For Homeless Advocates, a Discouraging Lesson in L.A.: Money Is Not Enough - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/us/homeless-housing-los-angeles.html <comment><USER3> Are there any online tools that YIMBYs can use to see and alert when a new development is planned for their neighborhood? I'd love to know when I need to go the local council and tell them to just build some damn housing.

<comment><USER4> It's not housing that's the issue. It's mental health. Most homeless people are suffering from mental health so giving them a place to stay won't solve anything.

<comment><USER5> I've spent a few nights in the psych ward at Zuckerberg General. There were quite a few homeless people. There were people that faked being crazy to get a bed and a hot meal, and the psychiatrist had to kick them back out onto the street.

Mental health services are ineffective if a person's basic needs aren't met. Giving homeless people a home is far from enough, but you can't expect a homeless person to get better if they are stuck out on the streets.

<comment><USER6> In Toronto many people who were formerly institutionalized are now living on the streets. I walk through an area with a high concentration of shelters on a daily basis, and I can tell you that most of these people suffer from some kind of mental health disorder ranging from mild to severe. It's certainly not helped by addiction, but I can't help but feel like homeless shelters or the streets are not the right place for these people. Nor could most of them be expected to look after their own needs if they were given enough money - <USER2> already have a reasonably generous welfare system in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Obviously money is not enough. SF spends more than $300 million on homeless per year, and SF is still a disaster. The money is not being spent usefully, but there is zero accountability and tracking. It's a complete disaster and yet no one is doing anything about it. The politicians who are making SF residents pay for this should be held accountable and a real solution should be made. You could build a mental hospital and fund it with the $300 million that SF spends for these homeless people. It's a disgrace.

[http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Despite-money- and...](http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Despite-money-and-work- homelessness-in-SF-as-bad-11242946.php)

</comment><comment><USER7> > _Lorena Plaza, which would cost about $23 million, would qualify for the > funds._

49 units at $23 million or $469k/unit. Is it me or is this an insanely high number? Remember, it's not even a house.

<comment><USER8> _49 units at $23 million or $469k /unit. Is it me or is this an insanely high number? Remember, it's not even a house._

It is not just you, and I've worked for many LA nonprofit and public agencies, including some involved in homelessness and mental health services. It's not surprising to me that the city can't keep enough homelessness services, for reasons I write about in "L.A. digs a hole more slowly than economics fills it back in: The Proposition HHH Facilities Program RFP" [http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly- economics-f...](http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics- fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program) .

Oddly, one of the better descriptions I've read about why LA costs so much comes from Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_architect_in_la_specializing_in_multifamily)

<comment><USER7> There are ways around many of these things, including variance/non-conformity applications. But I'm sure you know that given your blog post.

Boyle Heights is not a wealthy/expensive neighborhood and there is a large amount of housing stock that could be rehabbed/rebuilt for this project for far less. Even multifamily buildings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _"A majority of people who live around the project were opposed to it. The > people who are in favor of it live someplace else."_

This is the very definition of NIMBY. Where exactly do these people think projects like this should go, given that NIMBYs exist everywhere?

<comment><USER3> In somebody else's backyard. That's why you have concentrated areas of poverty. The government used to enforce this through "red lining" but since that has now fallen out of favor the language used to oppose these projects is now based around environmental impacts (the schools are full, the traffic is bad, it's a potentially toxic site, etc).

<comment><USER10> You forgot 'it'll ruin the character of the neighbourhood.'

<comment><USER11> What if those things are all true?

<comment><USER12> It's probably true, however, what is the correct point to "freeze" all development?

Most of silicon valley before the tech boom was orchards. Before the orchards, it was undeveloped land.

An argument could be made that development should have been frozen when it was orchards since it provided food, farming jobs, and bucolic scenery.

Environmentalists perhaps would prefer that even the orchards shouldn't have built and that the land was best kept as natural habitat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why should the homeless in LA be housed in LA? Wouldn't the city be able to house many more homeless people by building the housing in a less expensive place?

<comment><USER14> Because you don't want to just house them. You want to get them to a place where they no longer need assistance. That means they need jobs. Housing them in Newberry Springs or some such place doesn't give them any opportunity.

<comment><USER15> Good point.

But let's say 50% of those people aren't in the place to get jobs because they are Elderly, Mentally Unstable, Substance Addicted.

Could we move those homeless people who aren't "job ready" outside the city to a cheaper area? And then maybe move them back into affordable housing once they are ready to transition into a job?

<comment><USER16> I was fairly certain that forced relocation was generally not tolerated in the US anymore until I read your comment and the sibling comment suggesting the same thing.

These are human beings, and suggesting they be "moved" to different areas because of their socioeconomic status or being "Elderly, Mentally Unstable, Substance Addicted" is completely unacceptable to me.

<comment><USER17> Meet Travis. He's a notorious vagrant who likes to terrorize businesses in the Alameda business district of San Jose.

[https://video.nest.com/clip/cc20a6ffc52d485696c62b1708ffe5d6...](https://video.nest.com/clip/cc20a6ffc52d485696c62b1708ffe5d6.mp4)

[https://video.nest.com/clip/7c5ff8b138d44bafb1ff3f44ef8154be...](https://video.nest.com/clip/7c5ff8b138d44bafb1ff3f44ef8154be.mp4)

(warning: 2nd link has profanity)

-He has been sent by the court to literally every possible program in Santa Clara County for assistance, and has left everyone of them intentionally (usually after a few days) despite being ordered by the Court to complete the program(s).

-As a result of constantly violating the Court's orders regarding these programs, he ended up spending the maximum amount of time in County jail that the Court could impose before being released.

-Travis has made it very clear that he does not want help in any form, and that he likes his lifestyle and enjoys harassing people.

-After he left jail, it did not take long for him to revert to his old bad behaviors - substance abuse, aggressive panhandling and petty theft, and harassing local businesses.

The clips above are of him harassing the owner and patrons of Hannah's Coffee and Sweets. More recently, he emptied a trash can full of dog poop bags on the sidewalk, and kicked them all in front of a hair salon's door on the corner of Julian and Stockton.

What is your solution for people like Travis, who continually harass and endanger people and businesses in San Jose?

<comment><USER16> You're discussing criminal behavior. California has policies and institutions in place to deal with criminal behavior. They're not perfect, but that's an entirely different discussion.

Suggesting that the entire homeless population are criminals is disingenuous at best, and this kind of fear-mongering distracts from productive discussion about how best to help.

<comment><USER17> _Suggesting that the entire homeless population are criminals is disingenuous at best, and this kind of fear-mongering distracts from productive discussion about how best to help._

I never said that the entire homeless population are criminals. I merely provided a single, real-life example of someone for whom current policies and institutions have failed, _then_ asked you as to what you think should be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We have this problem in DC. We have a large homeless population, an extremely liberal population, and countless cries for housing, and services for the homeless. Yet as soon as the city decides to build a new shelter, or low- income/free housing, it is those same people who are the first to scream: "Not in my backyard!" Homeless integration in established communities works, and we should not support those who want to banish the homeless, and their support systems, to far-flung places.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm sincerely trying not to be a dick here but I thought this was obvious...

Lots of problems (most?) in many neighborhoods (and organizations in general) and families are not a simple function of "not enough money." They are deep rooted problems with self-sustaining feedback loops of vice.

There's true poverty unhappiness, which is simply not enough money to pay normal bills. But science has basically settled at this point in that "after being enough to pay the bills and have a little in savings, happiness no longer increases with more income." And happiness is a pretty good qualifier of general well-being.

You can't dump money into Afghanistan and have them all run around with American flags and Mustangs.

You can't dump money into a neighborhood and expect everyone to become great workers who love each other.

Likewise, you can't "love people" more and expect it either. You don't stop a drug abusing family member with only hugs. You send them to therapy. _Love is not enough_.

The best summary is in this quote from the article:

>"You cannot force a project onto a community at all costs," said Mr. Huizar,

Even if politicans and "well meaning" people are hell bent on pushing something through, doesn't mean it's going to actually help people. ("The road to hell is paved with good intentions.")

People are not simple. Adults have decades of experiences that got them where they are. And simply giving them something won't undo those experiences. They need counselling. They need structure and jobs that rewards positive character traits. And guess what? Plenty of people still aren't going to get better. Why? Because you can't improve people who don't want to get better. You can't "fix people" like solving a math problem. Both parties have to commit and genuinely desire change.

If we actually want change--and not to just send money to feel better about ourselves (see: Live Aid, which gave almost nothing to actual victims and may have actually helped kill over 100,000 [1])--we can't simply "Give money." We need actual scientists doing research (they already exist) and we need to find and listen to them even if their recommendations don't align with our political ideologies.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/24/g8.debtrelief](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/24/g8.debtrelief)

<comment><AUTHOR> I largely agree with you, except for the subtext that homeless people are all fucked up losers who aren't really trying/can't really be helped.

There is a huge deficit of affordable housing in the US. This significantly contributes to people who have various problems being unable to keep a roof over their head.

I actually think "homes for the homeless" is an oxymoron. We need basic, decent housing for people who are living at the fringe of society because they are elderly, handicapped, single moms, etc. We need homes for a certain demographic for whom the standard 3 bedroom, 2 bath house in the 'burbs simply does not work, in part because it is just too much money (in part because it is just too much space -- it is nigh impossible to find a small place in the US).

