Stop Patent Trolls: Support the Innovation Act of 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://act.eff.org/action/stop-patent-trolls-support-the-innovation-act-of-2015 <comment><USER2> This law would take the most effective tool against trolls and weaken it without providing any real relief for innovative small companies targeted by trolls.

The post-grant review process is the only way patents get a serious review of their validity. The PTO actually takes printed references found by accused infringers that pay a five-digit fee as reviews the patent. It's essential because the original pre-grant review only allows a few hours of research and examiners are rewarded only for issuing patents so it's hard for one to be bad enough to be rejected.

This bill would make it much harder to revoke patent claims by prohibiting the reasonable interpretation standard. It would also entitle trolls to demand new claims by making trivial adjustments in wording without any serious review so that winners who get bad patents revoked have to immediately face new bad patents.

Meanwhile the loser pays provision is so weak that it provides no hope to small businesses and little to large ones. East Texas judges have already shown it won't apply in their courts.

The pleading requirements have already been enacted by the Supreme Court this month.

This bill has been so watered down that it's worse than the status quo. EFF should oppose it.

<comment><USER3> EFF seems to be making a habit of backing these worryingly pernicious bills.

<comment><USER4> Could you provide examples? I've not personally heard of the EFF backing anything worrying.

<comment><USER5> worrying != worryingly pernicious

The bill does nothing of substance. That's the problem. It's a waste of resources for the EFF and frankly makes me wonder how they're spending my (and others') money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My two cents.

A lot of these problems come from two clear areas, software and business methods implemented in software. It was not until recently that patents were allowed in these areas. I have never felt that there was any justification for that change, and I would not mind if all patents in those areas are thrown out.

I do not support HR 9 it weakens protection for invention in all areas, tipping the balance to the big boys, since they repeatedly attack a small entities patents, without risking being found in infringement.

I think if you exclude the software and business method patents, you might find that a lot of the so called "non practicing entities" are not trolls, but are small businesses that actually are developing technology.

<comment><USER7> >> not trolls, but are small businesses that actually are developing technology.

While I admit that they are lots of such valid entities, by volume of lawsuits, most seem to be trolls who are developing nothing. Either they did so once upon a time (ie before the internet) or they have purchased some seemingly worthless patents for pennies and now wield them as if they were actual innovators rather than professional plaintiffs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stop the EFF before they kill innovation. HR 9 is overreaching. There are only a few real "patent trolls". The EFF has a list.[1] Only one law firm, Farney Daniels, has sent more than three demand letters.

What HR 9 does is to make it possible to sue patent holders over and over until they're worn down and broke. It empowers rich infringing companies and lets them infringe patents at low risk. Worst case, they end up paying royalties, not being shut down.

Background: [http://thehill.com/blogs/congress- blog/technology/238973-hr-...](http://thehill.com/blogs/congress- blog/technology/238973-hr-9-crushes-innovation-killing-the-american-dream)

Activism: [http://www.savetheinventor.com/take-action- now](http://www.savetheinventor.com/take-action-now)

[1] [https://trollingeffects.org/lawfirms](https://trollingeffects.org/lawfirms)

<comment> loup-vaillant Bah, the patent system as a whole is broken anyway. There are very few patents whose absence would have slowed down innovation. On the contrary, the _presence_ of patents tend to slow down innovation.

You want more innovation? Abolishing patents altogether is probably best. It won't "save the inventor", but it will certainly save the _invention_.

<comment><USER9> > Bah, the patent system as a whole is broken anyway. There are very few > patents whose absence would have slowed down innovation. On the contrary, > the presence of patents tend to slow down innovation.

There is very little evidence of that.

Also, for using a system that's allegedly broken, the US is the country that has been the most innovative in terms of software for decades in a row now.

<comment><USER10> Let's put your idea to the test. There's allegedly around 200,000 patents that can cover smartphones. Everything from how they look to how they can connect to putting voice over a data line. Try to design a standards-compliant smartphone that runs common apps with understandable interface that doesn't infringe on patents. You will have to read and consult hundreds of thousands of claims regularly as you make every detail.

Realistically, you'll just (a) not get into that market at all or (b) ignore the patents then fight with or pay whoever comes after you. Apple vs Samsung is a nice example of where (b) can go but most choose (a).

<comment><USER9> > Let's put your idea to the test.

My idea has already been put to the test and proven correct: the US __is __the most innovative country in the software area. And has been for decades.

The scenario you are proposing is unrealistic because that's not how the system works. Otherwise, we would never have had the iPhone, Android nor the BlackBerry.

Now try to understand why the system works despite your understanding of it.

<comment><USER10> Most of the patents files for software are by big companies. Most innovations come from startups, academics, and volunteers in FOSS. Most of it was protected by copyright law with money recouped in licensing and acquisitions.

Now try to understand why innovation existed outside patent motivations. Then look up what big companies do with all those patents. Only then will you see the real effect of the patent system.

<comment><USER11> Universities are big filers of patents, so that leaves startups and FOSS. The latter do a lot of innovative application, but not much invention. If you look at something like a smart phone. The UI was developed at a big company, using ideas originally developed at big corporate R&D labs. The CPU and wireless chips were all designed at big companies. The LCD and touch screen technology is all developed at big companies. The only big FOSS part (the Linux core of Android), is a clone of something (UNIX), invented in a big corporate R&D lab.

<comment><USER12> FOSS has its fair share of research. You just don't hear about it as often as you hear about the more engineering-focused FOSS projects, for the same reasons you don't hear about the research projects big companies do as much as their flagship engineering projects. (How many people have heard of Midori compared to Windows? I'd wager it's the same ratio, speaking in orders of magnitude, as the number of people who have heard of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler vs. GCC, both of which are FOSS. I could name many other examples just in the PL domain.)

Now you might say that a lot of those open source research projects are funded by big companies, so they don't count. But most development on popular open source projects is funded by big or medium-size companies. Research isn't any different in this regard.

I think it's no accident that most of your examples are hardware, not software. The problem there is that open source hardware is difficult to make work, not that open source research is difficult to make work. The other main example you gave is Unix, but FOSS didn't exist in 1973--of course it wasn't open source by the modern definition. Its research successor, Plan 9, _was_ open source.

Disclaimer: I work on one of those open source research projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The summary of the bill for those interested in what it actually does.

[https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/9/su...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/9/summary/17)

<comment><USER14> >Removes a provision that prohibits a patent from being deemed invalid based on novelty, prior art, or nonobvious subject matter solely because a defense is raised or established based on prior commercial use.

This looks kinda troubling. I'm no lawyer, but it looks like this section makes it impossible to declare a patent dispute invalid due to innovation, i.e., you can be sued for infringement if you make a better mousetrap, even though you have demonstrably improved the design.

<comment><USER15> Nope. You are reading it completely wrong. It's saying patents can be declared invalid in more cases, nothing to do with "declaring a patent dispute invalid."

<comment><USER14> My bad. Thanks for clearing that up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am starting to see ads against this bill from patent trolls. It's on the Congressional calendar right now. It has 27 cosponsors. Hopefully it will pass! The EFF link has a box where you can e-mail your congressional representative, if you live in the USA of course.

<comment><USER16> Wait, you can have ads against bills?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, here is one of their ads on Youtube ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMPF2gNfStg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMPF2gNfStg) ). The title video explains who the person is:

"Keith McNally - Inventor, Online Ordering Software"

If you click on the lower left link on the video, it takes you to a web page where they ask you to send a letter to your congressional representative urging them to kill House Resolution 9.

<comment><USER16> "Inventor of Online Ordering Software". _Really_?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To be very honest, whenever I see any political group supporting this or that bill, I have to roll my eyes. The thought that change could be wrought by this congress voting on anything when it is the congress that has enacted the least number of laws of any US congress in recent history[0] is one that is rooted in futility. It seems like those votes against obamacare, just political showmanship without the _serious_ hope of getting anything really accomplished. The last major changes to law/goverment in this country have been either by the courts(gay marriage, citizens united) or executive action(draw down of the war on drugs). Has anything been done through congress in the last few years where it is supposed to originate? None I can think of other than a couple of standouts.

