i3 4.18 - <AUTHOR> https://i3wm.org/downloads/RELEASE-NOTES-4.18.txt <comment><USER2> For anyone here who loves i3, but has always had trouble getting full integration to work on their laptop ( sleep, screen brightness, etc. ), check out the Regolith project[0]

It's a curation of several tools combined with i3 that gives a pretty fantastic gnome/i3 experience. Similar to spacemacs and emacs.

[0] [https://regolith-linux.org/](https://regolith-linux.org/)

<comment><USER3> If you are looking for a distro with i3 preinstalled, Manjaro i3 edition is another option.

[https://manjaro.org/download/#i3](https://manjaro.org/download/#i3)

<comment><USER4> I can recommend that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i3 ruined my life. It's an absolute delight to use, particularly when programming. However, its hard to get Linux laptops at work (Mac or Windows), and I constantly miss i3.

Also, among all tiling window managers, I think its config is probably the most intuitive to mingle with. Hardly ever breaks (if ever) between upgrades, and default workflow is very intuitive and explicit. Other window managers (eg. Awesome, xmonad) have pre-defined layouts, which (for me at-least) create more confusion than value.

PS> I think I've been using i3 since 2010 something.

<comment><USER6> If you're on Mac, I can't recommend the yabai [1]/skhd [2] combo enough!

I haven't used i3, so I don't know if yabai mirrors the i3 experience, but it's a very nice programmable keyboard-centric tiling wm for macOS.

[1] [https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai](https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai)

[2] [https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd/](https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd/)

<comment><USER7> How did you setup your menu bar? I can't find something that can replicate the i3bar/polybar experience, and I don't like having the native mac menu bar as it is hard to see the desktop I currently am on.

<comment><USER6> I haven't set it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using i3 for a few months and can never see myself going back to working without it now. I must say that I think it makes most sense when you have multiple monitors though.

<comment><USER9> I used i3 for a while and really enjoyed it. Though, I eventually switched back to KDE. I didn't like having to fiddle with power management and configuring screen locking.

I was noticing that I was only using 1-2 tiles at a time and I could easily emulate that by just side-by-siding windows in KDE.

I think if I ever have the chance to use a Linux machine professionally, especially with multiple monitors, I'll definitely reach for i3 again.

<comment><USER10> i3 couples with desktop environments rather nicely. I've used it with KDE and MATE, and others have used it successfully with XFCE.

My success with it with KDE was a little mixed, but I also didn't make any effort to resolve the little issues. With MATE though, it works flawlessly with no downsides or really any config needed. It's fantastic.

Here is how I set it up with MATE: [https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/mate- and-i3/](https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/mate-and-i3/)

<comment> blaser-waffle Cheers for the MATE panel applet you put together (that's in the blog post): [https://github.com/city41/mate-i3-applet](https://github.com/city41/mate-i3-applet)

Also, got any pictures of the desktop?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recently saw someone playing around with i3 and xzoom to make fractals and video feedback, seems fun- [https://twitter.com/maxbittker/status/1228241766240768000](https://twitter.com/maxbittker/status/1228241766240768000)

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're looking to switch from X11 to Wayland, you should definitely check out Sway[1]. It's all the greatness of i3 rebuilt on top of a cleaner, leaner, meaner tech stack!

[1]: [https://swaywm.org/](https://swaywm.org/)

<comment><USER2> >> cleaner, leaner, meaner tech stack!

What does that mean?

Sway is a great project, but I would be careful of using Wayland, as lots of minor issues came up last time I was using it ( death by a thousand papercuts ).

For example, if you rely on years of small x scripts ( xrandr, etc. ), be prepared to rewrite all of them for wayland.

Last time I used Sway/Wayland, I couldn't find a good alternative to redshift. While Gnome has it, I can't seem to just use this feature independently on other DEs.

Again, Sway is fantastic, and I fully support moving off to Wayland. But best case scenario Sway is a drop-in replacement. Most likely there will be some fiddling. Especially if you've been using i3 for years and have built a custom ecosystem around it.

<comment><USER13> There's a patched redshift for wlroots compositors (sway is the most prominent one) on AUR, works perfectly in my machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess tiling window managers should be considered more of a specialized niche tool, and in that it is commendable that i3 does such a good job of it. I do really admire it for being so light-weight on resources compared to a lot of the other more popular WMs.

I say a niche tool because I've never really understood why someone would prefer a Window Manager that places a lot of constraints than one that lets you controls / customize the windows as you please and is thus "freer".

I guess it can seem useful for, say, multiple terminal windows. But would suck for a scenario where you have to open different kinds of applications like a browser, file manager, video converter, movie player, terminal etc. etc. (just citing all the apps I have open now and am multi-tasking with) where the ability to stack them would prove to be more productive for the user.

That even control freaks like Apple, who like to think only they know what's best for their consumers, doesn't use a tiling only WM in their OS is telling. Even Microsoft switched from a tiling WM from Windows 2.0 on wards and has stuck to it (Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager) ).

<comment><USER10> Window management is truly a preference thing.

I feel the opposite of what you state. To me, a non tiling-window manager burdens me with moving and resizing windows, mostly with my mouse. With i3, its algorithm sizes and places the window ideally 90% of the time, and I fix up the 10% of the time with key commands, never needing my mouse.

My windows being so predictable and so easily maintained with the keyboard enables me to stay in flow much better. I basically never think about my windows, it's just a "solved problem" for me.

It's unfortunate that tiling window managers are really only available on Xorg based OSes. I feel if Windows and OSX had really good tiling window management (the available solutions are nowhere near as good as what something like i3 can do), then tiling window managers would be much more popular IMO.

<comment><USER15> For me the built in shortcuts to snap things to the left, right, and push to second monitor are all I really need and I get both tiling and non-tiling with windows/OS X/gnome... never understood why people go i3 when the shortcuts are built in to what you likely are already using. To each their own though, if i3 works better for y'all I think that is great too.

<comment><USER16> The built-in snapping only works for two windows per screen though. If you want 3 or more, you're stuck with the mouse.

<comment><USER17> There's the gtile gnome shell extension. I have shortcuts defined to snap windows to predetermined regions of the screen, which can be defined on an arbitrary grid.

That plus gnome's builtin shortcuts to move windows to different monitors and different desktops, and setting alt-tab to "switch windows directly" gives me pretty much everything I need.

Windows don't _start_ tiled, but this doesn't feel like a big drawback. When matplotlib pops up five plot windows I'd rather they stay the aspect ratio they were intended, anyway. But I'll snap my text editors, terminals, and file browser windows to half/quarter of the screen.

It's pretty great, and I get to stay within GNOME which is the 'happy path' for linux desktop use IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The thing I love about i3 is that the config file is the complete documentation. Forget how to do something? Open the config file. That's it.

<3 i3

<comment><USER19> And reloading the new config is even simpler with a combination of keystrokes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been considering trying out a tiling window manager. I'm curious what people feel they gain using a tiling window manager versus something like Windows/Gnome's screen splitting features. Is it being able to arrange more windows on the screen than just side-by-side windows? Is it keyboard shortcut efficiencies? Is it just cool?

<comment><USER21> On my personal machine, I use i3wm, and on my work machine I use OSX with Spectacle (a window tiler).

For me, the killer feature of i3wm is not how it lets me arrange windows on my screen, but how it lets me switch between them. With OSX, I have to maintain a mental stack of recently-used applications: If I'm in my terminal and I want to get to firefox, I have to hit cmd-tab, or maybe cmd-tab-tab, or maybe cmd- tab-tab-tab. At least once a day, I make an off-by-one error and get stuck in a context-shift loop until I pause, think, and do the needful. With i3wm, I have 10 workspaces, and each is available with a single chord press. I have my own conventions about what's where, and there's no cognitive load associated with switching between text editor and documentation, or whatever.

Along the same lines, I like to keep a roguelike open for quick breaks, but ideally I'd never accidentally switch to a video game. OSX gives you no ability to punt an application from your cmd-tab list except to quit the application. With i3wm, I keep that on workspace 0, and have never accidentally switched over to it.

You may think I'm being precious, but it really does make a huge difference in my ability to stay in the zone.

<comment><USER16> Do you manually move certain apps to certain workspaces, or do you have configurations to do it automatically? I've tried setting up the config to always have Firefox on workspace 3 and Slack on 4, but it doesn't work. I can do it with terminal, though. I've also done the xprop command to find the WM_CLASS property, but still no luck

<comment><USER22> See my dotfiles: [https://github.com/Kubuxu/dotfiles/blob/master/i3/config.bas...](https://github.com/Kubuxu/dotfiles/blob/master/i3/config.base#L193-L211)

'assign' allows you make so if window opens, it opens on given screen Lower, you can see me switch to given workspace before autostarting apps.

<comment><USER16> I've tried the assign keyword, but I can't get it to work with Firefox or slack

assign [class="Firefox] 3 assign [class="Slack"] 4

But it doesn't work for me

<comment><USER23> It definitely works. I'm on mobile now but remember that the two parameters in the wm_class correspond to name and class (I always forget which is which) . Also you can use regex in the matching iirc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Happy i3 user for 7 years, thanks to all of the developers. i3 is incredibly smooth to use. Looking at the bug fixes I've only ever hit one in the wild:

> move workspace to output: don't create duplicate numbered workspace

and didn't even realize it was a bug, always thought it was an issue with my configuration.