I think two things need to happen:

1) We need to develop programs aimed at empowering homeless people to solve it themselves.

2) We need more affordable housing -- nationwide.

I would actually prefer to see more _market based_ affordable housing. We tore down most of that in the 60s and 70s, largely because the Baby Boomers who were coming of age didn't need a small, cheap place. But, they were a demographic anomaly, and we haven't rebuilt what we tore down. We are seeing the consequences of that.

<comment><USER20> > We need more affordable housing -- nationwide.

Problem is job growth is incredibly centralized into a few urban cores. While property values on the west coast and the Boston -> DC strip bloat out of control entire counties worth of homes are being abandoned in the Rust Belt and midwest as the recession killed the last sparks of industry and never brought any jobs back there.

That is why housing prices are out of control. We should realize that the centralization of work should come with the centralization of living, where we build much denser housing to accommodate, but we don't do that because of NIMBY city councils and obtuse zoning laws.

Affordable housing is _profitable_ if you let it be built. It isn't a matter of needing the government to throw money at _building_ affordable housing. 50 stories of condos in almost any major metro area at 400-800 sq ft could sell at tens of thousands rather than millions of dollars and still be profitable for the materials and labor that went into building them, even at the current inflated land values. It is simply the case that _nobody can build anything like that_ because every city in the country staunchly opposes such construction for both private NIMBY interests and the desires of businesses operating to attract the rich to the cities and not the poor, even when the jobs they want to fill they only offer poor wages for.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Problem is job growth is incredibly centralized into a few urban cores.

That is why housing prices are out of control. We should realize that the centralization of work should come with the centralization of living, where we build much denser housing to accommodate, but we don't do that because of NIMBY city councils and obtuse zoning laws._

I just got myself off the street earlier this month after 5 years, 8 months and 1 week. I did it by 1) developing a portable online income and 2) moving out of California to a small town.

So, I beg to differ. I think this can be solved.

We have the technology. We can rebuild it. We can make it better. ;-)

<comment><USER21> I first became homeless about four months after you, and have been homeless off and on ever since. Now I stay in a tent and am fairly satisfied except that it's always possible my spot will be compromised.

I wish they would simply normalize campsites for living. I've heard people live in tents in India. Seems more humane than pretending we don't need that here when in reality we're denying people the right to be ANYWHERE.

<comment><AUTHOR> At some point while homeless, I talked to someone who traveled. They observed that in some South American country they visited, homelessness did not exist because slums were tolerated. So, people had housing, even though a lot of it was substandard by US standards.

American zoning, minimum house sizes, do contribute to the problem. We have created a situation where the Haves live in ever larger houses and can afford two or more places and the Have Nots are increasingly out on the street.

I don't know the answer here. I think certain minimum standards for housing matter. But, we should definitely tweak something. Setting the bar for minimum housing standards so high that large numbers of people can't attain housing at all is messed up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Lots of thoughtful discussion here. But none of them address the truth of this situation. Boyle Heights is the next target for gentrification and LA's City Council has demonstrated strong support for property developers (not to mention Mayor Garcetti's riches sourcing from property development). I'm sure the NIMBY component in this case is contrived as most of the soon-to-be- displaced residents of Boyle Heights are low income and are too busy working multiple jobs to stay afloat in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods.

Anyway, what's going to happen in this case is this organization is going to be starved out until some developer steps in to buy the property to put in a new strip mall or stack and pack development as the gentrification plan plays out.

</comment><comment><USER23> Isn't it the same thing in San Francisco? Most of the homeless services in the Tenderloin are funded by people who don't live in the area...

Same thing with section 8 vouchers--almost always grouped in one area. By grouping the poor and homeless in one area, it actually keeps them from ever recovering. If you spread them out, they are far more likely to succeed.</comment>


UK train operators to pull out of Interrail - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/07/uk-train-operators-pull-out-interrail-brexit-eurail <comment><USER2> interrail and train in general is becoming increasingly irrelevant for international travel with the advent of reasonable airline prices and bus companies like flixbus.</comment>


How to get an open source community to be interested in helping you - <AUTHOR> https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2017/10/manipulating-maintainers <comment><USER2> Intro: I am the creator and maintainer of SQLAlchemy. The post below describes my anecdotal experience working on this project and a few other related ones.

Great post, definitely these are the things that make for a great participating in an OSS project.

Unfortunately, the folks who spew out impatient, one liner bug reports are exactly the folks who will never read such a blog post, or anything else for that matter. They won't even read the _ALL BOLDFACE_ bug posting instructions I put up that tell them to post a usage example and don't just show a line of code you think should change.

I've had many days ruined by naive idiots who think I work for them or something, and it is an ongoing, multi-year practice to learn how to not escalate and how to not have your day ruled by such people.

In case I'm not getting downmodded here enough, I'll add that users/nicknames that seem to identify as female never have any of these issues - users that identify as female always come very well prepared with great test cases and all the up front research done. More and more the issue of "decency" seems to pervade all areas of human interaction as we've descended into such a non- decent era.

<comment><USER3> So, taking your comment at face value, I would hypothesise that women try extra-hard to be nice because they have faced or are afraid to face worse social repercussions if they're not.

<comment><USER2> that is correct. they know they have to come 10x more prepared.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I'm going to have to strip off the extraneous bits until I'm staring the problem in the face. Why should I spend my time doing that, when you—the person asking for help—could be?"

Oh, the dozens and dozens of times I solved my own problem while making it reproducible, before actually filing the report!

<comment><USER5> Much like Rubber Ducking: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> These are great tidbits for how a contributor can get the attention of a maintainer but I think these tips also inform well on how a maintainer can get more contributors.

Recently I started a new project and got 7 contributors in a week - more than I've gotten for any project ever. [1] I think its partly due to hacktoberfest but also because I realized I can't waste a contributor's time. I made issues with descriptions of exactly what should be done - where in the code they could introduce edits, and what kind of dependencies people could use to implement, etc. Though I could have done myself, I didn't have to and I also got to see some ingenuity of other people!

[1]: [https://github.com/schollz/croc/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/schollz/croc/graphs/contributors)

<comment><USER7> A recent Twitter discussion/checklist on attracting a community as a maintainer:

[https://twitter.com/sehurlburt/status/921921604140937216](https://twitter.com/sehurlburt/status/921921604140937216)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OT, but Michael is a great guy. At LambdaConf, he got lunch with me specifically to spend time explaining monad transformers, just because we were chatting and I expressed confusion. Had no idea who he was. Later learned he's the Yesod guy, which is the main Haskell web framework. I'm always grateful when the big players in some domain make themselves as approachable as he does.

<comment><USER9> Yesod (most typesafe webframework), Stack (quick to become a very popular build/install tool in Haskell land), conduit (a lib/ecosystem for dealing with data streams), Stackage (publishes sets of packages know to work well together). He's currently Director of Engineering at FP Complete.

Here the packages he's a maintainer for on Hackage:

[https://hackage.haskell.org/user/MichaelSnoyman](https://hackage.haskell.org/user/MichaelSnoyman)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As the sole maintainer of a pretty big repo, these are all super helpful. Another is that, if the project in question is compiled, add in a gdb trace. It's often the difference between "I know exactly what this is and I'll do it now to get it over with." and "There's about three+ ways this could be happening, I'll check it out later."

</comment><comment><USER11> My experience working on an OSS project has been that the biggest thing missing from the bug-reporter side isn't phrasing or planning, just dedication. If someone doesn't post a useful initial bug report, we can still probably work our way there if they keep pinging the thread or follow whatever instructions come out of the maintenance side of things. OTOH, if I can't see that an issue is actively causing someone pain, it's way easier for it to fall off my radar. Apathy slows down resolution far more often than antipathy.

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart- questions.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

ESR did it better, imho :-)

<comment><USER13> There's some marginally useful content buried in that, but wrapped in a pervasive and unpleasant position of "the person you're asking is way more important than you, lowly questioner", and many excuses attempting to justify elitism.

I much prefer Julia Evans: [https://jvns.ca/blog/good- questions/](https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/) and [https://jvns.ca/blog/answer-questions-well/](https://jvns.ca/blog/answer- questions-well/)

<comment><USER14> I had never seen Julia Evans' writing on the topic but have read ESR's many times. It looks like Evans' guide is mostly geared towards being considerate of the other person and ESR's is mostly geared towards collecting the appropriate information beforehand and phrasing the question the right way. Both are extremely important for effective question asking.

Regarding the "lowly questioner" dynamic, look at it this way: if you're asking someone a question about their software, you're seeking to extract time from someone in order to extract value from something that they created. Be humble.

<comment><USER13> > It looks like Evans' guide is mostly geared towards being considerate of the > other person and ESR's is mostly geared towards collecting the appropriate > information beforehand and phrasing the question the right way.

[https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/](https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/) covers both of those topics in detail, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> By not trying to window-shop? Aka, posting wishes disguised as suggestions.

My all time favorite- asking for a feature that is already existing, not taking time to search the documentation, then when somebody duplicates the information for you (basically becoming your free of charge search engine) - you dont thank him, but ask for a implementation (basically hiring a programmer for free)- once that doesent happen, you are never heard of again.

