Ask HN:  Call for action. All welcome to Vote – What is the future of YC? - <AUTHOR>

Your comments are welcomed, but if you don t have much time for that, a feedback of the form a,b,c to the question:
YC: From Incubator to a) Biz Franchise?  b)  VC ?  c) Biz practical Education ?'
is going to help get a sense of how the YC change affects its culture.
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
OK before starting, I want to clarify that I really like and respect what PG and his team does with YC.
What I would like to mention is that after the latest development of funding every YC team (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_10/b4218038672660.htm), YC has changed the business model that is following. I do not know if this is planned change or a result of trust and appreciation from Ron Conway. As a matter of fact I really like the vote of confidence from Mr Conway to all these prominent entrepreneurs. Now lets break it down a bit.
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-- Period A What it used to be. A home grown set of teams (8 teams), after a selection from relatively narrow sample (startups primarily focused to software ventures, with founders that can hack their way to prototype and which address a relatively big market). The above was nurtured with close relationships, that beyond common interest had a sense of common dream (according to PG a team can change their initial model, based on advice given). What is the new identity of YC? (is YC pivoting?)
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-- Period B A batch of 43 teams. I am sure that the networking logistics are a big advantage (http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html ==> paragraph about size), but the intimacy level will probably change (I do not want to be pessimistic but this is a probable outcome of the growth). Now is this good of bad? Positive 1) Bigger network 2) More traction 3) Even with same chances of succeeding, the financial outcome better. e.g. with 2 (10 % chance) good exits in 20 teams(in a year), maybe a 5-10 million exit after 2-3 years, but with 8 (10%) good exits from 86 teams, the prospective outcome is 40-80 million exit. Now if you can achieve this with the same structure (people-resources), then this is an amazing productivity boost. However the differentiator of Period A was the close relationship with PG and teams. This is not going to be the main rule for Period B. Now if the skills-mentorship of PG are transferable or shared by new instructors in YC, then maybe we are talking about a franchise style mentoring. This is possible, but surely there will be imitators with probably similar success rates. This model seems a bit more like a "practical business MBA". Maybe Universities will try this model as well. What about the 150.000 for each team? This is actually a tricky point. VCs or even Angel Investors work with the 1/10 rule. If you want to fund 10/10 then to keep the same rate of success you need to fund another 90 startups outside YC(I don't know if Mr Conway funds so many startups). Moreover we have another shift. The YC looks no longer like an incubator, but rather like an Angel VC which has already invested from day-1 to all teams. Quite a bet to take, considering that most teams don't have the working prototype beforehand. Hope that all goes well for YC, because we definitely want to see more success stories.
So, what do you think? How will YC evolve after the latest changes? </comment><comment><USER2> who are you?

<comment><AUTHOR> A reader of the list.</comment></comment>


Translating "The Economist" Behind China's Great Firewall - <AUTHOR> http://waxy.org/2009/02/translating_the_economist/ <comment><USER2> If I were the publisher of the Economist I'd highlight these chaps in an article and include the paragraph: "The Economist is sensitive to the desire of the Chinese state to avoid offense regarding certain controversial topics, for example political issues in Taiwan or Tibet. The Economist has no desire to offend the Chinese state.

Accordingly, The Economist hereby renounces any economic interest in the publication rights in China, and translation rights in simplified Chinese, to any article which any governmental organization in China determines is illegal or otherwise contrary to the public interest. Putting these rights in the public domain makes it absolutely impossible for The Economist to ever profit from their exercise.

No need to thank us, China, your continued high opinion of us is more than thanks enough. And believe us, the feeling is mutual."</comment>


Doing an Ironman - <AUTHOR> http://bytepawn.com/2008/09/22/doing-an-ironman/

<comment><USER2> nice timing. after reading about the nyc tri back in july i decided to give it a serious go next summer. so i started training and have already lost about 15 lbs in bout 7 weeks.

the nyc tri is an olympic distance tri and i would seriously suggest that you increment your load over time to work up to an ironman. beyond ironman and olympic distance there are triathlon events at various distances being held all the time all over the world. as a precursor to the nyc tri i am working up towards a half-olympic distance as a first test of my abilities (or lack thereof).

also, not to be forgotten is diet! along with swim, bike, run, weights you can not forget the diet. rule number one? stop drinking soda. rule number two? stop eating crap with high fructose corn syrup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations!! When is your next Ironman? (I have many friends who do Ironman triathlons and it is scary how fit they are and how important training is part of their lifestyle).

For those who don't know about Ironman training, the volume of Ironman training (15hr/week) etc. - the whole purpose of those hundreds of hours of training is so that the athlete does not go anaerobic during the race (lactic acid). Once you go anaerobic, your chances of completing the race diminish greatly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

Next season I'll 1\. do the half-Ironman, goal is to improve my PB of 5:30 to 5:00ish and 2\. run a marathon, anything lower than 3:30 would kick ass. (I've never ran "just" a marathon.)

I plan to return to the Ironman in 2 years and improve my time to sub-12:00. That should be pretty simple since I would've finished 12:30ish this year were it not for the fact that all season I ran on a rubber track and my feet couldn't take the asphalt at the race (last 10km went out the window).

<comment><USER4> I actually began casually training for a triathlon "sprint" which is a great lead into the sport.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triathlon#Standard_race_distanc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triathlon#Standard_race_distances)

I figure its the perfect length to get into it - each individual section I could do right now, but the combined effort will be killer :)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's almost counter-intuitive, but I was a lot more exhausted after the half- Ironman than after the Ironman. I pushed myself a lot harder during the swim and especially the bike leg at the half-distance race. At the full race I was more easy-going, making sure I'd finish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats on such an amazing accomplishment. I have triathlon on my list of goals for the next couple years, with the eventual goal of doing the Ironman. Definitely looking forward to getting to that level.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Good plans =) Start training and see how you like it. Also, once you invest in a nice triathlon bike, you pretty much have to take it out every weekend anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> the ironman-class tri is at the extreme end of the spectrum of athletic accomplishments. as a regular marathoner, i recommend starting small before taking on such a goal. 10k runs, 30 minute swims...you'll be happier and less likely to be injured. gradually increase what you take on.

<comment><USER7> On that note, I highly recommend "The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer". It starts at zero.

After I finish my third (in 13 days), I plan to look at longer things, and will definitely check out "Going Long".</comment></comment>


Minimalist shell in C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/olalonde/dashell <comment><USER2> These things make me afraid of setuid security vulnerabilities...

To clarify, the shell will have the permissions of its owner. So if its owner is the admin, for example, any common user that has access to the shell can do bad things.</comment>


Classic failure of brand reputation management - <AUTHOR> http://www.brandcurrency.co.uk/Pontins_Into_Administration_-_classic_failure_of_brand_reputation_managementhttp://www.brandcurrency.co.uk/Pontins_Into_Administration_-_classic_failure_of_brand_reputation_management

<comment><USER2> I doubt that negative reviews online could be responsible for a company like this going out of business. The Article falsely assumes a connection to some complaints and their failure. They more than likely had deep ingrained issues which they had not overcome in many years.</comment>


Adobe should fire Shantanu Narayen - <AUTHOR> http://www.codfusion.com/blog/post.cfm/adobe-should-fire-shantanu-narayen

<comment><USER2> _Since even before the Macromedia merger, Adobe has been dangerously dependent on a small number of core products: Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat. They typically mask their individual products in the CS branded suites, but the fact remains that after several years they are still unable to properly diversify their income across more products._

Actually that's not true. They've done very well with their enterprise software like LiveCycle, it's just not so familiar to people who write blogs.</comment>


Prediction: AirBnb goes down over spreading bedbugs. - <AUTHOR>

I was reading some comments about Airbnb and the various aspect of airbnb and it flaunting local regulations. In the end, I think AirBnb spreading bedbugs take it down. Everything else if harder to empathize with. <comment><USER2> Except many hotels also have bedbugs and they haven't gone out of business...