We need to fix the election finance system. That is the first problem before we can think that anything can really be effected through congress, as it is supposed to be.

[0] [http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/congress- numbers-11365...](http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/congress- numbers-113658)

<comment><USER18> _We need to fix the election finance system._

That's attacking the symptoms without looking at the real problem. All of this political gridlock is baked into the system. Separation of powers, first-past- the-post, non-proportional representation, electoral redistricting carried out by the party in power (can you say conflict of interest?).

<comment><USER17> The separation of powers is between divisions of government, not political parties.

Also, once you fix campaign finance, you'll have people who will vote to representatives who will fix redistricting issues. Probably not a representative sample, but the recent Ohio elections showed that partisan gerrymandering is _not_ popular. Once the electorate has representatives that need not worry about appeasing special interests, their will will be done.

<comment><USER18> _The separation of powers is between divisions of government, not political parties._

The separation of powers means you will often get a president whose party does not control congress. This leads to extreme gridlock. Where I live (Canada) people were tired of Stephen Harper so they tossed him and his party out of office; no gridlock to worry about at all!

 _Also, once you fix campaign finance_

I'm not convinced. Jeb Bush has hundreds of millions in finances and what has that gotten him? 5th place. He can't even crack double digit percentages.

Meanwhile you a guy like Bernie Sanders who, despite lacking a Super PAC, manages to draw huge crowds and build support. Too bad the separation of powers + first-past-the-post system means it would be utterly impossible for him to start his own political party so that people would have a real alternative to the Democrats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dear EFF, I have been a big fan and even donated in the past but this bill is terrible, and you guys are making a habit of supporting the wrong bills.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Patent trolls buy up patents and use them offensively against unsuspecting businesses—without creating or selling anything themselves."

This sounds suspiciously like something software companies would argue, to retain the right to protect their turf with patents, while reducing their exposure to professional patent enforcers.

</comment><comment><USER21> The problem they are trying to solve will only really budge when we get an improved crowdsourced-based approach.

</comment><comment><USER22> Stop Patents. Period.

That would definitely be a cause to support.

</comment><comment><USER23> Calling people who try to enforce the patents they own trolls is a disgrace.

<comment><USER15> Nonsensical statement. There is no other kind of enforcement than that done in the interest of the patent owner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> People really are confused about patent trolls ans NPEs. An NPE is not a troll.

</comment><comment><USER9> How about maintaining software patents (which have merits) but making it so the only way to acquire a patent is to acquire the company that owns it?

This would completely kill the patent troll business while adding value to startups that file innovative patents.

<comment><USER25> The only thing that would do is add the insignificant cost of forming an LLC to the cost of filing a patent. Also patent profiteering is typically based around licensing, not ownership.

<comment><USER9> You're missing my point. I'm not talking about filing a patent but acquiring an existing one.

You should only be allowed to acquire an existing patent if you acquire the company that owns it.

<comment><USER26> You're missing the point. Given your rules, if you file a patent through a shell company spun up for the individual patent, then you can sell that company to the patent trolls just like you'd sell a patent these days. It would leave many existing patents that are not already held by patent trolls off limits to patent trolls, but it would not do anything for patents created after the rule goes into effect (because there is no sufficient reason not to create a shell corp and keep that flexibility, if you're already going through the expense and paperwork of filing a patent).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 <comment><USER2> Here is the underlying study: [https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...](https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf).

The actual conclusion of the study is rather different than the headline. To understand why you really need to break down the methodology and conclusions.

First, the surveys of "public preference" are based not on voters, but general surveys. The authors studied:

> 1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the > general public asked a favor/ oppose question about a proposed policy > change.

Because voters are wealthier, older, and more conservative than non-voters, public opinion is not the same thing as voter opinion.

Second, they defined "economic elite" as people at the 90th percentile:

> We believe that the preferences of "affluent" Americans at the ninetieth > income percentile can usefully be taken as proxies for the opinions of > wealthy or very-high-income Americans, and can be used to test the central > predictions of Economic-Elite theories

So the "economic elite" here are people with household incomes above $150,000. If you account for the fact that the median voter is about 45, that's a top 15% income or so.

Third, there is a high correlation between the preferences of the public and those of the economic elite:

> It turns out, in fact, that the preferences of average citizens are > positively and fairly highly correlated, across issues, with the preferences > of economic elites (refer to table 2).

Fourth, interest groups also have significant independent power:

> By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, > highly significant, independent impact on policy. This does not mean that > theories of Economic-Elite Domination are wholly upheld, since our results > indicate that individual elites must share their policy influence with > organized interest groups.

Thus, the real takeaway is something like: adopted policies generally reflect public opinion, except policies that have low support among the top ~15% of voters and/or interest groups are unlikely to get adopted:

> When both interest groups and affluent Americans oppose a policy it has an > even lower likelihood of being adopted (these proposed policies consist > primarily of tax increases).

That is a predictable outcome of _representative democracy_ and does not imply that the U.S. is an oligarchy, or at least not the way one traditionally thinks of the term. When you define "economic elite" as the top 15%, you're roping in a big chunk of small business owners, professionals, property owners, etc. These are the people who employ other people, pay property taxes, serve on the PTA, and vote, especially in local elections. So 55% of the public may support say a hike on business taxes in a city, but if representatives worry that such an increase will make the city uncompetitive for jobs vis-a-vis other cities, the policy may not pass.

</comment><comment><USER3> We know that. Well, a lot of us do.

The real questions are:

How do we educate those who don't understand this yet?

Do enough of us, who do understand, care enough to act in a meaningful way?

<comment><USER4> Is there a meaningful way in which we can act?

<comment><USER3> Yes.

If we can arrive at a place where a sufficient number of us want to impact this, we could get an amendment done.

But, that takes a sustained civic effort, and there is the rub. Do we care enough to actually do that?

I think I do. When I ask others, I get a wide range of commit potentials. I don't think enough of us care.

<comment><USER5> I assume you mean an amendment to limit free speech so you can stop people from advocating for causes you don't agree with. That's what overruling Citizens United would be.

<comment><USER3> Money isn't speech, nor are corporations people. Sorry.

It has nothing to do with causes I do, or do not agree with, and everything to do with a healthy democracy.

Let's just say ones bank account is no measure of character, nor qualification to speak above others in the democracy.

A similar dynamic can be seen with land owners, who also consistently seek some advantage over their peers.

Acres do not vote, nor do dollars.

Additionally, it has nothing to do with stopping advocacy of any kind. Those of significant means have plenty of ways to get the word out. Non issue.

Bribery is another matter altogether. That is precisely what an amendment would be about.

Thomas Paine derived the justification for self governance, and the basis for its authority in his books. In particular, "Rights of Man", and "Age of Reason" contain most of this in easy to understand form.

A core idea is we agree to governance so we may better exercise our liberty. A lack of governance actually diminishes that for large numbers of people.

The government must then serve us if it's authority is just and true.

Allowing for money as speech in politics renders the authority of the government corrupt, unjust and untrue. In a real sense, it only serves some of us, when the intent is for it to serve all of us.

That we allow anonymous dollars is also troubling. The First Amendment does not include a shield. At the very least we should require complete and full disclosure of all funds.

Some of us want to advocate for causes an awful lot of the rest of us think very poorly of. And that is fine, but allowing powerful people to speak with impunity is as corrupt as the bribery associated with said speech.

What the two do is break the basic intent and trust necessary for the people to abide by and respect the government. And government is necessary, despite some who claim otherwise.

Further, it is not possible to conduct a meaningful debate, which can form the basis for cause agreement or disagreement in an environment where money so obviously trumps votes as consistently as it does in the US at present.