</comment><comment><USER25> As a long time dwm[1] user and the developer of a tiling script for KDE, Krohnkite[2], I'm purely curious what makes i3 so popular. It makes you spend extra brain cycles on managing windows, which isn't far from stacking WMs in my perspective. I mean, this extra cycle was the reason why I abandoned stacking WM.

Especially on small ("13 ~ "15) laptop screens, where people usually have <= 4 apps per virtual desktop, I think i3 doesn't have much benefit, because there are only a few possible layouts: half-and-half, master-and-stack(│├│ or │┤│) and quarter(田). All of these are well covered by Tile layout (or nv-stack, according to Arch wiki[3]).

On the other hand, I do admit manual layout can be really useful on large screens and ultra-wide ones. There's neither golden nor silver layout that always works well on large area. There are just too many possibilities, and imagination is the only limit in this case.

[1]: [https://dwm.suckless.org/](https://dwm.suckless.org/) [2]: [https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite](https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite) [3]: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Comparison_of_tiling_wi...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Comparison_of_tiling_window_managers#Layouts)

</comment><comment><USER26> So I'm a long time awesomewm user (5+ years) and when I started shopping around for a wm I tried both awesome and i3 (and another I don't recall the name). Awesome was easier to get started with and all the Lua code is easy to understand and use.

However, could someone who used both elaborate on the differences? Would I gain anything from trying to migrate to i3 instead?

At my point of view, only the community size is the difference, but that hasn't bothered me too much as awesome for most part just simply works.

<comment><USER27> Why change if Awesome works for you?

<comment><USER26> Just because it works doesn't mean there isn't better things out there. Wouldn't change if the benefits are not greater, obviously, but I find it healthy to always reconsider past choices every now and then.

<comment><USER27> true. I never thought about it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've always liked i3 a lot but it was a real pain to get some stuff working (like connecting a new monitor, or having to deal with wifi and bluetooth, or using two different keyboard layouts). Everything had to be configured, and while that's great for understanding how things work together, it's pretty painful when you're just trying to get stuff done.

All the pain went away when I found Regolith [0], which I heavily recommend. It's i3 with Ubuntu but it comes with sensible defaults, a nicer theme and shortcuts to all the configs you could need out of the box. It really makes things a lot easier than using just i3, especially when doing a fresh install (it's available both as an installable image and as a package - I've had no issue with either).

Some default shortcuts are different so if you've been using i3 for a while you'll have to iterate a bit over the config to get to a comfortable point, but it's the same config file. I also changed the default terminal back to gnome term, since their default one doesn't have a scrollbar, but again it's pretty easy to do and you only do it once. All in all, really made my life better.

[0] [https://regolith-linux.org/](https://regolith-linux.org/)

<comment><USER29> I personally didn't encounter any problems whatsoever installing a clean i3, but for anyone searching a batteries-included version of the window manager I've heard a lot of good things about i3-Manjaro (cf. 30-minute review on Youtube [0]).

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vG9ORRUkUQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vG9ORRUkUQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If you're on Windows and are upset that nothing like i3 exists, you can get a useful but watered down i3-like experience by:

1\. Using Windows 10's snapped windows along with various Windows key + arrow key hotkeys[0] for managing windows.

2\. Using DexPot[1] for hotkey controlled virtual workspaces (same ALT + N hotkeys as i3)

3\. Using Keypirinha[2] for fuzzy finding programs to launch (similar'ish to dmenu for launching apps at least)

Combine that with WSL + tmux + terminal Vim and it's not bad for day to day development. I've been using the above for over a year for full time development and while I miss my i3 set up on my native Linux laptop, it's manageable.

[0]: [https://support.microsoft.com/en-nz/help/12445/windows- keybo...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-nz/help/12445/windows-keyboard- shortcuts)

[1]: [https://dexpot.de/?lang=en](https://dexpot.de/?lang=en)

[2]: [https://keypirinha.com/](https://keypirinha.com/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Quick and shameless plug: I wrote a windows 10 style, true transparency enabled notification center/daemon, extending on the concept of dunst: [https://github.com/phuhl/linux_notification_center](https://github.com/phuhl/linux_notification_center)

Feel free to check it out and give it a try.

PS, for the enthusiasts: 100% written in Haskell

</comment><comment><USER32> I love i3, but there's one thing I really wish I could do that I still hadn't figured out.

I used to be a KDE user and I loved the fact that I could stack windows and make the one on top semi-transparent. I'd be using this feature to watch movies while hacking in the terminal. The way you'd set it up is that you'd stack one window on top of another, set it to "always on top" and control its transparency through extra options unlocked in the title bar.

Now, the question is, could i3 do that? In other words, does the "tabbed" mode actually "render" the windows underneath so that I could use an external compositor to set its transparency to whatever I want? Ideally I'd love to have a shortcut for that.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been using i3-wm for many years and am a big fan. It's great to be able to switch between workspaces so quickly and get such an efficient use of screen "real estate".

My current setup i3-wm on Manjaro, alacritty with fish is exactly what I need.

</comment><comment><USER34> Huge shoutout to all developers of i3, I absolutely love it! Since I started using it, the connection to my machine improved vastly. The precious pixel space of my X230 finally felt utilised fully!

I never had any issues with i3. Cannot recommend it enough!

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm using i3 for a long time, the only feature I'm really missing is `bindsym j [class="google-chrome"] xdotool key Down` so I can make vi like key binding for every program that I use.

<comment><USER36> If you're still looking, I quite like XKeysnail ([https://github.com/mooz/xkeysnail](https://github.com/mooz/xkeysnail)) for that, although it does occasionally get confused. It does seem like it's something a WM should be capable of though.

<comment><USER35> thanks I'll look into it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I use i3 on rooted chrome book and its amazing. I also use it on a 21 inch monitor its still amazing. It's so light weight, boots very quickly, uses all of the pixels and loading the new configuration is extremely simple. Just edit ~/.config/i3/config file and press Win-shift-R it loads the new configuration, basically very easy to experiment. Thanks so much Michael Stapelberg([https://michael.stapelberg.ch/](https://michael.stapelberg.ch/)) for this amazing software.

</comment><comment><USER37> i3 is a godsend. I used it for a long time before switching to Sway. I told my brother about it, helped him a bit to set it up and now he stopped using any other WM/OS.

<comment><USER10> It's one of my most favorite pieces of software. It has put me in a slightly odd spot of hoping to never be required to use Windows or OSX at work though. Hopefully all my future companies let me use Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> been a long time i3 user mostly for the sane defaults. It requires significantly less fiddling than any other window manager I've tried out.

<comment><USER39> Have you figured out how to make i3 move the mouse pointer to the area of the newly-focused window when you change window focus by keyboard? AwesomeWM does that out of the box. i3 doesn't and it's very annoying, because then when my table makes a microscopic movement and causes the mouse to move, suddenly what I'm typing is diverted to another window and weird things happen.

<comment><USER40> You can fix that with:

      focus_follows_mouse no

It doesn't do what you wanted, but I also can't see why anyone would want a window to focus simply because you hovered over it.

<comment><USER41> Because why should I have to _click_ to get focus?

Less of an issue on a tiling window manager, but sometimes I really want to be able to type in a window without bringing it to the foreground.

Also, selecting text should copy and middle click should paste. No one can convince me these things are bad or unnecessary.

<comment><USER40> > Because why should I have to click to get focus?

The click not only focuses but is also passed on to whatever you clicked on, so it's like it was already focused.

> Less of an issue on a tiling window manager, but sometimes I really want to > be able to type in a window without bringing it to the foreground.

I don't understand that. You have to somehow indicate to the system what it is you want to type on.

> Also, selecting text should copy and middle click should paste. No one can > convince me these things are bad or unnecessary.

I'm 100% with you on that. Although saying "selecting text should copy" makes it sound like it's being copied when selecting, when it's actually copied when pasting.

<comment><USER42> >You have to somehow indicate to the system what it is you want to type on

You do it by moving the mouse. It makes the mouse more useful because you can now focus things with one less click.

On the other hand, in what circumstance would you want to move your hand to the mouse, move it intentionally over another window without clicking, and _not_ focus it? What would be the point in moving the cursor?

<comment><USER40> > in what circumstance

Precisely in the one that brought this into topic. It's nice to not have to be so careful with how the mouse moves. When it gets in the way, I can just flick it off, not worried about my stuff changing focus. It also greatly decreases the annoyance of accidentally touching a touchpad while typing.

<comment><USER42> Fair enough, that makes sense. In practice I don't ever find I make mistakes with the mouse and focusing, but then I am very good with the mouse (after playing those FPS games :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> A great use case for i3 that is my daily driver is as a remote desktop windowing solution. My i3 desktop state is preserved and sanely laid out if I'm at home on a 15" laptop, at work on a 30" monitor, or even on my portable 12" laptop while I'm in meetings.

<comment><USER44> How do you do the remote desktop part?

<comment><USER43> I use Chrome Remote Desktop, but I imagine any similar system would work too. This Wikipedia page has a server/client/OS support matrix for various systems:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_remote_desktop...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_remote_desktop_software#Operating_system_support)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I used i3 about two years ago, and have been using awesome since then. Can anybody elaborate how do these two projects compare in 2020?

</comment><comment><USER46> Somehow I read that host name as "I3MW" and thought it'sa site for the BMW i3 car.

</comment><comment><USER47> I have been using i3 for a long time and here are some advanced features that I'd love it to have.