And that above is the norm in Open source community. Those hostility arise, because there is a constant stream of clueless users doing the crybaby on forums. Which is why man open source devs retreat to irc and only answer your question if you lurk for a day and post a little history detailing your own investment.

</comment><comment><USER16> The "XY Problem" link[1] has an authentic-sounding and hilarious impression of a developer being a jerks to a newcomer.

A quick analysis of "Example 1":

* developer has already figured out that the person almost certainly means to get the extension, but they then inexplicably post the likely irrelevant answer that blithely returns the last three characters. (More on that below...)

* developer uses caps-- meant to convey that they are YELLING at the questioner-- which is unwarranted and pointlessly aggressive

* developer is obviously annoyed by questioner taking too many steps to get to a proper statement of their problem. But after the developer states the problem properly and the questioner confirms it, the developer wastes a step in their own response to demand that the questioner obtain an arbitrary level of knowledge before they state future problems. I write "arbitrary" because the developer has apparently decided that the questioner should have already known that a) a file extension is called a file extension and b) file extensions don't always contain three characters. But the implication is that a questioner armed with this increased level of knowledge (and who would have therefore Google'd the answer more easily) strangely would be more deserving of receiving an answer than someone who obviously sought out the help of a fellow human being because they didn't know what to search for. That's a bizarre (and frankly anti-social) line of reasoning.

* developer uses a mean-spirited adjective "blindly", ostensibly to hurt the newcomer's feelings. But this is my favorite part-- the developer has already shown that they were nearly certain that the questioner _meant_ to ask for concept they were unable to name-- an extension. (Plus having that confirmed by the questioner.) So for the insult to work here, the developer refers back to their _own_ irrelevant example, calling that "blindly grabbing three characters," and using sleight of hand to reinterpret that as the initial query. All this after having already confirmed the questioner's _actual_ problem!

That shows an impressive level of premeditation to be a jerk-- that is, setting up an irrelevant answer in order to heighten the language for an insult in a later response.

I sure hope this example response doesn't really reflect the current communication style of FLOSS devs.

1) [http://xyproblem.info/](http://xyproblem.info/)

<comment><USER17> False XP Problem is a pet peive of mine actually. Personally, I downvote any answer on e.g. Stack Overflow that doesn't answer the question asked. The proper way to respond to any technical question, IMO, is first answer it exactly as ask if you can (if you don't, then don't answer). After that, you may optionally ask what the person is trying to do and offer your expertise.

The issue I run into is this: I work in the enterprise environment. I have a lot of experience but _sometimes_ I'm forced into doing something seemingly stupid that you would normally never want to do (obviously more complicated than the silly "last 3 characters" problem). So I ask on SO giving as little detail as possible, purposely because I'm hoping to avoid a bunch of wasted time with "but you don't _need_ to do that you can do solution A", where solution A is a solution I already wanted to do but was unable because of some reality of the company I work for (and no, I can't download or install _anything_ and I won't be able to change that). All the obvious solutions will be this way. What I actually needed was what I asked and I had to ask precisely because I also never normally want to do this so I don't know how.

I find the kind of answers that some people advocate for extremely arrogant. By answering e.g. an SO question by answering something that wasn't asked you (a) assume you know more than the person asking (you may, or you may not) and (b) assume there will never be another user anywhere that will actually need the answer to the question that was asked. I get hit by (b) the most: I put my question into google, I actually find an SO question that I need the answer to but some jerk explained the user wanted something else, answered _that_ and then, of course, the thread died.

<comment><USER18> I also run into this problem when asking on SO. Even if you write in the question "I've already ruled out ... as a possible solution" you still get people trying to argue about it. I'd rather they ignore the question...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _There 's an old "ha ha, only serious" joke. If you go to a Linux forum and ask for help fixing your WiFi driver, everyone will ignore you. If, instead, you say "Linux sucks, you can't even get a f_&$ing WiFi driver working!" thousands of people will solve the problem for you.*

This is 100% accurate. There is no better way to get assistance with HiDPI tweaking on a Linux desktop than to go onto a subreddit and bash your DE of choice, complaining about its lack of HiDPI support.

</comment><comment><USER20> A good summary.

I've also found that timing can be important. Basically: don't ask on Fri at 3:30.

<comment><USER21> You might be right statistically, but many of my acquaintances and I work on open source beginning Friday and ending Sunday night. It depends on the project. If it's an open source web server, you're right. If it's a tiling window manager, the opposite is true.

<comment><USER20> Fair. But timing matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> High usage attracts higher level developers. The motivation created by your software being used by a large community of people is, in my opinion, the most portant thing when contributing. Sometimes it is easy, like adding a few flags to fpc, sometimes it is a bit more tricky, like adding utf-8 support to an IDE which lacks it.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. This is why open source works: success brings in more resources (a positive feedback loop). It's the same thing that happens in for-profit companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd advise removing the first paragraph. It'll trigger some readers into rolling their eyes and leaving

</comment><comment><USER25> Explain what you want to do in twenty seconds, or less.</comment>


Your Unpredictable Daily Schedule Might Be Wrecking Your Estimates ( Plus - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@erickaminsky1/your-unpredictable-daily-schedule-might-be-wrecking-your-estimates-efa6e37d9d0f <comment><USER2> A project management methodology that explicitly deals with this variance:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_chain_project_managem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_chain_project_management)

One of the key insights is that estimate-driven planning creates an algorithm that accumulates the delays from late deliveries while being unable to make use of early deliveries.</comment>


What it's like to eject out of a military jet - <AUTHOR> https://www.popsci.com/what-aircraft-ejection-is-like/ <comment><USER2> The article only mentioned in passing NPP Zvezda, which is a Russian ejection seat manufacturer. I remember reading years ago how much trouble the company was having getting the US Defense Department to even consider using their ejection seats.

At the time I vaguely remember seeing a couple of Youtube videos showing Russian ejection seats in action. In one, a Russian fighter jet suffered a complete engine failure in a two engine plane. The remaining engine spun the plane around and pointed it straight at the ground. The pilot ejected just a few hundred feet about the ground, and survived with minor injuries. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Lz- ssypaw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Lz-ssypaw)

In the second one, two MIGs collided, slicing the nose off one of the MIGs. Both pilots ejected safely, and also only suffered minor injuries. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Lz- ssypaw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Lz-ssypaw)

<comment><USER3> > I remember reading years ago how much trouble the company was having getting > the US Defense Department to even consider using their ejection seats

The US counter-intelligence chief who approved a Russian supplier in US military jets would need firing from a large cannon, largely because the Russian intelligence chief who didn't use it as an opportunity for all sorts of mischief would also need firing from a large cannon for gross incompetence.

<comment><USER4> Of course you could also simply do incoming QA.

<comment><USER5> You don't really want to rely on suppliers with who you have regular beefs for critical infrastructures.

<comment><USER4> Check out who makes your rocket engines.

<comment><USER5> Well right now the whole rocket. The US has no other way to send men to the ISS than to ask the russians nicely.

But I don't think they are thrilled about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would not want to be in the position of ejecting. The stories I hear about bones breaking and even fatalities caused by the system seems like a risk in itself.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCORwUxlNQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCORwUxlNQo) \- XB-70 mid-air collision ejection story

> ...Today, the ejectee will "only" suffer from 18 Gs...

Related: I'd like to extend this to also include atmospheric re-entry: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCxNIaBC_r8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCxNIaBC_r8) (bonus [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_bkY7-9c8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_bkY7-9c8s) for channeling Rocky and Bullwinkle)

Diagram of re-entry window: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Notable_atmo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Notable_atmospheric_entry_accidents)

There used to be ejection seats in early space shuttles ([https://youtu.be/CwLx4L5NRU0?t=419](https://youtu.be/CwLx4L5NRU0?t=419)). After the mishaps with SS there was discussion about reintegrating ejection mechanisms, but it'd add weight, cost a lot to redesign, etc. This documentary talks about: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja4ZlswGvpE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja4ZlswGvpE)

<comment><USER7> I was at an Air Show at the old Willow Grove NAS in Pennsylvania when I was a kid and there was a Navy S3 Viking Jet set as a ground display. They were allowing people time where you could get into the cockpit. A 7 year old kid was in one of the front seats and activated the ejection mechanism and was killed after being ejected and landing on the nearby tarmac.

As I remember, the other people in the plane at the time were injured due to burns and other debris but survived. We were about 150 feet away from the planes on display and I remember hearing how loud and sudden the explosion was. Not sure what happened my Dad said looks like an ejection seat just went off.

I sometimes think back to that day and always do whenever I hear about or come across stories ejecting from an aircraft and how terrifying it must have been to that kid.

<comment><USER8> [https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19800707&id=...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19800707&id=HpcyAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gucFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4108,1220581&hl=en)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for that.