Finally, the idea that some of us deserve to call the shots, because money, for the rest of us is old world governance. You can lump that in with ideas like divine right, or nobility, etc...

A claim that God says one should be king, or that winning the birth lottery means the same is as silly as the idea of a wealthy person being somehow entitled in like kind.

The telling bit in all this is the strong and consistent pushback on disclosure.

Any cause really worth persist does not require anonymonity. Sure, there will be naysayers, but the overall open discourse will bring merits to light, as intended.

Many who do not want disclosure have also been linked to some pretty damn ugly policy advocacy too. That's a generalization, of course, but it's also indicative of why disclosure at a minimum is required to make any real sense out of the mess we have in money and politics today.

Honestly, I do not believe you understand how and why the First Amendment works, nor why it exists.

Full disclosure may actually prove good enough too. If we are to continue with the idea of money as speech and corporations as people, then we also need to insure the basic dynamics of those are true to the intent of the First Amendment.

Vile people can hide behind their corporate proxy and act with anonymous dollars to ends that are not easily demonstrated to be worthy. At present they can avoid judgement from their fellow citizens as well as many liabilities. That is a step too far.

Disclosure would bring that out, and it may be enough to be workable. I'm completely open to that.

I am absolutely not open to the idea of such powerful actors able to do so with relative impunity. Meaningful checks and balances are a core idea we all live by, and that is by design and intent to form a more just governance than our founders saw in the past.

Citizens United is nothing more than a call to return to the times of fiefdoms, kings, lords, nobility... and many other unAmerica ideas of just and true governance.

<comment><USER5> Given the current propensity for political witch-hunts in American politics, disclosure is clearly a trojan horse that is really intended to intimidate people over their opinions. Privacy for donors to non-profits is no different than a secret ballot, which America didn't always have.

Look at what happened to Brendan Eich. The cause that he donated to was popular enough to _win the election_ and even then, a $1000 donation was enough to undo him and force him out of his job. I don't agree with his opinions on that issue, but the precedent will clearly create a chilling effect on advocacy. Do you really think that's desirable?

The freedom of advocacy is inseparable from the freedom of speech. It costs money to print pamphlets, buy air time, pay people to stand on the corner, conduct opinion polls, etc. The Citizens United case was about a non-profit organization that made a film critical of Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary campaign. Their alleged violation was spending money against a politician within 30 days of a primary. Anyone who believes in free speech should have been appalled. Politicians want only politicians to be allowed to get their word out during an election. That wouldn't be a free society. The Supreme Court ruling was the only reasonable one.

Say that you or I have a novel political idea that we want to advocate for. How do you propose that we do so? We'd probably form a non-profit, spend money contacting potential allies, convince them on the merits of our case and to donate to us, then spend that money on pamphlets, TV and radio ads, etc. That's freedom at work.

<comment><USER3> Yes. Challenges to opinion are normal, expected and required of every US citizen by design.

If those opinions have merit, it will be found.

All of us are subject to the law that a mere opinion could impose.

Not only should that be challenged, we are required to do so.

Like I said, disclosure may be enough.

There is no, just try it here. Real people are impacted while living real lives.

Disclosure is a reasonable check on what is significant advocacy power and access to legislators.

As for your comments about the left... yes! The left cates about the little guy. No one else does.

Brendan lost his job due to losing the respect of those he was supposed to lead. It would not work a day for him.

I'll be frank, racism, bigotry and theocracy are completely unacceptable.

Politics is a contact sport. Anyone advocating we treat others like lesser people can totally expect to be judged on it. At a minimum, those other prople are going to speak out, as they should.

Hiding behind money and corporations means speech without accountability for said speech, and that is also unacceptable.

There is no shield in the First Amendment, by design.

The lesson here for Brendan is leading people requires you have the respect of those people. Maybe it's just not wise to classify some of those people as lesser, or wrong, or bad, undeserving people, if one wants their respect.

I find avoidance of these basic dynamics very deeply offensive.

Truth is, if the contact is a problem, maybe the speech is too.

Go ask the people who have suffered a lot worse when speaking truth to power.

Free Speech is not a license to say whatever one wants with no consequences, nor is it a license to be heard, or respected.

You will see things like, "everyone has a right to their opinion", which is true. But everyone else also has a right to say what they think of that opinion too.

All of that plays out as democracy and it provides checks and balances as well as the ability to challenge norms and advance the society.

Out gay brothers and sisters all decided to speak up and out over how they were treated in society, and that treatment has been shown to be unjust and often for untrue reasons too.

Good. Their supporters heard their story, found it compelling and acted on that.

I personally won't have basic discrimination of this kind. I've walked from jobs where it was te norm, and did so long before we had the state of awareness we have today too.

Everything costs something. I'm fine with disclosure as its a great check on bad idea advocacy just as its an enabler of good idea advocacy.

I'm not OK at all with attempt to advance speech with impunity.

<comment><USER5> So why draw the line at disclosure? Why not abolish the secret ballot, if politics should be a "contact sport" as you say. If anything, votes are even more powerful and important than money.

<comment><USER3> Oh, now I can reply. Must be a glitch. Let me make an edit and take care of a few things..

This is a good topic, and your question warrants dome discussion.

<comment><USER5> I've noticed this strange quirk of Hacker News. When a comment is new, you can reply by going to its permalink (clicking the timestamp), but not in context.

(Awaiting your reply!)

<comment><USER3> That is what happened. More in a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been thinking about this lately, and there might be a great advantage to modern democracy even if it is a sham run by oligarchs. Unlike an old- fashioned monarchy or dictatorship, if you want to take over the country, you just have to pay a bunch of money to take control of legislative seats and/or the presidency. This is way less disruptive than having a civil war with armies rampaging about.

It may be nowhere close to the popular ideal of democracy, but the reduced violence and destruction would probably make it a worthwhile innovation anyway.

<comment><USER7> Malcolm X would give several speeches about "the ballot or the bullet," talking about how history is full of violent revolutions, but he lived in a privileged time where revolutions can actually happen peacefully.

I think there's a lot to be said for the idea of elections as a pressure valve, as well as a way to displace leadership once they cross certain lines.

EDIT: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9BVEnEsn6Y&t=37m56s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9BVEnEsn6Y&t=37m56s)

Admittedly, he talks up the bullet as an inevitable fallback if the ballot didn't work, so maybe this isn't the perfect example...

<comment><USER8> He definitely got voted out of the 'Nation of Islam' by the bullet, not the ballot. So maybe the example is a better one than you think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Money is power. It always has been, and it always will be. Sure, votes are powerful, but voters can be influenced by money, so it's prohibitively difficult to get elected without the approval of capital. As a result, capital can band together as a class and purchase politicians to enact policies that are against the interests of people who have to produce for a living.

Our political system is not democracy. Our political system is capitalism. It is occasionally tempered by the possibility of a popular uprising, so you can find democratic aspects if you look hard enough.

How, then, do we prevent capital from ruling over labor? We must understand how exactly money works in making capital our kings. Money gives you the ability to compel almost anyone to produce for you. Producers agree because the money you pay them can be used to compel almost anyone to produce for them.

In these terms, our goal is to eliminate the ability for capital to use money to compel individual producers to act against the interests of producers as a class. When capital attempts this, we want producers to refuse not out of principle, but because the incentive has been eliminated. If producers can't compel anyone to produce for them if their money has come from capital's attempt to rule as tyrants, then capital loses its ability to rule as tyrants.

If this is the solution, then the problem is that money is anonymous. When someone compels me to produce for them, I have no idea where the money came from. If I did, I could refuse the tyrannical money while accepting any other money they attempt to pay with. Our money needs an auditable record of how it has flowed through the economy to allow people to exercise their inalienable right to reject the tyranny of capital. This requires sacrificing financial privacy, which sounds bad, but it's worth considering whether this 700 year- old concept should be as sacred as it seems.