1) Workspaces of workspaces

Let's say I'm working on five projects at the same time. Each project usually has totally different workspace configurations.

For example:

Project1 might have workspaces 1: dev, 2: mail, 3: tail -f access.log

Project2 might have workspaces 1: photoshop, 2: mypaint, 3: shell

Project3 might have workspaces 1: trello, 2: research

...

This is like tmux sessions. I can have multiple sessions, each session has multiple windows and panes. In tmux this works very well but in i3 you can'd do that.

I'm currently emulating this by running five independent i3 copies on five displays :1, :2, :3, :4, :5 and I switch between displays to switch to another project.

2) Static tiling

I3 is a dynamic tiling manager, which means it uses the entire screen. However, once you establish your workflow, you often have windows that take 1/3 of the screen and are 1/3 off the top, etc. and you don't really want them to take the entire screen because it makes you less productive and it feels weird. Also, once you establish your workflow, you don't want the workspace to change or resize. You just know where everything is and don't want a slightest disturbance in your workflow.

This is often hard to do in i3 and you need to use tricks such as vertical and horizontal splits of empty terminals to put the app where you need it to be. And it's extremely easy to mess this up, if you accidentally open a new terminal. Then your app resizes and shifts, and when you close the accidental terminal, it's no longer where it was because of many vertical and horizontal splits.

I found Notion window manager that is static tiling but I haven't tried it. It can also have tabs inside static tiles, which makes it very interesting.

3) Run or raise

Run or raise starts a program if it's not running, focuses it if it's running, and hides it when no longer needed.

For example, pressing alt+n starts and shows a notepad if it's not yet running. If it's running, it focuses the notepad and pressing alt+n again hides it.

I3 doesn't have this feature but it can be emulated via xdotool and scratchpads.

4) Using fzf instead of dmenu

Dmenu is nice but you need to type too much. The solution is to use fzf instead of dmenu.

I'm currently displaying a floating sticky terminal window that runs fzf, gets my input, performs the action, and disappears. It's so much faster than dmenu.

5) Using fzf to switch apps, workspaces, workspaces-of-workspaces

Often, when you're working on project2, you remember you had similar idea/code/notes in project4. You then have to switch to display :4, then switch to correct workspace and find the info.

This could be simplified by using fzf and just instantly switching where you need.

6) Using alt-tab to switch back to previous place you were.

Let's say you switched from appx in project2 on display :2 to appy in project4 on display :4, and now you have to cycle between them. You can't do that right now so the workflow isn't perfect and there's a lot of drag.

<comment><USER42> Notion seems to have my ideal tiling paradigm for the same reasons you describe, however it seems to be kind of buggy with modern applications, with repect to window and input focus especially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> my arch setup uses i3, it's not the only tiling wm but it's really nice, light and efficient.

</comment><comment><USER49> Why isn't i3-gaps merged by now?

<comment><USER50> The tracking issue for that feature is [https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3724](https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3724)

Merging gap support isn't that easy, and our spare time is not unlimited. Serious offers to help very welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Still no gaps support on main branch. Devs don't care about what their users want/need.

Happy bspwm user here.

<comment><USER37> I wonder why that is, but I never understood the appeal of gaps. It's wasted space.

I wonder if people who like gaps like bezel on their screen too.

<comment><USER42> Some gaps users claim that due to visual impairment, it helps them differentiate windows from each other. I guess you could use larger borders instead but gaps certainly look nicer than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I love tiling WMs. I'll try out new ones every now and then for a few days, but I always come back to i3; which has been my primary window manager since 2012. It's an amazing window manager and I'm glad to see all the work still going into it.

Sometime this year, I'll have to give Sway/Wayland another try on my laptop. I'd love to switch to Wayland, but the past few releases of Sway there was always something I got stuck on I couldn't patch or work around.

<comment><USER53> My experience with Sway was the same until the 1.0 release (about 11 months ago). The 1.0 release fixed all the show stoppers and I've been happily using it ever since. It also comes with a few nice things build in like gaps.

To be honest though, there isn't much difference from a day to day perspective between X11 and wayland. A few things are nice (adding and extra screen doesn't reset the video mode) and a few things are worse (recording video). Make the switch when it's the natural choice, don't force it ;-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Red letter/all caps admonishment in emails from upper management? - <AUTHOR> Is this still a common occurrence in some companies?  Do you consider it a generally acceptable and effective practice?  EG, overall, and without context, is it (ever) OK? <comment><USER2> I can imagine two situations. In both, I hope this email was in private and not CC'ed anyone (if it did, that's terrible).

1) You screwed up really hard and management wants to make sure you understand that and not to repeat it. This has been happening for a few times and you received an email without red/all caps before. If you were lucky, management even talked to you in person!

2) Your upper management is unstable, thinks they are superior in some way and basically doesn't care about people in general.

In any case, I don't see how this is effective (unless they want to push you to find a better place, which I would do).

</comment><comment><USER3> Sure. why not?

I know for me personally sometimes I do dumb stuff and could use an email like that.</comment>


Humble Bundle Post Mortem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pocketwatchgames.com/post/78594124321/humble-bundle-post-mortem-750k-monacos-sold

<comment><USER2> Conclusion: people stay loyal to the sales channel.

Not exactly, Humble Bundle and Steam have completely different buy sensitives.

While i buy Humble Bundle, Android Bundle, Weekly Sale, ... I almost never buy any indie game (never say never) from Steam, cause i use Steam to buy A+ discounted games (> 15%) on the front page once in a month. So i would never have noticed your game (honoustly).

But i buy a lot of Humble Bundle's that are worth it.</comment>


Does better coffee mean a better company? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codejobs.io/post/95672351561/does-better-coffee-make-a-better-company

<comment><USER2> If that's one of the 10 most appealing things you can come up with about working for your company, I don't want to work there.

The same goes for ping-pong.

Besides, it's been years since I walked into an office that didn't have a coffee machine. Coffee is at most a couple hundred dollars of initial investment for a machine plus pennies per day for a decent roast. Free coffee should go without saying.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't believe so. I once worked for a startup that offered not only coffee, but allowed beer as well. On the weekends at night, engineers would be having beers and smoking. Productivity was OK, and the owners meant well, but the culture sucked because they hired anyone who could do the job, rather than tailor their workforce. No one clicked. I left a year later to work for a major company.</comment>


'Home-brewed morphine' made possible - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-32780624

<comment><USER2> Well, made conceivable. They haven't even manufactured it in a commercial setting yet.</comment>


Thesis Hatement - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/04/there_are_no_academic_jobs_and_getting_a_ph_d_will_make_you_into_a_horrible.single.html <comment><USER2> Don't most of us think, "Duh?" to an article proclaiming that getting/being a PhD in Literature is hard and mostly pointless?

Upper level education costs a lot of money and involves years of time, don't these people think about what they want to do with their lives? Don't they do at least cursory research into what that degree will mean to their careers?

Every high school has some sort of career counselor. Colleges have many of them. These days, research on the Internet (these are pre-PhD Lit students, don't they know how to Google?) makes it simple to look up salaries, opportunities to be hired, personal stories from those in the career, etc.

Maybe this trend toward people realizing that many degrees are near useless is just a result of the economy and tougher times finally making the practicality of education paramount. It seems a shame that you need bad circumstances for people to evidence some common sense, though.

<comment><USER3> No. Up until very recently (the most recent recession, perhaps), simply having a college degree was thought of as being a road to a comfortable middle class life. To this day career counselling focuses almost completely on interests and lifestyle and ignores salary. Unless a student has a mentor to guide them, it is very easy to go through college blistfully unaware of the realities that exist once you are in the job market.

<comment><USER2> I don't agree with your assessment that this is a completely recent phenomenon.

"Is a college degree enough?" was a pervasive question when I got out of undergrad in 1991 since we were in a recession. My placement center and many magazines had "What is this degree worth?" compilations. This same information has been available online for at least the last 10+ years.

Ironically, I always thought of myself as being pretty blissfully unaware and unthoughtful of my own career and where I was headed... but I knew what my salary and job prospects were for my career before I settled on my major when I was a Sophomore in college.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like you were a much better planner than most college students. I don't think that salary research is of much help for 18 year olds. It's hard to gauge what a good salary is at that age. This is where mentorship and parenting can be of great help. But we're still at a point where a minority of adults have college degrees so many parents believe sending college is the silver bullet to a good life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To be fair, this post is about a _literature_ Ph.D., not one in a field like Mathematics or Computer Science. Not that the job outlook is a lot rosier on that side, but it's an important distinction to be made.

<comment><USER5> I think we should clarify that the research-job outlook is not rosy in CS. There are plenty of corporations that want to hire CS PhDs for non-research work. And there is always the entrepreneurial route (the smart VCs aren't going to hold the PhD against you).

<comment><USER6> In Germany there are plenty research-jobs, but most of them in civil service, so no CS-PhD want it. The industry just pays much better.

Last year there was something in the news about the payment of professors, which was about $5000 a month. This is an entry level pay of a software developer (without Master or PhD) in Germany.

<comment><USER7> "...which was about $5000 a month. This is an entry level pay of a software developer (without Master or PhD) in Germany."

Where? I'm near what, as I understand it, is considered a good area for high- tech workers (Ruhr area), but I don't see many jobs paying this much (maybe I'm looking in the wrong places?)

