The Real Adam Smith - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/we-should-look-closely-at-what-adam-smith-actually-believed <comment><USER2> I'm surprised it didn't mention an obvious difference from modern conceptions of the free market: he thought landownership was a monopoly privilege that could be taxed without harm, so long as you are taxing only the land rent itself, not the improvements.

"Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses. A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent, who acts always as a monopolist, and exacts the greatest rent which can be got for the use of his ground." \- Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II

<comment><USER3> Smith does not seem to be a private-propery-idealist as almost anyone in the mainstream today. Take this passage for example, also from book V.

"Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and*23 extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary.

Civil government supposes a certain subordination. But as the necessity of civil government gradually grows up with the acquisition of valuable property, so the principal causes which naturally introduce subordination gradually grow up with the growth of that valuable property. "

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN20.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN20.html)

<comment><USER4> Also note this passage, as a counter-point:

>>[The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. As the article states, Smith was clearly not some sort of proto-left- wing intellectual. Here is the source of your quote [http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS4.html#IV.I.10](http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS4.html#IV.I.10)

Evidently, Smith was unfamiliar with golf courses. I see the whole paragraph (of your quote) as being even more detached from today's reality than his oft- cited quote regarding famine and government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like to view this another way - too much concentration of power is a bad thing and we should strive for decentralizing it. So if merchants, in collusion with the state hold too much power, then the state needs to be cut down. Conversely if private players accumulate too much power, that too needs to be cut down, increasing the role of state if necessary.

There is no universal approach that will always be true. Depending on the circumstances, either a hands off approach to markets or more intervention from the state is required.

<comment><USER6> All that is very nice in theory, but who is doing the "cut down"?

By definition it has to be some entity more powerful that the entity that is cut down. And who should control that entity but the majority of the society?

So, we finish with the (very imperfect) solution of a democratic government. We should recognize that it's going to be a lot of interest trying to corrupt it and we (the people) have to keep watching and steering.

<comment><USER5> I agree it has to be a democracy. The right points to harms of government overreach to argue for less government. The left points to exploding inequality and argues for more government in order to tackle it. A good faith assumption could be that both are trying to decentralize power and maybe putting it that way will make it easier to reach across the ideological divide.

<comment><USER7> I think there's an increasingly compelling argument to be made at this moment in history, with the rise of powerful increasingly intelligent software that can 1) rigorously shape policy to ensure that ends are met and that 2) the means to those ends employ minimal bias, and 3) do so adaptively, shifting policy dynamically as circumstances evolve. I believe it's time to start planning for the day when we shutter the voting booths and find a better way to govern using networked sensors and dispassionate computers.

Democracy is dying. Long live automatic government for the people.

Is this really necessary? IMHO, yes. It's become clear that the easy manipulation of a gullible, clueless, and intellectually lazy electorate has broken all three branches of US government:

1) we have an imbecile President and a cabinet of grotesques who border on insanity

2) we have a congress that for over 30 years has done almost nothing constructive, that campaigns on one set of principles then serves others, the primary two being: the financial interests of Those With Money, and paying lip service to the fantasy-laden desiderata of Those Without.

3) a legal system that imprisons over 90% of those charged _without_ a trial.

What brought America to such a dysfunctional State? The democratic popular vote, of course. Nothing else could.

Thus I believe it's time there was a serious discussion (outside of Washington, of course) about alternative ways to shrink and de-bias all three branches of government, at all levels.

I'm convinced that software soon will be powerful enough to fairly, effectively, and adaptively guide the players (both citizens and businesses) in questions of policy to reliably and precisely achieve desired ends, rather than relying on the venerably bent tools of power -- a gigantic incoherent mass of self-serving, ends-oblivious, and inconsistent principles chisled into marble long ago by power brokers to preserve eon-old biases that reliably serves only vested interests.

If we want AI to reach its true potential, I propose better government be its ultimate objective. Start from the bottom up -- local government -- and introduce ends-driven smart services to serve civic and main street business needs at that level -- where feedback is clearest, most immediate, and most accountable. This way we might just put government right, from the bottom up, cutting away Caesar as we go.

<comment><USER8> The idea that AI would rise up and seize power over its human creators has always seemed preposterous to me. But it is not at all preposterous, as your comment demonstrates, that we might imagine AI as some kind of savior and put it in that position intentionally. This is the real danger.

It is a prescription for dystopia. Either the machines, acting without understanding, will botch things up royally, or unscrupulous people will find a way to use the machines as cover while they pull the strings to their own benefit. Or both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice article – gives a bit more background on Smith's ideas and why it's wrong to flag him as an absolute free market advocate.

TL;DR – The invisible hand doesn't symbolise the problem of state intervention, but of state capture (i.e. merchant elites lobbying governments to protect their monopolies). On the other hand, merchant elites are a "necessary evil" and the art of good governance is balancing over- and under- regulating them.

<comment><USER10> > The invisible hand doesn't symbolise the problem of state intervention, but > of state capture (i.e. merchant elites lobbying governments to protect their > monopolies). On the other hand, merchant elites are a "necessary evil" and > the art of good governance is balancing over- and under-regulating them.

The second sentence is 100% true and completely in line with Adam Smith's thinking and the overall Scottish Enlightenment.

The first sentence is an accurate summary of the article, but the article is slightly but profoundly wrong. Smith and his ilk probably would think that the (modern) idea of "state intervention" vs "state non-intervention" to be silly. By the time of Ricardo, JS Mill and Marx, "moral philosophers" like Smith were referred to as "political economists" because they understood that the state was the base layer on which the rest of society was built. After all, even if someone is a complete "market fundamentalist" today, he or she still depends on the state enforcing property rights, enforcing general criminal laws against theft, murder, rape, etc., and enforcing private causes of action like torts against neighbors who cause a nuisance, pollute, etc. Were Adam Smith alive today, he would be in favor of all of those "state interventions" in the market, as he seems to have been in his own time. (As a parallel, the concept of "civil society" has followed a similar arc: Originally, Aristotle meant a community bound under a common set of norms and the rule of law. Over time, the concept came to mean groups that exist "outside" or exclusive of the state.)

At the same time, he would have likely been against some of the more heavy- handed regulatory approaches that modern states use from agricultural planning to zoning rules, and he would be against them for the same reason that he disliked the Mercantile System in the 18th century: they give huge advantages to incumbents, they often fail to solve the problems they are organized to solve, and they depend on effectively arbitrary rule by the state.

In my opinion, modern thinking has overzealously accepted black-and-white dichotomies like "for or against state intervention" or defining huge enumerations of incontrovertible "rights." In reality, the intelligent question would be (and the one Smith, Hume, et al. seemed interested in), as your second sentence suggests, "How much should the state intervene so that outcomes are better than the alternative?"

From the man himself:

> All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus > completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty > establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not > violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own > interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into > competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is > completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he > must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper > performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; > the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing > it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. > According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three > duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and > intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the > society from violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, > the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from > the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of > establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of > erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public > institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or > small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could > never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, > though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is mostly accurate about Smith (although the man himself was much more favorable to entrepreneurs and innovators than is presented), but fairly inaccurate that "Right-wing" politics is some perversion of Smith. At the end, we get a taste of what he means in that Thatcher privatized various state industries during her run as Prime Minister in the '80s.

Otherwise, an entire sub-field of economics (it would be a sub-field of "political economy" if that term were widespread today) is Public Choice, which demonstrates rather well that often state intervention is at the behest of the "merchant interests." Public Choice is a direct descendent of Adam Smith's thinking. Indeed, the very term "state capture" that the author invokes frequently probably derived from "regulatory capture," a term Public Choice helped propagate.

There is also a misunderstanding that Smith's "invisible hand" concept implies some sort of Utopian paradise, when in fact, Smith meant more that aspiring monopolists who are nonetheless in competition with each other (and often in cooperation with others) lead to an increase in social gains, which on its own seems paradoxical and is highly counterintuitive. Modern economics seems founded on maximizing or minimizing every possible variable of interest, so I suppose some people may actually argue that the invisible hand is a statement about maximization, which it definitely isn't. In practice, the only people I see invoke the "Invisible Hand" in this manner are harsh critics of any sort of free enterprise regardless of the context, and always advocates of state intervention and thus regulatory capture ("[people] of the system", indeed).

I am most surprised that Smith's sympathies for labor do not appear in this essay, as they seem to be quite strong. Smith discusses the effects of specialization that happens during industrialization, and goes so far as to say it makes workers with repetitive tasks "stupid." In context, his sympathies are clearly with the worker.