It's weird, I haven't been able to find any other information about it. It's not even listed in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_air_show_accidents_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_air_show_accidents_and_incidents_in_the_20th_century).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What it's like to eject into a thunderstorm: [https://www.damninteresting.com/rider-on-the- storm/](https://www.damninteresting.com/rider-on-the-storm/)

<comment> orbital-decay What it's like to be ejected involuntarily, at 3.2M and 78000ft/23.8km altitude: [http://www.chuckyeager.org/news/sr-71-disintegrated-pilot- fr...](http://www.chuckyeager.org/news/sr-71-disintegrated-pilot-free-fell- space-lived-tell/)

<comment><USER11> Nice. Has that feel of Tom Wolfe's 'the Right Stuff'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The web page on the Ejection Tie Club, with member stories: [http://martin- baker.com/ejection-tie-club/](http://martin-baker.com/ejection-tie-club/)

<comment><USER13> >I was drifting backwards into the power lines and could only see each power line as it appeared from behind me ...

>I was given a physical examination at the Air Force hospital and told that I must be under observation by medical personnel for 24 hours. I told the doctor that I was going to the officers' club for a drink, if he wanted to observe me there.

Ejectee #2176

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I also think it's interesting to think about when you might need to eject on the ground without moving (zero-zero). It's harder than you think, since you have to gain enough altitude to get time for the chute to open.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejection_seat#Zero- zero_ejecti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejection_seat#Zero- zero_ejection_seat)

Fascinating engineering.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Pilots hesitate to pull the ejection seat handle because "we know that we > are condemning a multi-million dollar piece of equipment, paid for with > taxpayers' money," Matthew adds.

I wonder why planes as expensive as these don't have some sort of a remote- pilot feature that could kick in in case of emergencies like this - once the in-seat pilot has ejected, at least a best effort attempt at landing the plane could take place.

<comment><USER16> Ejections usually happen after the aircraft becomes unflyable. Birdstrike is a common cause, see this example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2zB7Z-b6Kc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2zB7Z-b6Kc)

The jet ingests a bird shortly after takeoff, causing engine damage and shutdown. Pilots try to restart the engine, after unsuccessful attempts they point the aircraft towards the nearest open field and eject. There wasn't much else to do. At low altitude, low speed, and without engine power and a place to land, the jet was going to crash one way or another.

<comment><USER17> Not always, though!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber)

Poor pilot was likely gifted a new callsign after that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "It was inconvenient," one ejectee says, dryly. He was in the backseat of a plane when it collided with a bird in June 1999. "The overhead canopy was smashed and there was blood and gore everywhere," he recounts. "I didn't realize it was the bird—I thought it was the pilot and when I looked in front he wasn't there, so I ejected. I broke five vertebrae and so lost a few centimeters," he says wryly. In fact the pilot was there, just bent over checking for damage, and later able to land the plane.

So it's possible one person ejects, but not the other? Also from the description of the seat wouldn't you know if the guy in front of you had ejected? The seat is really big. And what if you suspect the other person is unconscious? How do you pull the chord on his behalf?

<comment><USER19> I believe most ejection cable aircraft have a switch for changing between "eject both of us", and "eject just me". The actual ejection is set off by a rather large, difficult to use on accident, bar/lever. By default set to "eject just me". IIRC the sr-71 even had an indicator light showing if the other guy had ejected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why are they breaking legs/vertebrae upon landing? I assume it's due to the velocity in which they hit the ground - but having parachutes I'm not sure why.

Anyone have insight?

<comment><USER21> AFAIK traditional (WWII) and most military type of "round" parachutes come down "fast", much faster that what you may be used seeing in modern videos with "sport" rectangular/directional parachutes, where they can "brake" and practically land while practically at a standstill.

Paratroopers have some intensive training, and the standard is to land with a sort of somersault, see this (British Army) video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu2f1u928xk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu2f1u928xk)

exactly to minimise the risk of fractures, see also:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_landing_fall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_landing_fall)

Probably pilots (that may have additional issues with the G suit and the seat) cannot in many case do the same.

And also many "normal" users may fail at making a "good" landing:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachuting#Most_common_injuri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachuting#Most_common_injuries)

<comment><USER22> I was a civilian student sport parachutist in the late 80's before square canopies were in widespread use. We used Vietnam-vintage ejector-seat round parachutes that were modified to include a 'double-L' hole on the rear panels [0]. This created forward motion and gave some steerability, albeit at the cost of increasing the sink rate. We always landed with a parachute landing fall because the downward speed was a potential ankle-breaker. Basically you kept your feet and legs together, and as you came in the inevitable lateral motion automatically dragged you over sideways, and you could roll back on to your feet. I landed about 70 jumps, and by the time I stopped I could achieve good accuracy in low wind conditions (landing within a yard or two of a target after deploying at 2500 feet).

[0] [http://www.parachutehistory.com/round/combo.html](http://www.parachutehistory.com/round/combo.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does it happen to anyone else that the page loads, everything appears, then it all disappears and you're left with a blank page?

EDIT: Given the upvotes, I guess it has happened to others. It seems to be because of the adblocker. I run uBlock Origin. If I deactivate it, the page doesn't go blank.

<comment><USER24> It asked me to accept 50 marketing cookies + 10 statistics... Didnt bother to proceed past that window.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can't seem to view this site without accepting 50 different marketing cookies. No thanks.

<comment><USER26> > _To continue enjoying the free content made available to you on this > website, you must indicate that you understand and accept Bonnier Corp.'s > use of cookies by selecting the "Allow all cookies" button below._

What. This is not how GDPR popups are supposed to work...

<comment><USER27> If only they had a button 'no marketing', the essential cookies all seem ok.

<comment><USER26> That's what I expected to find when I clicked on "Details". But no, the screen only informs on the tracking being done. There's no option but to accept all cookies wholesale.

<comment><USER28> Why do they even have the annoying screen at that point, if they're not going to get valid consent anyways?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Site doesn't work.. Just redirects to a GDPR page, where you can't do anything.

<comment><USER30> Same experience for me.

Anyone have an archive link?

<comment><USER31> [http://web.archive.org/web/20190902014433/https://www.popsci...](http://web.archive.org/web/20190902014433/https://www.popsci.com/what- aircraft-ejection-is-like/)

<comment><USER30> Thanks. The archive works in Chrome, but not in Firefox.

<comment><USER31> It's weird, I use FF 68 and it works for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Prefix of String in Table?  a Journey into SIMD String Processing - <AUTHOR> http://trent.me/is-prefix-of-string-in-table/ <comment><USER2> There is an asymptotic speedup available for this problem, to the extent that there are lots of prefixes in the table: a finite state automaton representing the regular expression ^(prefix1|prefix2|prefix3|...) can be matched against a length N string in O(N) time, regardless of how many prefixes are in the regex. This approach is also behind the Aho-Corasick algorithm, which I think finds all occurrences of the strings but could be easily modified to find only prefixes.

I don't know if, in practice, the constant factor speedup in the article would beat out this asymptotic advantage for the table sizes that matter to the author. But the article doesn't mention considering and rejecting this approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can't do Aho-Corasick or any form of tree/trie structure (practically) without using pointers, and any form of pointer-chasing algorithm is going to have a tough time competing with the lower bounds of this algorithm, when we're dealing with 6 to 13 CPU cycles.

This data structure is specifically optimized for small sets of short strings. If we were dealing with larger data sets we wanted to match against, then a comparison against other contemporary techniques would be warranted.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I agree, the article's approach will definitely win for small tables. But readers of this article may want to solve the same problem on big tables, so should be aware that there's an asymptotically faster solution.

(Actually, I think you could probably use the article's approach in combination with DFA techniques to build something that's both fast and scalable. Something like a finite state automaton doing something like what's in the article at each node. But I don't need this and am not going to invest in trying to figure it out or learn whether there is prior art.)</comment></comment></comment>


Rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with techno-utopian ideologies - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2018/02/15/blockchain-just-isnt-as-radical-as-you-want-it-to-be/ <comment><USER4> The biggest issue I see right now is with organizations trying to jump on the blockchain bandwagon but controlling all nodes. If control of your blockchain is centralized, it's no better than an ordinary database. The benefits come when control is decentralized because you can still trust the data hasn't been tampered with.

<comment><USER5> I keep talking to people who don't seem to understand this, and I am having a hard time giving polite responses. It's not only no better than an ordinary database, it's worse in a number of ways, including not being boring enough. [1]

Even if one needs trust that there's lack of tampering, publishing a real-time transaction log is in many cases sufficient, just as long as you're willing to trust that the central point is ordering transactions fairly. Which is fine in the case where there's a legal relationship between the entities involved.

[1] [http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology](http://mcfunley.com/choose- boring-technology)

<comment><USER6> Your proposed system would not be censorship resistant: The central control point could decide (or be forced to) to block MrControversialGuy's from sending and receiving money. This point is not just theorethical, e.g. wikileaks got booted of the normal bank system when they dropped their big leaks, but they could still take bitcoin.

<comment><USER7> The same is true for a blockchain where the same organisation controls all the nodes, which is the scenario at hand.

<comment><USER8> If they know which addresses belong to Wikileaks

<comment><USER7> That's a feature of anonymity, not the blockchain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the bigger problems with blockchain is that there aren't many field experts working in the space. For example if you look at a voting blockchain you will be hard pressed to find an experienced psephologist working with the team.

Without experience most of the team is made of people who might have read up on the topic and thought - "Well! This can be changed via blockchain". What they don't realize is academic exhortations are vastly different from practical implementations.