<comment><USER6> I'm from Stuttgart, made my B.Sc. in 2011 and make about $5500 (~4220€) am month as a GUI-Dev. When I read the "IT-Payment" polls in the news I get the impression this isn't nearly as much as it could be. :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For an informative retitle, how about "Literature Ph.D. means no jobs and you become worse person," which is well within the HN character limit for titles? That seems adequately to summarize the article.

(I had to try this, because rewriting a title is a mere exercise for a humanities major like me who used to work as an editor.)

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure if I'd trust you to do that, because I heard you were a humanities major.

Aside, I'm sure there are a lot of STEM graduates here congratulating themselves on both their employablity and their superior moral character. Upvote!

Your title rewrite is missing a word by the way. :)

Edit; I got downvoted for saying what now appears in the top comment. Tut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Going full academic can indeed ruin a person, but there's a way to prevent that: a social circle that includes at least some people who are not academics. They can provide emotional support while you're earning your degree, drag you out of the ivory tower every once in a while (kicking and screaming, if they must) both before and after the degree, and generally keep you grounded enough to remember that you are not, in fact, on a higher plane of existence. That's valuable.

</comment><comment><USER5> What a bad article. First, a humanities PhD has little relation (from a career and financial perspective) to a STEM PhD. So I don't understand why this link is on Hacker News. Second, while I complain about the relatively-not-high compensation and limited opportunities available to CS PhDs, it isn't that bad if you graduated from a top 10-20 program. Lets stop it with the PhD bashing already.

\- a CS PhD

<comment><USER11> The article is specifically about literature PhDs. I don't know why that isn't in the title here.

<comment><USER5> The 3 people I know with lit PhDs had full-time jobs/careers and did the PhD for love of the subject rather than anything else. None of them expected to get a tenure-track faculty job - an adjunct teaching appointment at the local college from time to time was more in line with what these people wanted.

<comment><USER4> Don't most community colleges accept a Master's for adjunct positions?

Not that love of subject is a bad reason to get a PhD, but if the end goal is teaching a local course every now and then, you could presumably do that after you have the MS and (potentially) while pursuing the PhD, right?

<comment><USER5> True for community college. Universities typically prefer PhDs when they are hiring adjuncts. Also, to reiterate, for the lit PhD people I knew, the end goal was personal satisfaction - not a lucrative adjunct job :-p Some people just love their subject and share it with others. Teaching is a wonderful opportunity to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know several electrical engineering professors (PhD's from Carnegie Mellon, etc). They have no issue getting jobs at universities or in private sector. They are paid very well too.

<comment><USER13> I'm glad to hear job prospects for EE's have improved. I remember a time about 12 years ago when a graduate degree in EE and a buck would get you a newspaper and a shitty cup of coffee. Nothing like getting introduced to the new-hire at our shitty 2nd shift call center only to find out they've got a doctorate and 10 years of job experience and ended up having to take a gig in tech support just to feed their family.

<comment><USER14> This may only be the case for CMU EE PhD's. In today's winner-take-all economy, graduates of top programs have all the options; anyone who isn't a superstar generally has to eat shit.

<comment><USER12> Grads from big state universities with a technical focus do pretty well too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The point of life is not maximal profitability. Well, it is ok if your life is, but other people may have other viewpoints. Thankfully, the world is set up in such a way that I can easily derive a living from coding which I love to do. Are my contributions to humanity; optimized database queries, gui fixes, systems that my employer sell, etc more valuable than what a literature PhD does? Is it only the work that generates the most profits that is valuable?

If one adheres to the utilitarian philosophy, I think it is easy to see that there is a problem. If the goal is to maximize happiness, then it would clearly be better if people who love to read and discuss books can do that as much as possible instead of doing something that makes them unhappy. How would you solve the problem?

</comment><comment><USER16> She goes on about her hopeless job search, but she never mentioned _where_ she got her degree (Department of German at the University of California-Irvine).

I wonder if her perspective were different had she graduated from an Ivy.

<comment><USER17> "After four years of trying, I've finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job—and if you go to graduate school, neither will you."

Clearly, her personal experience can be extrapolated to everyone everywhere looking for a tenure track literature professorship. If she can't do it, nobody else should bother trying.

I wouldn't have hired her either.

<comment><USER18> True, the article is heavy on personal experience, but the numbers really don't look good if you want to be a tenured professor in the humanities. Just look at the number of open positions each year compared to the number of graduates. And don't forget to include the graduates from all the previous years who also want the one tenure-track job in early modern literature (or whatever your field is).

Yeah, the success rate for startups is low, but at least there are different routes to success (side project, bootstrapping, angel, VC, etc). If you want to be a professor the only option is to get a job at a university.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and _worth_. Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them.

But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanities, is everything but cosy. There is little money in it, there are few available positions.

However, being a slight bit along the same way as the author, I can only relay what I see around me every day. From the group of PhD students around me, how many hold any illusions as to what academia means? None that I have met. Out of a group of ~10 people, some almost finished, some at the beginning (this is not in the US, so everyone has done a masters or equivalent before), nobody wants to become a professor. One wants to become (and judging by how she's doing, she will be) a curator, I see people interested in broadcasting, teaching (as in: school), publishing and politics. It might be different in the US, I do not know. But here, it is painfully obvious to everyone I meet as to what the chances are to land a faculty position.

Do _I_ care? To a degree (no pun intended). Would I like to go into academia? Yes. Do I know what that means? Yes. I write quickly, I enjoy a wide range of topics, I don't mind giving talks etc. I am flexible. Would I have to move if I wanted to go down that route? Yes. Does that bother me? No, it really doesn't. I will give it its fair shot, I will finish the PhD, and I will have a look around for post-doc positions. If it doesn't work? Fair enough, publishing or IT or something else it is.

I am not terribly bothered about money, not because I am somehow well off, but because I do not particularly care. I don't need that much to be happy. As long as I will be able to buy books and music here and there, go out every now and then and have a somewhat nice flat somewhere, I will be fine. I would like to be able to have dog, though.

I don't understand the vitriol on HN, I really don't. Everytime the humanities come up, there are the same type of comments, comparing software development entry salaries to professors, talking about student debt etc. Many here seem to be _incapable_ (or unwilling) to even acknowledge that their own set of values is _not universal_ , that not everybody wants to make it or even cares about making it.

In many ways, I qualify for things here, I dabble in programming, I use LaTeX/Emacs/org-mode for all my work, I use Linux permanently, write my own shell-scripts, report bugs etc. That does not mean I would necessarily like to be a programmer. HN is obsessed with making money and in doing so forgets that not everyone shares the same worldview.

I'm sure I will be fine. I do not have any student debt, I will start doing whatever it is I will be doing with a clean slate, I owe no money and I see my experiences as everything but lost time. I love what I am doing, and It would be a pity to give it up. If I have to, I will, but until then, I'll see where it'll take me.

P.S.: I'm doing German now (though I have done other European languages before). Just like the original author. Her choice of topic probably didn't help her overall feelings about her position, either. Kafka is one of those authors about whom so much has been done that it is hard to approach him without a huge amount of preconceptions.

e: syntax

<comment><USER20> Very well said. At the risk of taking away from your original point, going into academia (especially a non-engineering field) can give you a very different perspective and release you from the tech mindset. As an example, the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has a PhD in German social philosophy. How the hell did he end up leading a billion-dollar tech company? Basically he was really smart, and his PhD gave him the framework to think about privacy and civil liberties concerns, something the company desperately needed. The humanities often give us the scaffolding we need to answer really hard social problems which are neglected by the tech community, but are extremely important.

<comment><USER21> "the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has a PhD in German social philosophy"

To be fair we should note that Palantir is a CIA operation whose job is to help the US military destroy indigenous peoples world wide in prep for western corporations to come in and exploit local resources.

Pretty much everybody at Palantir (such as Mr. Miller) reads HN regularly though since they post here all the time to promote and justify their company's fine work in suppressing people. The German social philosophy angle fits right in there.

Love the work you guys do attacking journalists and threatening their families. Real classy.

<http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> GMAFB, the HN title omits the word "Literature" from the "Getting a Literature PhD" This looks a lot like the folks at slate are blogspamming.

I wish HN admins would require approval on any sites with submitted content like slate, extremetech etc. Those guys are a whole lot of noise without much signal.

<comment><USER23> The title was too long and exceeded the HN limit.

<comment><USER22> That's one possibility. The other is that the submitter chose to retain clauses which would increase hits at the expense of wasting a lot of people's time.

How many people would bother with an article telling us that academic jobs for Literature PhDs are hard to find?

<comment><USER23> While that's possible, I thought HN was being a lot more strict about submission titles lately. I know I've had a few of mine changed immediately (and I'm talking about those I edited for clarity, not linkbaiting).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Uhh, I may get hated on for this one and it doesn't help that I just got out of a meeting with a bunch of academics, so I'm kind of annoyed right now, BUT, take note that I'm a PhD working in an academic environment.

[angry bold]Stop whining and start working. [/]

This article is one of the many articles, blogs, etc I've read from academics complaining that there are no jobs and how it's so hard, and OMG the hours are long, and why is this happening to me, and waaaaaaaaaa, I'm a victim. I _literally_ have 2 of them talking about this right now across from me as I'm typing this. You know what they aren't doing? Working (says the guy who is typing on hacker news:) ). Stop complaining and start being the best. Every academic that I have a lot of respect for was able to get a job. They are also the ones that work their asses off, networked, give talks, and play the game correctly. Being "smart" doesn't get you a job, regurgitating papers isn't what makes a good faculty member and thinking that you deserve a job because you have PhD does NOT quality for a job. Simple as that.