I guess as someone with relatively Smithian-Hayekian views, I am missing the overall point of this article, other than to hand-wring that so-called Neoliberalism (I have never met a Neoliberal) is actually unrelated to Smith's ideas and are a perversion. He is entirely unconvincing, even if one accepts for the sake of argument that "neoliberalism" exists as a coherent philosophy or even ideology (it doesn't).

<comment><USER11> The article gives a good description of a major facet of Neoliberalism: "[a] movement that seeks (as Thatcher hoped) to 'roll back the frontiers of the state". If you have heard someone whining about the nefarious "Big Government" and the need for deregulation, then you've met a Neoliberal.

The point of the article is summarized by the author in a paragraph:

""" The message that Smith conveys cuts across party and ideological lines, and applies to both Left and Right. It is about a pathological attitude that politicians of all stripes are prone to. If not kept in check, this can be the source not just of disruption and inefficiency but of cruelty and suffering, when those who find themselves on the wrong side of the plan's consequences are forced by the powerful to suffer them regardless. Smith in turn urges us to recognise that real-world politics will always be too complex for any prepackaged ideology to cope with. What we need in our politicians is careful judgment and moral maturity, something that no ideology, nor any position on the political spectrum, holds a monopoly on. """

The dogma of today's right-wing "mercantile" politicians is a perversion of Adam Smith. These politicians state that the invisible hand requires complete government deregulation in order to function. They ignore Smith's point that the invisible hand requires both free markets and government regulation of monopoly to function. The article states that "According to Smith, the most pressing dangers came not from the state acting alone, but the state when captured by merchant elites." If you've followed US politics at all over the last year you could see how the article's point is extremely convincing.

<comment><USER12> > then you've met a Neoliberal.

By your definition. But the term has been used for a whole lot more in many different context and that makes it so useless.

> The dogma of today's right-wing "mercantile" politicians is a perversion of > Adam Smith. These politicians state that the invisible hand requires > complete government deregulation in order to function. They ignore Smith's > point that the invisible hand requires both free markets and government > regulation of monopoly to function.

No. That's not what they ignore. These "mercantile" politicians never had the slightest interest in Adam Smiths ideas or in limiting power of the state and or business in the first place.

The point of Smith and his fellows (like Hume) at the time was that business would try to capture the state and that was one reason they tried to limited the power of the state and strengthen individual freedoms. Sure they might have been in favor of some regulation but what we have now is so far beyond the wildest dreams of Smith that it is hard to argue that, this is what he meant.

The problem is that the state is forever growing and that no democratic procedures can prevent business (and voters) from competing to capture these rents, rather then the rents from the state.

I would recommend 'Public Choice' economics because they think threw these different intensives very systematically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Expected this to be about Chydenius in part, but no:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius#Free_trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius#Free_trade)

"In 1765 Chydenius published a pamphlet called The National Gain (Den nationnale winsten), in which he proposes ideas of free trade and industry, explores the relationship between economy and society, and lays out the principles for liberalism, capitalism, and modern democracy.[5] In the book Chydenius published theories closely corresponding to Adam Smith's invisible hand, eleven years before Smith published his book, The Wealth of Nations."

<comment><USER14> fun fact: The expression "invisible hand" does not appear in The Wealth of Nations, but in Smith's previous work the Theory of Moral Sentiments.

<comment><USER15> That is not correct - it appears once in both. Part IV, Chapter 2 in "The Wealth of Nations" ("and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The invisible hand was invoked not to draw attention to the problem of state intervention, but of state capture"

It's not so easy to separate the two. Intervention tends to have winners and losers, which make the decision makers a big target for all kinds of influence.

Especially in a large country like the US, where a single representative (on average) controls maybe $5B in yearly spending, plus all of the indirect ways they can pick winners and losers.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to have intervention without capture, but it's something to be wary of.

Aside: I don't like the word "capture" as though the poor politicians are somehow kidnapped by evil corporations. I suspect the idea of corruption usually starts with a politician looking for opportunities to exercise their power. Then, it quickly becomes a symbiotic relationship.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've never been clear on why people who know nothing about Smith other than a few quotes appeal to his expertise. This article does a little to help, but really everyone should read Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations instead of some blog post if they want to be informed on the topic.

</comment><comment><USER18> When one wants a "real" person or theory, one strays as far as possible from the unreality-generator that is "academic" economics.

If one would mount an axle on Smith's grave, we could live off free energy for millenia.

</comment><comment><USER19> It is really hard for even professional historians to gain a good understanding of old technical works. There is just too much unavailable context. In the end, you get to ascribe whatever motivations you want by picking and choosing your quotes. So if Neoliberals want to use The Wealth of Nations as some sort of theological text, then more power to them. They just can't use it as some sort of appeal to authority as that particular world no longer exists. That applies to this article as well.

<comment><USER20> Why do you think historians don't study the context of a particular topic? They certainly don't pick and choose quotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is certainly a nuanced look at a figure who is generally cited in stark black and white. The notion of the "merchant elite" setting the tone of politics within the state -- and with neighbors and other competitors -- is a bit of a wake-up call. After all, for better or for worse, what finally dragged the US out of the Great Depression was World War II, and the sudden bulge of manufacturing it brought.

The question is, are we, today, seeing self-interested corporations stimulating or antagonizing hard feelings between countries, states, tribes, or families as a way to push up profits?

And a larger question remains: Is that inherently bad? I suppose that there are many who would think that it is not, by its nature, bad -- not if your nation, or ethnicity, or religion is not harmed. I think that this is the central question the article poses.

Given that, what is the value of a single human life? Or, more broadly, what is the value of any living thing, or living system? Is it okay kill a man through black lung, in order to maximize profit from a coal mine? Is it okay to bulldoze and pave a vast swath of land, to harvest wood, replacing the forest with a monoculture that will not support diversity? Where does that end? Is a culture safe? A nation?

There are, of course, a great number of people who think that one life lost is one too many, that an ecosystem is a living thing, that a culture is sacred.

Smith seems to hew towards regulation of business and industry -- that the watershed must be considered in mountaintop removal mining, that heroin sales on the street are not in the best interest of society. (Even though illicit drug sales are probably the very best example of a truly open and free market.) I would lean with Smith on this account. Government has NO business in business. But truly free people must be free to regulate business in their own interest.

<comment><USER22> Your second paragraph is answered by post-9/11 American foreign policy in Iraq (to say the least). But just to echo that answer, yes - Halliburton (and plenty of other private military, security, cyber security service companies) did and continues to thrive off war profiteering. War is an economy. That's why the military-industrial complex is discussed so frequently. Not many other nations subsidize an entire market segment to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. One that, again, generates profit off of the selling of weapons and arms to be used against other human beings.

<comment><USER21> Yes. I agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is disingenuous in a number of places. For example, it quotes the passage in the Wealth of Nations warning of collusion between merchants:

>>As he put it in The Wealth of Nations: 'People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.'

It uses this as a data point to support the contention that:

>>It is an irony of history that Smith's most famous idea is now usually invoked as a defence of unregulated markets in the face of state interference, so as to protect the interests of private capitalists. For this is roughly the opposite of Smith's original intention, which was to advocate for restrictions on what groups of merchants could do.

Which is absolute nonsense. Sangar omits the context in which the collusion passage appears. Immediately following that paragraph, we find this:

>>It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies. . . . A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows, and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary. An incorporation not only renders them necessary, but makes the act of the majority binding upon the whole.

So Smith very much endorses "unregulated markets in the face of state interference", which Sagar claims "is roughly the opposite of Smith's original intention".

<comment><USER23> How on earth do you read that as endorsing unregulated markets in the face of state interference?

<comment><USER4> I can't imagine how you don't see it.

All of his warnings are against regulations that make collusion more likely, and he explicitly says that it would be impossible for any regulation that would prohibit people from the same trade from meeting to "be executed" or "be consistent with liberty and justice".

Every single admonishment was against regulations, whether on grounds of contributing to collusion, or being unenforceable and inconsistent with "liberty and justice".

<comment><USER8> > Every single admonishment was against regulations

Every single admonishment was against _particular kinds of_ regulations. It's not at all clear that these amount to an argument against _all_ regulation. In fact that strikes me as a very odd generalization... like saying "Java sucks so let's do away with software".

<comment><USER4> Yes you're right that he criticizes particular regulations in that passage. My point is that he doesn't endorse any regulations and criticizes several. This is context in which the passage about collusion between merchants, which Sangar claims supports his contention that Smith's intention was the "opposite" of that of modern free market advocates, appears.

That passage in no way conveys a position in opposition to the free market. If anything, it only supports it.

Moreover, I'd argue statements like "It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice" take a philosophical position against regulations in general, and there are many such statements in the Wealth of Nations.

<comment><USER8> > statements like [quote elided] take a philosophical position against > regulations in general

I don't get that at all. Regulations cover lots of things other than potential collusion.

