approach, except with Mercurial. It works. :)

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been doing this exact setup for over a year now. I sync between three computers: office desktop, home desktop, and laptop (all three computers run Ubuntu 12.04). I'm very happy with this setup, although there have been problems.

The major benefit is that I don't have to remember to commit and push my changes before switching from one computer to another. When I'm leaving work, I'm often in a hurry; when I get home, all of my work comes with me. Same thing applies to travelling with my laptop.

The major problem is that Dropbox occasionally fails. Because I have come to rely heavily upon this setup, a failure causes significant pain. In my experience, Dropbox has failed in 2 ways.

1\. I make some changes on computer A. Dropbox screws up when syncing the change to computer B. When I switch to computer B, I discover that the repository on computer B is messed up (HEAD has been updated, but not the working tree; or the local repository is messed up so that 'git status' fails; or something else bizarre). In this situation I must switch back to computer A, move the 'good' repository outside of Dropbox, wait for Dropbox sync to complete, move the repository back into Dropbox, wait for sync to complete, then finally switch back to computer B and wait for Dropbox sync to complete. You can imagine how this process would be extra painful when it requires you to commute back and forth between home and office for each step.

2\. I make some changes on computer A. Dropbox has silently stopped syncing the repository on computer A. When I switch to computer B, I discover that none of the changes made on computer A have synced. In this situation, restarting Computer A usually causes the Dropbox sync to resume. Troubleshooting this situation follows a similar course to situation 1.

I have communicated with Dropbox support extensively about Situation 2, and I believe that it is related to the '10,000 folder limit' for Dropbox on Linux. See the section "Monitoring more than 10000 folders" on this page:

<https://www.dropbox.com/help/145/en>

Git uses a very large number of folders (usually around 1500) for each repository. This does not play well with Dropbox on Linux. When Situation 2 occurs, Dropbox gives every indication that it is working correctly; files that are not syncing show the "green checkmark", and the Dropbox tray icon shows "All files up to date". Troubleshooting Situation 2 was a thoroughly enraging experience.

A good precaution is to push your personal working branch to GitHub (or your remote repository of choice) as a backup when using this setup. Treat this remote branch as disposable; if you rebase your working branch, you can just delete the remote branch and push your rebased branch (`git push origin :my- working-branch`, `git push origin my-working-branch`).

So, there have been some serious issues, but altogether I am very happy with my setup. I like the flexibility of not having to commit and push changes when I'm switching from one computer to another, and in general I feel the daily benefits have outweighed the occasional problems.</comment>


Anti-Anti-Wikileaks attack overview - <AUTHOR> http://malwaredatabase.net/blog/index.php/2010/12/07/anonymous-attack-against-anything-anti-wikileaks/

<comment><USER2> Very comprehensive post.</comment>


LeVar Burton on Google Glass: 'It disturbed me' - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/09/levar-burton-google-glass-expand-2013/

<comment><USER2> Pretty authoritative considering this is coming from the guy that got to wear the Geordi Star Trek visor</comment>


Uber VP: we could spend $1M to take revenge on journalists - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2014/11/17/uber-executive-revenge/ <comment><USER2> I don't know if someone has submitted the original BuzzFeed report and it's just been buried/flagged...but let's give credit where credit is due:

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests- dig...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up- dirt-on-journalists)

BuzzFeed's editor attended this dinner that was apparently "off-the-record", but such terms were not made clear to BuzzFeed, which is why we're even hearing this story. A few prominent journalists/publishers were in attendance, including Arianna Huffington, and I'm interested in what they have to say now that the horse is out of the barn.

But what really fascinates me is that even if Uber made clear that everything was off-the-record...what kind of batshitty, drunken affair was it such that an Uber executive could even think it'd be worthwhile to loudly muse about such a plan, as if no one present would ever leak such an abhorrent discussion. Either everyone was giving off a similar elitist vibe of hear-no- evil-speak-no-evil, or the Uber exec was saying these things jokingly while doing his impression of Richard Nixon. Or this exec is just incredibly stupid.