Yes, there are very few jobs and way to many PhDs. But, I'd bet that statistic would look much different if you looked at people who actually work smart ,play the game and have some business sense. When you have no business experience at all, and only have been through school with your parents paying your way , well..yeah, it's an eye opening experience that working is hard. Deal with it, stop complaining and go work harder/better than anyone in your field or work at starbucks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is my own essay on grad school in English lit: [http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should- kno...](http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-before- you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and- opportunity-costs/) , the short version of which is "Don't go, and friends don't let friends go."

<comment><USER25> You might want to clean up the "being to be" typo. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yikes. Applying FOL to Kafka, how... well let's just say recursive.

I think a labor shortage in some academic fields is a good thing. CS has been good to me, and I may eventually get over what I had to do to get my PhD, but if there wasn't a good job waiting for me, I don't see why I'd blow the opportunity cost on it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sensational and over generalizing title. This should be downvoted for being misleading. Of course a PhD in literature is going to have almost zero prospective jobs. There's no demand. I'm a EE and in the engineering world this is certainly not the case.

<comment><USER23> Read the title and subheading on the original article, not the HN parent. It was too long and exceeded the HN character limit, and had to be edited. This is about Ph.Ds in the humanities, not the Ph.D in general.

<comment><USER26> Well then the HN title should've reflected that somehow...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like someone's bitter. Or trying to stave off competition. :)

</comment><comment><USER28> > the disciplines that comprised a college education in its > entirety for > thousands of years, but whateve

I would love to study the humanities. One of my favourite classes in college was British Lit. But universities are just too damn expensive. If I'm going to spend ten of thousands on an education it's going to be one that can pay off loans.

</comment><comment><USER29> I can only assume the prospects get worse with the movement towards online classes and learning. How many 101 classes can't be taught nearly exclusively online? That will reduce the demand for PhDs and supply of positions further.

</comment><comment><USER25> One point not covered -- suppose you do get an academic job. Where will it be located? Now suppose you have a spouse with a career of his/her own. Where does s/he want to live and work?

Oops.

</comment><comment><USER30> She should start writing horror PC and Xbox game design pitches. And I like the illustration. EA should make her the offer.</comment>


Newer way to notify customers about new features & Save Money - <AUTHOR> http://dokeeno.com/ce

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the use case and the solution I'm providing

If you are a online product company, you ship new features. How do you effectively notify/educate users about those. You may do several tactics and techniques.

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Instead worrying about old fashion documentations. We have introduced a way to overcome this. You can learn about them with this document.

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<comment><AUTHOR> Hope to see, How you guys think about this.</comment></comment>


What is the best language/strategy for doing text analysis on websites?  - <AUTHOR>

I would like to identify companies involved in certain kinds of businesses by searching on a keyword(s) and using software to identify the company names in the sites. I'd like to automate the whole process, and be able to use some sophisticated methods to digest the results. <comment><USER2> Well first you have to scrape the information, you could use something like uBot, or some macro software out there.

Digesting the results, I'd just outsource that for someone to distinguish brand names from keywords.</comment>


Saved.io – simple online bookmarks - <AUTHOR> http://saved.io/ <comment><USER2> [http://tinynote.com](http://tinynote.com) goes to a godaddy parked page.</comment>


Show HN: MessageBook, an extension to limit FB usage to Messenger - <AUTHOR> https://messagebook.github.io/ <comment><USER2> I don't know how this extension work, but I have no problem with that.

I just go to messenger.com and never visit fb.com. How does the extension work and why?</comment>


Curse of the Greedy Copyright Holders - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704608104575220551906611796.html

<comment><USER2> Ken Bruen writes crime fiction. When I first discovered his work years ago, each of his chapters would begin with a quote from someone else's novel (attributed). I got introduced very quickly to a lot of other great writers. Then the effing lawyers moved in. This wasn't Fair Use -- so pay us. As you see in the WSJ article, the prices demanded have no relation to reality whatsoever. Ever since that time, Bruen has used public domain quotes. I can't think of a single _writer_ who would have objected to Bruen's use. Because writers _love_ what he did. But when publishers, lawyers, and agents get involved, the common well of culture is drained dry by their greed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Then there are the copy-free positions that some people espouses, but ignored because people think such an idea is nuts.

A major libertarian think tank did think it's an alright idea, going as far as giving away free PDF and put their entire content empire under the Creative Common Attribution. Not exactly public domain, but they don't want people to claims copyright over it and prevent the institution from being able to publish it. I heard that they are even asking for bit torrent expert and seeders. In the end, they still managed to sell a healthy amount of books.

The copyfree position is a revolution that is taking place within libertarianism. IP was a controversy, but gradually, the anti-IP position has won out. To that extent, business models are changed, too.

It could be a precursor of things to come in mainstream society.

<comment><USER4> Think tank link? I know that mises.org has been doing amazing stuff with providing free content. They purchase the rights to a book so they can distribute it for free, often causing the books sales to increase significantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his > record label's parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my > book.

Not sure on what basis they are demanding that money as the record label does not hold any copyright over the lyrics of a song. Song lyrics copyrights belong to the songwriter and the publisher, if the song is published.</comment>


We rely on 15 people to do our science - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Sydonahi/status/991797172877381632 <comment><USER2> lol I mean I think the point is compensate those people better but this person acts like Matlab/LabVIEW/R/etc don't exist</comment>


Afrostream is shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://www.okayafrica.com/culture-2/afrostream-ending-tonje-bakang/ <comment><USER2> I've always wondered whether VOD is an inherently unsustainable business model. The big daddy in the space charges $8-12 per month yet people regularly watch upwards of 10 movies per month on the service. That's less than $1 per movie?! Also, this forces anyone doing a similar business to charge even less than that to break into the market, so there reaches a point where we're talking fractions of pennies per movie on some services. How is any of this sustainable given the massive cost of acquiring the content in the first place, and is there any VOD service with healthy profits that you can point me to?

<comment><USER3> Once you've acquired the content, the marginal cost of a view is very low. So it makes sense to get as many customers as possible even if that means charging a lot less per view. And the stability of subscription income is nice too. I'm sure there are lots of people who have a $10/mo subscription going for years who hardly use the service at all.

<comment><USER4> I haven't seen any data for video content, but I imagine some content is pay $$$ to steam to as many users for a limited time, but much of it is probably pay $$$ to be able to stream it, plus $ each time it is streamed. And I imagine some deals are based on a share of revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if content was significantly more expensive than bandwidth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've never heard of this product but it's sad to see it not work out. There is a huge gap when it comes to black media representation in the United States specifically and I believe it will be a huge opportunity to whoever can tap into it's potential. Black millennials in particular are such a driver of culture in America it's surprising to see how little they are catered to in terms of product. Especially in regards to social media, the impact of Black Twitter is well documented. Also, for anyone who used Vine it seemed like Black creators were really the base of the content that Vine was known for.

<comment><USER6> Yes agreed. I'd also argue that black millennials (and younger) aren't just drivers of culture, they're also tech early adopters! Vine is a great example, Worldstar is a somewhat notorious example, BlackPlanet... those are just off the top of my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Let's take the example of an African-American independent or Nigerian film > (Nollywood) at € 3,000 per year of use.

What about giving away shares for content? I mean, if Afrostream gave away X% of the shares, in return for the rights to content outside the home country, the cost of content reduces to close to zero, and the money spent on operations and marketing starts to approach 100%.

This is a far less than ideal model, to be sure, but then, the company closing is a lot worse! Shares are worth nothing until there is a liquidation event, so maybe the play is to get the content providers to become shareholders?

I could see a play where content providers that have content worth essentially nothing (unless there is a marketplace for streaming Nollywood in the west I am unaware of {which is indeed extremely possible}) but for which they may be able to grow a market that, over time, has value. That seems like a win-win, or at least a no-lose-no-lose, situation.

Is that not worth pursuing?

</comment><comment><USER8> As some comments imply it was strength of or "approach to diversity" in the market that caused the failure, it should be noted the post outlined: What caused Afrostream to close is not lack of traction or market demand but lack of capital. The more subscribers gained, the more content thus, more funding required. The VOD industry has high operating costs (content acquisition, marketing, localization, tech, etc) and a longer breakeven timeline (note cited examples of other much bigger but not yet profitable companies including Netflix). Afrostream addressed a sizable but ignored niche with demand demonstrated in user growth and it is unfortunate that they couldn't get more funding.

</comment><comment><USER9> > _" Diversity is a business opportunity"_

No it's not, few people care about what skin colour the characters in a work of entertainment have, unless it is fundamental to the plot or an aspect of the source material. At very least, they do not care enough to self-segregate and bear separately the cost of producing an entirely different set of works of entertainment which are of competitive quality.

No untainted mind watches _Game of Thrones_ and thinks "You know, it's weird that this fiction styled after old Europe is full of white people.". Nobody watches _Narcos_ and thinks "You know, it's weird that this fiction set in Colombia is full of Mestizos and white latins". Nobody watches _Big Brother Africa_ and thinks "You know, it's weird that this reality game show set in sub-Saharan Africa is full of sub-Saharan Africans".

<comment><USER10> > No it's not, few people care about what skin colour the characters in a work > of entertainment have, unless it is fundamental to the plot or an aspect of > the source material. At very least, they do not care enough to self- > segregate and bear separately the cost of producing an entirely different > set of works of entertainment which are of competitive quality.