How do you build an auditable record of how money has flowed through an economy? Blockchains give us such records without needing to bestow power to any central authority to maintain the record. Blockchains will let us build a political system where capital still directs production, but the producing class has veto power. Capital alone isn't enough to rule; merit is also required. This is merit capitalism, and I think it could work better than not just the charade of democracy we have today, but also the ideal democracy that we thought we wanted.

</comment><comment><USER7> The lack of open access academic work is incredibly frustrating. We're only guessing at the content of the article based on BBC's coverage.

Consider this bit:

 _A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans…is adopted only about 18% of the time, " they write, "while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time… On the other hand[,] When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it._

a) How much difference is there between "adopted about 45% of the time" and "generally do not get it?" That seems kind of important to the argument.

b) I'm somewhat relieved to hear most groups never actually get their way. From what I remember of the Federalist Papers, gridlock was always the general idea.

c) What policies are we talking about here? I feel one way when representatives overrule majorities that are trying to add accountability, but another way when majorities demand unconstitutional or unworkable policy changes. I'm really curious how many of the 1,779 policy issues inspire me towards majoritarianism.

d) When are majorities and economic elites actually at odds? I'm not sure why, but it seems like some of the poorest people I know are the most supportive of tax relief for the rich. But really, at several income levels, I know both conservatives and liberals on various policy issues. The set of disagreements could tell us a lot about why one group's positions pass more often than the other.

e) How often to policy implementations flip back and forth? Some tax cuts and educational policies just expired after a decade. Is that a win for people who fought to see them implemented? Or a win for people who opposed them? It's really a messy combination. There are landmark laws that stick around, but with most laws, there aren't clean victories on either side once you back up and see how they were amended or repealed over time.

I'm sure the authors are very intelligent, so maybe they addressed all of these concerns in their paper. It's hard to know though when the default is gated, for-profit research.

</comment><comment><USER10> This old claim gets resubmitted to Hacker News over and over and over, and there is never anything new here.

The authors of the overly cited study don't represent a mainstream view in political science research. The more developed literature about Public Choice Theory[1] provides a lot more insight about how politics works--in every country in the world.

Reading the BBC brief commentary kindly submitted here, which summarizes the "study" details that have been posted here many times before, I still have to ask, where is the comparison with other countries of the world? The United States continues to enjoy a high rate of net immigration with regard to essentially all other countries on the planet, and I know happy immigrants to the United States from China, India, Russia, Canada, Mexico, the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Singapore, Somalia, Argentina, Ecuador, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Ghana, South Africa, Haiti, and plenty of other countries that aren't immediately coming to mind. Are there problems in the United States, including problems caused by poor governance? Sure there are. But, on the other hand, where is there somewhere that is a better democracy than the United States to the degree that local people there have to institute restrictive immigration measures to keep the United States citizens from migrating in?

AFTER EDIT: I can see the silent downvotes for disagreement as well as anybody can, but meanwhile can you respond to what I have brought up substantively? Most of the other comments here also think that the authors overstated the problem they identified in their "study," and anyway how is one country any different from another country in this regard?

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=Public+Choice+Theory&oq=Publ...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Public+Choice+Theory&oq=Public+Choice+Theory)

<comment><USER11> The insanity and hypocracy in the American immigration system is infurating and will lead to fewer immigrants in the future. With the way the H1B system works it is extremely impractical to hire foreign workers who may be more qualified than domestic ones. Hardly any of the visas are dual intent. I know a Canadian who has been here for like 20 years and still doesnt have a green card. Most other countries give you permanent residency after you stay for a certain number of years. There is no startup visa. Want to come work at a company in the USA? There are a few (if bad) options. Want to start a company in the USA and employ Americans? Be prepared to bend the truth and risk getting deported.

The United States has enjoyed its position of supremecy after Europe imploded from two world wars, and it is being taken for granted now.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the substantive comment. I mentioned in my comment that I know many first-generation immigrants to the United States, so evidently it is still possible to immigrate here with various statuses. I have lived overseas in one other country, for two three-year stays, once in the 1980s, and once spanning the turn of the last century, and then it was harder to settle there to work and MUCH harder to become a naturalized citizen there than it has ever been in the United States, although I hear that now immigration is becoming more liberalized there (Taiwan).

<comment><USER11> I think that the difficulty immigrating to the United States is a relatively recent development (post-9/11). Lines for green cards have become very long for a lot of people and for some there isn't an option to get a green card (due to non-dual-intent status which is basically "Hey we want you to come spend the best years of your life contributing to the American system and then you have to leave!")

One of the bigger problems is that there isn't an entrepreneur visa in the US, which basically means that you can't be on a visa and start a company in the USA. At least in theory. With something like 50% or more of companies being started by people who weren't born in the USA, it seems a bit problematic.

It's not impossible to immigrate here, it's just very difficult compared to other developed nations such as Canada, the UK and the EU.

I feel like a big problem with tackling immigration in the US is it's so tightly coupled with the partisan issue of illegal immigration from latin america that it's basically impossible to have any sort of reform for legal immigration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This situation exists in most so-called "democracies".

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there actually any such thing as a democracy, and if so would we want it?

A _pure_ democracy would actually be a nightmarish form of totalitarianism in which the majority was able to enforce its norms upon any minority without any checks or balance.

The US is a constitutional republic in which democratic institutions act as one check upon power.

<comment><USER14> The US is a constitutional republic in which democratic institutions act according to the wishes of those with the biggest checkbook except for a few limited cases...and even when the populace can defeat that, often the checkbook eventually wins. See CISA as the most recent example.

<comment><USER15> It's too easy to blame the billionaires' checkbooks. US elections can be bought, but only indirectly. Money buys advertising, but the people still have the power not to listen to advertising. Just ask Jeb! Bush. I still blame the individual voters who choose to remain so ignorant.

<comment><USER14> > Money buys advertising, but the people still have the power not to listen to > advertising.

Quite true. However, considering how the financier of these advertisements can be obfuscated or just not reported period, you're basically asking people to ignore all political advertising and be suspect about just about everything they read, hear or see.

<comment><USER13> "The people" are sort of a non entity. A person can resist propaganda, but a propagandist does not have to convince a person. A propagandist need only convince enough people to sway an election-- and any subset of people of any age or education will do. If the election is close it might only take a few percent. This indeed places a lot of power in the hands of the media and anyone who can buy it.

Democracy is sort of a plutocratic oligarchy system where ordinary people are recruited to be intermediaries and are therefore given the illusion of power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could we get the date on the title? This is from 2014.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh, US, US, US is the center of the world. Can't you see the entire world is exactly like the US in these matters? If the US is not a democracy, you can start blaming the mankind.

</comment><comment><USER5> Given how much policy-making is specific to particular industries, is there anything wrong with the players in those industries having a big say in policy? I'd love to see what the "1,779 policy issues" that the study considered are, but I bet the average person doesn't have much to say about most of them.

The goal is not to pit people against corporations. Those corporations are just the economic vehicles through which people act. Fishing companies are clearly going to have a lot to say about fishing policy, and are going to provide better input to Congress than I ever could, since I know nothing about fishing other than a few sound bites like "we're overfishing the seas". I don't know what that means for particularly fisheries or whatever other considerations there are.

Take a more controversial example, banking. Most people don't know a thing about banking. They've heard sound bites about "greedy bankers" and "inefficient regulators", but they probably don't even know what fractional reserve banking is, let alone what the effects of regulation on it would be. How is it a bad thing that bankers have a large amount of input into these policies? And it hasn't stopped the government from passing policies that they oppose. Look at the animosity toward Dodd-Frank on Wall Street.

Social scientific research can be twisted to support any conclusion. It's typically dressed up in the legitimacy of statistical analysis, but the underlying data is usually weak and their conclusions involve a lot of narrative-writing on the part of the authors.