For example, if everyone could implement that amazing trading system from that trading book, everyone would be millionaire. But that is never true. Another good example of this is the mistaken understanding of banking and especially Visa:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/04/21/bitco...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/04/21/bitcoin- banks-and-a-whole-lot-of-fud/#2b2335bd21f1)

What this means blockchain solutions either run into issues during build or work in a very specific circumstances.

For example, the building block of most cryptocurrency is game theory - <USER2> someone takes over 51% then rational economical thing to do is continue the chain. But what if we have an irrational actor who doesn't care? Or what if people can manipulate the change even below 51%. A good example is the F2Pool's manipulation of Status ICO with 25% hash rate:

[https://themerkle.com/f2pool-allegedly-prevented-users- from-...](https://themerkle.com/f2pool-allegedly-prevented-users-from- investing-in-status-ico/)

<comment><USER10> \- getting to 51% is no easy task. \- if an irrational actor can get to 51% and decide to wreck havoc, the current transactions are impacted. The community will come together to hardfork away. The last transactions preserved in the blockchain are not. \- if the above happens, then the particular blockchain does not deserve the position it holds and deserves to go down. It is no longer censorship resistant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Bitcoin caused excitement when it proposed a technical solution to a problem that previously required a trusted intermediary—money, or, more specifically, the problem of guaranteeing and controlling money supply and monitoring the repartition of funds on a global scale. It did this by developing a distributed database that is cryptographically verified by an entire network of peers and by linking the production of new money with the individual incentive to maintain this public repository._

The problem was much more narrow than this: double spending prevention by an incentivized network of peers.

The basics of cryptographically secure electronic cash had been worked out long before Bitcoin came along in 2008.

What was new was the idea of replacing the mint (a trusted entity through which all transactions must flow) with an open P2P network secured by monetary incentives and probabilistic settlement.

With no controlling entity at the center of the system, no valid transaction can be censored. This is the new force that Bitcoin unleashed on the world: censorship-resistant electronic commerce.

The fact that Bitcoin's main value proposition is censorship resistance leads many in the affluent minority to miss the point of Bitcoin entirely. They don't have a money censorship problem (at least none they care to face), and they view everyone who does as morally inferior.

<comment><USER12> A "money censorship problem" is the funniest unintentional euphemism for money laundering I've seen in a while, congrats.

<comment><USER13> Tell that to the people of Cyprus

<comment><USER14> The reason why Cyprus got a "bailin" rather than a bailout (liquidity extension from central bank) is precisely because the place has a reputation for money laundering, e.g. [https://euobserver.com/justice/139688](https://euobserver.com/justice/139688)

<comment><USER13> So when banks freeze funds eg in Argetina or Venezuela this is because of money laundering prevention, never any other factors like um I dunno, money supply issues? :)

<comment><USER14> Cyprus, like all the Eurozone countries, traded away the currency right of issuance to the ECB in return for the stability of the Euro, in much the same way as some countries "dollarised" to get away from exchange rate fluctuations.

The Argentine and Venezuelan situations had a different cause: the economies had tried to peg to the dollar, but that requires capital controls in crisis situations to avoid capital flight.

In each case the fundamental problem is that a country can't print other countries' money; either they have to accept (a) the possibility of a bank run or (b) the possibility of a floating currency dramatically changing in purchasing power.

Bitcoin solves (a), IF AND ONLY IF people hold their own bitcoins rather than using exchanges. Bitcoin and gold advocates tend to avoid talking about problem (b) or pretend a rapid shift in purchasing power can't happen in the presence of a fixed money supply, which is contradicted by history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well, the blockchain hype is easy to criticize. Tech people refer to its inefficiencies and how it is just a decentralized database. Political people point out that the real world is much more complex than what a blockchain can represent.

I would argue that its strength lies in another area: It gets people excited. It makes people start thousands of new projects and companies, millions read all the news articles and a huge crowd invests a lot of money into the space.

And, of course, it gets people excited because it hits a nerve. It promises a change of power structure in the world. Away from monolithic, opaque, political structures to democratic, transparent, border-less systems. Changing the role of _everyone_ from a helpless observer to an actice participant.

Obviously the build-up is messy and over-promising but it may very well change the core infrastructures of how the whole world currently operates - economically, politically and socially.

<comment><USER16> The ratio of people who's nerves are hit because crypto can change the power structure, to those who're interested in it because it has the potential to turn a young person's $10k creditcard borrowings into $1m, is probably pretty close to 1:100.

I mean, name the 10 biggest use cases. Bitcoin is 10 years old, it is a household name, it's been in every newspaper, every developer in the world has heard of it, it captured orders of magnitude more angel and venture investment than say a google or facebook did. It should have some genuine users who are using it not because it's a volatile asset class with an average annual return of >10x.

It's virtually impossible to find any usergroup of significance anymore. Outside of course the asset class, which so far hasn't changed the power structure so much as it has made a few techies and rich people (paper) rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Instead, local publicans stepped in and extended credit to their customers; > the debtors were well-known to the publicans, who were in a good position to > make an assessment on their credit worthiness.

I didn't know what a publican was, so I googled it...

 _pub·li·can

noun.

1\. (British) a person who owns or manages a pub.

2.(in ancient Roman and biblical times) a collector of taxes._

I assume the author is referring the first definition.

<comment><USER18> Still widely used today (the former definition)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a problem with biased titles such as "X isn't as you want it to be" or "No, X is not Y". This makes the whole article biased and me more biased about reading it. Any valid points inside are clearly from the perspective of the writer having formed a very concrete opinion over the subject and trying to convince you. The title is like "either you are with us or against us" and trying to either make me relate to the people that are disillusioned (so offending me) or unite me against "them".

</comment><comment><USER20> Never understood how as a customer I can 'trust' a niche blockchain deployment considering that a majority of the computing power in that network would likely lie within the organization deploying the niche blockchain in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Fostering and scaling cooperation is really difficult.

It all depends on incentive. BitTorrent was so popular that it had to be outlawed and heavily persecuted

> It doesn't stand in for all the slow and messy bureaucracy and debate and > human processes that go into building cooperation, and it never will.

Blockchains didn't want to go there anyway. But they replace the implied trust in statespersons that lies behind any bureaucracy with machines. thats quite radical, even if you layer a huge trust-based bureaucracy on top of that.

> there is no linear-causal relationship between decentralization in technical > systems and egalitarian or equitable practices socially

There is a causal relationship between centralization of the internet and monopolies/inequality and everything that people hate

</comment><comment><USER22> Great article derailed by the final paragraph. So, the author is disappointed that we want to ignore differences rather than focus on them. Inefficient and unnecessary. I find the author's point about blockchain trying to replace politics with economics to be something worthy of more study and thought.

</comment><comment><USER23> Crypto will end up being used as a tool for governments to control monetary flow. Congratulations.

<comment><USER24> Can you explain how you see that happening?

<comment><USER25> Each consensus method (Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, Directed-Acyclic-Graph, etc) has weaknesses that can be exploited by a large or influential enough entity - there are _no exceptions_. All it takes is time.

By the time the system has reached mass adoption, we will probably come to find that there is a central entity with majority influence over it but the utility and infrastructure integration will have such momentum that changing will be effectively impossible. Fringe communities may be able to operate relatively independently, but the core will be subject to the most dystopian control and tracking system ever devised - Huxley and Orwell could not have imagined worse.

That isn't to say that life won't be improved in general - there will be major positives. However, an undercurrent of entrapment will pervade even if it isn't at the forefront of attention.

<comment><USER26> It seems likely that Proof-of-Stake can require an economic commitment which will be extremely hard to expropriate, and can at least start out with a fairly diverse group of validators. If the chain is valuable enough, it's going to be expensive to buy up enough to pervert its consensus, and doing so will result in the stake being slashed.

On the other hand, a currency which people are forced to use by law (legal tender for tax payments) will always have a huge advantage. So if governments decide to move to most transactions in the national currency taking place via cryptographically signed attestations involving government-provided keys, that will be a major move towards the kind of dystopia you're imagining.

<comment><USER25> Proof-of-Stake units don't have to be acquired via public exchange, so ownership can concentrate without visibility; same as any other crypto system. It would likely work well enough for a period of time but as the system starts to show it's age, lots of unpleasantness follows.

I fully expect governments will embrace and utilize crypto to terrifying effect. Maybe it's time for Mars colonization?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _"There's zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness pose any kind of threat to capitalism."_

Disagree.

Desktop publishing disrupted the idea of Copyright as Intellectual Property. The Internet obliterated it.

Open Source is a superior alternative to Capitalism. People cooperate on a project instead of capitalist organizations competing and trying to extract rents. In both cases, quality goes up but in the open source case, costs stay near zero the whole time. Once again this became possible because of information dissemination.

When Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, those giants didn't charge rent!

Next will be open source drugs.

I would like to see a new system emerge. One where people GIVE AWAY their inventions because if they don't, someone else will beat them to it, and control for a time the direction.

In this world, people are more free and Basic Income lets them choose what to do with their lives. Robots do more and more work while people contribute here and there to a growing snowball.

It is the world of OpenAI, Wikipedia, WikiNews and citizens uploading videos etc. and not this lamenting about how the newspaper industry will make money.