Edit: Also, Uber investors should take note of how wasteful this exec is. The Church of Scientology did the exact same thing in 2010...but they were able to hire a Pulitzer Prize winner, a former 60 Minutes producer, and the former executive editor of the top investigative news organization...all for less than $10,000 apiece (or at least the editor was, I'm assuming the other reporters received roughly the same rate)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/02...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/02/21/AR2010022103692.html)

<comment><USER3> Ok, I'll ask the obvious question. Why is this "abhorrent"? Is it also "abhorrent" that Sarah Lacy and others at Pando report on the personal life of Uber and other tech execs?

[http://pando.com/2014/02/27/we-call-that-boob-er-the-four- mo...](http://pando.com/2014/02/27/we-call-that-boob-er-the-four-most-awful- things-travis-kalanick-said-in-his-gq-profile/)

[http://pando.com/2014/10/06/venture-capital-and-the-great- bi...](http://pando.com/2014/10/06/venture-capital-and-the-great-big-silicon- valley-asshole-game/)

tl;dr; Why isn't turnabout fair play?

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure if you really don't understand or are just arguing to be provocative, but I'll play along to make the point.

It's morally equivalent to saying that you would fund a smear campaign against a judge or juror that ruled against you. It's one small step from making threats of physical violence to silence negative reporting.

The press is considered an independent 3rd party bystander that is a crucial underpinning of any functioning democracy. Making aggressive threats against the press threatens the roots of civilized society, and is "abhorrent" because it's a tactic used by nearly every oppressive/fascist regime.

<comment><USER3> Are journalists who dig up dirt without making threats a "small step" from people who use violence against people without making threats first?

There is a core difference between threats of violence (such as what is done by oppressive regimes) and threats of telling the truth. And it's a bit silly to call Pando and Sarah Lacy an "independent 3rd party bystander". The entire enterprise is an extremely opinionated anti-tech enterprise - kind of like what the Uber execs proposed building, just with a slightly different target.

It sounds like you are saying the people who call themselves independent media deserve special privileges that the rest of us don't get. Is that correct?

<comment><USER4> Sarah Lacy would be skewered by the public if she said her goal was digging up dirt against a specific individual.

Similarly, she'd probably catch some negative press if she made questionable statements in a GQ article.

So no, she doesn't get special privileges.

If Uber wants to open a newspaper to advance their political agenda, they at least have to go through the pretense of reporting on everything, a la Rupert Murdoch.

<comment><USER3> So the act of digging up dirt is acceptable. It's only doing it in a targeted manner, rather than opportunistically, that's the problem.

I'm sure she might catch negative press - lots of harmless behavior creates negative press. I'm not asking how to manage the media, I have no interest in being a PR flack. I'm asking whether reporting on her questionable statements (the sort of thing opposition researchers do) would be "abhorrent".

Similarly, would exposing and reporting on her personal emails and other parts of her private life (as Pando has done to Evan Spiegel) be "abhorrent"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to add to the charming profile of the paragons of virtue that is senior management at Uber[1]:

"...In fact, the general manager of Uber NYC accessed the profile of a BuzzFeed News reporter, Johana Bhuiyan, to make points in the course of a discussion of Uber policies. At no point in the email exchanges did she give him permission to do so."

\- So the CEO has publicly admitted to Calling it Boob-er [2]

\- Laughable disregard for Customer Privacy [1]

\- Thuggish/Predatory tactics towards Competitors [3]

\- Hit pieces & Misogynistic Statements about Journalists who cover them unfavorably

Why are investors falling all over themselves to give this grab-bag of egomaniacal, frat-boy thugs more money?

This is the real question for VCs and investors...is turning a profit the ONLY thing? then stop Bloviating about trying to change the world, about trying to attract more women into CS, etc. etc.

Actions speak louder than words.

[1] [http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests- dig...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up- dirt-on-journalists)

[2][http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201403/uber- cab-c...](http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201403/uber-cab- confessions)

[3][http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/26/6067663/this-is-ubers- play...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/26/6067663/this-is-ubers-playbook-for- sabotaging-lyft)

<comment><USER5> It's not just the disregard for customer privacy that's at issue here. It's that the situation with Johana flatly contradicts Uber's subsequent remarks that they would _never_ do...exactly what they did to Johana.