Also, a listing on AirBnB having bed bugs affects the seller strongly, but not so much BnB. To an extent, people reasonably don't blame AirBnB for bad listings too often

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm talking about guests spreading bedbugs to other apartments in the building.

<comment><USER2> My bad, I misunderstood -- while I don't want to think of that as AirBnB's problem (a person who is motivated to lease the apt will find a way to), it is the case that AirBnB is probably introducing a lot of people who might not lease their apartments out...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.bedbugregistry.com/](http://www.bedbugregistry.com/)</comment>


GoldPlay – Listen to Now, rethink music discovery - <AUTHOR> http://goldplaymusic.com <comment><AUTHOR> GoldPlay is a music discovery app focused on delivering trending new music daily. GoldPlay's emphasis is on promotional music and pre-licensed content, curated from across the internet. Music is presented without genre in an endless feed that refreshes every 30 days.</comment>


How Chinese gangs are laundering drug money through Vancouver real estate - <AUTHOR> https://globalnews.ca/news/4149818/vancouver-cautionary-tale-money-laundering-drugs/ <comment><USER2> The most important line here is at the bottom: "(c) Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc."</comment>


Today the internet is 50 years old - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/1189128206466637824 <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384191](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384191)</comment>


An Open Letter to U.S. Dollar Owners: Bitcoin Is a Threat to Your Savings - <AUTHOR> https://www.krnc.io/post/an-open-letter-to-the-owners-of-u-s-dollars-bitcoin-is-a-threat-to-your-savings <comment><USER2> Founder of block chain company tries to convince you that blockchain is digital gold . That block chain scarcity better than the gold standard Likely knowing full well that the value of promises backed by gold would still have you know value. Promises backed by hashing have no value in the event that the currency fails

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm actually trying to convince people that, if we accept the premise that blockchain technology can create digital gold (as the market has, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars) then we should harness that digital gold to protect the value of the money that everyone already owns, rather than setting the world on fire by launching new currencies that function like pyramid schemes.

<comment><USER2> While noble, your digital gold is worse than usd not being fully backed by gold though. There is no intrinsic value in a database of hashes in the event that a currentcy fails. This solution is as much a fiat solution, if not more so than usd. The gold standard was as much if not more about securing the value of money as it was about controlling inflation as a result of over printing.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's two nuances I would respectfully suggest that you're overlooking.

First, KRNC is designed to be employed as a _supplement_ to USD. Most transactions would be executed with both USD and a corresponding blockchain asset. Technically, this is a digital analogue of the "symetallic standard", in which base money is comprised of both gold and silver in a specified ratio. The point is risk diversification: if fiat money implodes, or if crypto fails, you aren't wiped out.

Second, the concept of "intrinsic value" is misleading/confused when it comes to money. Things that trade at their consumption/production value are not monetized. Treating something as money involves attaching _symbolic_ value to it: accepting it as proof of goods or services rendered in the past, and as a token that can be used to acquire goods or services in the future. Even gold would lose most of its value if it were suddenly priced based only on demand for use in industrial applications.

Money has always been valuable because everyone else treats it as money, whatever it is. It's a Schelling point that enables abstracted barter. Nothing less, nothing more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > But it's also designed to work like a pyramid scheme. Most of the Bitcoin > that will ever exist is already in the hands of a small group of early > adopters.

What if Bitcoin were superseded by a cryptocurrency with a linear emission (i.e. a constant block reward)? Would that no longer be a pyramid scheme?

> everyone who owns U.S. Dollars will become poorer.

You mean everyone who owns dollars but no bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER4> What money is going to be fully reserved? Base money or credit money or both? What happens to new credit money? How do you keep the blockchain based currency from trading at a different value, e.g. me not believing in it selling USDf for real USD? (All not answered in F.A.Q..)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the questions. I'll make sure to expand the FAQ when I get a chance.

1\. The USD that you can use to unlock USDf (forked dollars/digital gold) is limited to deposits at commercial banks and credit unions. The public does not have access to electronic base money, so it's not included.

2\. The quantity of USDf you can unlock is based on your historic bank balances, as verified during a defined window in the past. New credit money created after that point in time doesn't affect those past balances. To the extent that the owners of new USD wish to acquire weight for them, they'd need to purchase USDf, increasing its value. That is sort of the whole point: if governments keep inflating their money, the "forked" version with guaranteed scarcity will gradually increase in value.

3\. USDf will trade at a different value than USD. At first, a much lower value. The idea is for them to be employed in a hybrid unit of account, USDw, where 1 USDw = 1 USD + 1 USDf.

A crypto-weighted dollar (i.e., USDw) will trade at a premium over a USD, since it is a USD + cryptographic weight. Think of it like a stablecoin that also comes with Bitcoin-like inflation protection. However, it's also possible to use USDf as an independent asset, and that will be convenient in use cases where transferring USD on existing payment rails isn't practical.

<comment><USER4> I would argue that smart savers at the moment are saving in cash in a safe. They would not get any USDf, right? So USDf is for the less informed. Are you expecting them to actively go through an unlocking process? Or will their banks do it based on public demand somehow? How is demand going to happen without people using it? Why would people use it if they don't have an advantage?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like bitcoin is a threat to ones savings instead..

<comment><AUTHOR> That is precisely the problem we're trying to solve: allowing the public to take advantage of blockchain-based digital scarcity without anyone being forced to invest in speculative assets.</comment></comment>


Mark Cuban: Dear Mr President, My Suggestion for Infrastructure Spending - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2016/12/18/dear-mr-president-my-suggestion-for-infrastructure-spending/ <comment><USER2> Bridges have fallen, trains have been derailed, infrastructure spending is the best way to put Americans back to work and Mark Cuban wants more automation, now, more robots. Which robots? Manned exoskeletons? Autonomous job-stealing robots? Cooking robots to replace fast food workers? Soft robots to help old and handicapped people? Micro robots to pollinate plants when the bees die out?

How about not declaring war and using half the taxpayer's money on making defense contractors richer? How about not having 800 bases around the world? How about not toppling foreign governments? How about actually making corporate giants keep and reinvest their profits inside the US instead of keeping it in the Bahamas or in Ireland? How about giving everyone free education, thus really investing in your country's future -its children? How about not having more than half of the US population living in financial precarity despite the country supposedly being the richest country on earth? How about making sure everyone has a home?

Writing blog posts is too easy for some people. Not that this president-elect can do better, but choosing the destiny of a country is more complicated than your dreams of robotic supremacy, Mr Cuban.

A country that does not want to live in peace with others, a country that mainly exports bombs and war, that does not look after its own population rich or poor, black,brown or white, a country that does not care for its sick, a country that has a government which only works for those who have bought it, a country completely indifferent to the mass murders of its own citizens, a country where being black is to be born guilty, a country where cops are judge, jury and executioner does not deserve to be leader in anything at all.</comment>


Ask HN: Can I contribute to a startup? - <AUTHOR> I am an experienced Oracle DBA. I have 15 years experience in IT. I know Unix, storage and networks, and naturally I can code in bash, perl, sql and pl/sql. I'm a very good DBA - in addition for doing a good job for my employees, I also speak at conferences, write articles and in general I'm respected by my peers.
My problem is that me and most other Oracle DBAs I know are employees of IT departments of very large organizations. But I live in the bay area and working for utility companies and banks feels like I'm missing all the fun. I want to work at a more fast paced, exciting, cutting edge place. With maybe 20 other employees working on something unique.
I realize that most startups can't work with Oracle. I'm learning MySQL, but I'm wondering if DBAs at all are interesting to startups, or maybe the position is normally shared between sysadmins and developers. None of the "HN Jobs" I've seen were looking for DBAs.
What can I do to make myself (and my CV) more interesting to startups? <comment><USER2> If you're prepared to take a significant pay cut in return for equity in a high risk environment I'm sure any startup with big plans will have you gladly.