The alternatives to Capitalism aren't "socialism" only. They are Collaboration. Science! Open source!

A society may be "free" by anarcho capitalist standards but each individual person may fear losing their paycheck. This is not sustainable in the face of technological unemployment.

What kind of freedom is it that you are coerced by the system into committing to working on things you don't like in a constant state of food insecurity and pne month away from homelessness? This is the situation for millions of people.

It doesn't have to be like that. We have enough resources to feed and house everyone ten times over.

<comment><USER27>
      > Desktop publishing disrupted the idea of Copyright as
      > Intellectual Property. The Internet obliterated it.

Must be some parallel universe. Or I totally misunderstood you. Are you talking about torrents? The bad news is: basic income will not cover costs of producing GoT or Breaking Bad.

      > Open Source is a superior alternative to Capitalism.

What does this even mean?

      > People cooperate on a project instead of capitalist organizations competing and trying to extract
      > rents.

As already pointed out, in many (most?) cases these projects are sponsored by capitalist organizations.

      > In both cases, quality goes up but in the open source case, costs stay near zero the whole time.

It would be nice if that were true.

<comment><USER28> I mean, strictly speaking the same group of people producing GoT now could continue to do it voluntarily while living off basic income, but you have to include the suppliers as well as the people directly working on the show in that equation.

Once your consider the full chain, you're probably looking at something like 2000+ people working full time to make Game of Thrones. How do you organize and incentivize them when there is no material reward for their labor? Right now the incentive is "we'll give you money" and the system of governance is "the person who gives you money tells you want to do". That second part is as much the problem as the first; if you had 2000 people making GoT as a labor of love, what happens when there is a schism over how it should be adapted?

<comment><USER13> I see it moving more in the direction of collaboration.

For example, Britannica was done in the way you say, while Wikipedia is a mashup of many edits by many people, and governance is done less by money and more by expertise and consensus of people with reputation.

Who says Game of Thrones needs to be done this way? We can always have capitalist projects. However, they have a totally different flavor. They suck you in, make you watch more and more, just like fb so you can make them money. Who needs these things, anyway? I for example didn't have TV since grad school. Sure the high budget shows are cool but they aren't essential to life.

I would even say Copyright can stat but Patents should go. Finding a life saving drug is way more major than producing a blockbuster movie.

Not to mention that a lot of stuff can now be automated, eg music production doesn't require a 100 person orchestra anymore since you have synthesizers.

In fact, as costs come down we will have a glut of movies people produce in their bedroom. Just notice, there are no longer the "world class" mozarts and einsteins of the world. Now everything is more democratized.

<comment><USER28> > In fact, as costs come down we will have a glut of movies people produce in > their bedroom.

Phrasing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Also, this article's title isn't as radical as they want it to be because they are conflating distributed ledger technologies with blockchain.

<comment><USER30> What is the difference? Isn't a blockchain a specifically branded crypto- currency flavor of distributed ledger?

<comment><USER31> Not every crypto-currency flavor of distributed ledger is a blockchain. See Distributed Acyclic Graph as used by iota, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A lot has happened in the space since August 2017 when this article was written. Having said that, it's still quite relevant.

</comment><comment><USER33> The markets that cryptocurrencies are potentially going to replace include NASDAQ, NYSE, LSE, TSE and all the other national centralized stock exchanges.

Cryptocurrencies are a superior way to represent stocks, especially software company stocks where the service can be tightly coupled to the currency itself.

There are multiple reasons why cryptocurrencies are better at representing company ownership shares:

\- There is no need to trust a middleman or government to maintain your holdings. There is no room for bad actors.

\- Transparency regarding who owns what (assuming that the ledger is public).

\- It can never go bankrupt unless all users of the network abandon it - <USER3> they all have a strong financial incentive to keep it running.

\- It doesn't need government regulation to function properly; in fact, it transcends government boundaries. Loose government regulation makes it extremely liquid. Imagine if you could buy your lunch using company stocks directly instead of cash.

<comment><USER14> I find it hard to see why people would go for a system where the transaction times are comparatively huge - you can't HFT on the blockchain, for example. And it's revealing that the cryptocurrency infrastructure has basically replicated the exchange system, complete with central counterparties and broker-dealers.

> Imagine if you could buy your lunch using company stocks directly instead of > cash.

This sounds like an excellent way to complicate your tax return.</comment></comment>


Bipartisan Backlash Grows Against Domestic Surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/us/politics/bipartisan-backlash-grows-against-domestic-surveillance.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> The problem with scaling back is that they'll just shift it around and do exactly the same thing.

The Justice Department has shown the way here. Just as they're aggressively hunting and prosecuting leakers, they need to aggressively prosecute and _jail_ government and contractor executives for Constitutional violations.

As long as those in charge believe they won't be punished, they'll take that as a wink and a nod, and cloak themselves in patriotism.

Heads must roll.</comment>


Analyzing Three Space Leaks in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2015/09/three-space-leaks.html <comment><USER2> This sort of problem is Haskell's downfall, and very nearly negates all the other wonderful features of the language. It doesn't matter how fun it was to write or how the type system promised you up and down it was correct- if your program is taking up 20Gb of memory to run in simple cases it's going nowhere. And as this post shows, solving such problems is easily as laborious a process as tracking down memory leaks or buffer overflows in C; in these cases nearly all of Haskell's great and powerful abstractions are working _against_ you.

The guys behind Haskell are utterly brilliant and seem to come up with profound new programming concepts on a regular basis, so I'm surprised they've not introduced fundamental features to solve or mitigate this problem. Until they do most people are going to be too scared to use Haskell for serious projects.

<comment><USER3> > I'm surprised they've not introduced fundamental features to solve or > mitigate this problem.

The problem is, to completely solve space leaks, Haskell should abandon pervasive laziness. But laziness is sold as one of the best things about Haskell, and most Haskellers _do_ love laziness because it improves composability.

I myself _hate_ pervasive laziness, and I'm all for removing it from the language. Unfortunately this argument will fail to convince most Haskellers because they're already sold on the bright sides of pervasive laziness.

Ok, this is all good, but from here there's one really annoying aspect of the Haskell community. They try to twist the reality to convince _themselves_. The typical reaction when these kinds of arguments are brought on the Haskell community is "space leaks are actually rare in the real world applications". Yes, this is the saying from the very community that emphasizes on program correctness. Sure, buffer overflow and memory leaks also rarely happen in other languages? Isn't "exact resource usage" also a part of correctness? At least in a broader sense?

Even SPJ (one of the designers of the language) admits laziness should retire now (it was a good experiment to develop purely functional ways, but now the disadvantages outweigh the advantages), but most Haskellers will never agree with this because laziness does also have advantages, and they love it. I actually gave up waiting for the Haskell community to abandon pervasive laziness, so just moved to other languages.

Sometimes I get a sense that many Haskellers treat hardware as merely implementation details.

<comment><USER4> > I actually gave up waiting for the Haskell community to abandon pervasive > laziness, so just moved to other languages.

I certainly wouldn't hold my breath for Haskell abandoning pervasive laziness. It's a core principle of the language (Haskell is, after all, "being lazy with class"); if it were removed, the result would be Haskell in name only.

If you don't want pervasive laziness then using a different language is absolutely the correct thing to do. That's not a bad thing; it's just a case of having different tools for different jobs. Haskell may be the best fit for some projects but not others.

<comment><USER5> Completely agree. Laziness has too many benefits not to justify the added complexity of thunks and thunk-based space leaks. If you don't agree, don't use Haskell =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What, by All That Is Curried, is a space leak?

<comment><USER7> As someone else already posted, here is a more detailed explanation: [https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2538488](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2538488)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A quick google suggests space leak == memory leak, is that correct?

<comment><AUTHOR> Usually, a space leak is an abnormal/unexpected amount of unevaluated data in a lazy language. A memory leak is data in the process heap that isn't referenced by the process.</comment></comment>


Safari looks to be jumping on the Chromium bandwagon - <AUTHOR> https://chromeunboxed.com/apple-safari-google-chrome-chromium-browser-open-source/ <comment><USER2> Since something like 75% of you won't even open this link:

 _UPDATE: According to some traffic over on Twitter, it looks like this whole thing may be vaporware. A user has uncovered the bug in question in the article below and as it turns out, this bug has nothing to do with Safari or Chromium. It is still private and cannot be viewed by non-Google employees, but it appears that this bug is assigned to "Move sync tests to staging" from 2015. We're sorry for the incorrect reporting and have left the original story below._

</comment><comment><USER3> The next internet scale worm will be a zero-day and cross between Chrome, Edge and Safari, perhaps involving WebRTC.</comment>


Developmental biology: Gene lets animals tell left from right - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v531/n7592/full/531010c.html <comment><AUTHOR> The Nature article actually just summarizes the original article, which is open access and can be found here: [http://www.cell.com/current- biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(1...](http://www.cell.com/current- biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822\(16\)00056-7). Unfortunately I cannot change the URL.