<comment><USER4> I read the "[in]consistent with liberty and justice" quote as a stance against laws that inhibit the right to associate, and that is very closely related to the right to freely contract, which the vast majority of regulations inhibit.

If he believed that it would be consistent with liberty and justice to prohibit certain classes of contracts, he would have simply advocated for a law against collusion agreements/contracts as the solution to merchants colluding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Relevant excellent TV series [1]. After Raegan/Thatcher privatization there was a 2nd wave Clinton/Blaire of liberalisation. The idea was to dismantle "old hierarchy" / Big Government and replace it with market formed by everyone maximizing their individual self-interest.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_\(TV_series\))

</comment><comment><USER25> The writer tries to pretend that there is something drastically opposite from knowing that the state captured by business is different from the danger of mere statism. Well, the answer that preserves liberty is to reduce the chances of the state being captured. This begins by having a limited govt. If the madam of the bordello is out of business, there is no need for customers to line up

<comment><USER26> If no one governs your rights/freedoms, you don't have any.

There is no difference between an unchecked corporation and a corrupt state. The answer doesn't lie at either end, but in a balance.

<comment><USER27> That doesn't make sense, unless you meant...

If one governs your rights, you don't have any.

Freedom isn't government granting you rights, it's government protecting you from coercion.

If government is the source of your rights, then government can take those rights away.

If government is the source of protection for your rights, they can only take that protection away. Leaving you your rights and now full burden of protecting them.

Corporations don't have any power without government, which is why a limited government limits corporate power.

<comment><USER26> > Corporations don't have any power without government, which is why a limited > government limits corporate power.

They have as much power as they have resources to enforce, which is a lot more than you have, meaning they have a lot more - and in practice all - power.

> If government is the source of protection for your rights, they can only > take that protection away. Leaving you your rights and now full burden of > protecting them.

A governing body is a collective agreement over what rights and freedoms its members deem fit. If you have none, as you said, you have the full burden of protecting them. Someone else (in the case of n-1 of all people) will always have more resources to protect (or impose on others) their freedoms/rights.

You either end up losing your rights/freedoms, or you establish a coalition with other nearby people, but you won't call it a government, because for some reason that word is bad.

<comment><USER27> Unless corporations have the right to coerce you (which only government can grant them), they have no power over you.

Walmart is one of the largest corporations around and they have no power over me. I can voluntarily work or shop there, but they can't force me to do it.

<comment><USER28> > (which only government can grant them)

You've missed the point, there is no government to grant or revoke anything in this scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ah, we have the Adam Smith article again.

As somebody interested in these for many years, there is a periodic rewriting of this article.

The beats are always the same, Smith not actually like evil neoliberals (whoever that is) think. He also wrote 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments' and so on. Admittedly this is by far the best one I have seen in many years.

Nothing in the article is really wrong, and it is completely correct the same analysis Smith used can often be used against people on both sides of politics.

I would tell people not only to focus on Smith but rather see him in a broader context with Hume, Ferguson and there English predecessors.

Overall we need to value individual freedom of choice both socially and economically, we need to strongly protect human rights, the political power must be limited and so on. Free people working for themselves, their family or friend, their community can achieve things that are beneficial for all if these interactions take place in such a framework.

> Thatcher's restructuring of the economy was as much a product of the 'spirit > of system' as any Soviet strategy

While this critic is certainty true we must also realize that if you accept Smith and the Scottish ideas, we need to find some way back to the ideas of individual liberty and limited power of government, specially government and business working together.

So there is still a very, vary large difference between going towards such a system or to go towards the Soviet union.

Here is a good podcast about Adam Smith: > [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/06/otteson_on_adam.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/06/otteson_on_adam.html)

<comment><USER29> From Paul Sagar's bio (the author of this article):

"i am lecturer in political theory in the department of political economy, king's college london

i completed my doctorate at the university of cambridge (2014), after receiving an ma in intellectual history and the history of political thought from the university of london (2010), and a ba in politics, philosophy, and economics from the university of oxford (2008). from 2014-17 i was junior research fellow at king's college, cambridge. my doctoral thesis centred upon the political thought of david hume in the context of british debates over the nature of human sociability and moral psychology. i extended this research in my recently completed book, the opinion of mankind: sociability and the state from hobbes to smith, published with princeton university press. alongside my work in the history of political thought i also research contemporary political theory. i am in the early stages of researching a second monograph, which will explore adam smith's political thought as grounded in his views of history and commercial society."

(the original is in all caps, hence the lack of capitalisation)

From you: "Nothing in the article is really wrong"

Well, thanks for that. I'm going to take a wild guess that the author knows a hell of a lot more about Adam Smith than you do, even if you have been "interested in these for many years".

And I think that applies doubly to the other critics above.

<comment><USER30> Hey, this is a discussion forum, so can we please not appeal to authority here just to say (in so many words) "I don't care what your opinion on this linked article is because he's an expert and you're not."

What's the point of discussion if you simply say "Oh, but they know more so just shut up"?

<comment><USER31> There's nothing wrong with an appeal to authority in response to an appeal to authority.

<comment><USER32> Why not?

How does a logical fallacy become okay if it is in response to the same logical fallacy?

<comment><USER33> Appeals to authority aren't necessarily fallacious, if the authority being cited is _actually an authority_.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for pointing this out. I appreciate the sentiment behind critiquing a blind reliance on authority but lately online I've seen a lot of knee jerk rejections of _any_ authority which I find counter-productive at best. Surely we can agree that our presence on an online discussion forum doesn't obviate the fact that some people who have spent years professionally researching a topic are likely to have a stronger claim to knowing about it than those who haven't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> this describes the current "capitalist" system we have today, where powerful individuals can lobby the state to create laws favouring them directly. the problem is, of course, the existence of the state.

<comment><USER6> Of course.

Maybe you can point us to some examples, current or historical, where human societies thrived without the existence of the state.

<comment><USER35> sure: [http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/faq.html#part17](http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/faq.html#part17) should i tell you who will build the roads next?

<comment><USER36> The bigger issue is that societies organized around a state tend to conquer societies not so organized, because states are much better at forming armies

<comment><USER35> so you agree that the state is almost always the initiator of aggression? if so, it's simply immoral to allow it to exist, just as you wouldn't allow organized crime to exist. my opinion about the state stems fully from morality, as presented in the non-aggression principle.

<comment><USER36> If you believe in any form of consequentialism, unilaterally disarming is rarely the moral choice.

<comment><USER35> of course not, the moral choice is to give everyone equal access to weapons and military equipment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get industry feedback on pitched feature for PM role at Uber? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN!
I'm moving in March from Dubai to San Francisco to reunite with my partner who completes her MBA at Stanford. I'm changing industries (energy to consumer tech), company size (corporate to startup) and geography at the same time.
I'm old by tech standards: 30. Yet I believe I can re-invent myself. So I resigned last week. My future is a white page.
I applied in December to UberEats and Postmates for a role in PM. In order to maximize my chances I prepared a pitch deck advocating for a new feature in about 20 slides. I got rejected by both. I tried getting feedback but no success.
I'd like to massively step up my game as I'm sure there is lots of room to improve. I'm aiming to get a product manager role in consumer tech. However it's not clear to me how to best reach the industry experts (i.e. consumer tech PMs), to get them to read the deck and provide me feedback on it. I'll post it on Medium but having few followers it might end up being a total flop.
Any suggestion?
Thank you HN! <comment><AUTHOR> After discussing on other forums, I will make it a Medium post :) will publish the link here this week once uploaded (need some formatting to transform from PPT to Medium).</comment>


The "Donald Duck as prior art" case - <AUTHOR> http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/donaldduck/ <comment><USER2> More Donald Duck awesomeness: [http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing- things-invent...](http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things- invented-by-donald-duck-seriously.html)

<comment><USER3> That was awesome! Donald Duck created a chemical before it was actually discovered! Brilliant!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Carl Barks (one of the most popular Scrooge McDuck writers) had an enormous impact on the world. Without knowing chemistry he invented methylene 20 years beforehand. His drawings laid the foundation for Japanese Manga as well as large swathes of Disney artists to follow. You can read more about him at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Barks>

<comment><USER5> He also wrote the story that was the inspiration for the guy who traded the paper clip into a house. <http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome. I'm starting a comic called "The Adventures of Mathan Nyhrvold" consisting almost entirely of computer software and hardware carrying out the most banal and mundane of tasks for our anti-hero.

"Everything in just one click."