Screwing people is bad. Screwing journalists is just stupid. Personally threatening other journalists is borderline insanity. Turning around and lying about the safety of the threatened journalist in a way that involves the abused journalist — who can demonstrate that the lie told to the threatened journalist is a lie — is over-the-moon idiocy.

Buy hey, I'm sure these guys would _never_ lie to their investors, right?

<comment><USER6> Aside from the debate of whether he's a good exec, the argument about "lying" is perceived differently from country to country. In US, lying sounds like the worst thing eva. In France it's allowed to lie for your defense, even in front of the police or of the jury.

Just yesterday I saw a movie where the kid was accused of shoplifting, said "I didn't do it", then the commercant frowns, the camera focuses, eyebrows darken and he says "!and you're a LIAR!?". From here it sounds quite ridiculous because we know people are failible and they sometimes commit little frauds, which wouldn't have been found otherwise and therefore should be dismissed. Especially so-said "lying" can often be turned over if you look at the context, the lack of precision, the tone and the informal situation.

It _doesn 't_ mean the executive is a good person, he seems to have used misogynist comments, privacy tampering and threatened journalists in general. Just lying is not a demonstration by itself.

<comment><USER5> This maybe true of France, but we're not talking about France. We're talking about America. And in this country, lying to a judge (for instance) will likely get you thrown in jail on perjury charges.

Also, the relative permissibility of lying has no bearing on whether or not others choose to trust you. The real question has to do with how these guys manage to maintain the trust of their investors when they're so reflexively dishonest with everyone else in their orbit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Uber are not doing themselves any favours the last year or so, wow. Rather than sling words against a company that is already doing a great job at hurting their own image, there are tonnes of decent competitors in the ride sharing space that offer the same kind of service, if not better than what Uber are offering.

I recently tried out Lyft for the first time here in Seattle and I must say, it was a much more pleasant experience than I had previously had in my numerous Uber rides. Do not get me wrong, I have not had completely terrible Uber rides, but I have run into instances where Uber drivers have claimed to know shortcuts to get somewhere, only to find themselves lost all while the meter is running on quite a few occasions, I vote with my driver rating, but still.

Other reasons to use an alternative to Uber like Lyft is the fact the Lyft app lets you give a driver a tip. Too many times I have been in a situation where I had no cash to tip an Uber driver who helped me carry heavy luggage or items because the app lacks a tip feature.

I am not one for jumping on bandwagons, but I really do not like the kind of leadership and image Uber are portraying, not to mention the questionable business practices that were revealed a little while ago.

The power of choice is the strongest message we can send Uber that they need to grow up and be a real business. Vote by choosing an alternative if this bothers you like it bothers me.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can we all just agree that Uber, as a company, is a piece of shit? They obviously have no respect for their drivers, their customers, or the public at large. Their sense of competition is cutthroat and amoral.

</comment><comment><USER9> Normally I don't like jumping on bandwagons without due diligence, but there are just so many competitors that aren't being accused of being huge douches. I think I'll give Lyft a shot.

<comment><USER10> As far as I'm concerned, the nigh-ceaseless stream of reprehensible behavior coming from Uber and its management team more than serves as due diligence.

<comment><USER11> I really wish they weren't the ones doing the most aggressive expansion. Soon I will finally have the choice between my city's awful cabs and uber, but I really want lyft. :/

<comment><USER12> Keep talking about them, then. The more people are using Lyft instead of Uber, the more Lyft has the ability to expand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Apologies will go around, investors won't be held accountable, employees will be fired to feign action, company culture won't change, and they'll all end up rich(er), more influential, and praised by this very community at the end of it all. Such is life, sadly.

I've been a loyal Uber customer for some time, and have defended them in the past, but there's an undeniable pattern that's emerged indicating a company culture I'd rather not support any longer.

<comment><USER14> I think it's unlikely anyone even gets fired. They should, but I bet they won't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Two other HN discussions active.