<comment><USER2> But you did exactly the right thing with the relevant follow-up rather than a separate submit.</comment></comment>


An Interactive Analysis of Tolkien's Works - <AUTHOR> http://lotrproject.com/statistics/books/

<comment><USER2> Not bad, but getting the data is one thing, but this screams for a "so what?" question. Interpreting data and making sense of it is where the real analysis takes place. For example, you would need to compare what makes Tolkien books stand out from the rest of the literature and so on in order to drive observations and tentative conclusions.

This being said, great work and hopefully this is just the beginning of a continued effort to better understand Tolkien's work.

<comment><USER3> I disagree; I find the 'pure data' of this much more compelling than some arbitrary speculation about the meaning of the results.

For example, you could speculate that the sentiment analysis shows points of tension and peace in the story, and investigate that hypothesis... but is writing a blog about that, what situations it works in, and what situations it doesn't work in and coming up with a 'well, maybe...' kind of result what interesting? Not to me.

...but providing me with the tools to investigate that myself?

Awesome!

<comment><USER2> This is not really "pure" data as there could be tons of other analysis done on the text that one can do and you do not get the raw results, and the tools to get the data and do further analysis are not provided (AFAIK). Why did the author just limit itself to those, or why did those matter more than the other ? What is the purpose of getting the data in the first place? Usually getting data is a mean to answer a question, you do not generate data just for the purpose of the data itself. Hence my "so what" question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "Gandalf's Gear" poster has a reference to Erfworld. (Which, in turn has references to just about everything else.)

<http://www.erfworld.com/wiki/index.php/Eyebook>

</comment><comment><USER5> This is badass, but I put my money down right now that you're going to get sued by Tolkien Jr. That guy is relentless.

</comment><comment><USER6> Frickin WOW!! what an amazing project..

<comment><USER7> Considering that he even has an Android app .... I'm just blown away by the sheer dedication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was looking at the sentiment analysis tab of the project. I really wonder how the algorithm works. It seems that for almost all pages and most books the sentiment is either negative or neutral. The absence of positive sentiment can be observed immediately.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does the OP describe what tools he used to perform the analysis? I'd love to learn!</comment>


Joseph Stiglitz: The Non-Existent Hand - <AUTHOR> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n08/joseph-stiglitz/the-non-existent-hand <comment><USER2> Markets can act irrationally even if the players are acting rationally. This is because of players acting in their own self-interest. For example, if an investment bank takes an enormous risky position that backfires, it may appear irrational. Then consider the massive severance package and/or political support that protects the executive or firm! Now that risky position isn't so risky after all.

I think my point is that "rational" acting is not a clear-cut term that describes a market and its players. Let's take a look at another player, Joe Homebuyer who has access to easy loan money and can buy well out of his price range. Given that home prices had risen consistently for so long (perhaps longer than Joe Homebuyer has been living), at what point does the overvalued price of the house become irrational? Maybe it's when the mortgage-to-rent ratio is too far off, maybe it is some other trigger, but Joe Homebuyer thinks he has protection anyway because he cannot conceive of the possibility that prices will drop. All of his experience shows only gains for this purchase. So, is buying that overpriced house rational or irrational? Seems rational to Joe, but irrational to people with more information about the market.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe the Nobel laureate has the wrong title.

It is not as if there's no market efficiency, no collective pricing that occurs from the interaction of individual agents.

But individual, selfish agents do not always act in the public interest.

Some economists call the problem of externalized costs "the Tragedy of the Commons."

But a lot of commons aren't visible, which doesn't make for a great tragedy. So I (and some others) have taken to calling that problem "the Invisible Foot."

<comment><USER4> > But individual, selfish agents do not always act in the public interest.

That assumes that "the public interest" is well defined and knowable.

It may be in a very small number of cases but, in general, when someone invokes "the public interest", they're trying to get you to go along with what they want, the "public" be damned.

And no, it's not the frauds who do the most damage, it's the do-gooders, the true believers, by a large margin. The frauds can be bought off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is politics very thinly veiled as economics, and there's also a lot of misinformation in it. But one thing in the piece stands out as so incredibly wrong but often repeated, that it must be debunked and re-debunked and argued against until the reality of things becomes common wisdom:

> They provided support for the movement which stripped away the regulations > that had provided the basis of financial stability in the decades after the > Great Depression

This is _not_ the case. The financial system is incredibly complexly regulated, and the regulations are growing each year. They're too complex for lay people to understand. As such, you get a phenomenon called regulatory capture -

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture>

"Regulatory capture occurs when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead acts in favor of the commercial or special interests that dominate in the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for large firms to produce negative externalities. The agencies are called Captured Agencies."

Regulatory capture _always_ happens in large money industries where the regulations are too complex for lay people to understand and get upset about. Regulations grow each year in banking, every single year - and the regulations inevitably benefit the banking industry, who have lobbyists, experts, panels who are deeply interested in getting their way.

This is very important:

 _The entire financial system is created by regulation._

We use paper money because it's required to use in the United States. The U.S. dollar, for instance:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender>

"Legal tender or forced tender is an offered payment that, by law, cannot be refused in settlement of a debt, and have the debt remain in force.[1] Currency is the most common form of legal tender."

From there, the printing of money is created by regulation, the banks are beholden to the printing body, and so on, and so on. This mess is indeed a failure of regulation - the regulation created it. The entire financial system, top to bottom, is probably the most heavily regulated in the world. Regulation created it. It's already heavily regulated. The regulations are twisted over time to benefit the banking industry itself.

I'd encourage everyone who hasn't read it to the Austrian theory of the banking cycle:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_business_cycle_theory>

"The theory views most business cycles (or, as some Austrians prefer, "credit cycles") as the inevitable consequence of excessive growth in bank credit, exacerbated by inherently damaging and ineffective central bank policies, which cause interest rates to remain too low for too long, resulting in excessive credit creation, speculative economic bubbles and lowered savings."

It's a very interesting theory, and pretty convincing to me. Central banks set interest rates artificially low, people borrow a lot, inflationary bubbles happen, things crash. Today it's bad mortgages derivatives, yesterday it's bonds, before that it's the stock market a few times, next it's something else.

A country with legal tender laws ("you must accept this kind of money"), money of no inherent value (which would act as a natural check to printing more), an agency that can create that money at will (the Federal Reserve), and uses this new money to set interest rates artificially low (which it does) - this always leads to crashes, always. We don't need more regulation, we need to tear the whole mess down. Politicians have proven repeatedly that they can not be trusted with the ability to print money that you're required by law to take.

<comment><USER6> _> They provided support for the movement which stripped away the regulations that had provided the basis of financial stability in the decades after the Great Depression

This is not the case. The financial system is incredibly complexly regulated, and the regulations are growing each year. They're too complex for lay people to understand. As such, you get a phenomenon called regulatory capture..._

You have utterly missed the point. And the rest of your rant just goes farther afield from the article.

Stiglitz claims that there are specific regulations which were responsible for several decades of financial stability in the USA. He further claims that these regulations have been removed. There is, in fact, a great deal of support for both claims.

He does _not_ claim that there are now no regulations. He does _not_ claim that all regulations are good. And it is a safe bet that he has spent _more_ time thinking about regulatory capture than you have.

Now get off of your pedestal, go read what the Nobel laureate has to say, and you just might learn something useful about economics.

<comment><USER7> That is pretty condescending. I am not a libertarian and I even agree with the sentiments of the article, but the analysis offered in the article was very weak and the OP is right to be skeptical.

<comment><USER6> The article was meant to be a book review aimed at an economically sophisticated audience, and not an airtight argument for a thesis. I would suggest researching the various ideas that were brought up.

It is worth noting as well that in many cases Stiglitz is not saying, "This is what is true." Rather he is saying, "Here are several important schools of thought that were ignored, but which are relevant to the current crisis."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> alan-crowe There seems to be a huge leap in paragraph two. Stiglitz writes "if markets were as efficient in transmitting information as the free marketeers claimed, no one would have any incentive to gather and process it." The implications of this observation have a degree of inevitability which I work though below.

Suppose you want to make money on the stock market. If you could work out the true value of the companies listed there you could manage a portfolio by buying underpriced stock and selling it later. Perhaps you hire a team of PhD economists to do the valuations for you. Suppose their valuations are accurate and you make money on your trading. Your friends will be envious at first. If however it turns out the money you make trading fails to cover the cost of running your research team, you will end up having to sell your yacht and your friends will laugh at you.

What is the relationship between research costs and prediction accuracy? We might at first guess 1/x. However, if we had spent a million dollars to get a 10% accurate prediction, do we really think that a second million would get us to 5% accuracy? The biggest issue is that stock values depend on the future and the future is usually exponentially sensitive to initial conditions. Perhaps the accuracy with which our research determines initial conditions is inversely proportional to the cost, but that still leaves an exponential divergence.A reasonable first guess is that if we want an accuracy of x% the research will cost exp(1/x).

Meanwhile we need to take a stab at the function form of the profit from trading. Perhaps it is proportional to the difference between the true price and the market price, but that ignores the question of how long we have to wait before we can sell and realise our gains. The dynamics of the market are at issue. The traditional saying is "markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.". Well, yes, but the more prices are out of wack, the faster the pressure for a correction builds up. Dynamics is difficult. Let's just guess that the profits from trading on difference btween true price and market price have a form something like x tanh x.