</comment><comment><USER7> " although surprisingly this confirmation did not give any detail on which patent office or _how_ the Duck story came to its attention"

This may come as a surprise to some, but in the Netherlands certain comics are considered respectable literature and have been for a very long time. Donald Duck, Kuifje (Tintin), Olivier B Bommel and Suske en Wiske are read by people of all ages and social classes. For example Donald Duck magazine is still one of the most popular magazines for college students.

</comment><comment><USER8> That would suck to come up an idea, put nose to grindstone and turn it into a working invention, and then have the patent for it thrown out because a comic book writer had a similar idea and used it for a gag.

So, if Google actually ever tried to sell an automatic car-driving system, would the patent be voided on the basis of _Knight Rider_ reruns, or would they cite _The Love Bug_ (original version) as prior art?

<comment><USER9> The car-driving thing would only count if Knight Rider included details about exactly how the automation works.

The Donald Duck comic was pretty specific about exactly what was going on: they were feeding ping-pong balls down a tube into a submerged ship until the boyancy of the balls raised the ship. Knight Rider and friends just say "Hey what if there was a car that could drive itself? Let's make a show about that car fighting crime." Same way (to use another 80s show) MacGuyver doesn't have prior art on the idea of blowing stuff up with improvised materials.

<comment><USER8> The actual invention didn't use ping-pong balls, nor was it being presented as a feasible solution to a real-world problem any more than Donald Duck filling a car's tires with helium is presenting a serious design for a flying car. It's a _cartoony gag_.

Invention requires more than, "I bet you could make an X by doing Y." It requires actually getting something to work. It's not writing, it's engineering.

<comment><USER10> You can define inventions that way. But that does not mean that the patent process requires something that fits your definition.

<comment><USER8> That would be much of my point in my first post, now wouldn't it?

<comment><USER10> Indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't an idea have to have been implemented for it to count as prior art? If not, there seems to be a problem for the future. When everybody blogs and tweets their most mundane thoughts, the chance that your new invention has already been described (but not implemented) in some form of media accessible by public is very large.</comment>


Yet Another Skitch / Evernote Fail - Image Sharing/Uploading No Longer Works - <AUTHOR> http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2012/11/yet-another-skitch-evernote-fail-image-sharinguploading-no-longer-works.html <comment><USER2> I'm so sad to what they did to skitch :( It used to be my go to tool for screenshots and annotation. Now I'm stuck with the default mac screen capture & Preview annotation. I haven't find a better alternative yet</comment>


Andreessen Responds On Ning Porn: It's About Being Pro-Freedom - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/05/andreessen-responds-on-ning-porn-its-about-being-pro-freedom/ <comment><USER2> _Third, adult topics and content are a relatively small percentage of the total activity on Ning. We have various ways of quantifying this, and all of them show this to be the case._

How about publishing the "raw" data along with the methodology and letting the rest of us see that there aren't any flaws?</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to commute into a Bay Area startup? - <AUTHOR>

I am a great type of person to have at a startup. I am a product manager who can actually code (and not Excel, I've got code in the Erlang VM and have extended CouchDB for our needs), which means I know how to decide what to build and how to build it, too. There is no skill at a startup more important than knowing what to build, IMO, and I would love to use my product management skills to help a startup.
I don't generally fit in at large companies as a result of my schizophrenic career personality and the startup ecosystem where I'm at is marginal. I've been working at a startup for the last 18 months (in a weird, not-quite-founder way). The "not-quite" part has become untenable for me, so it's time to move on.
Is it possible to become involved with the Bay Area startup scene without moving to the Bay Area? For personal reasons, I am unable to move to the Bay Area, though I am close enough that I could commute in regularly and, since I'm outside of the Bay Area, I could use some of the salary difference to cover that.
I recognize this likely wouldn't work for a two-person startup, but is it possible to get involved early in a place this way? If so, how would you go about breaking in? <comment><USER2> In my experience Product Manager is a difficult job for telecommuting in an early stage startup as you need to be communicating frequently with so many different people/functions and even video chat isn't really the same thing as "let's grab a whiteboard and brainstorm it" or "come on this customer call with me in 10 minutes."

However I've seen and worked with plenty of developers this way, in fact my company just added three or four remote folks and in my previous team half were in the office and half scattered across the East.

</comment><comment><USER3> It doesn't matter where you live so long as you can be there during a similar timeframe as the rest of the founders.

All startups are recruiting to varying degrees, but recruiting the right people is hard, and so we tend to prefer recruiting through contacts.

From a job seeker's position, getting involved requires contacts in order to reach founders, and contacts come from socializing. Go to some of the many startup mixers that happen in the area and get to know some influential people. They're the ones who will introduce you to the right founders.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Is it possible to become involved with the Bay Area startup scene without moving to the Bay Area?_

Yes.

 _[...] is it possible to get involved early in a place this way?_

Yes.

 _If so, how would you go about breaking in?_

I would do, and did, everything I could think of. I'm not being hyperbolic. The answer to "Should I [action X]?" is always "Yes." Just do it.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you feel welcome on HN? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Only as long as it never touches politics. I'm conservative (not taken to mean Republican). If I opine on something political in nature, and it doesn't follow the normal liberal hive mind, I'll get criticized and/or downvoted.

Thus, I don't feel welcome to participate in such discussion.

<comment><USER4> Gender and politics. I've noticed that it often doesn't matter _what_ alternative viewpoint you have, if it doesn't align with the predominant view of the thread (which, interestingly, isn't a single philosophy, I've seen multiple threads frontpage with different thrusts, e.g. recently during the tesla harassment discussions) you'll be silenced.

Someone can tell me if this is rose colored glasses or not, but I do feel that "Old HN' downvotes correlated far more directly with "does not contribute to discussion" whereas now it feels a lot more like a reddit style "support/oppose" voting contest.

What bothers me more, and has gotten me "in trouble" on a few occasions for speaking up in defense of hearing out, is that posters more fringe than myself, but who are still making a solid post and useful contribution, are often silenced/flagged into oblivion. It's not even a matter of feeling welcome or not, most people I find who post here regularly are _very_ polite/welcoming, but to watch silent attempts at forming an echo chamber gives me pause.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you completely. I always strive (doesn't mean I never slip up), to only downvote someone if they are not contributing to a discussion. One thing that irks me bad though is when people make emotional claims about complex topics without any references or even logical arguments to back up what they're saying. I really like hearing new opinions, but you cant have a real conversation when the other person is convinced they shouldnt have to convince you.

The most recent thing I changed my opinion on thanks to HN though was smoking - a guy came with studies in his comments, and convinced me there is actually a net monetary benefit govt healthcare systems have from smokers i.e. smokers die younger and the treatment method is shorter than other diseases. Those are the good moments on HN :)

<comment><USER6> I've definitely learned my lesson: Never respond with a political comment (unless of course it pertains to the thread.. though even that can get downvotes).

So politics and religion are two things I definitely stay away from on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR Moderation on HN is a black box and is scary and not comforting (hence unwelcoming a little bit?)

Details: I _feel_ like there's an undercurrent of heavy handed moderation here. Replies get detached, deleted, and no one would know unless you really looked.

PS:I'm not saying these forums aren't vulnerable to abuse. They're and should be moderated (I guess), but make the moderation visible and obvious, is what I'd say.

My worry is if and when I step over to the wrong side of the (imaginary) line that the mods have drawn in the sand, my replies or posts here would be doomed, pushed out of existence and visibility.

Mods also do appear snappish here based on the few replies that I've read.

All of this seems anecdotal. The question did say "feel". I'm not going to bother collecting evidence because don't think this topic would get that much attention (it should though)

</comment><comment><USER8> No, but I don't feel unwelcome either. It doesn't feel much like a community, perhaps by design? It feels more like a place where people can anonymously voice out.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sort of, but in the spirit of Groucho, I wouldn't want to be a member of any in-group that would have me. I avoid Reddit these days, except in specialist subreddits, it feels like wading through a mire, and highly combative. The over-arching subculture is a little much for me.

I wouldn't come here instead if it was too welcoming - getting to the end- result of high-quality discussion involves being harsh or exclusive in some way, and false-positive/debatable-positive moderation happens. I'd personally like to see a little less technophilia (or more philosophy/critical commentary), but you can't say WYS!=WYG with a name like Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER10> There's an awful lot of trolling, and moderation is not quite transparent.

But as another comment said, I don't think HN is a meant to feel like a welcome community by design. It feels more like a semi-anonymous public forum.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not at all. HN is a Silicon Valley echo chamber while at the same time being an accurate reflection of the tech industry: predominately young, white men with vocal but shallow opinions on anything outside of tech.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am new to HN (less than a month) and I have not seen any negative issue. I have noticed several grayed out comments etc but have not noticed a tendency toward such. On a number of the comments that are gray I have not found anything wrong with them. This may be a result of the down-voting. It I am just not that familiar with the down-voting aspects of HN as of yet. Additionally, I don't really comment on things of a political nature but have commented on several of the sexual harassment stories etc without issue.

