Bureaucracy as Active Ingredient - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/30/bureaucracy-as-active-ingredient/ <comment> temp-dude-87844 The author's musings about this are good fun but they struggle to make a coherent point that delivers deep insight. In this post, he considers the points that commenters raised and tiptoes around the possibility that maybe some bureaucratic rituals are a filter to screen the petitioners by desperation, but he doesn't talk about the possibility that such structures may have evolved incrementally to optimize for maximum ass-covering and the implications thereof. To him, efficiency (of filtering customers) is a sufficient explanation, which is odd considering his complaints about bureaucracy's inefficiencies before and after.

So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV. For being the primary identity providers of the US populace, the DMVs of US states are actually rather remarkable. I guess the seemingly arbitrary progression of ticket numbers in cavernous waiting rooms is valid annoyance, but watermarked cards being mailed out to thousands of people just a few business days after collecting their info is pretty good, and then there's more vehicles than that.

Bureaucracy gets a bad rap, but it's worth applying the "I could've built that" test for them the same way it's trendy to critique valuable companies that are "just a chat app". If you had to credential 35 million people and 39 million vehicles a year, how would you do it? Would you codify a few things, and hire rockstars who can think on their feet? How soon would you start making rules about the blatantness of invalid forms, or unpaid fees, or how many people would you have to catch selling favors before you re-examine the process?

Deep bureaucracies are often the emergent result when your process has been burned by costly customers (in time, money, effort) or rogue employees (corruption, graft, espionage) too many times. They are systems where each and every decision maker can always defer to the Process as an explanation for why someone can't have something and the Process is sacred because "it's always been that way", even if it changes, and where each and every fulfiller is powerless to truly make a meaningful exception, except when that feature was already built in.

<comment><USER2> > _The author 's musings ... struggle to make a coherent point..._

> _So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV_

Maybe read it again? The author raises a coherent hypothesis, _then questions it_ as a widely explanatory principle, using the DMV explicitly and intentionally as an example of bureaucratic inefficiency that it describes poorly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Always like to see SSC here.

Unbelievably, the medication example the author uses is a system I have direct experience with. It is a group whose job it is to make the decision of whether insurance covers a drug that a doctor has prescribed.

The triage is more sophisticated than a queue management ritual, but also has elements of it in it.

Some insurer programs require that the patient be declined by another one before paying for the prescription, so the doctors fill out hopeless requests because they need the rejection letter to achieve their outcome. This fills the decision queues, and everyone experiences the lag. Consider doctors handwriting as a next order CV problem, and then think about the attitude of the user demographic who doesn't feel obligated to be clear about their intentions - now design a digital product for them.

Bureaucracy in real life is a kind of cluster-governance, where nobody serves each other, and everyone presumes everyone else is coming to them to be regulated. Further, they really do think their job is to avoid obligations to others unless they are somehow mandated to have one.

I can say that agile development methods are disrupting bureaucracy in a big way. You don't see it, but every online license renewal and filing system wipes out layers of bureaucracy. The systems take years to develop because the personal/business relationships that made those systems work need to be identified and unraveled before you implement them in code. I would argue you don't understand stakeholder management unless you have spent time in a bureaucracy, and the people who do succeed at it in the private sector often do so as the result of both luck and negative anti-patterns.

I saw how the internet changed government almost 20 years ago, and can say that cloud and microservices are now also revolutionary.

Tech is an expression of how its users want to relate, and in this way it's culture. When we impose tech on institutions, it realigns them to organize around the relational patterns in the tech.

Bureaucracy is an active ingredient, and the tech we develop changes it. Want a better DMV? Build one.

<comment><USER4> _> I saw how the internet changed government almost 20 years ago, and can say that cloud and microservices are now also revolutionary._

Please elaborate. I would be very interested to hear more about this from your perspective. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Short version is it moved the power base and budget approvals into IT governance, and corporate security touches everything.

It created the abstractions of clients and services and put enterprise architecture in the middle. All projects became IT projects.