Also, you have to consider what the goal of democratic institutions is. Is it accountability or representation? Representation means that Congressmen would mirror the opinions of the public. Accountability means that the peoples role is to vote out bad leadership. Both are important, but I think accountability is typically the better goal.</comment>


Break up Facebook (and while we're at it, Google, Apple and Amazon) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/20/facebook-google-antitrust-laws-gilded-age <comment><USER2> Although I am in favor or breaking up, maybe not Apple, but the others ASAP, that is not going to happen unless there is a Snowden copycat at work inside Google / Facebook.

Look at the Google Transparency Project. Google basically runs the US government (or at least used to under Obama). [https://www.googletransparencyproject.org](https://www.googletransparencyproject.org)

Without having a "new Snowden" giving the average citizens the shock of a lifetime by displaying how much info those spy companies have on us all nothing is going to change.

When Rockefeller was around in the 1930 there was no, or only little, lobbying but since it is now legal for anyone to buy US politicians little will change.

Lets hope the Snowden of Google / Facebook start his/her upload to wiki leaks soon.

<comment><USER3> > not Apple, but the others

Why Amazon ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rana Foroohar has ben very eloquent on this topic all year. 'Antitrust policy is ripe for a rethink We should consider regulating Big Tech like we do the banks' [https://www.ft.com/content/b5ce2342-7624-11e8-b326-75a27d27e...](https://www.ft.com/content/b5ce2342-7624-11e8-b326-75a27d27ea5f) But as Reich points out in his UK Guardian piece neither wing of US politics seems very interested in reining in the giant platform companies. Surely if Faang was 'broken up' other monopolies would just spring up in their place...antitrust seems to wax and wane politicly and some of the biggest DC lobbyists are firms like Facebook...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I really, really don't get lumping Apple in with Google and Facebook here. The only rationale given is that 'Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers.' the first - smartphones - is highly regional, and the second isn't even defensible as an argument, as Apple only sells a small percentage of laptops.

Even if those were both completely true, I can't fathom how it leads to needing to break Apple up?

<comment><USER5> > _I can't fathom how it leads to needing to break Apple up?_

Apple the device company is quite different from Apple the media company. Spotify competes with the former on an unlevel field.

Agree, though, that the case for breaking up Facebook, Google and Amazon is more urgent.</comment></comment>


Firing Dick Costolo from Twitter would be a huge mistake - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2015/01/07/firing-dick-costolo-from-twitter-would-be-a-huge-mistake

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't buy into the idea that all celebrities will go crazy and start producing video right away, but Jason has a point that this can be more attractive than YouTube or other avenues for some.</comment>


How one SV engineer benefitted from the tacit acceptance of entrenched sexism - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-one-silicon-valley-engineer-benefitted-from-tacit-faye-keegan <comment><USER2> I agree Haseeb's comment was sexist, and I'm glad that Keegan called him out on it.

But I think the punishment she's asking for is too strong. She seems to be implying that he shouldn't be allowed to have a successful career after making that comment, which I think is a massively disproportionate punishment.

Also, this isn't "tacit acceptance of entrenched sexism". There was nothing "tacit" about her calling him out, and her response and Ruggeri's response were not "acceptance". In fact, if every sexist comment got called out like this, people would stop making sexist comments. The problem is when people make sexist comments and don't get called out on it, or when the incident is brought to higher authorities and the authorities defend the sexist comments-- neither of which happened in this case.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also it is not so clear that this person is really a winner in the long term.

My experience is that if you negotiate for a high salary, unless you really perform like a super-superstar, you will be the last to get a raise and the first to go if anything goes wrong.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd only heard the name App Academy before this article. I did a bit of reading on it. It's an intensive twelve-week program, and it looks like applicants have to pass heavy screening for aptitude. I can well believe that properly screened and highly-motivated people can learn a huge amount in twelve weeks. And Qureshi seems highly intelligent. He's described in the Business Insider article as a former professional poker player with an English degree. His blog says he was a millionaire poker player by the age of 19. So I'm guessing he's pretty powerful analytically.

But still. If a company is putting a _quarter of a million dollars_ on the table, I would think they'd be able to find somebody as smart as Qureshi who also had a computer science or computer engineering or mathematics background and _years_ of coding experience.

I don't work in the tech world this article is describing, so I don't know. But it seems odd to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're looking for a job in any field, and any type of _ism_ is a concern for you, you have three options:

1\. Ignore the _ism_ and be yourself.

2\. Call out bad behavior and campaign against the _ism_.

3\. Adopt the behaviors of the _ism_ and try to minimize the differences.

Individual personalities and circumstances likely dictate which of these you choose, but everyone who is subjected to an _ism_ and looks for work chooses, and none of those options are the better choice for everyone.

If you are in a hiring role, keep in mind that you put your company's reputation at risk and can invite legal action if you judge candidates by any measure associated with _isms_. Be thoughtful and prudent out there.

<comment><USER6> you forgot

4\. Whine about it in a blogpost to try to create an internet outrage army

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think Haseeb wants to offer genuine help to women. If this woman doesn't want to take the advice, it's OK. Just ignore it. But please don't write a blog post about how he communicates instead of what's important: the message. For Engineers communication style was always secondary, and although it's getting more important, it should be staying secondary to the content and the real meaning behind the message.

</comment><comment><USER8> >> "Shake hands like a man, especially if you're a woman."

Er, that's a load of bollocks.

</comment><comment><USER9> [Haseeb left a long comment (sorry it does not seem to be possible to link directly to it) Here is an edited version (I have removed sentences but believe I have preserved some key points) To be clear I don't know Haseeb and have never met him, but I thought his comments helped to put aspects of the original post in context. I don't know that they are true but they are posted under his LinkedIn ID.]

Hey Faye, Someone linked me to your article that you posted on LinkedIn Pulse about me. First off, your article is completely fair. Though this took place about 6 months ago, it's something that weighed heavily on me when it happened. I never reached out to you to discuss it personally, though I don't think that was my fault. Let me explain.

[...]

That presentation was the first time that I realized I'd said something flagrantly sexist. I'd written the slides about 30 minutes before the presentation and never read them aloud to anyone. I immediately felt ashamed when I read them aloud, because I knew it was a sexist line that I should've immediately deleted and re-written. So when you pointed out that it was sexist, I hoped that the best way I could concede the point would be to acknowledge you were correct and fix it in front of everyone. After the presentation, I was pretty ashamed. I wasn't really sure what to do about it, because I thought two things: one, I made a point to fix the presentation, so was that enough? Should I have done something else? Second, should I apologize to you personally? But would that be weird? You weren't the only woman in the crowd; should I go apologize to every woman? Would that be even weirder? I wasn't sure what to do, so I decided I'd wait for lecture feedback.

[...]

When Ned took me aside a few days later and told me about receiving an anonymous e-mail about it, it made me feel even worse. He didn't tell me which female student it was, but his conversation had confirmed both that someone was strongly affected by this incident, and that I hadn't done enough to address it. Ned did not tell me who you were. I told Ned to let whoever had sent that message know that I'd be happy to apologize to them personally if that was something they'd be open to. I also would've hoped to ask what I could do best to address it to the rest of the class. I never heard back. So the personalized apology you said never came, was because Ned rightly did not reveal who you were unless you wanted to communicate with me directly. Though I didn't hear anything more about it, that incident affected me very strongly, and made me much more vigilant to be thoughtful about my language and what biases I bring to my teaching at App Academy. I decided that if I were ever to make a mistake like that again, the best thing to do would be to call it out and openly address it as a mistake after the lecture, and apologize explicitly to the students.

[...]

There's a lot in your post I don't agree with (no surprise there). I also don't think Ned was in the wrong in any way here, and I think it's unfair for you to paint him as having been complicit in anything untoward. But mostly I want to say, I'm sorry. I'm sorry both that this happened and made you feel unwelcome at App Academy, and also that I wasn't able to make it right after it did. Sincerely, Haseeb

</comment><comment><USER10> tl;dr: too-blunt reality check offends some

<comment><USER11> Trying to make your interviewer believe you are like them is fine. Accepting that most interviewers are men, as immutable fact, is not. Telling women they need to be less womanly to get a job is not.