Do you have any evidence to support this ridiculous claim? Two of the largest movies of the year (Get Out and Girls Trip) are predominantly black produced. The issue is getting Hollywood to fund such ventures, not demand for them.

> No untainted mind watches Game of Thrones and thinks "You know, it's weird > that this fiction styled after old Europe is full of white people.".

Actually, people _do_ say this. It's a completely fictional universe, and even if it wasn't written into the source material, the show creators could have made an effort to ensure that it wasn't so eurocentric, at least by casting. No such luck. The main representations of people of color that I remember—the sand vipers—were hands down the worst part of the entire show so far. You think people don't notice this shit? What kind of bubble do you live in? People care that they see people _who look and talk like them_ on TV. Everyone else in game of thrones speaks with out of place ethnic accents; way to screw over everyone but the danes and the brits.

Finally, I'd just like to point out that diversity increases the strength of TV shows. If you watch Friends, it's like they were living in this tiny bubble that only existed in NYC coffee shops. Their world is nearly unrecognizable to me despite having lived in the same city about the same age. Had they had any diversity on the show, maybe it would stand the test of time better. Now it just looks dated and white as fuck—way whiter than you'll ever find in NYC.

<comment><USER9> > _Do you have any evidence to support this ridiculous claim? Two of the > largest movies of the year (Get Out and Girls Trip) are predominantly black > produced._

It's a bit silly to say that _Get Out_ was successful _because_ it was "black produced"; it was clearly well written and produced, it stands on its own merits.

> _Had they had any diversity on the show, maybe it would stand the test of > time better. Now it just looks dated and white as fuck—way whiter than you > 'll ever find in NYC._

Who cares? I live in Toronto, and my Panjabi, Mumbaikar, and southeast Chinese flatmates are thoroughly entertained when they put on _Friends_.

They're of clear mind, so they're not thinking "what's with all these white people?", they're thinking "LoL, that definitely wouldn't cure a hangover, so it's funny that they depict it as doing so; LoL, Joey is factually oblivious but really has his finger to the pulse when it comes to people, how charming!".

When I watch a Japanese or Korean drama with a friend, or a Hindi movie with my flatmates, I'm not thinking "what's with all these coloureds on my TV?".</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Tamber – put real time, high-accuracy recommendations in your app - <AUTHOR> https://tamber.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all! I'm Alexi, founder of Tamber. We built Tamber to help developers put fast, effective recommendations into their apps.

After trying a few open source libraries for a music app I was building, I found that they were surprisingly tedious to implement and tended to overfit for popular items – Neil Young _is_ similar to Bob Dylan, but that doesn't help you discover new music. I knew there had to be a better approach that would solve this popularity bias problem, and make recommendations less painful to implement.

Tamber overcomes popularity bias by learning not only the relationships between items, but also how trends in taste evolve over time and using that information to boost less-well-known items in recommendations.

It works just like an analytics service, except that every event you track triggers a system-wide update to the model. And it's really fast, returning fresh suggestions in 20-120ms. So as a user navigates around your app (even if they aren't signed in!) your app can always display the optimal set of next things they should see next.

Here is a simple demo app for book recommendations we made using Goodreads data pulled from Kaggle: [https://tamber.com/demo/goodbooks](https://tamber.com/demo/goodbooks)

I'll open source the app code once I clean it up a bit.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!

</comment><comment><USER2> Our company has been using this for a few months now and it's seriously awesome - has saved our developers about 100 hours of work...paid for itself 10X over and seeing a bump in user time in product</comment>


Cringely's Problems Contacting Startups - Do You Know Who Your CEO Is? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2010/05/question-time/

<comment><USER2> It's not only startups that don't have phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and identifiable persons of authority. It's big companies too.</comment>


An iconic phone before the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.juxtapoz.com/design/an-iconic-phone-before-the-iphone

<comment><USER3> I'd argue there are several really important telephones:

Automatic Electric 34/40 - First one without a subset - Western Electric 500 - First self compensating network - Western Electric 1500/2500 - First with TouchTone - Motorola StarTac - First Clamshell Phone - Apple iPhone - <USER2> Modern Smartphone.

Out of all of these landmarks, the AE 34/40, WE 500/1500/2500 and the Motorola StarTac are the most important ones.

The AE 34/40 was the first what we'd identify as a modern phone in appearance, the WE 500/1500/2500, is so iconic that anyone could identify it as a telephone, it also was a huge leap forward in transmission quality, and the StarTac was the first of billions of clamshell phone, the thing most identifiable as a cell phone to anyone shown an abstract drawing.

I'd argue that the 500 is more iconic however than anything to come before or after it.

<comment><USER4> > Apple iPhone - First Modern Smartphone.

Depends on your definition of "modern".

The iPhone wasn't the first to support apps (Windows Mobile / CE handsets had been around for a while, but they weren't nice to use as a "phone". Also plenty of feature phones, eg most of Sony Ericsson's pre-Android range- supported apps too).

If you meant "the first smart-phone form-factor", then there were Nokia and sony handsets long before the iPhone. But they weren't all that great from many of the accounts I heard (which always put me off buying one). Blackberry and Palm (remember them) also had some great offerings for their era too.

If you meant the "first with capacitive touch screen", then LG beat Apple to the market with an iPhone-like device by a few months.

However Apple's iPhone is still the handset we all remember as being the groundbreaker. I don't know if that's because Apple PR team have done a wonderful job rewriting history; or because Apple happened to build the most successful product of that era that it made other products before it seem forgettable. Maybe a bit of both. But in any case, I think if you want to credit the iPhone for it's importance in history then it's only fair to credit the numerous other handsets which preceded it and pioneered the various different technologies and paradigms that Apple then went on and merge together so effectively.

<comment><USER3> Apple was the first one to put all of those things together in a single package that really worked well - thats what I mean by first modern :-P

<comment><USER4> Well that's now more a question of personal bias / preference than something that can be defined as cold, hard fact.

What worked for you might not have been someone else's preferred method of using a smart phone. As well polished as the iPhone was, I found many of its design implimentations worked against the way I liked to use a smart phone. And I think the fact that Symbian (amongst others) outsold iOS for the first few years of the iPhone's life would suggest that I wasn't alone.

So I think even by that measure, it's still unfair to exclude other handsets of the same generation which were just as popular.

But then I guess history is written by the victors, not the other pioneers who've since fallen by the wayside.

<comment><USER3> Apple took the smart phone from something used by technologists and other tech oriented people, and turned it into a mass market appliance accessible to everyone - every smart phone that has come since is related to it in form and function.

<comment><USER4> If Apple held a majority market share, then I might agree, but as I said before, Symbian et al had a larger market share so they must have had some degree of mass market appeal as well.

edit: just to clarify. I do agree that the iPhone deserve a place in the history books because it did change the landscape significantly. But my point was that the iPhone wasn't the first phone of it's ilk (probably the best all rounder and definitely best at specific criteria, but those are point I'm enjoying discussing here). In light of that, if the iPhone deserves a place then equally the handsets that pioneered much of the technology and paradigms which Apple beautifully combined, those other handsets deserves a mention too (like how scientific papers based on original research still need to draw from the pool of existing research and thus even new theories owe credit other publications)

<comment><USER5> Symbian had a larger market as Nokia were throwing it on as many devices as they could, irregardless of whether it worked well so they saturated the market. Plus they were commonly called featurephones and not smartphones.

<comment><USER4> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In Sweden our most iconic-looking phone was the Ericofon "Cobra". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericofon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericofon)

</comment><comment><USER7> > Although only ten buttons are needed for today's telephone needs, thw two > "extra" buttons prepare these sets for future communications services.

I wonder what they had in mind? Have there been any noteworthy uses except for stuff like signaling the end of an input?

<comment><USER8> In the US, the * key was used for a lot of shortcodes with various add-on phone services -- turning on/off caller id visibility, disabling call waiting for one call, calling the number that dialled you back, etc. However, in general, the keys were designed to be used to access computer services where you needed various delimiters.

Of note here is that the DTMF system was originally designed with a fourth row of keys, A-D. These were supposed to be used for general access of menus instead of the now traditional 1-9, but they only ever really got used for the military Autovon [1] network for setting priorities.

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

<comment><USER3> Not was, is, the vertical service codes still work - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_service_code](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_service_code)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very informative for those of us like myself who didn't know touch tone was around since the 60's, but damn is that website stuffed with ads. I had to click 3 close/collapse and then lower the browser window to cover up the footer bar crap just to read the post without getting a headache. Note to self, never overdo the ads like that.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I've had several phones with this design. One of them was made of clear plastic so you could see the components inside... and had some LEDs that lit up when it rang. But my favorite was just a plain old version that I hacked apart and installed the components into a shoe.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why was I expecting a post about the Nokia 3310?

<comment><USER11> Because the Nokia 3310 (and to a lesser degree the 3210) were the iconic devices of the cellphone, just like the iPhone 4 (with iOS 6 or earlier) is probably the most iconic phone of the smartphone era.

And even if you were told to think of a landline telephone, the image in your head would probably look less like the Trimline and more like a late-era Bell, the kind that was chosen to represent the Washington-Moscow hotline.</comment></comment>


OO is not Computing, Newer is not More modern - <AUTHOR> http://ormomg.blogspot.se/2012/04/oo-computing-newer-more-modern.html <comment><USER2> I would like to meet one of these fantastical java-only OO-proponents that are often brought up in posts like this, claiming that Java and OO are the end-all of programming. To be honest, I never have.