This one links to a Pando post by Sarah Lacy, the journalist being threatened. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622187](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622187)

This one links directly to the Buzzfeed report. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622003)

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been to a couple of Uber house parties here in SF. The culture seems pretty pathetic - all the employees think they can do what they want because their CEO is aggressive and can run through brickwalls. Its funny how it percolates through to everyone.

</comment><comment><USER17> People complain about Uber's unethical (and sometimes illegal) business practices, but I think it's useful to entertain a different perspective: Considering all of the laws restricting hired transport, do you really expect a _nice_ company to enter the market? Many saw the opportunity but thought, "That business would probably be illegal. We should do something else." Meanwhile, UberCab (remember when it was called that?) disregarded the laws and went for the opportunity.

Obviously, this doesn't excuse their behavior. But it does explain it. In heavily-regulated markets, nice companies are selected against.

<comment><USER18> Alternative theory: Uber is run by an asshole, and that percolates down through the company to create the toxic culture we see today.

We can differentiate by looking at another highly regulated market: short term housing. AirBnB certainly isn't angelic, but I think it is fair to say it doesn't come close to Uber in pure reprehensibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It almost feels like this was setup to be leaked. Instead of paying $1M to dig up dirt, now they can just pay for a few faux-pologetic PR messages and have even more journalists worried about covering them badly in the future.

<comment><USER20> Except journalists can just write under a pseudonym?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not so surprised and I'm getting sick of all the fake apologies. Uber should be proud to be ruthless and change their motto to "fuck being nice" because it's worked well so far for them. Digging up dirt on your enemies is just part of the standard MO if you've come from a background in Washington.

<comment><USER22> The problem is they play up their "underdog being beat down by the bureaucrats and cab companies" (like a lot of other companies)

We should be shaming companies that try this, even if we like the disruption. People slinging shit at each other just lowers the standards for everyone, and makes everything slightly worse.

<comment><USER21> Oh I absolutely agree that it's terrible behavior but my point was not that I condoned it, just that they should stop pretending like it's not their true culture/nature. I'm more sick of people apologizing for something they did mean when they get caught.

<comment><USER23> Yes, whatever it is you do, you should embrace it, brag about it and wallow in it. And if you can't do those things, then stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady It's just one PR disaster after another with Uber. They have a good business - why do they have to continually act like scumbags?

</comment><comment><USER24> They should. It would make Lyft a lot more popular all of the sudden.

</comment><comment><USER25> I would do the same thing. Journalists, especially ones on sites like the verge.com, need to have a taste of their own medicine.

In this day in age, there is almost no consequence for starting social media mobs against people for the sole purpose of silencing opposing viewpoints.

#vergegate

<comment><USER26> If Gamergate has done anything positive, it's to finally drive home the point that anyone nonironically using "gate" as a scandal suffix should be taken about as seriously as someone who starts a disagreeing sentence with "Sir,".

Regarding Uber, I've switched over to Flywheel in SF & Seattle and am quite happy with it so far. Price is a little higher (except when Uber's surging), but it's a worthwhile tradeoff for me at least (and the drivers, at least so far, always know where they're going when I give an address or crossstreet and don't drive with a GPS in front of their face).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I initially got a weird vibe that this Uber crusade, started by PandoDaily, reeked of similar SV faux-dramas originally pioneered by Michael Arrington and TechCrunch.

Which is why I'm not surprised to see former TechCrunch tech-drama bloggers Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr stirring the pot in a CrunchFund/Arrington backed venture.

<comment><USER22> I'm sorry but I'll bite

What? In what world is what is said here OK? In what universe are we fine with a company going on smear campaigns against a reporter's personal life in response to criticism of the company and its tactics? In what dimension is Edgar J Hoover approved tactics suddenly OK, and a multi-billion dollar company joking about attacking specific people not absolutely repugnant?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> While I can't condone or condemn Uber's actions without more info, I also don't condone the actions of many journalists. To make it perfectly clear, I am in no way defending Uber's VP here. But what is said "off the record" could perhaps be taken out of context - maybe the VP was half joking? Thinking out loud? Far from an official statement or policy. Tasteless, yes, but not necessarily representative of other people at the company.