I think overall the active HNers a great.

</comment><comment><USER13> Although I don't have the technical experience of many more active commenters, I do generally feel welcome to comment. I do self censor sometimes - <USER2> myself making a irrelevant joke, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's OK. Downvoting is the worse thing about HN (and Reddit) IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not really, for a few moths here I have been bullied by someone already plus a lot of sheep mentality from the crowd...

<comment><USER16> Hmmmm.... I looked over your commenting history. Let me provide an alternative viewpoint:

1\. You frequently make very bold claims about quantitative trading. Some of these comments were contextually appropriate, but others came across as tone- deaf. Most of these comments seem very hand-wavy, and you have provided very little in-depth explanation of how such a system actually works in terms of profitable categories of strategies (even in abstraction), robustness of strategies in "black swan" events, etc. Some of the claims even seem contradictory (e.g., amount of maintenance required, amount needed to invest at scale, etc.). Note that there are many people on HN who have an interest in using their brains and tech skills to beat the market, and there have been some amazing threads on those topics. That said, those threads tend to be very frank about risk, scaling, potential role of luck, etc. This type of frank discussion is largely missing from your posts. As such, I think your posts as a new person are not held in particularly high regard from people who have been here a while and have seen very high quality threads on quantitative trading.

2\. You quote Warren Buffet frequently seemingly in a way that supports quantitative trading. Warren Buffet is a value investor, and quantitative trading is the antithesis of what he does. Many people here have intimate familiarity with Buffet's writings, so associating Buffet with QT probably comes across as odd to quite a few regulars. Again, there have been many good threads on Buffet, and maybe you have something substantive to add, but many the hand-wavy comments you have made so far just seem flippant (at best) or just wrong.

3\. You got into a flame war with logicallee. He is our resident troll. I haven't looked at his history, but most of the dead comments I see are from him. I am surprised he still has an account. Apologies for that, but I hope you can appreciate the context -- my guess is that he is on a short leash.

4\. You seem to get very defensive when people do not take your hand-wavy comments at face value. As a new person, I hope that you can appreciate the skepticism that the community has towards people who make bold claims without backing it up or having an established track record.

5\. You insult people quite a bit. The "sheep mentality" comment here. The suggestion that someone just "get laid". The comment about the "forever lonely" person due to their choice not to have kids. This is certainly against the spirit of the rules here at HN if not against the actual rules. I hope you appreciate that these types of blithe comments are not a particularly effective way to endear yourself to a new community.

SUMMARY

HN is a place that historically appreciates thoroughly reasoned explanations of potentially complex topics. You have written some stuff that has a lot of interest on HN, but you have provided very little detailed reasoning for your claims, and your claims fly in the face of the experiences (direct and observed) of many HNers. As a new person, if you would like to warm yourself up to the crowd, then invite questions when someone challenges you and answer them with well-reasoned detailed answers. You don't have to give away your trading strategy, but you should be able to talk about it in abstraction such that your argument is believable. A detailed example of a strategy that you developed, used, and now no longer use would be a very easy way to do this.

As for potentially being bullied, please report these cases to the mods. They strike me as being quite effective at handling abusive commenters.

<comment><USER15> good analysis, unfortunately it had not much to do with the bully, which I promptly reported and the mods took care of him, but it doesn't change the fact I was bullied... for my detailed trading strategy, I am yet to see a sane person with good working trading strategy to go and publish it on the internet, so nice try with the analysis, I'll give you that :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Rapture Ready: The Science of Self Delusion - <AUTHOR> http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

<comment><USER2> I like how they've already made up their minds about Global Warming and treat skeptics like crackpots. It pretty much proves their point in the article.

They even try to justify it with 'evidence' that the more educated a Republican is, the more they deny it because "one insidious aspect of motivated reasoning is that political sophisticates are prone to be more biased than those who know less about the issues."

It couldn't possibly be that the facts don't provide the proof required. No, it must be bias and their ability to create counter-arguments.

Counter-arguments are good science. Trying to disprove a theory is good science. Blindly accepting the word of 'scientists' is not good science.

Also, telling someone they aren't smart enough to understand the facts will never convince them, especially if they are college educated.

For anyone out there that doesn't already know it, here's the skeptic's stance on AGW:

The planet is warming. The planet has natural warming and cooling cycles.

There does seem to be some correlation between man's activities and increased warming. Causation has not been proved.

The ONLY data on this subject has been doctored by people who stand to gain from it. The original data was destroyed and nobody else can reproduce their work. Good science depends on peer review, which cannot be done now.

Any steps to 'fix' the planet could very well be pointless (if there's no causation) and are almost guaranteed to have side-effects. "We have to do SOMETHING" is foolish and dangerous. It's quite possible (maybe even probable) that doing nothing is less harmful to the planet than doing random things that might help.

There is nothing magical about a college education that makes someone able to do a job that a non-college-educated person could not. Telling someone they couldn't possibly understand the science involved is ridiculous and pointless.</comment>


Created my fist IO game – bomb your enemies - <AUTHOR> http://owom.io/ <comment><USER2> Is Jack a bot? Cool game.

<comment><AUTHOR> No it's actually me :)) Thanks! I'm looking forward to your feedback

<comment><USER2> This definitely was a fun little browser game. If you want to keep working on it this is what I would add.

1) I clicked through the splash page too fast to read the instructions. So I was confused for awhile. I wouldn't mind having the basic commands persistent inside a floating box in the game for awhile.

2) I would like the ability to invite someone to play with me, in case the game is empty.

3) I would like a win condition, like if you hit 100 the game says you win and resets.

Did you follow a game building tutorial to make this, or was it entirely from scratch?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

1) Added commands for speed/shield/invisibility, will add bomb commands

2) We have facebook share button, obviously not enough :) I'll see what other options can be added

3) IO games usually don't follow this pattern, but thanks

I did it from scratch, and created a small client-side framework in the process which I plan to open source when It's ready.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hadley Wickham, the Man Who Revolutionized R - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/hadley-wickham-the-man-who-revolutionized-r/

<comment><USER2> Hadley is a strange amalgam of academic rigor, entrepreneurial gut feel, and coding chops. Ggplot is as close to a perfect example of a library that I can imagine that embodies these things. He started by doing an academic literature review and seized upon a conceptual framework that is superior to every other organic or ad hoc plotting concept out there. And, he correctly assessed that there was a need for more powerful visualization in between "draw it all from primitives" and "choose from one a handful of canned visualizations." Finally, he executed it in fine form.

Rinse, spin, repeat with plyr and dplyr. And lubridate. And devtools. And ... Well, you get the idea.

I got to meet Hadley briefly at a R meetup in Seattle. I lamely asked whether he made it back to New Zealand much. What I really wanted to say was, "You're my hero and how can I be like you?" But I couldn't figure out how to say that without being creepy.

Hadley is aces as far as his contributions are concerned. But he's also a great example of how to comport oneself online. I've never seen Hadley pull a Torvalds. Thanks Hadley, you're one of the good ones!

</comment><comment><USER3> His book is pretty fantastic, but I didn't realize he wrote half of the packages I use.

</comment><comment><USER4> I could not recommend R without the Hadley packages. I started in R using ggplot to replace a bunch of Excel graph reports.

</comment><comment><USER5> "One of the attributes that has made me successful is that I am exquisitely sensitive to frustration". And of course, he did something about it.</comment>


Please let this not be the future of reading on the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.elezea.com/2011/11/future-of-web-reading/ <comment><USER5> edw519's simple rules for reading on the internet:

That's a Back Button

(to the cadence of "That's a Paddlin'" from "The Simpsons")

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFgR0m-9FmM>

      Login button below the fold? That's a back button.
      Animated ads? That's a back button.
      Shifting content? That's a back button.
      More than 2 pages? That's a back button.
      Need to be logged in to Facebook. That's a back button.
      Unexpected video? That's a back button.
      Unexpected sound? That's a back button.
      Overlapping ads & text in my browser? That's a back button.
      Overlapping ads & text at 800 x 600? That's a back button.
      No horizontal scroll bar to get beyond right fold? That's a back button.
      Flash? That's a back button.
      pdf? That's a back button.
      Slideshow? Oooh, you better believe that's a back button.
      Freezes my computer? That's a battery removal.

It's a wonder I find anything readable any more.

<comment><USER6> Publishers' solution to your problem:

Disable the back button.

<comment><USER7> I tend to open things in new tabs. Closing the tab works. If things get annoying enough, other people can adopt my habits on this.