<comment><USER10> Even if it works? I mean sure, in a perfect world. But the advice was to job- seekers in the current world. Thus, 'reality check'.

We can spell out the right and wrong way things should be run all day long. Not useful unless you're in a position to change them. For the rest of us, good advice is to adapt.

<comment><USER11> Well I also left out the most obvious thing, which is describing a confident handshake as "shaking hands like a man." That really is blatantly sexist.

<comment><USER10> Did you understand what was meant? Then the phrase was effective. Are there statistical correlations between handshakes and gender? Blunt reality check again.

<comment><USER11> What it means is that women should be encouraged to give confident handshakes, not that women should renounce their femininity and try to be more manly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The R Word? - <AUTHOR> http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080121/world_markets.html

<comment><USER2> No, the D word.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't jump the gun just yet...

<comment><USER2> Ok, I'll wait a bit longer before jumping the gun.

Granted no one will ever call it a depression. 50 years from now in the history books, sure, but not now.</comment></comment></comment>


Nobel Prize medal fetches record-breaking $4.76M - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/12/05/nobel-prize-medal-fetches-record-breaking-476-million/

<comment><USER2> This is, what, the 11th time this sale has come up in the last week? There were 51 comments in yesterday's posting at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8703155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8703155) , for example.</comment>


How to fix email while still keeping email - <AUTHOR> http://gd0t.com/node/23

<comment><USER3> As I commented in another post bashing email recently, there's nothing to fix, and this can be easily pushed to the client. As a messaging protocol, email works great. If you want JSON messaging included, you could build a client that reads that specific MIME type and interprets it differently than other messages. Is this not how Outlook meeting requests work? They are just shown as random attachments in non-supporting clients. Outlook meetings are not part of the email standard, _nor should they be_.

We don't need to add more cruft to email itself. If you want to create extra protocols for doing different things using email as a medium, go ahead. Email is extendable, as Microsoft, Gmail, Xobni, etc have shown.

Long story short, you can do whatever the hell you want with email. It's not perfect, but it's a really great messaging framework. You can send any message you like, to whomever you like. How the recipient interprets that message is up to them (ie their client).

EDIT: just wrote this up since I'm sick of repeating myself: [http://blog.killtheradio.net/technology/email-is-not- broken-...](http://blog.killtheradio.net/technology/email-is-not-broken-its-a- framework-not-an-application/)

<comment><USER4> Actually, email as a standard is horrific. It would be worth the effort to replace it just to move to something more consistent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem: Unknown mime-types are displayed as attachements. People are confused due to these "broken attachements". That is why I do not use "PGP/MIME", for example.

As far as i know, there is no mime-type stuff to the proposed "semantic alternatives".

<comment><USER6> Is that really an issue? I get those weird attachments from Outlook very often, mostly in corporate mail. I think most people have been conditioned to simply ignore them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some of this could be very good - I already get messages like "your next issue of 'Linux Journal' is ready" that tip me off to go grab it. It would be nice if this would auto-download and get synced up to my other devices - <USER2> for things like bills, statements, etc.

But I tend to think that's a corner case (email based subscriptions notifications that need to be delivered by non-email means) - we already have tech to do this, between Microformats, RSS feeds with enclosures, and other established attachment formats like vCard and [v|i]Cal. I'm thinking that building on those rather than inventing new and arbitrary JSON syntax to enclose via MIME is probably a better long term strategy.

I also see the distinct possibility of abusive, antisocial behavior. Most people don't understand whitelisting, and the crazies among them already set their email clients to always tag every email from them as being "IMPORTANT", demand read receipts on everything, send HTML only messages, and worst of all, top post.

<comment><USER8> There's nothing wrong with read-receipts. In fact I think all messages should have them.

<comment><USER9> You can add it to all your messages easily.

But there's no way you'll succeed in pushing people to reply to those requests you're making.

Mail to my inbox might be considered 'important' by the sender and might consider a header that makes my MUA ask me if I'd like to confirm that I'd read the message - but I can disagree and decline. In fact, I have rules that filter out important flags at work (they are always abused and there's no need to flag something on your side if I'm reasonably on top of my mail queue anyway) and ignore read receipts (Send me stuff and I read it unless it is spam. But I decide when and won't disclose that with anyone).

Use a good subject and accept that mail is not a real time protocol and we're getting along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this essentially how MS Exchange works for calendar items and invites and probably a whole bunch of other things I've not encountered yet?

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been working on a JS framework to make this simple in web apps. <http://github.com/pfraze/link> It's not ready to use, but I wanted to mention it here so nobody starts a duplicate effort unnecessarily.

The use case goes in both directions: extensable code means plugins to do what you need, and reusable code means multiple remote services can use the same UIs. Think of a single inbox which natively sends & receives messages with email, private social network(s), twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and anything else with a web API (or that can be wrapped in one). Adding new services and/or UIs is just adding a JS file.

So I'm building this HMVC-like mediator framework that uses command objects (which behave like http requests / responses) to try to make that happen. It's kind of like a set of UI-building proxies in the browser. Each module is a contained set of resources which should drop into a URI structure and start working.

I need to refactor the API a bit and write the docs. I also figure it would be cool to package it with some node servers to allow users to install it and run it purely clientside, since all it really needs is config persistence, a proxy to deal with cross-origin, and some gateways to handle oauth.

</comment><comment><USER12> There are so many other problems with email that could be addressed by a new protocol, eg: spam, security.

There are measures to address these issues more broadly with SMTP, but they are not widely adopted, something that could be standardized in a new protocol, ie: encryption by default, message signing to prevent spoofing, encrypted transmission, etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was writing an imap client recently and I also thought about using that in the same way to prompt for deadlines or bringing a sense of urgency.

In fact email is wrong but so is ADSL's design (using the high frequencies on copper lines) - yet it works. So at the cheapest, email protocol could simply be augmented with a set of metadata which then clients have to somehow integrate.

It doesn't sound like the solution, but it is a quick and dirty fix. And it may be all we need until the real solution emerges, which I think nobody quite knows what it is yet.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was attempting to use email as a message transport mechanism some time back .. some problems I ran into; off the top of my head:

1, Acknowledgement of receipt .. this has a whole load of pitfalls to watch out for so you really have to treat email as a send and forget and if you require acknowledgement of a message .. good luck.

2, Timing, email isn't real-time, your message will arrive when it's good and ready.

<comment><USER15> I've used email as a transport mechanism for more things than I care to think about. In some cases it was a perfect fit, and in others... no so much.

I build a system that synchronized user data between to organisations. It didn't need to be real time, just a nice feature where a user could change his or her address a the parent organisation and it would later trickle down to other systems.

A second system has handling orders for production of electricity in the Danish power grip. The decentralized power plants had a little as 15 minutes to react. The designers of this system clearly didn't understand email, the assumption was that emails show up in a minute or two, failing to understand that in reality it shows up when, as you say, "It's good and ready".

Email can be a good it for a messaging mechanism, you just need to consider the application. If you need to communicate with a lot of people or system cheaply, and you can afford to lose a message or two, emails fine.

On the other hand, email and ftp is most likely the two most misused protocols ever devised.

<comment><USER14> That's interesting about the powerplant .. I bet there was a good amount of face palming going on when that was picked up.

Email appealed to me mainly because it explicitly includes identity. The system I was attempting to use it for was an online school data management system that needed to stay in sync with the schools in house data systems. Unfortunately spam filters just kept breaking things, because in the UK many schools have what are know as "managed services" which translates to underpaid keyboard monkeys with no clue running their IT infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting idea. How would you go about simple authentication to prevent spoofing since PGP/GPG is too difficult to explain?

<comment><USER17> > PGP/GPG is too difficult to explain

I don't know about that - I was able to get my dad (not a tech-geek by any means) to understand it enough to start using it very easily.