There are many journalists who simply do not do adequate research. In the age of one billion blogs, there simply is not the time or money to bring all slander, defamation, and libel cases to the courtroom. Many "journalists" or bloggers simply do not know who they are hurting or what damage they are doing (doing legitimate damage is fine, propagating false info is not).

Edit: if you disagree with me - totally fine, just let me know what you think - I like to hear alternative viewpoints! :)

<comment><USER26> The decent response to "powerful tech executive considers doxxing female journalist who reports bad things about his company" is not to spend one paragraph thinking of every possible way he could be exonerated, then randomly slag online journalists with no-true-Scotsman arguments.

<comment><USER28> I don't really care how "innocent" or "guilty" the VP is, just thinking out loud - playing devil's advocate if you will. :) That said, I still do think there is legitimate concern over the lack of consequence in general among journalists, although admittedly this was definitely the wrong article to bring this up on - I think I've started a witch hunt now :)

<comment><USER29> Please, just stop. You say you aren't defending this behavior, but you effectively are -- and it's behavior that is among the filthiest, nastiest behavior I've seen in two decades in this industry. This has absolutely nothing to do with your -- or anyone's -- "concern" about journalism; this is about a top executive at a top company threatening the most vile, most disgusting kind of retribution against a public critic. The behavior is entirely indefensible and inexcusable, and Emil Michael should (and no doubt will) lose his job over it. Kindly pick a different occasion to have a discussion about journalistic integrity; the only discussion to be had here is whether this incident is a single broken executive -- or an entirely rotten corporate culture.

<comment><USER28> Request granted. I think I'm only digging my pit deeper anyway :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How much equity should I be getting - <AUTHOR>

So, I've been working in a really small company (6 people) making an app. I wasn't one of the founders, but I've been working at half my rate for the last 8 months. I figure at this point I've "invested" $48,000 in opportunity cost. Though the app is making about $1000/day, the company has run out of cash and I've been asked to stay on for a few months while they look for investment. So, they're offering some equity. (I would have received some anyway for working at half my rate for 8 months.) I really have no idea how should start to valuate how much I should be looking for. It seems to me at this point I'm more a partner in this thing if I'm actually working for free and have already invested $48k as opposed to an employee you'd throw a few shares at for incentive. Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> " _the app is making about $1000/day_ "

Revenue, not earnings?</comment>


Python to Go Cheatsheet - <AUTHOR> https://www.353.solutions/py2go/index.html <comment><USER2> My god is go a cumbersome language. I get why the explicitly returned errors are a good thing but the complexity for parsing json surprises me

<comment><USER3> What?

// example for unmarshalling an http request to JSON

contents, err := ioutil.Readall(req.Body)

if err != nil { return err }

req.Body.Close()

user := new(User)

if err := json.Unmarshal(contents, user); err != nil { return nil }

// do whatever you want with 'user'

<comment><USER4> Why do you have to call `req.Body.Close()`? Does Go not have RAII?

Does Go have something analogous to Rust's `try!` or `?` operator, which would turn it into (pseudocode):

        contents, err := try!(ioutil.Readall(req.Body))

Or:

        contents, err := ioutil.Readall(req.Body)?

If not, why not?

(I don't know Go)

<comment><USER5> No garbage collected language will ever have RAII, the features conflict. Go does not have RAII, but tries to fix it with "defer" [1].

As for why not, you'd have to ask the Go team. But my guess would be that as a general rule, Go does not have language feature X. It's a very, very basic language deliberately lacking pretty much every modern language feature you can think of. The pro/con is that programming in Go is very delibarete. Go programs will only ever do what you explicitly make them do, to an almost ridiculous extent. If a Go program knows how to sort a list of customers, it takes 20 lines of code to make it aware of how to sort any other record type. Especially operations minded people this is a big plus.