<comment><USER8> Or switch to a browser that doesnt allow a website to disable your back button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The future of reading on the web is easy to change, all we need to do is pay some money for each article we want to read without adverts...

Unfortunately, the primary impact of putting up a paywall for premium content seems to be to raise huge arguments about why "information wants to be free", not the reality of what happens without one.

<comment><USER10> I don't know about most people, but I don't read many articles from the same source: I read a few from some online newspaper, then some from another, then a blog post, etc. Now take NYT.com: the minimum subscription is $15/month - it's absurdly expensive for the three or four articles I might read there.

You need to solve micropayments to make paywalls work.

<comment><USER9> I think the view that NYT.com and www.thetimes.co.uk are taking is that if you pay the $15, you'll end up sourcing most of your news from that site, justifying the price.

I don't know how true that premise is, but it's definitely a simpler solution for them than coming up with a solution to micropayments (which you're absolutely right, does need to get solved).

<comment><USER8> Sourcing most of my news from the NYT would seriously impair my knowledge of the world. It would be like going back to the bad old days before access to the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "...Ad networks like The Deck come to mind..." everytime someone says this I just switch off. The Deck and other hipster brand ad networks are not a workable solution for 99.99% of bloggers, please stop using them as an example of how advertising can be "good"; they're an example of why it can't.

<comment><USER12> Why? Is it because The Deck is selective? Because if that's the reason then there you have a problem to be fixed by another startup. Bloggers of the world, unite?

(I know there are already a couple of offerings and people working on new ad networks.)

<comment><USER11> That is exactly why it can't be considered a good option and why it is "bad" for the wider internet. The Deck being selective is saying "we know adverts suck, so if you're actually good you can be in our super neat actually good system!" so instead of solving the problem of bad adverts, they're just ignoring it and saying that the sites they like can be in their small network that doesn't have the problem.

Their entire network does ~100m monthly impressions, that's nothing.

<comment><USER13> Is your concern that the millions of sites with bad content will not have many options?

<comment><USER14> No, it's that thousands of sites with good content will only have crappy options.

<comment><USER15> Ads are a race to the bottom though. The Deck recognized that exclusivity is the only way to create an oasis, and I'd rather have that oasis than have nothing at all.

To effect wider change what's necessary is for users to start to value content and be willing to pay for it. If the major pubs could make money from the readers than they would be inclined to improve their experience. However, mass-market readers have never really been willing to pay the full cost of quality content, so don't hold your breath.

<comment><USER16> And there's not much stopping others creating their own versions of The Deck, especially around niche areas. I'm surprised more people haven't done this, or even created some sort of simple and reliable engine that allowed people to do it easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This has been the future of reading on the web for about the last 10 years. It's now so bad that my default browser setup (the one I use for sites I've never visited before / known offenders, as opposed to my online bank) is Firefox + AdBlock + RequestPolicy + NoScript + FlashBlock. Yes, I know some of these overlap. Yes, I probably want to look at Ghostery too. I also run a fairly aggressive filtering proxy on another server on the LAN and all LAN HTTP/HTTPS traffic goes through that by default (with exemptions for some sites that fail to cope). I don't care about your ad dollars. The chances are I don't actually care about your content either, but it's something to do to pass the time. If you want to throw up a paywall, knock yourself out - if the content is good enough, I will pay.

Around this time of year, every dickhead with a WordPress install seems to discover the same crappy JavaScript snow plugin, so that gets a special regexp all to itself in my filtering proxy. I didn't pay for a fast quad core CPU so you can animate snowflakes / leaves / puppies in the most inefficient way possible.

Amusingly the mobile experience is actually better in some ways - a double tap to zoom often fits the actual content postage-stamp-sized region to the screen, and I don't see the rest of the page...

</comment><comment><USER18> I dislike the trend towards light grey text on a white background. Unfortunately, the article itself is guilty of this. It's fine for timestamps and other page noise, but why dim a blockquote?

</comment><comment><USER19> My "favorite" "feature" is when you arrive on the web page for the first time in your life and you are being prompted with a popup to take a survey on the web site you never seen before...

</comment><comment><USER20> Well, which would we prefer? Seeing the ads, or having to pay for access to each site?

Personally, as annoying as ads are, I still prefer them being there to the content not being available at all.

<comment><USER21> The issue is not the existence of advertising.

The issue is (primarily for me) the new wave of popup ads that don't let you view the content until you find the 30x30 pixel close area. And secondly the sites where ads have become more important than content (reflected in the design.) And thirdly the dozen social media buttons on every single page.

Non-horrid advertising should be possible for any respectable website. Advertising that abuses your users is only going to be tolerated for so long, and pushes more people to use adblock.

<comment><USER22> > And thirdly the dozen social media buttons on every single page.

You mean the "Like" / "+1" / "Tweet" buttons under articles? What's wrong with these?

I personally want them to be on websites and I _actively seek them_ after reading an article, because clicking on two or three buttons is so much easier and less distracting than having to copy the URL and paste it into every social website I use.

<comment><USER23> I personally consider Facebook, etc. to be lame wastes of time and consider those buttons tacky and unneeded.

It seems a simple browser plugin could still allow Facebookers and Diggers and whomever else the ability to poop back and forth as much as they like while not polluting the web for the rest of us.

As it is now we have to pray that some of these sites don't make it...imagine how many buttons there will be in 50 years!

EDIT: Just wanted to point out this was not a personal attack. I was just trying to raise awareness that not everyone has the same interests.

<comment><USER22> > Just wanted to point out this was not a personal attack. I was just trying > to raise awareness that not everyone has the same interests.

Don't worry, it didn't sound like one :).

Thanks for explaining your point of view. I just realized I didn't really stop and think about people who, like you, don't like Facebook et al. Personally, I think I'd be happy to use a browser plugin or whatever, just like I use e.g. Instapaper. Hell, in browser like Conkeror it would be even more convenient (for Instapaper I now just press "C-x i", it's even easier than pressing a button on the address bar).

<comment><USER23> I think this method is inevitable. Either that or a protocol/standard to handle them all.

As it is now we'll eventually run out of real estate on the screen for 'like' buttons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I find it ironic that I had to disable AdBlock Plus to see the images in the post.

<comment><USER25> That's a technique I have considered in the past, i.e. making my images look like ads, so that those users either disable the blocker or move on.

If ad blocker users were more than a minority, then I would have to shut my websites down, but thankfully most people allow the ads.

The recent (and potentially upcoming recession) means ad revenue is very weak, so that's why we are seeing/using more aggressive advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is why I use Adblock on my desktop, and ReadItLater to extract the text on mobile. Without these the web would be pretty unusable.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why don't we start by trying to raise the quality and therefore effectiveness of ads on the Internet? A fundamental shift in how ads work and what they're trying to do needs to be done.

The ads you see on websites right now are remnants from the newspaper, nearly identical to their print counterparts.

Creating a "prettier ad network" or "other way to be profitable" is only patchwork. We need to completely rework the execution of "I have something to sell and I'd like to tell your readers / customers about it".

Solving this requires something larger.

<comment><USER28> "Solving this" implies that there are users who like, value, and _want_ advertising. I don't feel that there are that many people who do.

The better thing to solve is "how can websites make money without ads"? How did TV networks stay on the air before commercial breaks? Maybe a similar model can be applied.

<comment><USER29> Big government, taxes, licenses required to own televisions. As unpopular as advertising is, that's even less likely to fly.

<comment><USER28> Well, we still have 2/3 of those things in the US and 3/3 in many European countries.

I was more alluding to the idea of "this website sponsored by ___" being inserted into the content in a tasteful, subdued way - kind of like how "Beat the Clock" was actually "Calgon's Beat the Clock".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is driving me crazy. I feel the author's pain.

It's gotten so bad I've created a web site that gives me plain headlines of all the tech, science, world, sports, and political stories I might want to read. Phase 2 is walking the links and using something like Readability to make those readable as well. <http://newspaper23.com>

I didn't do this as a for-profit startup kind of thing -- it's for my own sanity. Everywhere you go folks are screwing with you instead of just giving you content. I wanted a place I could go to just catch up quickly on the opinion of the day. No bullshit.

I also feel like it is a mistake to blame this on SEO. SEO has nothing to do with it. I have a few sites optimized for SEO myself, and the only thing I want to do is present plain, simple, easy-to-understand text. How else would people easily consume it and recommend it to others?

Nope, the problem is _stickiness_. Everybody wants their site to be sticky and entertaining -- to the point of popping up email sign-ups, ads, social crap, you name it. SEO just means getting people to visit. Believe me, the last thing you want to do is annoy them. It's the folks who already have large audiences that are crapping all over the net. And they're not doing that for new eyeballs, they're doing that to keep the eyeballs they already have -- it's called _engagement_. Content providers make a clear and decisive design statement when they decide to screw over readability for stickiness. (Yes, some small-traffic sites do this, but only because they could care less about the audience in the first place. Any visitor for them is a mark. These are the guys who are never going to grow and stay big and simply don't care.)