Some people seem to have a disposition to modeling problems with objects, but I fear I'm too young to have ever met any Java zealots. To me they seem more like straw men invented to help set up posts like this one.

<comment><USER3> There are a lot of Java-only OO-proponents in the corporate world.

<comment><USER4> Agreed with parent. Come take a stroll in my office; I work in a coporate bank. Most of my coworkers learned "real" programming in the 90s, when Java was the hot new thing on the block. To most of them, the whole Programming Language eco-system can be summarized to an endless "C++ vs Java vs C#" flamewar.

Just yesterday a colleague of mine looked at me with chock and awe when I told him I enjoy coding in C. "But... it's not OO!" he mumbled, puzzled.

Pushing the caricature a little further, Python and Ruby are toy languages that only hipsters use, Perl is only to be used by the sysadmin down the hall, and Lisp is the biggest failed experiment programmers ever came up with.

Pointy-haired bosses encourage this kind of thinking: They would never get in trouble for chosing a language amongst the big 3 (C++/C#/Java).

I once heard someone say: "I don't understand why there are still new languages coming out every day. Shouldn't everyone just use Java?"

<comment><USER5> > can be summarized to an endless "C++ vs Java vs C#" flamewar.

As opposed to an endless "Ruby vs Python vs PHP" flamewar?

Pushing the caricature a little futher, C++ and Java are enterprise languages that only old out-of-touch programmers use.

Hipster Apple-using kids encourage this kind of thinking: They would never be un-cool for choosing a language among Ruby, Python, or Lisp.

It's far too easy to become that type of programmer. Choice of language has little to do with it. No doubt you understand this, just making the point clear.

<comment><USER4> You sir made my day, thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"Lots of so called object oriented languages have setters and when you have an setter on an object you turned it back into a data structure."_

That may be because data structures is what we actually need. Data structures largely determine the computational complexity of operations and I think it makes little sense to act as if we could always think in terms of abstract responsibilities, interfaces, encapsulation, message passing, etc.

These things are useful organizational principles for coping with large systems, but at the core of most large systems is some algorithmic transformation of one data structure into another.

<comment><USER7> I think that the point here is that while data structures are objects, not every object should act like a data structure.

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that when Alan Kay says "object" he means something different from programmers-at-large. To the general population of programmers, an object is just a data structure that's been bundled with some behavior. To Kay, an object is a computational entity that can only send/receive messages (what Carl Hewitt called an actor even before Smalltalk was on the scene). In Kay's mind, objects do not expose state the way they commonly do in the mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most of object oriented programming to me feels like nothing more than trying to decide the best place to put something. As time goes on though, typically the 3rd iteration, there just is no good place to put this new thing. A redesign would be best, but I only have 1 week to finish this new feature.

So a project (well at least in my experience) progresses like this: "Wonderful architecture" > "glad I designed this project well, its' paying dividends!" > "hmmmm I never considered this paradigm before" > "new guy joins team" > "argh this code is crap"

Object oriented programming can be really elegant... but I can see why people hate on it.

<comment><USER9> I think you summed it up well. People hate object oriented code because it has an extra startup burden. It's hard to just dive in and start fiddling with code because there are many project-specific abstractions you need to understand before-hand. The new guy on the project has to spend extra time to "grok" the idioms of the project. I personally don't see this as a bad thing.

The fact is, abstraction is key to programming. People who have a hard time managing extra abstractions in their head probably aren't nearly as good of a programmer as they think.

<comment><USER10> On the other hand, people complaining about this don't realize it is very much the same in any other language.

Go ahead and just fiddle around in that million loc c codebase. Or that million loc java codebase. (and ignore for a second that that c codebase is a large compiler and that java codebase is an elaborate hello world). Or a hypothetical million line haskell codebase.

In C you have to understand modules, functions working on structures and functions controlling the architecture. In Java you have to understand class hierachies and classes or functions managing the control flow. In haskell, you have to understand abstract data types, type classes and monads and functions managing control flow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> OO gets a bad rap, it is incredibly useful in applying ontology to program structuring. Yes, OOP in Java isn't ideal, but if you look at more pure OOP languages like Smalltalk or Self, its virtues really do begin to shine through.

FP is great when expressing computations, but we often are just gluing nominal entities together, where OOP excels over FP. I like to have a few FP options in my languages (C#, LINQ), but my mind is firmly rooted in objects when it comes to overall macro design of the program.

<comment><USER12> OO is great for systems, where you have real objects, and only care about their current state. In effect - for simulations, games, such stuff.

In most systems - changes over time, archival data, and relations between objects are important. And with OO it's ugly to keep them. You end up implementing relational db backed by object collections. And your nice objects instead of representing nouns (Employee, etc.), start representing relations (Employement, etc.).

So people use relational db with ORMs and load everything from database into objects only to show window/edit data, call one or 2 methods on these objects, and save data back into database. All this ceremony to write employee.giveRaise(raise) instead of giveRaise(employee, raise).

<comment><USER11> And yet this problem kind of goes away in a key value or graph database. I wonder if the ORM mismatch is often not one of objects getting in the way, but one of using relational in the first place. At anyrate, how you manage your objects (for things like search) is ideally orthogonal to the objects themselves; though this is difficult to accomplish in practice.

I use objects in reactive (non-persistent/DB) systems all the time. Objects aren't the problem, but you do have to manage your dependencies dynamically by tracing/dirtying/and cleaning. Objects actually excel at encapsulating and managing state, it is much harder to do this with functions (see all the work on functional-reactive programming).

<comment><USER12> Hm, I've never used key-value/graph datastore, and it seems I need to. Is there something like selects with joins for graph nodes? How do you represent changes in objects over time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, when Alan Kay implies Java damages the brain, he is quoted. When I say it, I get downvoted. Do I see a double standard here?

BTW, I learned to program on a Texas (TI-55) calculator. What symptoms should I be presenting? ;-)

<comment><USER14> RSI, perhaps?

<comment><USER13> Any age-related condition would be a fair guess ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Modernism (bauhaus/destijl) is about 100 years old.

Why is it so hard to understand that there is an implicit set of limitations based on the tools (and/or materials) we use in our projects?

Think skyscraper... now think wooden skyscraper.

</comment><comment><USER16> Objects are a poor man's closure. Closures are a poor man's object. Objects are a poor man's first-class module, and so are closures. First-class modules are a poor man's type-class. Type-classes are a poor man's first-class module.

Hail, _Torat Exists_ , the holy teachings of the existential type!

</comment><comment><USER17> That's why I like C++ so much. It doesn't force OO down your throat. It lets you program using whatever style is best suited for the job.

<comment><USER18> I also take or leave C++ language features as required, and I wish more people shared your point of view.

Among the C++ crowd (particularly over at Stack Overflow) there's this infuriating attitude that any code that doesn't use std::string, std::vector or boost::magic_super_auto_ptr is _language sacrilege and the developer should be burned with fire because it's not C++ it's C and malloc is deprecated and arrays are deprecated, and, and..._

<comment> UK-AL That's because without using these things, people can end up accidently shooting themselves foot quite easily. Like accidentally removing the end character from a char* string...

Normal malloc, and dealloc can get stupidly complicated when lots of other objects reference one memory location, which is why these referencing auto pointers come in, with built bounds checking etc

Using those things is defensive programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm interested in what alternatives that the author has for the Object Oriented "zealots." I'm assuming that his alternative is a functional language. Personally, I think that functional languages are great, but I don't think that's any reason to flame Java/C++/C#. These are great tools. They were created for specific reasons, and they can certainly be used in efficient ways. Of course, they can also be horribly abused. I don't think that it's fair to say that any particular language is the end-all be-all for development. You have to pick the right tool for the job.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra "ORMs are newer and hipper than those old boring outdated relational databases?" I stopped reading after this point since author obviously doesn't understand what he's talking about.

<comment><USER6> What does he not understand?

<comment><USER20> an ORM is a library to map objects onto a relational database. They're not a substitute for databases themselves, but a substitute for a DB interaction library.

ie: To use an ORM you must use a relational database. Things like mongoose exist, but they're not ORMs since they don't map objects to a _relational_ database.

<comment><USER6> I see what you mean. I thought he was mocking the idea of wrapping the old uncool relational model in a fashionable new OO API.

What is substituted is not the relational DBMS but the relational model. ORMs are supposed to let you think in terms of objects instead of sets of tuples.

<comment> UK-AL No, turns out most sql work involves extracting data from the resulting sql statement into objects. So you don't end up passing 5 params from the sql result everywhere.

ORMs do these automatically, and go beyond.

<comment><USER6> That's true for some basic CRUD operations and that's what ORMs should be used for.

But people tend to just blindly copy everything into an object model and perform operations on those objects that could just as well have been done in a set oriented way with a lot less code causing a lot less network traffic.

Obviously there are scalability downsides and not everything is easier to express in terms of sets, so I try to be pragmatic. You can of course do set operations through an ORM but that's not its purpose and the performance implications are sometimes tricky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been looking into different software engineering methodologies and it seems that all of them rely on specialization. I think this leads to un- necessary complexity.

OOP might not be more modern but I think it was trying to move into the direction of less specialization. Unfortunately, it has gotten side tracked.