[1] [https://blog.golang.org/defer-panic-and- recover](https://blog.golang.org/defer-panic-and-recover)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those fluent in Go first, this is good as a quick Go to Python reference too. Though good as an initial quickstart, this invites programming in Go using a Python-style and vice versa. Glad that there's at least a section on goroutines and chan.</comment>


Tech and Antitrust - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2019/tech-and-antitrust/ <comment><USER2> Couldn't agree more with the analysis- I just wish some of the politicians running on a "break up big tech" platform could show they've thought about these issues half as much as the author has. They seem to mostly be appealing to voters emotionally without ever diving into the significant details like "what is a monopoly", "are these companies monopolies?", "what good will come from breaking them up?"

<comment><USER3> Well, you can't completely understand the calls for breakup until you understand that the politicians don't really care about the traditional monopoly issues. They're upset that Facebook, Google, and Twitter have as much control over the political discourse as they do (note the missing Amazon in that list, modulo the fact that Amazon's CEO happens to own a major newspaper). If society is like a big collective brain as it thinks about the big issues, those companies have installed filters on a significant portion of the neural links and they aggressively use them.

I personally think this is a bad thing as well, and fully support breaking them up for this reason alone. In a perfect world, we'd carefully and thoughtfully craft new laws to address this matter; in reality, we're going to probably "creatively" read some existing laws in new and unpredictable ways to get some unprincipled compromise of what several groups want.

So I'm likely to be both unhappy at the theory and the practice of how they are actually broken up. Isn't government fun. But I do agree they need to be broken up.

This analysis is then useful as a conventional reading of anti-trust laws, but I fully expect that if a conventional reading of the laws won't get it done, then either new laws are going to be made or unconventional readings will be made.

I also think that these platforms are basically boned in terms of voters and public opinion. Consider two sets of forces on these platforms: First, the set of forces that want to insist that they carry any given piece of speech, and second, the forces that want to insist that they censor any given piece of speech. (Observe I'm _not_ breaking this up on conventional political lines; all sides have their lists of both types of things they want.) I submit that there simply is no solution for a single universal platform that combines all of them. Almost all even remotely controversial speech is going to be on the mandatory list from one party and the banned list from another, which means that in the public opinion war, every political side is going to have an endless list of grievances against these platforms, literally no matter what they do. There is no solution for platforms at this scale. This is ultimately what is going to kill them; even if the government doesn't break them apart, something will.

In fact, in my first paragraph, when I said they "aggressively use" the filters, I'm not saying they even necessarily have a choice, or particularly accusing them of "incorrect" usage. I think at this point, they're simply at a size where they're boned no matter what they do with those filters. I do have my own list of particular localized grievances, but if you don't have one now, you probably will soon. The latest YouTube demonetization purge is hitting a lot of weird channels, including... a channel dedicated to making completely a-political cartoon parodies of the Final Fantasy games? Everyone's going to be pissed at _something_. I don't think there's ultimately a solution to "the one big site that everyone uses". Applications to the stock price of the relevant entities left as an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER4> > They're upset that Facebook, Google, and Twitter have as much control over > the political discourse as they do

This is the part that resonates with me the most. It's about power. The tech giants have amassed power in a way not seen before. It's different than Standard Oil and the Bell phone monopoly. On the balance, consumers aren't being harmed as they would in a typical antitrust scenario.

<comment><USER5> > On the balance, consumers aren't being harmed as they would in a typical > antitrust scenario.

I would argue that they _are_. If private info is the new currency we're paying for access to these services, the price has been constantly increasing as more and more information is collected through tracking and "partnerships". This is one reason why it would be nice to put a dollar value on private data: to make this price increase obvious.

Real competition might look like delivering similar services without requiring as much tracking data to do so.

<comment><USER3> One of the problems with claiming that customers are being harmed by the privacy invasion is that the companies can demonstrate that they are only making a few bucks per year per customer on these "privacy invasions", making the most naturally _legally defensible_ definition of the "damage" being done only a few bucks per year, per customer. The argument at that point that the customer receives far more value than that is very, very easy.