<comment><USER16> I don't think the issue is just stickiness, I think it's more about publishers trying to squeeze out the next dollar, and the one after that. They're all gradual steps down into reading hell that is horrible when looked at from afar, but easier to understand when you consider them on their own.

      Add one more promo spot for a few extra bucks. I guess. OK.
      Make the header banner larger. OK.
      Boss wants a Send To Friend feature because they heard about someone using one, once.
      Maybe trial an interstitial because it will cover the costs of the new SEO guy.
      Etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is just the beginning guys! Big web properties are becoming more like a TV Network. They interrupt you with an ad because they think that if their name is not some power of 10 then they have to use this TV-like experience. Maybe they're right but if this "platformization" thing catches on then you will _not_ have option to block them out!

I don't know the solution but I'm (we're) trying with our startup.

</comment><comment><USER32> There was a statement of Matt Cutts at PubCon saying Google will penalyze pages with too much ads above the fold. Expect to see that.

<comment><USER16> I'm an AdSense publisher and I get emails from Google suggesting that I add more ad blocks to my site, and also tips on where to place them to get noticed most - above the fold, primarily. They also coach on making the ads stand out by using bold/bright colours. I suspect you'd have to go above and beyond with your ad placements to frustrate Google...

<comment><USER16> Also wanted to mention that they also routinely email me suggesting I swap out my text-only ads for image-based ads (which in my testing don't perform as well).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think I have mentioned this in the past on other articles about advertising. The overall game of creating aggressive advertising has not changed, they just now have more tools to do it.

If your going to force me to have a fullscreen ad before reading your content then at least allow me to dismiss it easily with a single click on the ad and not having to hunt for a close button (if there even is one). The amount of times I've had a fullscreen ad completely block a page with no way to remove it..

Regards content, I think this is partly just a function of so many people now reading stuff online. With more people reading things on smartphones/tablets on their way to work on the bus etc there is a market for more "tabloid" style writing that can be consumed quickly.

There are still plenty of people writing high quality content and lots of it gets linked to here on HN.

People will just be more discerning about the content portals they use.

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't think that Daring Fireball is a good example for a membership based blog. Gruber made all feeds freely available in August 2007. The membership button is still there, but besides a T-shirt, it doesn't provide you with anything new.

AFAIK he gets a lot more from the weekly feed-sponsorships, The Deck ads, and Amazon referrals.

</comment><comment><USER35> the biggest thread for reading on the web is - in my humble opinion - <USER2> swipeware deployed on multiple small and big sites (i.e.: all *.wordpress.com blogs) for mobile devices like the iPad. swipeware has a horrific user experience, adds nothing of value to the page or the article and makes it impossible to read an article from start to finish.

out of curiosity: is there anybody out-there who thinks swipeware on blogs is a great idea/experience?

<comment><USER36> What's swipeware?

<comment><USER31> application controlled by swipes. you know ones you do on a touch device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This:

"The question for reddit isn't whether or not people enjoy it and want to spend time on it, but whether or not the owners can make money selling those people's attention. The traffic to reddit - while admirably large - <USER3> relatively unattractive to most advertisers.

"Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub- reddits.

Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.

I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah. If you're in the content game, your business's value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn't be to sell your audience's attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.

Condé Nast isn't built to do this."

Via - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628>

</comment><comment><USER38> I use, (and pay for), Readability, and I don't really see this as a extra work or a hack or a a necessary evil on my part.

Even if these interstitials weren't there, I'd much rather hit tilde without even thinking, than have to read a page that's even 90% as nice as Readability is with my consistent settings. I do it all the time on blogs without ads or pages that are already very readable like bostonglobe.com.

It's like an office coffee pot, nobody complains that the coffee isn't already sweetened or creamed, they're fine doing the little extra step so that everyone has it the way they want it.

(The one-click send-to-kindle is a time/productivity saver that offsets the cost of that extra click, as it isn't even an option on most sites, and certainly not without hoops to jump through.)

</comment><comment><USER39> The problem is not the poor state of the reading experience -- that's the symptom -- the problem is the per-page-view model of the online advertising, which breaks an article into pages, sharing buttons in your face... etc.

A better paradigm has to come.

</comment><comment><USER40> Publishers are clearly struggling to make money from their sites and decline in the quality and increase in annoyance of the adverts is the result. I wrote this a while ago (though not much has changed):

[http://posterous.richardcunningham.co.uk/the-problem-with- on...](http://posterous.richardcunningham.co.uk/the-problem-with-online- advertising)

</comment><comment><USER41> This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve at Skim.Me (<http://skim.me>), except we're not focused solely on article text reading. Even reading my bank account info on the web is terrible.

</comment><comment><USER42> AutoPager is a great browser add-on that preloads the next page of nytimes, reddit, tumblr etc. It takes care of a lot of the annoying pagination.

It took a long time before I was convinced to try it - but it's sweet.

</comment><comment><USER43> _"... as well as the growing number of sites that offer memberships (like The Loop and Daring Fireball)."_

So there is a concept, that you can't tell people about, they have to experience it, then they "get it."

Small anecdote, when I left Sun in 1995 I went to a startup called "GolfWeb" which was publishing an online magazine about Golf. I saw the web as the new world of publishing (I was waaaaaaaaay early :-)) and had plans for a micropayments type Java wallet applet that would allow you read articles and consume content like you did with a regular magazine only better since you only paid for the articles you read, and you didn't have to store back issues they were always online. There were three problems with this vision:

1) Technical users of the time were chanting "information wants to be free" and were rabidly opposed to paying for content.

2) Nearly nobody had Java in their browser yet, so supporting this meant a very small market to work from.

3) DigiCash and David Chaum had a bunch of patents on electronic versions of cash transactions and they didn't have a clue about 'reasonable' licensing.

[Trust me, in 2015 after all that crap expires, we're going to have some really useful tools available.]

So Golfweb, like others, turned to putting banner ads on the pages and using that to pay the bills.

Information has value. This may seem obvious but for a number of people it is not. The question is how do you convert 'demand' type value into something fungible like cash.

The easiest way has been selling people who want to contact people who would want to consume this particular information, an opportunity to make their case. Sort of like giving lions a seat at the watering hole where gazelles come to drink. The lions pay more for seats near a good quality watering hole. But the nature of watering holes is that the gazelles, despite their thirst, will not frequent watering holes that are saturated with lions. No gazelles, and the lions lose interest. That is the value transaction of most web sites, selling your 'demographic' to advertisers for a spot on the page. And like our eponymous watering hole, you can screw it up by over doing it. So at the tipping point, the value of the information is higher to the reader, than having access to the reader is to the advertiser. So you switch from selling access to lions to selling gazelles access to a fenced watering hole where there are no lions.

To date however that switch has been limited by our gazelles ability to express a preference. Some sites are experimenting with memberships, others like Kachingle are providing a way to pay authors of good sites (less reliable income that advertising). What is needed will be something which is part payment system, part rights clearinghouse, and part web framework.

I of course bowed out of this particular game until 2015 :-) but its going to come to pass. I pay $12/yr to get a magazine, why not $1/month to a web site to access the new content there? Especially if it means the ad farms are tapered down to something less egregious than the examples given in OP's article. Because it isn't that advertisements are bad 'per se' (I used to get BYTE magazine in part _for_ the advertisements), it is the egregious nature in which publishers try to force them into your face which changes the value proposition negative for the reader. So some content publisher growth, some additional understanding in the advertising world what to expect, and voila we'll have moved off paper for this kind of stuff.

<comment><USER44> The problem with paid content is that you only know whether it's worthy for you in hindsight. On top of that you have to compete with gratis (and often surprisingly good quality).

You have all the problems of an asymmetrical information market and you also have to break a cultural gap.

Honestly, I don't subscribe to magazines anymore. I just can't get consistently satisfied with any single source. The only subscription I pay is the broadband contract itself. I don't consistently watch TV or follow any sports for me to consider paying. I know there is a market for that, but it's a really difficult one.

<comment><USER43> In my opinion the quality problem (knowing apriori) is endemic to any market. Unknown entities will be hard pressed to convince but that is true of most things. What will be interesting though (and this is starting) the good 'free' quality stuff starts becoming harder to find for free as those folks develop appreciative audiences.