Putting these together and equating marginal chances leads to what I call the "dead zone" theory of markets. Market prices are wrong and bumble about in a dead zone around the true price. Reasonable functional forms give quite firm edges to the dead zone.

An interesting follow question asks for the probability distribution of the true price in the dead zone. Perhaps there is a strong central tendency, but what might produce it? Perhaps the distribution is uniform across the dead zone? Or maybe psychological factors push the dead zone so that the true price is at one end or the other. (If only we knew which!) However I want to get back to Stiglitz' book review.

The reasoning that Stiglitz adumbrates leads to the notion of a dead zone of some definite size. Three responses are the pessimistic, the "markets fail, use markets" of Bryan Caplan and Stiglitz's maneouvre.

A pessimist could follow up with a critique of modern society that claims it is out of control and heading for disaster. The pessimistic critique could insist that technological challenges and uncertainies make the future unmangeable and unplannable, and futher more market solutions will not help because the dead zone is huge; Adam Smith's invisible hand might as well not be there.

A free-market advocate need not be much embarrassed by even a large dead zone. How should production and exchange be organized? It is a choice between competing options and the difficulties that give rise to the dead zone seem to place heavy burdens on the alternative options.

Stiglitz treats the dead zone as huge, so large that "Adam Smith's hand was not in fact invisible: it wasn't there." I don't know why. The dead zone clearly has to exist, but that sheds no light on whether it is large or small.

I'm not managing to make much sense of economic discussions. Does efficient- market-theory" really deny the existance of the dead zone? Do the opponents of efficient-market-theory really believe that because the dead zone exists it is necessarily huge?

<comment><USER6> Your "dead zone" was described in Stiglitz' Nobel lecture by _the price system both imperfectly aggregated information and that there was an equilibrium amount of "disequilibrium."_ However that is but one of many important effects from information asymmetry, and many of the others you have probably not thought about yet.

As for the size of the effects, economists disagree. It is true that Stiglitz is inclined towards believing that they are large. His reasons for doing so range from the personal (in particular time spent in Kenya) to the professional. As well when you spend a large chunk of your life thinking about the importance of an effect, you're going to be likely to think it important.

For more on this topic, I recommend reading through his Nobel lecture, available at [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/...](http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/stiglitz- lecture.pdf).

Furthermore there are other factors that affect Stiglitz' thinking, and he doesn't really have room to discuss them all, all the time. For example I know he is very concerned that modern financial markets have externalized a lot of risk to tax payers. It is rational to take a large risk if it brings a chance of massive rewards on the one hand, and a bailout on the other. However banks that do this will not even try to price certain risks correctly. And this leads to systemic market failure modes.</comment></comment>


When you don't pay your web developer - mark-ruwt http://www.greentouchlandscapers.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> All things considered, while this is certainly might feel satisfying, it's a rather irresponsible move on the developer's part. Not only would this sort of behavior turn off future clients (shows that the developer is vindictive and unprofessional), but the dev is almost certainly legally exposed. IANAL, but it would be trivial for the client to show in court that the dev's actions led to quantifiable damages to their business, and might even be open to criminal prosecution.

The correct way to resolve this depends on the contract the dev signed in the first place. If the dev retains IP under the contract, they may be able to take the website down, or revert it to a previous state. If not, I'm not totally sure. Certainly the dev should refuse to perform any work for the client, and probably should solicit legal advice (relatively inexpensive to take a client to small claims court).

<comment><USER2> Recently on reddit I answered a question on the /r/webdev subreddit asking about backdoors in websites in case the client doesn't pay[1]. Sometimes webdevs don't quite understand how to deal with clients who don't pay, and the real answer is get a legally binding contract. Most other devs I know don't bother with this though, and leads to some frustrations on their part.

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/7u5965/how_to_add_b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/7u5965/how_to_add_backdoor_to_client_websites/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> lol. A web "developer" that uses Microsoft Word -- Export as HTML..

<o:DocumentProperties> <o:Author>John Raphah</o:Author> <o:Template>Normal</o:Template> <o:LastAuthor>John Raphah</o:LastAuthor> <o:Revision>5</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>62</o:TotalTime> <o:Created>2018-02-06T15:35:00Z</o:Created> <o:LastSaved>2018-02-06T16:15:00Z</o:LastSaved>

Looking at archive.org's snapshot from 2017.. I wouldn't pay this "developer" either..

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170512143057/http://www.greent...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170512143057/http://www.greentouchlandscapers.com:80/)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, using tables for layout, a XHTML transitional doctype at the start, inline CSS and a general lack of mobile responsiveness doesn't suggest the most up to date knowledge of web development.

Still, I guess for the 'pay me' page, it could be somewhat assumed to be a simple rush job given the situation involved, so maybe the dev just wanted any old way to get a page up for this rant.

And hey, it's still more modern than this thing was:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160322053716/http://www.webkin...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160322053716/http://www.webkingusa.com/)

That's something, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> US law doesn't apply to businesses based in Kenya...

[http://web.archive.org/web/20160701233200/http://greentouchl...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160701233200/http://greentouchlandscapers.com:80/contacts.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Serious question could a non-payment clause protect you from a client claiming damages from a stunt like this?

For instance could you include a clause that states: "In the event of non- payment, development on the site will cease and will be replaced with a temporary landing page until payment issue is resolved."

<comment><USER7> Even if you have such a clause, it would be very trivial like @beisner has stated, for client to prove reputation damage and loss of business (even if they weren't making money to begin with).

> it would be trivial for the client to show in court that the dev's actions > led to quantifiable damages to their business, and might even be open to > criminal prosecution.

Source: @beisner [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16326732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16326732)

<comment><USER8> Couldn't you add another clause stating that the webdev is not responsible for any reputation damage, loss of business, or any other damages caused by the non-payment landing page?

<comment><USER9> Try to get a client to agree to such a clause, especially when they've probably already decided the likelihood of not paying the developer at the time they are hiring them.

<comment><USER8> > Try to get a client to agree to such a clause, especially when they've > probably already decided the likelihood of not paying the developer at the > time they are hiring them.

Seems to me like that's not a bad thing. If they're not planning on paying in full, you probably don't want to do any work for them. Better to find out sooner than later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Warning: the embedded music video is probably NSFW due to nudity.

</comment><comment><USER10> Funny.

Though I would have just turned off the record sets for said domain. (assuming I had that control)

Even less effort, more professional response.

</comment><comment><USER11> Empty page now, anyone got a snapshot?

<comment><USER12> Screenshot: [https://imgur.com/PNstZf2](https://imgur.com/PNstZf2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> hope you both get paid and don't get into trouble because of this.

<comment><USER14> Oh no, trouble! That's the worst thing that could happen to someone! Getting in trouble!

People should stand up for themselves more, you deserve to be paid for your work. The client is the only person who should be in trouble. Don't be afraid of trouble.

<comment><USER15> I was just about to purchase $10,001 worth of services from them and have now decided not to because of the computer trespass by the web developer.

According to [https://www.cga.ct.gov/2012/rpt/2012-R-0254.htm](https://www.cga.ct.gov/2012/rpt/2012-R-0254.htm) that makes it a Class B Felony.

Plus the prima facie tort for the lost business.

Are you sure it's such a good idea to go around looking for trouble like this?

There are plenty of legal recovery avenues without going looking for trouble and pretending it's just standing up for yourself - a defense which will go nowhere in a felony hearing.

<comment><USER16> I guess you assume US laws are applicable everywhere in the world?

<comment><USER15> I guess you assume that because it's an African country that they don't have computer crime laws ?

[http://kenyalaw.org/kl/fileadmin/pdfdownloads/bills/2017/Com...](http://kenyalaw.org/kl/fileadmin/pdfdownloads/bills/2017/ComputerandCybercrimesBill_2017.pdf)

<comment><USER16> You posted a link to Connecticut laws/regulations in your original post. I don't think that is applicable to Kenya.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope he pays you soon, that landing page surely isn't good for business.</comment>


Google Cloud SQL pricing announced - <AUTHOR> http://googleappengine.blogspot.in/2012/05/cloud-sql-pick-plan-that-fits-your-app.html

<comment><USER2> "Hello, we are Google. We make billions of dollars. Now we want you to pay 10 cents per hour, in case you want to play around with a minimal MySQL database."</comment>


Show HN: Customer Requirements -Everything programmers need to know before coding - <AUTHOR> http://www.marcobehler.com/requirements

<comment><USER2> If you're willig to (and able to) dive into two academic papers:

Gingnell, L., Franke, U., Lagerström, R., Ericsson, E., & Lilliesköld, J. (2014). Quantifying Success Factors for IT Projects—An Expert-Based Bayesian Model. Information Systems Management, 31(1), 21-36.

Lehtinen, Timo OA, et al. "Perceived causes of software project failures–An analysis of their relationships." Information and Software Technology 56.6 (2014): 623-643.

Both attempt to find the sources of software project failure, the second even manages to find causal relationships. Requirements definitely play a role but are not always the root cause. Overly generalised; the root cause seems to be with the lack of a clear vision on what the product/artifact will or will not do, this in turn leads to vague requirements. Lacking a clear vision, Decision makers will base their priorities solely on the information source they deem the most important: the customer.</comment>