Showing that they do much, much more damage to privacy to make that several bucks is going to be legally challenging, and trying to convince a judge that the damage is yet higher because of my aforementioned nebulous concerns about "the social fabric being censored at the metaphorical-neural level" is going to fail unless you get a particularly activist judge, because they're not supposed to be ruling on the basis of such abstract concepts like that. (That's supposed to be what Congress is making laws based on.)

One of the challenges to my mind here is precisely that on the whole, individual customers _aren 't_ being harmed. On the whole, individual customers come out ahead. For most people, this is an acceptable bargain and they are substantially on the winning side of it. It is only once a single entity aggregates substantially the entire market that society and democracy starts to be substantially harmed, even as at every moment, there was never a transition point where individual customers changed to being harmed.

<comment><USER6> I think the issue of pricing is harder than that - damages and the ammount earned don't inherently line up.

If I sit at an intersection and record the cars passing and sell it to the municipal government for say $500 and I note 250 cars they didn't lose $2 each. Just because you can make money off of someone else /doesn't/ mean it is exploitation.

Conversely if someone broke a MRI Machine to steal the copper wire and sell it for $5 it doesn't mean the hospital suffered only that much in damages.

<comment><USER3> "I think the issue of pricing is harder than that - damages and the ammount earned don't inherently line up."

If you read again, you'll see I acknowledged that already. It's just that the _easiest_ number to defend as the "damages" is the amount earned. But that number is so low that we're going to be trying to claim numbers literally 3 or 4 orders of magnitude higher. That's going to be much _harder_. Not necessarily impossible, but much _harder_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As Peter Thiel wrote in Zero to One, both small and giant companies will try to creatively redefine the definition of the market they are addressing, in the first case claiming that they absolutely own a small market segment of questionable relevance and in the second case claiming that they are small fish in a much bigger market than the one where they are enjoying a monopoly. So the results will be determined not by some objective standard but by relative political power of these companies and their adversaries.

As for durability, I personally fail to see how google and facebook are not durable monopolies - the network effects are so strong. In google's case it is even more than that - it is almost impossible to have a product of comparable quality without the users and the information about their behaviour, which is impossible to obtain because everyone uses google. Gone are the days when good search rankings could be inferred from the link graph of the web.

<comment><USER8> to me, ML creates an interesting question concerning monopolies when strictly looking at data-results. If I have the best data possible, you can't build a better-competing model. However, forcibly splitting data up among competitors creates worse models, which is not best for consumers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apple's walled garden's the only place a pro-consumer, pro-privacy stick has been successfully used against the broader software industry. The only alternative to achieve similar levels of privacy and safety are a combination of hyper-vigilance and just _not doing very much_. I'd hate to see that little walled city of sanity breached until the worst behavior of the various software snoops (Google, Amazon, Facebook, but also credit card companies and others) has been legislated out of existence, assuming that ever happens.

<comment><USER10> >Apple's walled garden's the only place a pro-consumer, pro-privacy stick has been successfully used against the broader software industry

Except that Apple has given the iCloud encryption keys of millions of Chinese users to the Chinese government [1], after forcing users to move their data to the Chinese data centers [2]. This gives the Chinese government access to Apple user photos, docs, messages, and other user data at rest, demonstrating that Apple is more for-profit than for-privacy.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17587304/apple-icloud- chi...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17587304/apple-icloud-china-user- data-state-run-telecom-privacy-security)

[2] [https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/02/24/apple-to-move- chi...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/02/24/apple-to-move-chinese- icloud-keys-to-china-servers-opens-door-to-government-data-requests)

<comment><USER11> > demonstrating that Apple is more for-profit than for-privacy

In China. In the other 194 countries in the world, this isn't true.

<comment><USER10> Intentionally ignoring millions of Apple customers is a _No-True-Scotsman_.

<comment><USER11> Fair.

Do you have any suggestions for any alternatives that are better in regard to user privacy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the article:

"Apple is leveraging their iOS monopoly into an adjacent market — the digital content market — and rent-seeking. Apple does nothing to increase the value of Netflix shows or Spotify music or Amazon books or any number of digital services from any number of app providers; they simply skim off 30% because they can."