I still subscribe to several magazines, but by far my favorite in terms of understanding this new reality is The Economist. If you subscribe you get your content digitally for no additional cost. Presentation is good and not overwhelming with ads (of course the magazine isn't either so perhaps its more cultural to the publisher as well). One magazine I subscribe to but _don't_ pay for as an 'app' is Popular Mechanics. Their presentation is less useful in digital form than their printed form sadly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I would argue that once you dismiss ads and scroll down the page that content is entirely readable. The internet has given us an expectation that everything should be free and immediate, and we can't tolerate anything less.

In the old days you paid for a newspaper or magazine with money, now you pay for it with advertising (or you pay money to remove the advertising) - <USER4> new there, nothing surprising, good content is still good content, and the shit is still there in abundance also ...

<comment><USER16> You pay for a newspaper and it still has advertising...

<comment><USER46> ...but my newspaper ads are a wad of color-printed coupon sheets etc. I extract the ad-wad and drop it in the bin on the way out of the market.

Leaving me with 3 or 4 thin sheets of local news.

<comment><USER16> Newspapers here in Australia will have those catalogue inserts (we don't really have coupons) PLUS ads on almost every page. In fact, the amount of pages in the daily newspapers is directly decided by the ad inventory they have - fewer ads and they'll leave out content, more ads and they'll find more stories or lower the bar a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Use ghostery. :-)

</comment><comment><USER48> Evernote Clearly, anyone?

<comment><USER49> Definitely. Actually read this article with it. [http://blog.evernote.com/2011/11/16/introducing-evernote- cle...](http://blog.evernote.com/2011/11/16/introducing-evernote-clearly-one- click-for-distraction-free-online-reading/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Q: Do you want to pay for reading content on the web?

A: No.

Q: Do you want to see ads while reading content on the web?

A: No.

Q: Do you want everything to be free all the time but maintain a capitalistic society?

A: Yes.

</comment><comment><USER51> Readable sweeps all that shit away and puts the plain text on a plain background. Use it and you'll stop caring what lightboxes and other crap web sites festoon their pages with. Safari's reader is nice as well, it even auto fetches all the pages in a multi page article.

<comment><USER52> Article: It sucks that we need to use things like Readability just to read things on the internet.

Parent: Just use Readability.

In short, not very helpful as comments go.

<comment><USER51> I suppose you've got me there. If the argument is "but it's an extra click", I can't say I feel much sympathy.</comment></comment></comment>


U2, Bendygate and iOS 8.0.1: Apple's banana skins - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29361957

<comment><USER2> And yet they moved USD $7,000,000,000 worth of product in 48 hours. This will all pass.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bendygate? No. It's #bendghazi.

<comment><USER4> A complete non-issue people jump on for political reasons?</comment></comment>


Power-touch – Shortcut touch keys on mobile - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rokyed/power-touch <comment><USER2> Not too much info, but I can see the first commit was yesterday. Looks like it opens a web server on your PC, which you then open in the browser on your phone. The buttons there make requests that triggers stuff through robotjs.

Cool idea, but doesn't look secured at the moment. And impossible for me to use on my work network, a pairing with the computer would work (bluetooth or USB), but probably not be as easy to implement.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know is not yet secured , but this was a prototype, because i had the idea yesterday when i woked up. I will be working on securing the whole with maybe a password or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds cool. I'm probably not going to install it without an idea of what it's capable of. Maybe a better README with some examples and screenshots would be helpful.

<comment><USER4> You go to [http://your.pc.ip:3000](http://your.pc.ip:3000) with your phone's browser. You get some keys on the screen. You touch the keys and it plays some other keys on the pc. What worked for me were volume up, down and mute, Alt- Tab. There were other less interesting combinations like CTRL-numbers but the shortcuts can be configured in a json file. It eventually core dumped and I had to close every terminal before being able to type again (Ubuntu 16.04).

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for the guide, I will add it to the repo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why would anyone upvote this? the README is worthless, the repo was started yesterday and it has absolutely no authentication before allowing control of your computer via a publicly available webpage.

Common' HN, smh.

<comment><USER6> > has absolutely no authentication before allowing control of your computer > via a publicly available webpage.

It's less than 100 lines of code, not hard to see exactly what it is doing. It doesn't dial out to a remote server, it starts a local server. And unless you're running a computer that is exposed to the public web, that won't be "publicly available."

I'm not saying it's secure, but let's not immediately jump to conclusions. It is what it is a little useful utility, albeit small and immature.

<comment><USER5> >let's not immediately jump to conclusions.

I did no such thing. Everything I pointed out is the truth. The README is incomplete (being diplomatic) and lots of people have port forwarding turned on for various reasons making boxes publicly available.

I question the dev's priorities and judgement if authentication wasn't the first thing on the list before putting it out there.

>It is what it is

you're correct, it's a poorly thought out application that allows for remote control of people's computers.

<comment><USER6> > I question the dev's priorities and judgement if authentication wasn't the > first thing on the list before putting it out there.

Come on, this is the kind of thing I meant. You question his priorities and judgement? Seriously? Because he shared a little project he put together? He made a thing. He shared it. That's it. It's not like he is selling this, or promoting it as some great thing. I imagine he thought other people on HN would find it interesting given all the discussion of Apple's touch bar, so he shared it. No need to be so antagonistically critical of what is obviously not a finished product. A little kindness and consideration goes a long way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I want to add that, my priorities are to make this project available for everybody, my intent is to make it functional, on the prototype I didn't see the need of security because, my own network is private so testing it was a breeze, but now i did implement an authentication because many people requested it. My main goal of building something that's like apple's touch bar , is kinda finished but that doesn't mean i won't evolve the project , all i need is just some ideas and I will happly implement them because I love programming

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always thought it made a lot more sense to pair an existing touch device with a computer instead of embedding touch in the keyboard. It's less limited (e.g. larger horizontal or vertical or grid layouts as needed) and it uses something that most people already have.

<comment><USER8> Isn't the advantage of embedding it in the keyboard that it's ideally positioned just a short finger reach away from the default touch typing stance? Also embedding it in the keyboard means it doesn't require any extra desk space, so it's available in bed, on the couch, etc.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes you are close to the keyboard and sometimes you're walking around giving a presentation or other activities. There is space for both approaches.

<comment><AUTHOR> i can see that, thanks for the idea

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sounds kinda similar to Unified Remote.

<comment><USER4> I tried Unified Remote and obviously it is much better having been under developement for so much more time.

Unfortunately it keeps disconnecting from my phone, both WiFi and Bluetooth. The app is very bad at signaling if you're connected or not and at managing the connection parameters, and that doesn't help. They could copy JuiceSSH, which is not supereasy but better, or Syncthing.

Still, it doesn't work so I uninstalled it. Power-touch seems potentially better because it does so little that there is no danger of misconfigurations. It's much more hackable too.

<comment><USER10> Did you try Quadro ([http://quadro.me](http://quadro.me)) instead? You need an iOs device tho, Android support is not yet available

<comment><USER4> I would if I were into iPhones. I'm on Android. Thanks anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Still much work to do but it's an interesting idea and a good demo for one day of work.

It core dumped after a few minutes and I had to close every terminal instance before being able to type again but it's OK for what it is.

When it won't crash and kill the keyboard I could use it as a clicker for PDF presentations on my Ubuntu laptop. There is already a wonderful remote for LibreOffice Impress ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.libreoffic...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.libreoffice.impressremote&hl=en)) but I didn't have anything for the other presentation formats.

But we'll need at least some kind of authentication over an encrypted channel.

<comment><AUTHOR> i will be working on the authentification

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please leave sugestions under github, it makes easier to keep track and make them tasks.

</comment><comment><USER11> Did Apple never try using ipods or iphones as alternative controllers before ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I really don't know, but my point was actually to build something that's like TouchBar from Apple, but i didn't wanted to pay the premium price of a mac book pro .

<comment><USER10> You don't need to create one yourself [http://quadro.me](http://quadro.me)

<comment><AUTHOR> I see, but I prefer mine, plus I want to let all the people have the source code, I am not interested in closed source apps.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How much do startup founders pay themselves - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/486961/how-much-do-startup-founders-pay-themselves-and-other-questions-you-were-too-afraid-to-ask/ <comment><USER2> Article is from 2015</comment>


The science of reconstructing a freak accident - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/18/science-of-reconstructing-a-freak-accident/3007179/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+usatoday-NewsTopStories+%28USATODAY+-+News+Top+Stories%29

<comment><USER2> It would be a lot cooler if this article actually discussed the science of accident reconstruction. I spent 10 years as a forensic animator and was looking forward to a stroll down memory lane. Instead I get a brief dismissal of the "mind-numbing series of tests"</comment>


My Favorite Liar (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/my-favorite-lia.html

<comment><USER2> Huh. I've heard this story before, but in a setting where I thought it was an urban legend. Perhaps multiple professors have this tactic.</comment>