You probably will be wearing a few more 'hats' in the beginning though. Start- ups tend to employ people that are multi-talented to keep payroll costs down in the beginning. Later on there is usually more specialization.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds reasonable. I think my CV is a problem - 15 years of Oracle probably sounds like "very expensive specialist" to a startup. I should probably rewrite it to say "Will do any type of work very cheaply for a startup", only without sounding desperate ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Personally, I think a DBA would be a valuable resource, mainly because my primary skillset lies in different area. It's the area in which I could use the most help in my project, also the area in which I have the fewest possible resources to tap. But as Jacques says, you can't be _just_ a DBA. Try to pick up some more programming, especially in one of the popular frameworks (Django, Ruby, etc.) or maybe even design work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out specific frameworks. I got the feeling that I should be doing more programming than just unix scripts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd suggest that aside from Perl you look pick up a language at something like Python or Ruby. Ruby would probably be a bit easier because it pulls some of its influences from perl, although Python has a fairly gradual learning curve as well. There is always PHP. I know a number of companies looking for decent developers that know PHP.

I think that brushing up on MySQL is a good idea. I'd also know startups are doing some pretty cool things with Postgres. I'm again guessing that going from Oracle to Postgres would be less of a jump than going from Oracle to MySQL.

Also, I know a lot of founders, myself included would love to pick a DBA's brain. I'm in the middle of deciding how to model a complex data store right now. I'm toying with the idea of going to a NoSQL database, but that's primarily because I don't really know anyone that has a bunch of experience with this type of problem. All we hear as founder is "RDBMs's don't scale".

I know a bunch of really smart guys from HackersandFounders meetups, but there aren't tons of them that have a huge amount of experience managing a lot of data with a lot of complex relationships. Or, the guys that do have tons of experience managing that kind of data work for Google and they can't talk about it. :P

So, I'd suggest coming to the next <http://HackersandFounders> .com meetup and letting me pick your brain. :)

It's not that hard to get into the startup scene. Go to meetups like SV New Tech, Hackers and Founders or any number of technology specific meetups like the MySQL, Postgres javascript, Python, Rails, iPhone, etc... Hang out at the Hacker Dojo or NoiseBridge. Hand out business cards. Build a couple of simple web apps in your spare time and get people's opinions on them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats for the detailed reply. My email is firstname.lastname@example.com, feel free to pick my brain :) I joined Hackers and Founders meetup - just meeting people who are doing interesting work sounds like great fun and will probably make me feel more "silicon valley" than working at a bank does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Make sure to get some public url's of some demo apps up online. That'll help w/ your marketing to startups.

hope this helps,</comment>


Mir Books - <AUTHOR> https://mirtitles.org/ <comment><USER2> Many many years ago, I used to take the 560 from Kamal Cinema to Connaught Place (in Delhi for those who don't know these references) with a couple of geeky friends.

We would walk from the CP bus terminus to Connaught Circle, grab a bite to eat at Nirulas and then make the pilgrimage to the MIR store, which used to occupy a huge space right in the middle of the circle. I don't even know what's in that space now. Probably a McDonalds or a jewelry store.

That's where I bought books by Piskunov, Nikolskii, Perelman and many many other books. I still remember being puzzled that every discovery that had one name attached to it in the the western texts that I got out of the British Council Library - the next stop in the pilgrimage - had another name, usually ending in -ov or -sky attached to it in the MIR books.

That was before the end of the Soviet Union, liberalization and Shining India. That world has faded away faster than my imagined memories of Gondor.

<comment><USER3> Was it a Mir store? Or is it People's Publication office/bookstore? The book store/publishing house run by ICP? They are still around. They used to stock Progress Publication books too - USSR's literary cousin of Mir (they've stopped stocking Mir now). I am not from Delhi but whenever I'd visit I'd go there to check out some translations, especially Hindi translations of Russian works. I still go - I was introduced to Russian literature in Hindi and I still crave for that. I bought Cossacks's Hindi translation few months back.

PS. I bought my first IE Irodov in Delhi though. Sunday market.

<comment><USER2> It wasn't called MIR for sure. People's Publishing House or some variant sounds about right. I am amazed that it's still there - does it occupy a cavernous space in the heart of the circle?

Edit: it's quite possible that what's called PPH now is the inheritor of the space I used to go to, but it's not the same space as far as I can tell from online photos.

<comment><USER3> PPH isn't tiny but wouldn't call it very big either. The only other book store from there I recall was named something like The English Book Store. I've been going there since 2004ish only I think. Once in 2-3 years maybe. I'm going to Delhi in a few weeks, if I manage to visit Connaught Place I'll look/ask around :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ah, a Mir book, what a nostalgia trip. A friend of mine gave me a physical- chemistry lab textbook (translated to Spanish) and it has been the best scientific undergraduate lab book I have ever used (as student and lab teacher). Very nice experiments and explanations. The only con is that, as with many soviet things at the time, they barely gave any recognition to the western european scientific legacy, so almost any principle you associate with a western European name(Boyles Law, Avogadro Number, etc) was named after a soviet scientist who supposedly discovered it first. To be honest I never bothered to research about how valid were those claims.

</comment><comment> the-mitr I am the maintainer/curator of the mirtitles blog. Please also have a look at our gitlab page where we are typesetting some of the classics in LaTeX

[https://gitlab.com/mirtitles](https://gitlab.com/mirtitles)

<comment><USER5> That's a stunning quality curation, really impressive!

I would love to see more math books in there. There are some great and dear books from my youth that do not still appear...

Just one question: what is the motivation for re-typesetting the text? The original typeset was already beautiful. Why didn't you go the way of simply giving an OCRd pdf ?

<comment> the-mitr The motivation was purely electronic text, though OCR is good for text for mathematics it may not be that good. And it is fun typesetting the books you love!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the Soviet Union did one thing right, Mir was it. I owe my love to applied math to it.

</comment><comment><USER7> My native is Russian. For those who don't know, Mir translates as: 1. World, 2. Peace, 3. Microcosm, 4. Non-Religious life (в миру).

</comment><comment><USER8> There were also Italian translations of Russian books, which were very popular slightly before my time as a student.

On the other hand one of my most prized possessions is a hardcover version of Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games in Russian that I bought at a flea market for less than $2.

</comment><comment><USER9> In Soviet Union "Mir" was well-known for its translations of foreign scientific and technical literature. I never realized "Mir" published English translations of Russian books too.

In my (very one-sided and biased) opinion Soviet Union was a very provincial country immensely handicapped in its scientific and cultural life by being cut off from the world. (Although it might not look like that in 1960s when it was proudly going into space and testing atomic weapons.) But there existed good fundamental science and some original thinkers and authors worth translating and studying.

<comment><USER10> Mir publications (in English and other languages) were very popular in many countries of the world where they were affordable and available. It was one of the best things to come out of the Soviet era. They were excellent across the board. It is fashionable nowadays to badmouth everything "Soviet" but their focus on educating the masses in Science & Technology was farsighted.

See my responses in this thread - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346272) where i am exhorting people to bring them back into print :-)

From the above same thread, link to the archive - [https://archive.org/details/@mirtitles?&sort=-publicdate&pag...](https://archive.org/details/@mirtitles?&sort=-publicdate&page=1)

<comment> the-mitr I am the maintainer/curator of the mirtitles blog. Thanks for the comment, we had thought of republishing also. Perhaps Little Mathematics Library comes to mind first due to the smaller number of pages. But it got stalled due to other commitments that I had. But we are surely looking in this direction as well.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for responding and Appreciate all your hard work on this. This knowledge needs to be saved for posterity.

Just thinking aloud, why not approach the Russian publishing houses (and maybe the Russian govt. itself?) to get behind this and fund it? Or maybe a tie-up with well-known technical book publishers like Oxford/Cambridge publishing (i myself am partial to Dover Publications) to start a line under "Mir Titles"? A few professors to edit out the obvious propaganda material and everything should be good for mass market. I sense a good business opportunity here :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some are widely regarded classics like Landau & Lifshitz' course on physics.

</comment><comment><USER12> When I was a kid, I used to buy handful of Russian books (translated to English) for the price of one American book. For a poor kid, it was awesome. Ah, good days they were...