The Web of Trust may be harder to explain, but you don't _need_ to take advantage of the Web of Trust in order to get value out of PGP/GPG signatures...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like this. This seems like a good temporary fix before one of us finally breaks down and creates a good email protocol that takes the uses of modern email into account; as well as a webclient and server for that protocol.

Mayhaps I'll have time for that this summer.

<comment><USER19> Thanks in advance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems like a good fit for activity streams?</comment>


Why the EU should lead against US Tech giants - <AUTHOR> https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/regain-control-over-eu-data <comment><USER2> > The EU itself has shown itself to be, with the introduction of the GDPR and > related regulation of the IT sector, a champion for EU business, privacy and > security.

It has also weakened Net Neutrality laws, introduced VAT laws that complicated the life of small businesses, and just passed harmful copyright directives.

So what the EU has shown itself to be is an organisation that is not the champion of the internet we once thought, and that big money and computer illiterate MPs can still do a great deal of harm.

At this point I'm more inclined to believe the good laws the EU as passed (e.g. GDPR) were flukes.</comment>


Too Many Chiefs not enough Indians (pun?) - <AUTHOR>

Recently i started working on a little side project developing Facebook apps. I started looking for talent to join my small team. I was overwhelmed by  the type of responses i have been getting. If seems  that everyone is interested in starting their own company rather than working with a team to accomplish something.
What many of us must remember is it's better to own 1% of something than 100% of nothing.
This by the way happens to be my 5th simultaneous company. So i'm pretty sure i'm part of the problem.
<comment><USER2> is it a facebook only app? is the idea so simple and obvious that you're scared to even say what it is? are you just the idea man or are you also going to be doing some development work on this project (css + javascript count)?

<comment><AUTHOR> I currently have two other developers on my tean.They are assigned different individual apps to work on. I polish the apps once they are made and take care of the business aspects. I also handle all of the software and data base design. We are working on some pretty interested facebook apps. I'm very excited about the work that we are doing. Face book right now is like the California gold rush. A lot of money and hype around it. i'm still looking for 2 more developers for flash,php/mysql.

<comment><USER2> I'm in the same boat, i need one or two more devs... i think in terms of complexity to implement your app(s) and mine are more or less on par...</comment></comment></comment>


The Benefits of 'Mob Programming' - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/11/unruly-mob-programming <comment><USER2> Oh god, this reminds me of a company I left where management would regularly talk about "swarming" a problem. They'd form these temporary "feature teams", where they'd assign more programmers than were needed to a problem, while other important concerns were left abandoned. From a management optics standpoint, it let them tell the executives "Look how serious we are about this feature!" From a practical standpoint it was pretty much a disaster. You would end up with one person actually qualified to do the work being dragged in five directions by trying to manage five other people who were well meaning, but had no idea what to do. It ended up with one or two people being stressed out and overworked, and the rest of the team being mostly idle.

I know this isn't exactly the same thing, and I try to keep an open mind on these things, but you could just as easily call this "programming by committee". We all know how great anything described by "X by committee" turns out.

There's nothing wrong with gathering a few people together to work on a thorny problem, but that sort of gathering has to happen organically. When people trying to sell management books turn this sort of thing into a buzzword, it just ends up being cluelessly applied by some starry eyed junior manager that has found a shiny new hammer and the world looks like nails to him.

<comment><USER3> Sounds to me like they tried to apply "put out fires" management style to new features.

Sadly, most managers are of the wait until there's a fire type. These are not really managers except in title as they simply are not managing anything.

<comment><USER2> Yep, that's a pretty apt description. The sad thing is almost all these fires were avoidable if they had let forward thinking engineers work on problems we all knew were upcoming, but weren't the emergency of the week. Unfortunately, the dedication to "agile" seemed to mean that anything outside the scope of the next two weeks pretty much didn't exist, and if you tried to do anything that wasn't in the "backlog" you were some sort of rogue cowboy. (Even if the backlog was empty!)

Fundamentally, the problem was trust -- the management didn't trust the engineers, so they micromanaged them poorly while invoking "agile" to make heavy management somehow seem like a populist movement for the "team". And because the team was micromanaged and not trusted, motivation was low and the output was poor, which just made the problems worse.

(Not surprisingly: the company recently just laid off the entire staff)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this reply thread is confusing the specific, i.e. the technique of 'mobbing', with the general, i.e. the (mis-management) approach to fixing issues with 'all hands to the pumps'.

The only thing the Unruly team is dogmatic about is delivering valuable software. The techniques they talk about are simply this - techniques.

In my work as a consultant there is rarely a 'one-size fits all' technique to developing a feature, but knowledge of several approaches is very valuable.

This is the purpose of the article - to allow you to consider the addition of 'mobbing' to your existing approaches of single development and pairing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> (Looks at HN) Hey! Another Agile story. Mob programming is cool. Wonder what the commenters think?

(Looks at comments) Sigh.

Okay, everybody who has actually mob programmed? Raise your hands. Let's hear how it went. Everybody who has an opinion -- usually about how it's all a crock of shit and a waste of time -- you guys to the back of the room. No offense, but this is kinda the standard response to _anything_ posted on HN.

Modern programming, especially at BigCorp, is much more about tooling and environment (both technical and social) than it is technology. People who get together and work a piece of value from front to back in the system quickly gain a common understanding of how all that tooling and environmental structure is supposed to work. In a day or two of mobbing, you can take a team through what might otherwise be months of mentoring and code reviews. It's so effective at teaching "how to make solutions here" that I'm hearing stories of noobs picking up an entire language simply by participating in a mobbing group over a few weeks.

Got a team that wants to make mob programming into another committee meeting? Guess what? Your team is broken. Get that problem out in the open on day one and then fix it. Don't hide behind process. Mobbing makes you do this.

If programming were measured by the amount of keys you pressed, or KLOC, mob programming would make no sense at all. But it's not. Programming is about making computers do things that people want, whether it's one line of code or a million. So what you're optimizing for is the appropriate mix of diverse problem-solving methodologies and personality types in order to maximize the quality of creative responses to the business problem.

I'm a big mobbing fan -- having watched it and done it. I don't think it's a magic bullet or appropriate everywhere. I think the interesting part of this discussion will be identifying situations where it's a bad idea. (And of course that would be done empirically, not anecdotally)

<comment><USER5> Agreed. There is a narrative programmers tell when complaining online. It goes like

> If only they would just leave me alone! I would sit in silence for 4 hours > pondering the depths of the system at hand. Then I would spend 30 minutes > invoking VIM macros at 240 actions/minute (that's why I spent 12 years > integrating VIM into my lower cortex, after all). Then I would spend 5 > minutes admiring the perfection of my creation before retiring to the pub. > Tomorrow, everyone will find everything just works so much better than > yesterday and they won't even know how or why. I'll just lean back and say > "You're Welcome."

But, the reality is that you don't work in a vacuum; you don't know the whole situation; your proposed solution probably isn't as good as you'd like to think it is; other people are doing stupid things and breaking stuff because you never mentor them; you are doing stupid things and breaking stuff because other people aren't informing you about what you should be doing better; even when you are actively working on code, you spend less than 5% of your time actually typing code; if you are a senior engineer working on non-trivial systems, you probably spend more time sorting out how other people's code works than your own.

These realities don't fit the [http://hackertyper.net/](http://hackertyper.net/) narrative. They're embarrassing and require inter-personal effort to resolve. But, brushing them off is making you a whole lot less productive than you should be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! I couldn't have said it better myself. Having worked across a variety of codebases and teams over the last 10+ years, it has become obvious to me that delivering software is an inherently social activity (at least the delivery of valuable software)

IMHO, the reason we've seen the rise of XP, Behaviour-driven Design (BDD) and DevOps is that each part of the software delivery community is gradually coming to this conclusion within their own realm

Mobbing for me just makes sense on so many level, especially from the point of view of adding 'expertise' to a problem/solution:

Not sure on how to integrate the latest language feature into your code - bring someone with experience into the mob...