</comment><comment><USER22> Java is a new language? It's been around for 15 years or so. OO is even older - goes back to Simula 67 and Smalltalk in late 70s....</comment>


Show HN: Teleport – Lightweight JSON types - <AUTHOR> http://www.teleport-json.org/

<comment><USER3> It looks like Teleport is trying to do too many things.

Input validation systems are great - there's an excellent one for Python already, called Schematics ([https://github.com/schematics/schematics](https://github.com/schematics/schematics)).

Declarative schema systems are also great - JSON Schema ([http://json- schema.org/](http://json-schema.org/)) is the industry standard for JSON. The clever thing about JSON Schema is that it is itself written using JSON - <USER2> it's completely language independent. A JSON Schema is a document which you can a) version and b) upload to a schema repository like Iglu ([https://github.com/snowplow/iglu](https://github.com/snowplow/iglu)). I don't see any equivalent non-language-tied schema approach in Teleport.

Thirdly, tooling to help document APIs is also a great aim - the go-to project here is Swagger ([https://helloreverb.com/developers/swagger](https://helloreverb.com/developers/swagger)).

These are all huge problems _in themselves_, and the above solutions have lots of cross-platform tooling, developer mindshare and polyglot language support. I think you need to decide what problem you want Teleport to solve...

<comment><USER4> Swagger may claim to be polyglot, but it seems really Java focused to me and I've yet to see an implementation for another language, particularly one that's difficult to analyze statically (the power of swagger is the ability to generate the majority of the API documentation from code and annotations, something not possible in dynamic languages), that's not a huge train wreck. Solutions like [http://apiblueprint.org/](http://apiblueprint.org/) and [http://raml.org/](http://raml.org/) are much more language-neutral than Swagger.

<comment><USER3> Ruby support for Swagger: [https://github.com/richhollis/swagger- docs](https://github.com/richhollis/swagger-docs) [https://github.com/tim- vandecasteele/grape-swagger](https://github.com/tim-vandecasteele/grape- swagger)

JS support for Swagger: [https://github.com/wordnik/swagger-node- express](https://github.com/wordnik/swagger-node-express) [https://github.com/wordnik/swagger-js](https://github.com/wordnik/swagger-js)

PHP support for Swagger: [https://github.com/zircote/swagger- php](https://github.com/zircote/swagger-php)

Etc. Sure Swagger is fairly opinionated about what a RESTful API should look like, but claiming it's Java-focused is off the mark.

<comment><USER4> I don't use Ruby or PHP, but the JS support is laughable. Getting it to even work is a challenge (the code is pretty terrible) and the code they force you to write is ugly, overcomplicated and unlike an idiomatic node API code. The Python support is somewhat better, owing to Python's annotations. But there are languages like C++ and Rust that are completely unsupported.

But you can't be language-independent if you require specific languages features that aren't present in all languages and require specific language integrations that need to be written for every language. Options like the two that I mentioned before are actually language-independent.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, I'll take another look at RAML. I have to confess I found it a bit weird that when we started with Swagger that we couldn't start "schema first" (i.e. just describe the API in a doc, but instead had to start with the annotations). I guess that's part of the wider problem you describe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmm, so the types are not actually a part of the JSON output, but they live in a separate schema. That being the case, I would've preferred if this were built on top of [http://json-schema.org/](http://json-schema.org/) instead of something entirely new and Python-specific.

It seems like for the past couple of years JSON-schema has been just below some critical treshold for it to take off. Why not define models with JSON schema instead of a custom format for each web framework? Why not use JSON schemas to build forms, validation logic and admin interfaces, like [https://github.com/jdorn/json-editor](https://github.com/jdorn/json-editor) does? Why not document your API by specifying the JSON schema a GET request returns? ([http://raml.org/](http://raml.org/) sort of does this).

Seems like a chicken and egg problem where currently the tools are not yet nice enough to merit widespread adoption, but with widespread adoption they'd get to be really nice and cross-platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair questions! Teleport actually aims to be an alternative to JSON-schema: much smaller but more extensible. Python is merely the language of the reference implementation. I'm working on a specification a JavaScript port is in the works too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does this compare to something like transit[1]?

[1]: [https://github.com/cognitect/transit- format](https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format)

<comment><AUTHOR> * Teleport's JSON form follows conventions of web APIs, Transit's JSON form doesn't look so familiar

* Teleport does everything it needs to do in less than 1000 LOC, and I'm planning to keep it small maximum portability

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just use protocol buffers. This can't really be a serious competitor to json/thrift/protobuf with no benchmarks and only a python client, sorry.

<comment><USER8> Your comment would be so much better without the condescending "sorry" at the end. You're in a public forum airing your opinion, not rejecting an application for something.

<comment><USER7> Sorry</comment></comment></comment>


Government Authority Intended for Terrorism is Used for Other Purposes - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/peekaboo-i-see-you-government-uses-authority-meant-terrorism-other-uses <comment><USER2> I'm a bit surprised that there aren't purpose limitations in the enabling legislation for the most controversial new government investigative authorities.

The Wiretap Act has an explicitly enumerated list of offenses for the investigation of which wiretaps may be authorized:

[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2516](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2516)

The default is that a wiretap is _not_ available to investigate an arbitrary crime. (Of course, there's been a lot of creep and wiretap authority has been expanded to more and more crimes.) This is based on the idea that a wiretap is uniquely and intensely invasive compared to other law enforcement techniques.

I don't see why that pattern hasn't been repeated with other investigative authorities. In the case of section 213 of the Patriot Act, described here, the effect of the new law was to amend 18 USC §3103a

[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3103a](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3103a)

to allow for "delayed notice" when a search warrant was used. But that section authorized the issuance of warrants for "any property that constitutes evidence of _a criminal offense in violation of the laws of the United States_ " (emphasis added), that is, for the investigation of _any Federal crime_. Presumably it would have been easy for section 213 to have taken a Wiretap Act-like approach and said that the delayed notice procedure was available for investigation of crimes x, y, and z, but not other crimes.

(I work with the author of the original article, but we haven't discussed this topic.)

<comment><USER3> When some lawmakers openly admit they don't even read the laws they are voting for, it is no wonder things are passing that people afterwards go "wtf these guys were thinking?" It's like writing code without any review, testing and debugging - just type it in and ship to production. But it's about fighting terrorism - so who has the time to do it right? And of course then when people see the exploits and try to fix it, they get the pushback - you are siding with terrorists? So when we get lucky and somebody writing the law really cares about not breaking things - we can get reasonable limits. Otherwise, best case we can hope Supreme Court will eventually patch it, once it gets there, which probably will take another 10-15 years.

<comment><USER4> >It's like writing code without any review, testing and debugging

Well, most PMs don't personally review/test/debug. They assume their people have done it for them, which I'd guess is how senators operate. So in and of itself, not reading the laws isn't intrinsically bad. If they had proper oversight of their teams and knew there was enough QA in the process, they could rely on summaries from their teams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suspect that 0.5% is not the fraction of searches that most Congress members voted for when authorizing this law after 9/11 --

"The 2013 report confirms the incredibly low numbers. Out of 11,129 reports only 51, or .5%, of requests were used for terrorism. The majority of requests were overwhelmingly for narcotics cases, which tapped out at 9,401 requests."

This is always the case with these kinds of authorizations - a few years pass, people forget, and suddenly an anti-terrorism "narrowly targeted" drone strike via the "disposition matrix" becomes the go-to strategy for all police SWAT teams. This is exactly what we saw in Ferguson recently..

</comment><comment><USER6> I think some of the most interesting findings is how focused the government is on tackling the drug trade.

You have to wonder, what is the fear of drugs which is driving this? Would a nation with unrestricted drug trade would descend into anarchy and lawlessness? That productivity would tank, and all our money/growth would shrivel up? Are they wrong? It does seem like this would be more terrifying than a few civilian deaths from terrorist attacks.

<comment><USER7> > _what is the fear of drugs which is driving this?_

It's just a good excuse to be perpetually at war, and war makes people very, very rich.

Notice how convenient it is that ISIS showed up and suddenly we need to go to war with them just as Al Qaeda and that war were winding down?

Pretty soon we'll have an entire generation of adults that have never known peacetime, then being at war will just be normal.

<comment><USER8> > Notice how convenient it is that ISIS showed up and suddenly we need to go > to war with them just as Al Qaeda and that war were winding down?

Take off the tinfoil hat. It's not "convenient", it's what happens when a superpower withdraws from a region creating a huge power vacuum. What are you suggesting, that ISIS is a shadowy plot by Halliburton and the Illuminati?

Quite apart from which, the US _does_ need to sort shit out in Iraq, seeing as the current mess is _their fault_.

<comment><USER7> > _the US does need to sort shit out in Iraq, seeing as the current mess is > their fault._

How many messes in a row can they create / need to sort out?

<comment><USER8> I don't think "standard issue dictator likes posturing" and "roving bands of religious crazies armed with Western equipment murdering women and children for sport" are quite the same level of mess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Other purposes" being primarily the "war on drugs", which as we all know, is going fantastically for the US government.

</comment><comment><USER10> If only Obama would have kept his promise and had the "PATRIOT" Act repealed...

</comment><comment><USER11> Well, you know what they say; a gun in the first act goes off in the second. Given these tools, the agencies equipped with them are not going to sit around not using them.

</comment><comment><USER8> In other news, ursine defecation is predominantly forest-based.</comment>


Mamoon Hamid from S23P reveals secrets to SaaS investing - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/03133938319/saastr

<comment><USER2> great date</comment>