</comment><comment><USER13> I usually do not comment on threads. But upvote for sure! This one is different. Nostalgia, First Science Education... What not! Thanks a lot for the website.

</comment><comment><USER5> The TeX recreations are amazingly good quality. I would like to buy professional prints of some of them, but it does not seem that they are selling them.

</comment><comment><USER14> Brings back great memories of solving I.E Irodov's problems in physics. Made you feel like a genius whenever you cracked one.</comment>


What tiny thing in Lion makes you smile or has caught you off guard? - <AUTHOR> http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/17759/what-tiny-thing-in-lion-makes-you-smile-or-has-caught-you-off-guard <comment><USER3> My favorite new feature is the revamped FileVault. The old version of FV was a huge mess: it only encrypted your home directory, it didn't play nice with TimeMachine (since it saw your home directory as one giant encrypted file) and was generally a nuisance.

Lion's FileVault is full-disk encryption and operates at the file-system level. This means that every program sees your encrypted file system as just ordinary files, while HFS+ is transparently encrypting and decrypting on every read and write from the hardware. This makes full disk encryption so simple and problem-free that I recommend everybody turn it on, immediately.

Ars has more information on how this all works ([http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac- os-x-10-7.a...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac- os-x-10-7.ars/13#lion-file-system)).

<comment><USER4> Agreed, this is my favorite too. And, after you encrypt your primary drive, you can either leave your Time Machine drive alone (which seems silly, but it's an option now, whereas before using FileVault created an encrypted disk image, which meant Time Machine could no longer backup changes-only, defeating the purpose of TM), or you can go into TM settings and encrypt your TM drive too.

You can also encrypt secondary disks on the command line. It all runs silently in the background until encryption is done.

There is a 20-30% disk performance hit (that I haven't noticed, on an SSD): [http://www.anandtech.com/show/4485/back-to-the-mac- os-x-107-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/4485/back-to-the-mac- os-x-107-lion-review/18)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As seen on ArsTechnica, "Hey! OpenBSD's PacketFilter is in Lion!" - [http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=115170...](http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1151707)

</comment><comment><USER6> I actually regret upgrading at this point mainly because of Mission Control. 2d spaces and painfully slow switch-screen animations has hurt my productivity.

<comment><USER7> After seeing the Lion previews, I thought the 2d spaces would be a problem for me as well. However I was pleasantly surprised when I found that my keyboard shortcuts still worked (I use Cmd+# to switch to a space). Since this takes me directly to a space the animations is no worse than that in Snow Leopard.

<comment><USER8> The difference is that you could disable the animation in Snow Leopard,

        defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES && killall Dock

If anyone knows how to do the same under Mission Control please, please do tell.

<comment><USER9> Does anyone know how those settings are discovered? I've tried running 'strings' on a few binaries but haven't uncovered anything.

<comment><USER10>
      defaults read

EDIT: Hmm, that shows all of the defaults that are currently in the system, but I guess doesn't show you what extra settings you could set. E.g. that setting in the grandparent doesn't show up in my defaults.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is not a criticism, just a curious enquiry. How does Apple manage to get so much support and discussion that seems very organic and grassroots in nature about its product releases, but somehow Microsoft and Windows get the short end of the stick? It is in no sense a scientific observation, but I did not notice so much interest when Windows 7 was released, even on Hacker News.

<comment><USER12> This site should be renamed Apple Fanboy News, that's why. I'm tired of these worthless submissions. There are lots of things I like about my OS, but I'm not insecure enough to need to justify any love I might have by telling everybody on Hacker News about it.

<comment><USER13> It's actually a very good submission. I didn't know Leopard had all these neat features. Now I want to upgrade.

I also have a Windows box, and I wouldn't mind a similar SE about Win7 niceties, and of course Win7 having such niceties...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"How about ability to resize windows from all edges of the window. That alone is worth the 30 bucks."_

 _That_ made me smile...

<comment><USER15> Love that you can hold option while resizing to change the size from the opposite ends. Very handy.

<comment><USER5> Or hold shift to keep the width/height ratio the same.

<comment><USER15> Ahh, very nice! It's crazy to think how many of these little touches are hidden in OS X.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My absolutely favorite feature is "Show related messages" in Mail conversations. 10 years after Gmail did it right, I can start using a desktop client again.

</comment><comment><USER17> Pros: generally "feels" faster than 10.6 \- repairing permissions seems to stick whereas 10.6 would always have 10000 broken permissions. cons: - <USER2> ability to use resize icons by clicking and dragging slider bar. now you have to set in view options \- stubborn settings like having windows reappear upon restart despite disabling feature. \- you STILL have to get plugins like totalfinder to set up finder with tabs. default is like opening up a new browser window each time you want to go to a new link.

<comment><USER18> The slider in finder is still there, but you have to turn on the status bar to see it

<comment><USER17> tnx for the tip. Turns out that opening finder was clipping off the bottom part where slider is. The only way I found out was by clicking and dragging the window downward an inch or two. Definitely needed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really like Mission Control, specially two of it's features. First, creating spaces on the fly. Second, dragging an app icon and dropping in another space moves all of it's windows to that space. It's like Apple read my mind! Sweet.

Another thing is UI update as a whole. Aqua has been outdated for quite a while. Now all objects look and feel more real. Also I'm enjoying the new windows' subtle lighting and texture, they look like anodized aluminum.

But the top feature on my list are the new APIs, of course.

</comment><comment><USER20> The Finder's "Arrange by Kind" has been updated to actually group the different files. Folders, Documents, Developer, Images, etc. I really like this.

</comment><comment><USER21> The quality of the badges on apps seems very low right now, it seems really grainy on mail.app (to be fair I havent seen a badge of anything else).

<comment><USER22> Yep, the pixelation is something I've noticed all around. Hopefully it will be fixed in 10.7.1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can have different backgrounds on different Spaces. It's great to be able to organize a little mental model of your workspace by using differently colored backgrounds. I find I'm using the swipe gesture to change spaces frequently, and it can get a bit disorienting; every space looks almost the same except for a slightly different arrangement of rectangles.

<comment><USER24> That's true; although the desktop background pane in System Preferences can be quite buggy, to the point where it's far from obvious that it would even be possible to make the backgrounds different.

For instance, it will only appear by default on the displays you have on the desktop you're using, and it shows the background of that desktop in its mini- rendition even if you try to switch desktops. It can also sometimes show the wrong background in the preferences pane even after you've changed it. So although it _does_ work, it hardly gives the user confidence.

The most reliable method seems to be to use the Finder's "Change Desktop Background..." contextual menu from the desired desktop, to force System Preferences to open in the right state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Actually didn't realise how many things I like in Lion...

"When you do things right, no one will notice you've done anything at all"

</comment><comment><USER26> Of all the "big features" Lion has, the one that I find a good reason to upgrade is Mission Control. Still, not being that big of a deal, I've been lazy about actually upgrading. Funnily enough, reading about some of the really awesome small details that people are talking about there _really_ make me want to upgrade!

</comment><comment><USER27> Anyone else have a problem with the clicking on the trackpad when waking from sleep? Sometimes when opening my air, the mouse is unable to click on anything - I can only move the cursor and right click. Closing and re-opening the lid will solve the problem, but it is pretty damn frustrating

<comment><USER28> You just need to press either shift key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love the "sign without printing" feature in preview. I've already used it to sign some legal docs. The one problem is my lawyer then asked for originals... d'oh!

</comment><comment><USER17> If upsidedown smiles count, I would have to say that Launchpad makes me smile with its duplicate entrys and no intuitive method of organization/removal of entrys.

</comment><comment><USER30> Do people like or hate that the order of labels has changed when sorting by label? (labeled items now appear first, but in a reverse alpha order)

</comment><comment><USER31> I miss expose ...

<comment><USER32> Expose is gone in Lion? has it been replaced by something similar?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> That method of entering accents seems really backwards to me. Why not a Compose key?

<comment><USER34> Agreed. I don't have Lion installed yet, but in SL I can enter "ä" by typing option-U, then A. The article makes it sound like the new behavior can be disabled so I'm hoping that means the current behavior, which I'm very happy with, still works!