If I download and use the Netflix app, Does Apple really take 30% of the monthly Netflix subscription payment? If so, that seems unreasonable because Netflix is doing most of the work of streaming the content.

<comment><USER13> It depends on whether you sign up within the app or sign up on the Netflix site and simply log into the app. Paying through Apple will give them the 30% cut.

<comment><USER14> OK. Then that's legal.

If you could _only_ get access to it through Apple, that could be illegal. Of course, only to the extent that Apple is a monopoly. Or at least a majority market holder? So, yeah, trying to argue that in front a 9 supremes, who are sticklers for getting this sort of thing right, is not likely to go well. We really should have changed the laws, and only after the laws were changed, should we have gone after the tech companies. Would have been much more successful.

Doing what we're doing is just a display for the purposes of getting votes. It's like the politicians don't even think the issue is serious, they just want to try to get some votes.

Which, I suppose, is their only real goal anyway.

<comment><USER10> The difference being, that _all_ app subscriptions and payments made on device are forced to use Apple payments as a supplier. The fact that Netflix is diverse enough allow an independent web payment option is a red herring, because there are many iOS apps that are not. Consumers are forced to use Apple payments by Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nutty idea for discussion. Should the US go in the other direction and officially sanction some of these monopolies with the tradeoff that they have to accept some extra oversight/regulation (ex. telecoms)?

It could be argued that some sort of oversight of these things is sorely needed. The well documented ability of mobile apps to influence behavior, and collect and exfiltrate the detailed personal data of US citizens at population scale presents an unprecedented national security risk - especially in the age of AI.

<comment><USER6> That approach is more sensible for exlusive markets like utilities. If a better product exists they can go the way of Yahoo quickly. Now it could be argued they have too much inertia and splitting wouldn't actually help much - even so it raises another big question.

What regulation would even help? What is the actual explicit problem that could be addressed and is it even something addressable constitutionally? There is plenty of sloganeering and FUD but little thought into what would help from even limited to first order effects. Break up Amazon retail into five and the one with the name would win.

Also how does that qualify as a national security risk? I know the term is used as a thought terminating cliche for "shut up and obey" but I just don't see it in any way which respects democracy. People have a right to communicate with the outside world which allows data gathering and influence. Taking action to leave people completely "uninfluenced" would be totalitarian control.

The "unprecedented threat" reminds me of the anti-Catholic "if elected they would be a puppet of the Pope" \- which shows utter historic ignorance given how kings interacted with the pope. He wasn't close to being in charge in a far more homogeneous and theocratic environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is all this antitrust talk directed at tech companies not just a way for media to direct that energy away from themselves?

</comment><comment><USER17> These companies provide valuable platforms. If you want to bring competition back, you will need a way to get ubiquitous platforms without the monopolies.

The platforms are going to be provided by decentralization technologies. Such as cryptocurrency, various content-centric networking, p2p everything apps, etc. Federation, where people host open services on servers and connect them is more popular now and may be a significant factor for awhile also. I assume p2p systems will eventually be more widespread once people figure out how to do it, since p2p can scale better/more easily.

<comment><USER18> I really don't see how p2p scales better in economic terms. Because crypto currencies lack central authorities they need mechanisms that are highly energy intensive to guarantee consensus, thus driving up prices for transactions. The same thing is true for a federated social network. The sum total of all federated instances is harder to manage than facebook.

The benefit of decentralisation is redundancy and fault tolerance, not the ability to scale.

<comment><USER17> There are less energy intensive cryptocurrency scaling techniques.

<comment><USER18> true, but they'll never be as efficient as a centralised system, because intrinsic to the trustless design is a proof of work or proof of stake, which is to say the investment of resources to drive up the cost for any given actor, to make owning the system impossible. There is no way around this by design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We have two "monopoly" problems here... the legal, and the political. Even for companies that are probably not legally monopolies, like Facebook, consumers are very uncomfortable with them, and politicians are leveraging that consumer fear. So if antitrust doesn't work, think about where politicians might turn next.

Or they may just go on making blathering promises with no intent to keep them, like they do about, say, Citizens United.</comment>