Not sure how this feature could be tested - bring a QA/tester into the mob...

Not sure of the infrastructure requirements of this new database - bring an operator into the mob...

<comment><USER6> People have been doing this for years, they've just not put a name to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> In my experience working as a consultant across multiple organisations, not _enough_ people have been doing this.

As for a putting a name on it - a name can help spread the idea (ubiquitous language and all that), but it can lead to abuse and cargo-culting.

I believe a label is often helpful during the 'innovation' and 'early adoption' diffusion of innovation phase, and this is firmly where mobbing is at the moment

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you consider that the entire point of Agile™ is evidently to reduce programmer efficiency by 40-60% over the "actually give them a few days in a row of uninterrupted time to work" technique, this makes sense. By letting 7 simultaneous cooks in the kitchen not for meal planning, but for actually cooking the same dish, the near optimum 3% of employee value can realized.

<comment><USER8> I agree, but I'd like to separate here Agile from Agile™.

I was at a number of the early Agile conferences, and the biggest critique at the time, a valid one, was it was mainly a revolt of programmers saying, "Enough of this management bullshit, let's create a method where work actually gets done." That's why one of the points in the agile manifesto [1] is about valuing working software. It was an amazing group of people.

But what has become Agile™ is, in my view, the same managerial power structures co-opting the vocabulary and the energy for change into something so watered down that it has a lot of the same problems. [2] This works for many organizations because their actual priorities are less about getting things done or delivering customer value, and more about maintaining primate status hierarchies and letting people play out their office dramas.

So for those people who are at the rare organizations that would like to get something done, I encourage them to dig past the pile of Agile™ horseshit to find the perfectly serviceable horses.

[1] [http://agilemanifesto.org/](http://agilemanifesto.org/)

[2] I've written more about this here: [http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and- how...](http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell- in/)

<comment><USER9> I agree. The local chapter of the Project Management Institute has 7,000 members. I don't think there are 7,000 people here in town who can actually write code, so this is where Agile becomes Agile™. They map agile buzzwords into their own screwed up processes designed mostly to appear important and CYA. It's almost the definition of an anathema.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems like a great way to increase the cost of getting work done by a factor of five. Not to mention getting and end result which is a "design by committee". Brainstorming features this way could certainly be useful, but programming - seriously, are the individual team members _that_ weak? I work _best_ alone during long, focused sessions, not hanging out with my mates.

<comment><USER8> This is also basically the standard critique of pair programming, but I've never heard it come from somebody who has done much pair programming. I've never tried mob programming myself, but I've done a ton of pairing, so I wouldn't be averse to trying this on occasion.

The hard thing about making software is not the typing, it's the thinking. And on teams, some of that thinking can be individual, but a lot of it has to be collaborative if the software is to end up having any real coherence. As Kent Beck writes, "division of labor is a dangerous fiction when all of your big problems are integration problems".

I've done a lot of good work alone in long, focused sessions. But I've done even better work in long, focused sessions together. Hands down the best code bases I've worked on are the ones where we did it all using pair programming while changing pairs every half-day or so.

<comment><USER11> > This is also basically the standard critique of pair programming, but I've > never heard it come from somebody who has done much pair programming.

I've done a fair amount of pair programming and generally found it to be an inefficient waste of time.

Having colleagues around to bounce an idea off of is great, but there's almost never the need to have two people continuously coding together.

<comment><USER8> Ok. Now I've heard it from one person. But I think "there's almost never the need to have two people continuously coding together" is a pretty strong conclusion from one person's experience. Do you mean that you haven't noticed the value in it?

One possibility is that your team was maybe not so good at it. Sometimes that happens:

[http://agilefocus.com/2009/01/06/21-ways-to-hate-pair- progra...](http://agilefocus.com/2009/01/06/21-ways-to-hate-pair-programming/)

Another is that you were working in a domain where the benefits of pairing don't matter so much. For me, they include improved code quality, less siloing, making it easier to bring people on to the team, faster iteration, and a greatly increased ability to actually take vacations due to improved truck factor.

On long-lived code bases with high business value and fast iteration, quality and collaborative ease become very important to me. Basically, I put pairing in the same category as code reviews, but I think it's much more efficient. And others do as well:

[http://slesinsky.org/brian/code/pair_versus_review.html](http://slesinsky.org/brian/code/pair_versus_review.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been pair-programming for over 15 years now, and was introduced to mobbing by Woody and Llewellyn a couple of years ago. I've tried it in a couple of teams for specific tasks. I don't think that in a team of experienced devs I would mob all the time (although if the team wanted to I wouldn't veto it), but it definitely has its place. In particular for learning new techniques, large refactorings and exploring solutions with customers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sigh, some trends in this industry have me regretting choosing programming as a profession. I like programming alone godammit! Will programming alone be relegated to hobby projects while I head to the meeting room for all my job- related programming duties? Bah humbug!!!

</comment><comment><USER13> Just one of those buzzwords. Programming in crowds may work for some and not for others. A few years ago I was learning about agile and various methodologies. Eventually, I realized that most people writing most about the various trends and ideas did so to mainly to make a buck.

I'd very much prefer a methodology that focuses on knowledge sharing, respectful culture and hard knowledge (and fun).

<comment><USER8> Knowing a lot of the early Agile people, I'd say your bit about "most people writing most about the various trends and ideas did so to mainly to make a buck" is both helpfully true and dangerously false.

There are definitely some people who say, "Oh, X is fashionable, so I'll jump in and become a thinkfluencer." Those people are dangerous. There aren't many, though; call 'em 10% or so.

There are plenty more people who jump in to participate but just don't understand the ideas very well. They're not really out to make a buck. They're mostly trying to help people; it's just that they have a poor understanding of how little they know. These people often do very well because their clients also don't know much, and really don't want to know much. This is the bulk of the market, say 75%.

But then there are 15% of people who are sincere, very smart, and deep thinkers. This is often a hindrance in making a buck. Their ideas are so radical (in both senses of the word) that a lot of their potential audience gets scared off. However, they are definitely worth listening to. Their solutions may not match your circumstances, so you shouldn't follow them blindly. But for me they're the ones most likely to trigger deep reevaluation of something I thought I understood.

My take is that the Extreme Programming community is mostly in that latter camp. If you're really looking for an approach with the values that you state, I'd encourage you to check them out. The original books, 15+ years old at this point, are a bit out of date, but still useful as foundation. The community itself has mostly moved on to different practices, but Josh Kerievsky gives a good summary of where it has gotten to:

[https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/modern- agile/](https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/modern-agile/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> More info:

[http://www.infoq.com/interviews/zuill-mob- programming](http://www.infoq.com/interviews/zuill-mob-programming)

[https://vimeo.com/131643015](https://vimeo.com/131643015)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is parody -- right?

</comment><comment><USER15> The only benefit of mob programming in my experience is for training. Working through a program together can teach people new techniques and details about libraries/frameworks. Other than that it is worthless.

</comment><comment><USER16> God bless the designated typer in the mob. That is a job worse than death.

<comment><USER8> I imagine it depends a lot on the mob. I've definitely been in living rooms where people were basically doing mob video game playing. If the mob is enthusiastic, respectful, and generally helpful, it can be a lot of fun.

<comment><USER14> The video-game-playing mobs occur, pretty much by definition, organically.

If this stuff catches on, it will be imposed from above on coders who are far from enthusiastic.

<comment><USER8> There are quite a number of good software development practices that are mostly great when teams choose them on their own but often produce terrible results when imposed. Unit tests and writing documentation are two that come to mind.

I think the problem isn't with the individual practices, it's with a theory of management that treats programmers as minions rather than professionals. And, of course, with programmers' widespread acquiescence to that power relationship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> obligatory link to alternative for anyone interested: [http://programming- motherfucker.com/](http://programming-motherfucker.com/)</comment>