<comment><USER22> It does.

ü < crude attempt at a smiley face ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Everybody talking about little details of an otherwise not so significant update makes me smile (or has caught me off guard) ... you people are crazy and need to realise that you spend way too much time with your OS ...

<comment><USER36> Sure it's not a major update but it is the little things that makes an OS great. After being a long time power Windows user, switching to Mac OS made me realize how the little things can really improve productivity and workflows.

<comment><USER35> No they don't ... if you spent this much time with your OS you are doing it wrong, sorry.

<comment><USER37> You know, some jobes are done on things called computers. And OS pretty much is required for them to be useful. And then when you spend some eight hours (too much, according to you) each day, small details suddenly are not so small and unimportant.

<comment><USER38> The GP didn't put it very eloquently but he has a point. Most days I start with booting my computer, start one application and the browser and do all my work in those.

When that happens I really don't care about the amount of polish the window manager has.

<comment><USER39> As if spending 5 minutes picking up some tips is a big outlay?

<comment><USER38> That isn't what I meant and I myself do read the docs. But: if YAGNI then YAGNI.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Seducing Mussolini - <AUTHOR> http://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/02/seducing-mussolini/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting that certain constellations of personality traits seem to travel together, even in different cultures, and in different centuries. The cult-of-personality goes with the authoritarianism, which goes with the desire to delegitimate all criticism, which goes with particular ideas about sex, and the relations between men and women. So again, in 2017, we see the revival of the same united set of personality attributes that are described from the 1930s:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

 _At first Claretta was brusquely mauled by Mussolini under his desk or on mattress-like cushions installed for the purpose. Towards the end of his 23-year-dictatorship, however, the Duce's potency inevitably diminished and he became addicted to a German-manufactured aphrodisiac pill trademarked Hormovin. Taking this prototype Viagra was, in some ways, a political act as it served to prolong the myth of the Duce as the one who never flagged. Not only did he squeeze women's breasts as if they were 'rubber automobile horns' (in the words of one of his British biographers), he routinely made for their genitals, Trump-style._

<comment><USER3> Definitely! Being Italian, I find the whole Trump-style so soo sooo rétro, and my family is amused by his improbableness too. He reminds us of our (admittedly not so dignified) past.

<comment><USER4> Sadly your last one Silvio was involved in that international right-wing manufacture of the "Yellow Cake documents" so buffoons that they may be in many ways, these sorts are very dangerous when enabled without limit.

<comment><USER3> I've never understood what happened with that vicissitude...

Specifying: what I wrote does not mean I think they should get a free-pass, quite the contrary!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Comparison with Other Frameworks - <AUTHOR> https://vuejs.org/guide/comparison.html <comment><USER2> It says they tried not to be biased, but it doesn't look like they tried at all. Apparently every design decision made in Vue is superior. This isn't a fair comparison and shouldn't try to masquerade as such, it would be fine if it was positioned as an opinion piece on why we think Vue's approach is better instead of a "perfect framework" ad it is.

But after using JSX I'm never going back to a templating system. JSX has an intuitive direct mapping to JS that lets you use the full power of a programming language without needing to learn another crippled DSL syntax.

If you've never used React before after reading this you could be forgiven for thinking it's a complex monstrosity needing a week of prep to build a HelloWorld app which is a biased gross over exaggeration. React has one core concept, Components, which is easier to create, encapsulate and reuse better than anything else I've seen. I also believe in React's being able to use JS for Views, Style and Behavior making it easier to encapsulate cohesive Components.

I consider Ecosystem, community, dev resources / backing, encapsulation and reuse integral for adopting a framework which React wins easily on but is quickly disregarded here.

Whislt this is a biased guide Vue has convinced me enough to evaluate it, I'm especially interested in its performance and being able to reference it like a jQuery script tag which I believe is the biggest shortcoming of modern JS fxs which has succumbed to npm micro module madness inflicting complexity and friction on all developers which is IMO the major source of complexity when adopting a modern fx.

<comment><USER3> I like that Vue seems to be carrying Angular1's torch of "make it easy for non-programmers to write templates" but I feel like that has been an illusory strawman from the start.

Not only does it mask the fact that the supposed non-programmer template designer would still have to understand HTML and CSS yet somehow not have even the most basic knowledge of JS, but they would still have to be able to use whatever build tools are necessary to actually render those templates, including version control and node.js (which is the de facto platform for client-side build tools these days). The target audience seem to be old-school "webmasters" who FTP their PHP templates to the live server yet we're talking about technologies requiring a workflow that already precludes them.

So we're talking about a scenario that only benefits people who already tick all the boxes for "front-end developer" _except_ they apparently suffer from a nervous breakdown if they have to look at an if-block or understand a for-loop yet they'll be fine learning another template language that is typically based on JS expressions anyway (though Angular was guiltier of this than Vue).

Maybe these people exist. Maybe there are teams where optimizing technical decisions for these people results in a net benefit. But I strongly doubt that this scenario is so widely applicable that this design decision makes a framework inherently superior when the cost of JSX to a team of JS devs is practically nil.

<comment><USER4> How do you mean, "templates for non-programmers"?

I see Angular's directives as a pure convenience compared to most every templating engine I've used across languages, never considered it something that makes it accessible to non-programmers. I'd actually think someone who only knows html/css would be more thrown off from a page with random, unsanctioned (by W3C), tags and attributes that may or may not reveal what they actually do.

As a programmer I don't want to write long templates, I seriously prefer Jade/Pug for that reason. When I can't use them for a client I typically use them to do all initial work, compile them to HTML, then make whatever minor changes from there.

Consider ng-for:

{{y.title}}

The ASP.Net solution is a pain, a function with HTML string template to dynamically add elements to a "runat" div.

This PHP example seems more idiomatic, at least to me, yet takes more to write

      <?php foreach($x as $y){ ?>

 <? echo $y->title; ?>

      <? } ?>

The JSP style is kinda similar to Angular, again maybe more idiomatic at first glance but still not as quick/simple to write

      <c:forEach items="${x}" var="y">

${y.title}

      </c:forEach>

The jQuery/plain JS solution, especially before ES6 is not preferable by any means, especially beyond this simple example.

      var body = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];

      [...].map(function(y){
      body.innerHTML +=
        "
"+
         "
"+y.title+"
"+
        "
";
      });

Unlike all the other solutions, angular has 2 way data binding so when you programmatically add elements to the array in ng-for, they are added to the DOM without a reload.

So, is the goal of a programmer to simply write more code? If so, then Angular is definitely not for programmers.

Is the goal of a programmer to solve problems? If so, Angular is definitely a tool for programmers.

<comment><USER5> PHP also offers a nice way to write templates without even having to use echo and without braces:

      <?php foreach($x as $y): ?>

<?= $y->title ?>

      <?php endforeach; ?>

<comment><USER6> Yes, that's what I do. I also think it's fine to use omit trailing semicolons and to use short-open tags (I already labelled the file .php --- why do I have to keep saying "php" all over it? And I'm not usually outputting XML.)

      <? foreach($x as $y): ?>

<?= h($y->title) ?>

      <? endforeach ?>

You just want to make sure to escape all output with htmlspecialchars, or define a shorter function like I did ("h").

<comment><USER5> I agree!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _In React, everything is Just JavaScript, which sounds very simple and elegant - until you dig deeper. The unfortunate reality is that reinventing HTML and CSS within JavaScript can cause a lot of pain._

So what's the pain for me, as a user of React? It's just embedded HTML for me. They never go on to explain why.

And...

 _Instead, we offer templates as a simpler alternative:_

<template>

 {{ item.name }}

No items found.

 </template>

Notice how the templates are code in strings. I don't find that simpler at all. I find code in strings to be an anti-pattern. I already have a nice real language (TypeScript in my case) to do "templates".

<comment><USER8> I fiddled with VueJS some weeks back and didn't use the .vue files because I wanted to understand what I was doing and not have a build chain.

After a while it felt like I was writing strings in strings in strings. And that was exactly was I was doing. I think JSX is a very sane way of coding after all. I think writing things like

            {childItems.map(x => RenderChild(x)}

is wonderfully clear.

<comment><USER9> no need for lambda

         {childItems.map(RenderChild)}

<comment><USER10> Maybe, but be aware those are not equivalent (your method will pass extra arguments to RenderChild)

<comment><USER9> If you're the one designing the map function transformer, then you know about the extra args thing... but otherwise you're right that you have to be careful!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the way vue components are composed is perfectly suited for everyone that comes into the frontend story right now.

There is no syntax to learn, except that you can have v-if and v-for in your html elements. A style block contains your CSS like you're used to, plus it can be scoped to a component. A script block contains a bit of local logic and event handlers.

Component = <template> \+


Japanese magazine filled with only QR codes - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.org/2008/03/14/japanese-magazine-filled-with-only-qr-codes/ <comment><USER2> This is CueCat all over again? Except that the hardware for reading the codes isn't junk sent out on venture capital. It's just every already existing camera phone.</comment>


Ask HN: Basics of startup business accounting? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I have a decent grasp of marketing and product discovery/development, however I feel quite week at the basics of business finance and accounting, preferably in the post-series-A startup universe.
Are there any short and sweet resources out there on the web that you would recommend? I know Udemy and other MOOCs have courses on it, but I'd rather get a compressed "for hackers" version of the subject without sitting through hours of chatter.
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> I am a finance professional, and I will give you a tip. The same tip a few different ways.

Businesses go insolvent because they run out of cash, not because of profits and losses. It is perfectly possible to make a loss for years if you have the cash. It is perfectly possible to run out of cash at a profitable business.

Learn the basics of forecasting your cash flows, and outsource your accounting.

Burn-rate and runway are short-hand terms for chatting with VC's, but are no substitute for understanding your cash flows.

Cash is king, cash is the lifeblood of a business. The finest Financial Controllers specialize in optimizing cash-flows.

A cash-flow forecast is a great way to view your business, model expansion plans and work out your funding requirements.

One last time learn about cash flows. Depreciation, amortization, taxation etc are for accountants.

<comment><USER3> +1 this is what will keep the doors open. Don't spend money you don't have. Don't expect to have it when you want it.

The company can be profitable even if the customers never pay up. So at the end of the day cash is king.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Outsource.

If you don't have the time to spend to learn it properly you most certainly won't have the time to do it properly. Also doing your accounts yourself adds no value to the business. Focus on the important stuff and let someone else handle the bookkeeping.

<comment><USER3> I think the op is asking more than just about bookkeeping. Sure outsource the tasks, but the OP still needs basic understanding of the problem.

<comment><USER4> You're right. Unfortunately I ignored the hard part of the question (because I have no answer) and only answered the easy part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Hey! Give me the TD;DR on finance and accounting obligations and rules for a 5-10 million dollar tech company! I mean I know people go to school for years to qualify for those roles, but I'm a hacker! I don't have time for the boring details, how hard can it be???"

What could _possibly_ go wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> My interest is to be able to understand and keep up with conversations in that specific area, not make those calls myself.

It's similar to how, as a product manager, you don't have to be a principal software engineer with a PhD from MIT to collaborate with your development team. However, you do benefit greatly from understanding the issues and the challenges of building software at a much less sophisticated level, so you can speak the same language.

<comment><USER5> Fair enough - you've got to admit though - the question wasn't written clearly enough for it not to be an obvious target of amusement... Apologies for poking a little fun at your expense...

<comment><AUTHOR> I've learned not to expect much empathy from the Internet.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get started as a Technical Writer - <AUTHOR> I've been told that I am very articulate and explain technical things in a very easy to understand manner. I've also made several HOW TO Guides, Quick Start Guides both in blog format, as well as in Video / Screencast format.
So I was thinking of trying my hand at Technical Writing.
Can some of you Industry veterans give me some tips and pointer, DOs / DON'T relating to this? Some specific things I would like to know are...
1) Are there popular GitHub Open Source Projects that are sparse in Documentation? If yes, how do I filter / locate them and start contributing Technical documentation
2) What do you (as a hacker) expect to see, in terms of Documentation, whenever you come across a cool / useful Open Source Project, or a Commercial API / Software Product? What would be most useful to you when you come across a software or API or product that you want to use in your Projects?
3) Do Companies hire Technical Writers fulltime, or is it more like a fixed hourly contract type situation?
4) How is the market? Are there too many, or too little Technical Writers?
5) Is what I am looking to do called by any other name? The Title of the Professional i.e.
6) Anything else you might have insight on / inputs in?
Thanks so much! ~Sean <comment><USER2> Not a technical writer, but:

1\. "Instructional design" or "Training" is another job title/set of skills you might look into. Or for that matter "developer evangelist". All slightly different, but all overlap with your skills.

2\. Sounds like you have a portfolio already, so you might want to just start applying for jobs that sound interesting and see how it goes.

<comment><AUTHOR> #2. Yes I have portfolio scattered around the net. It never occurred to me to just apply. Will look into that. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hosting companies for one have a vested interest in this stuff. Looks like DO is hiring: [https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/#technical- writ...](https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/#technical-writer)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a full timer but was a freelancer for ten years. As others have said, a portfolio is a great entry ticket. Try to flesh out your portfolio with further examples of the work you would like to do. Tech writing, like development, is a very broad church. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> I would say talented Technical Writers are definitely in demand. I've seen both full time and contractor positions. I concur with itamarst, if you have portfolio pieces already just go for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you!</comment></comment>


Signs You're Working in a Feature Factory - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-factory-44a5b938d6a2 <comment><USER2> Previous post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13044685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13044685)</comment>


Those 12-Hour Days Are Killing You Without Helping Your Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/those-12-hour-days-killing-you-without-helping-your-business-rampton/ <comment><USER2> There's also the question of what you are "doing" during those 12 hour days.

I've known some great passionate people putting in lots of hours who were highly productive. Good for them.

But more often than not the folks cramming in all those hours that I met did a lot of what I felt was "filler" time. Tasks that they might not otherwise have done / done the same had they just finished up for the day. A lot of times it involved emails, meetings they might not otherwise not have scheduled / been involved in. Things that in the long run, maybe just made more work for everyone, and had less positive outcomes...

Sometimes more work is productive, sometimes it is just, more work.</comment>


Emotional Bag Check Lets You Trade Problems for Music - <AUTHOR> http://emotionalbagcheck.com

<comment><AUTHOR> For youth between the ages of 10 and 24, suicide is the third leading cause of death. It results in approximately 4400 lives lost each year. It's important to help them carry their baggage. Service like that is a great idea. More here:

<http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pub/youth_suicide.html></comment>


Is democracy overrated? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23607302

<comment><USER2> From the comments I see here so far, I don't see evidence that people have read the article (which is a transcript of part one of a radio talk that just went out over the air on the UK's Radio 4). It seems people are responding to the title.

Here are some quotes:

The totalitarian system, I learned, endures not simply by getting rid of democratic elections and imposing a one-party state. It endures by abolishing the distinction between civil society and the state, and by allowing nothing significant to occur which is not controlled by the Party.

...

In the underground universities of communist Europe, my friends and colleagues studied those things, and prepared themselves for the hoped-for day when the Communist Party, having starved itself of every rational input, would finally give up the ghost. And the lessons that they learned need to be learned again today, as our politicians lead us forth under the banner of democracy, without pausing to examine what democracy actually requires.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps it is a dry article, but I heard it on the radio this morning and really appreciated it ([http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037vb15](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037vb15) \- may be blocked outside uk). I was grateful to see the text version. Summary is that Roger Scruton believes that democracy needs an independent judiciary, property rights and the right to free speech and opinion in order to succeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> " _Western nations have acted upon the assumption that democracy is the solution to political conflict and that the ultimate goal of foreign policy must be to encourage the emergence of democracy.._

 _.. three ideas - democracy, freedom and human rights - are spoken of in one breath_ "

Ironically, thing that current liberal-democratic ideologies should have inherited from Marxism is the emphasis on influencing the people. Democrats of the last few decades give the general public's attitude and political culture a ridiculously strong presumption of innocence. The problems in autocratic countries are assumed to be institutional: bad systems, bad leaders. The People want peace, freedom and human rights. I think that's why human rights are expected to follow democratic elections.

In the middle east right now we have seen this fail in a similar way in several places. Democratic elections bringing to power strongly non "democratic" candidates. Confessionalists, nationalists & theocrats.

A more Marxist-like approach would worry more about spreading the ideology among the general public. In Eastern Europe (especially East Germany) "like Western Europe" was enough. In the middle east " _lets be more western_ " is not going to work. We're understandably hesitant to start pushing a "little book of ideology" into the hands of 16 year olds around the world given our 20th century experience with such books. I don't know what the answer is to that. What I am pretty certain about is that if you want to see "democracy" in Syria or Egypt, you have more than just an institutional problem to fix.

</comment><comment><USER5> All systems put _their_ form of rule on a pedestal worshiping it, saying: "there is none like it".

It will fall apart as all the other systems have and be considered "silly compared to our knew awesome form of rule"

<comment><USER6> Except democracy has been around for at least 2500 years, and we still have it. It seems that all those other "awesome forms" fail and revert to the natural, default state of countries: democracy.

Which brings me to my second point: democracy seems to me like the natural order of a large group of people. It's natural for people to compete to achieve their goals, and democracy seems to be the only system that spreads success around.

<comment><USER7> monarchy, autocracy, and tyranny have been around a lot longer than 2500 years. don't we still have those, too?

<comment><USER6> We still have monarchies, but many of them are also democratic (hereditary monarch plus elected prime minister and legislature). I agree we still have tyrannies too, because I think there's a cycle between them and democracies. Democracy weakens, a tyrant takes power, this lasts for a while before collapsing, then his competitors take power themselves (in some cases, democratically).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad to see this comment from a Brit, because it's exactly what I was telling to the Western friends for some time: formal procedures do not make democracy. (I think Iraq and Afganistan are clear examples.) It's a whole culture of participation of citizens and accountability from those who take the power, and those cultures are mutually dependent.

We had all formal procedures in USSR & Russia in 1988-1991, but the citizens did not know what to do with them, and then they were gradually taken away. Democracy is a grassroots phoenomenon, it grows ground-up.

</comment><comment><USER9> From Wikipedia:

" _Democracy [...] encompasses social, economic and cultural conditions that enable the free and equal practice of political self-determination._ "

This article is not alone in having a very narrow and technical conception of democracy as solely a method of election and legislation. That this in itself is not sufficient for a flourishing and liberated society seems obvious.

The real issue seems to be how to encourage actual, real, functioning democracy, instead of installing a thin veneer of technical democracy on top of a society whose deeper currents are undemocratic.

For some reason I'm thinking about the story of how the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia has historical roots in the Communist suppression of Zappa- influenced psychedelic rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. Maybe the world just needs more psychedelic rock.

<comment><USER2> "This article is not alone in having a very narrow and technical conception of democracy as solely a method of election and legislation."

That is an argument about words and not ideas. The article says that voting is not enough, and so do you.

"That this in itself is not sufficient for a flourishing and liberated society seems obvious."

Some things bear repeating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." — Winston Churchill

</comment><comment><USER11> No system of government really works that well because most people "defect" in the sense of the prisoners dilemma. So instead of working for the public good, the government ultimately becomes a means of exploiting the public good for powerful individuals' advantage.

Pretty much everyone government ultimately devolves into a form of "mafia" \-- a relatively tight network of powerful individuals united by some fairly strong bond such as familial/ethnic ties. This network can count on each other to "cooperate" and not "defect", while the public/masses just can't coordinate and cooperate enough to oppose them.

<comment><USER12> Every society is subject to the problem you are talking about. That's why humans actually evolved to go at lengths to punish anybody who does defect. Without this sense (for fairness), no society could function. And as you correctly point out, mafia is the subject of the same rule. (That's why you usually get either a rigid hierarchical system or democracy, not so much a system where a large portion of population democratically controls the rest - that's unstable.)

The key in democracy is exactly what it says on the tin - one person one vote. This is much more stable to this devolution, because other people in society can observe when this rule is broken by anybody and take action. Thanks to this, much less energy is required for infighting, and people can be happier.

<comment><USER11> > humans actually evolved to go at lengths to punish anybody who does defect

They might have initially, but I'll make the argument that probably since the dawn of agriculture, and the generation of large societal surpluses, evolution has been pushing humanity towards defection.

I think recent experience in the US shows quite clearly that votes don't really matter, only money does. Moreover votes can be manufactured through the media (money).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the real problem is we don't really have democracy: once every four years we are allowed to pick between Coke or Pepsi and then we hand over all our power to a bunch of people until the next election.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is he talking about democracy as an ideal or democracy as commonly implemented? These are two very different things..

The ideal is to give everyone the same say in what laws should govern the society. In my view, that ideal isn't overrated. It's just basic fairness.

If you have two kids, that argue for a toy, what do you do? You force them each to have it for half a time, fairly.

The societies that evolved the ability to implement such fairness spend less resources warring about who should get how much power (arguing about the toy), and so spend more resources on productive activities (playing with the toy).

<comment><USER14> If you - and apparently many others in this thread - actually read the article, you would know that he is not talking about ideal vs commonly implemented democracy at all. He is talking about other institutions of free society that are in his view as important as democracy, but are usually lumped together with democracy in political speeches of the leaders of the West.

These other institutions that can exists with or without democracy are judicial independence, property rights, freedom of speech and opinion and, finally, legitimate opposition. In his view, all these can exist independently, and often existed before democracy in Western European countries.

<comment><USER12> I read his article, but I didn't get his point, and you're basically explaining the reason why.

He is not correct in lumping all those together in his analysis. Maybe he could say "Western democracy".

I agree that these institutions existed before democracy. But you would also be hard-pressed to find democracy without them, but it's not because democracy would require these institutions to exist.

I can perfectly imagine a democracy in Islamic society with Sharia law, that doesn't have those institutions. As long as everybody can secretly vote, with equal vote, they know what they vote about, and it's impossible to restrict voting of other people by voting, it's democracy in my books. However, I don't think it would last too long. The other innovations are probably so useful for majority of people that they would very quickly (and democratically) agree on implementing them. That's why we never see anything like this in the real world (in the real world probably both things co-evolve).

In other words, I see democracy vastly more important than those institutions, because implementing democracy itself will probably lead to implementing these institutions, while the opposite is not true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not quite what the article was talking about, but what worries me about modern democracies is where the responsibility of government decisions lies. In theory the voters should bear it, since they chose the government. But in practice they just shrug "rotten politicians" and move on with their lives as their country wages war on millions of innocents. The politicians themselves rarely get their comeuppance, because hey, the people chose them!

Democracy only works with a politically active population. And frankly, most people don't give a shit.

<comment><USER16> IMHO its worse then that, the system (The political parties, the media, electoral systems etc) has moved in such a way to make people not give a shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of Pope John Paul II's reply when asked why the church was not more democratic:

 _The church is not a democracy and truth is not established by a show of hands_

<comment><USER18> It's _more_ plausible, not less, that divine inspiration is reflected in the vote of a group than in a single man's decision. Like a multiple sensor array, the noise in a single instrument (and the risk of its corruption) can't cause the whole to fail to detect the signal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would say, yes. Theoretically, an all-knowing Philosopher King would be the best form of government. In reality, that's extremely hard to achieve. Modern day democracies, like in the US, are intentionally designed to move slowly, so that no single person or group of people can radically change how it affects it's citizens. That also means it is slow to reform.

<comment><USER12> No, it would not. The all-knowing philosopher (AKA enlightened dictator) would basically amount to democracy.

Let's say this philosopher wants to do something which is undeniably correct, but majority of people still disagrees with it, and they are willing to protest and risk lives. Then what is he going to do?

Is he going to kill those protesting? Or beat them up? Then I would submit he is not enlightened in any way.

Or is he going to back down with his proposal? Then here you have it. He basically let the people decide.

He also may have a third option, deceive the majority of the population. I would not consider that enlightened either. It's a slippery slope - he has to know what is good for you before _you_ know it, if that's possible at all.

I also don't think democracies are _designed_ to move slowly. In fact, the more direct democracy, the more slowly it moves - common people are much more conservative than people who want power. You can actually observe that empirically, and it is arguably a weakness of democracy.

<comment><USER20> Or he could just allow them to protest peacefully but implement his plan anyway.

A truly wise and benevolent leader (if such a thing were possible) would also be skilled at assessing public mood around a proposal and would weigh that into his plan.

Of course the difficulty is in knowing what constitutes a "good" policy. Is it something that makes the majority of people happier right now? Is it something that rewards desired behaviour? What about weighing long term factors against short term? For example if we can increase greatly quality of life right now at the cost of massive environmental destruction that won't be felt for several generations.

<comment><USER12> So what if they wouldn't stop protesting? What does it mean, allow to protest peacefully? Like a free speech zone?

But isn't this "weighing" you talk about just a form of voting? If he caves in based on public opinion, then he is being effectively democratic.

That's the problem. The concept of "benevolent dictator" is just oxymoronic. I would be glad if people stop using it as an argument, because it's just so contradictory.

<comment><USER20> Isn't this roughly how it works now? You implement legal rules for when and how protests can occur and allow people to protest within those rules but a protest is no guarantee of policy change.

I guess a truly benevolent dictator would have some objective principles to decide the best course of action and use those. What those principles would look like, I have no idea.

<comment><USER12> If we really lived in democracy, it wouldn't have to be that way. We would just accept defeat if majority would disagree. That's what people in Switzerland do.

You just hid the contradiction of "benevolent dictator" into "objective principles I have no idea about". That's the reason why you have no idea - such principles don't exist independently of subjective values of each person!

<comment><USER20> I think that the closest you could get would be to define some formula for quality of life or happiness, possibly based on neuroscience and predictive modelling that is far more advanced than we have now and govern based on that perhaps based on median happiness or some such.

Of course you will still get people under such a system who would be worse off than they would under others. You also have questions about whether you let some people be happier than others if their actions are likely to cause the average level of happiness to increase. Similar to the conversations we have about wealth now.

However I don't think the choice would be between implementing majority rule on every micro decision and tyranny.

Perhaps it makes sense to think of such a system as a representative democracy where every election is won by the same candidate because they are so vastly superior to the others.

<comment><USER12> But there is also an issue of freedom and trust. Sure, you could provide "endless happiness" by making everyone stoned, but what freedom that is?

The point isn't to implement majority rule on every micro decision; people are often generous enough not to be control freaks. But again - when they are not, then it probably isn't just a "micro" decision.

Your last sentence was exactly my point. If such a dictator is going to win every election, why he needs to be a dictator? Why we can't just have those elections? By this, you also gain trust.

I love Linus Torvalds quote: "People can trust me [about kernel development], because they don't have to trust me." I think it's true everywhere - trust is only gained if you have choice not to trust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's worth remembering that there are ways of achieving democracy that don't involve voting. For example, creating a Government from a randomly-selected group of citizens every few years.

In my opinion that's a vastly superior approach to having everyone vote for one a bunch of - for the most part - crooks, thieves and liars.

</comment><comment><USER22> Disambiguation is called for in respect to what _democracy_ actually is...

[http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic](http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic)

Black's Law Dictionary says that the difference between a democracy and a republic is that sovereignty is retained by the individual within a republic. (USA is a Constitutional Republic)

The article fails to note that democracy does not preclude communism, and the DPRK ([http://www.korea-dpr.com/](http://www.korea-dpr.com/)) is a classic democratic communist nation in which the people have no individual sovereignty in lieu of that sovereignty being relegated to the collective in the name of the greater good _for the nation._

<comment><USER23> Aren't all existing democracies republics?

Personally I think the pendulum needs to swing a lot more in favor of true democracy, and accountability of those "few" representatives in power. Because it doesn't look like the current system, where the pendulum swings a lot more in favor of the representatives, has been working very well.

We need more direct democracy, more referendums, more citizen law-making, where the representatives are only a _relative_ "check" on that citizen power (to prevent _extreme_ abuses of "mob rule").

<comment><USER22> Isn't "true democracy" a form of civilized mob rule?

Why should individual sovereignty be forfeit in favor of the group sovereignty that is democracy?

East Germany was another "Democratic Republic," which didn't turn out so well.

Is the fault with "democracy," or the "republic?" (these terms have little relevance to America's present political parties) Or is it some other aspect.

In my estimation, if a nation's citizens have no individual sovereignty, that nation cannot be properly referred to as a _republic,_ yet such nations do fit the definition of "democracy" by virtue of the sovereignty enjoyed by the collective majority.

<comment><USER12> East Germany was only called "democratic republic", in reality it was neither. The fault isn't within those terms; the fault was that calling it that way was simply a lie.

You also ask: "Why should individual sovereignty be forfeit in favor of the group sovereignty that is democracy?"

Because we want to agree on certain things. Human societies have evolutionary advantage over independent sets of humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Real democracy doesn't exists in any country. Except from e-democracy experiments like in Rio Grande do Sul(Brasil). Instead we are in a tight controlled Particracy.

Thanks to internet we are getting closer to a new Era where citizens will have direct control on the governments. This is yet to be achieved but there are already thousands of people working silently on this.

We will have the first real democracy in Europe at the end of 2015 and it will spread quickly.

We are citizens, we are real democracy.

<comment><USER25> > We will have the first real democracy in Europe at the end of 2015 and it > will spread quickly.

What are you referring to ?

<comment><USER26> Well, they wouldn't be working very silently if he just went and _told_ you, now would they? ;)

<comment><USER25> Ah, well. I just noticed it was a one-post account.

I was asking myself what could be going on regarding EU laws or constitution or sthg in 2015.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Yes! (But also no)

The problem is that in the "western world" there are complex systems designed to preserve both widespread individual liberty as well as consensual governance (for convenience I'll call these "free systems"). However, we tend to merely label these systems as "democracy" even though many other systems that have popular voting can exist which do not offer the same protections of liberty and consensual governance. This terminology and modeling problem makes it more difficult to spread the aforementioned "free systems" of government because it's very much more difficult to elucidate all of the factors behind such systems, some of which are socio-cultural and economic.

One common pattern in "unfree" countries that have experienced bouts of democracy is for there to be a popular vote that brings in a government that then ends all of the democratic institutions. This has happened routinely for well over a century. Another problem is that you have a corrupt group in power with few checks on their authority and they simply rig every election in one way or another.

I think it's mistaken to believe that it takes generations for a country to be ready for freedom and effective democracy merely because naive attempts to set up democracies can easily fail. I think it's also a mistake to assume that countries with long histories of democratic institutions and liberty are comparatively immune to collapses of those institutions.

Much like the situation with economics we tend to live within political systems which rest on foundations that are not widely well understood, if at all, and rarely even discussed in depth at an abstract foundational level.

It's no wonder it's so difficult for countries to try to bootstrap their way to democracy and it's a bit of a shock that our own systems of government in the "free" world work as well as they do.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Is democracy overrated?

No.

It's just that we haven't gotten through to eliminating the corrupting elements and anchoring this legally, yet.

Why? Because corruption (= ultimately money) protects itself.

<comment><USER29> Even worse, in Germany the election turnout is less than 50% on average, getting even worse every year.

Most people are literally not interested in everything around them and get mad when you start talking about politics. With people like this, democracies will fail. A living democracy needs involved and civilized people.

<comment><USER30> That's also a massive opportunity though, since whomever could capture the attention of that 50% and get them to vote could become the biggest party overnight.

To me that just sounds like an underserved market waiting to be addressed.

<comment><USER31> Yep. Just like in 1933

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> No.</comment>