Today, the clash of iterative methods that provide makers with almost total autonomy vs. waterfall PM oversight and governance is the key friction point in large institutions, imho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> bjelkeman-again To me bureaucracy is more about it being someone's job to follow the rules and make sure they really are followed. And then you have someone else who makes sure the rules cover every option. And as you may have experienced, there are always cases that don't fit the rules perfectly, so the bureaucracy keeps getting more complex. It is a rabbit hole, unless you deliberately step in and simplify the rules regularly.

<comment><USER5> I've always seen bureaucracies as process design for people that are bad at process design.

I work in a very compliance heavy environment, and we run an "agile" team that ships as often as 10 times a day. We have easy audits and no compliance issues because we invested in good process design. A company we're quite close with has the same compliance requirements, and their shipping process involves printing, signing, scanning and filing excel sheets. It's not like we're vastly better at our jobs than they are, we just designed far better processes.

<comment><USER6> Can you indicate what industry ? Or even what level of process (if it's just auto checking we have filled in the right sections on form 1, or more complex?)

<comment><USER5> For us, PCI with a multi-billion transaction volume, SOC 2 and ISO27k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think of bureaucracies similarly to software. I've seen many legacy code bases that started out simple but as they add features and identify more and more edge cases programmers start adding abstractions and config files and processes and it becomes increasingly complex and difficult to modify and nobody fully comprehends the whole system or how to fix it. I imagine it's the same thing with organizational processes.

<comment><USER8> The bureaucracy in codebases often mirrors the same of the company in which they were developed, or in some cases the general culture of the programming language itself (prominent examples being Java and C#.) The most horrifically indirect code I've seen comes from large enterprise software, where something that is actually quite simple takes inordinate amounts of code to accomplish; on the other hand, code written by and maintained by only one or two individuals rarely accumulates such accidental complexity.

<comment><USER9> See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Author makes the inadvertent case for insurance companies to buy pharmaceutical companies. The marginal cost of production of any medication is virtually nil, the costs are nearly entirely due to R&D. If the treatment costs the insurance company $10,000 then the insurance company has an incentive to provide poor service, but if the treatment costs the insurance company pennies, then there is no need for such bureaucracy to incentivize patients to choose cheaper drugs. Indeed, purchasing the pharmaceutical companies would allow insurance companies to cut out unnecessary levels of administration and their associated costs, thus boosting profits.

"Orgs have an incentive not to respond yes to every request they get" \- not true. Orgs have an incentive to reduce the cost of saying yes, but saying yes is an important part of providing good customer service, keeping repeat business, and building a brand that enables bigger growth. Orgs that lose sight of this, deserve to be eaten by their competitors.

<comment><USER11> Nothing about vertical integration of those two industries would solve that problem. Paying out millions to billions to own drugs isn't going to make their unit economics any better. The $10,000 drug isn't going to magically only cost $100 just because it got bought by an insurance company. In fact it'll probably cost more, because the transaction costs involved in buying the drug will have to get added onto the R&D cost of developing the drug, which is the reason it costs $10,000 in the first place.

It's also wrong to assume that just because a company gets acquired, that there's going to be 'unnecessary levels of administration and other associated costs' that are just begging for the ax. Pharma companies have finance people too that can provide that kind of oversight and recommendations.

The market for drugs is complicated by two factors. First is that people who need drugs generally can't get that need met by any other product / service. So there's an incentive for price creep. Second is the patent system which forces companies to grab as much cash as they can until the patent expires.

If longer patents were granted, or the patent system were more sane in that the patent period doesn't begin until after the drug is able to be made available to the market, then the costs of developing drugs would be a lot more legible, and therefore amortizable.

<comment><USER12> There's no reason to assume that the drug division of the combined firm will continue to develop new drugs. In this imagining, they only need to continue to manufacture the drugs they've already developed.

Also are you seriously arguing here for longer patent terms? You think that will get new products to market more _quickly_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't the answer that we are moving towards decentralised / self sovereign platforms with more creative ways to transfer value that naturally evolve the right economics?

The irony is that bitcoin, the pioneer, confirms your hypothesis because it relies on a form of intentional waste (POW) to disincentivise bad behaviour. PoW is the new bureaucracy.

I do think we will find better ways, and decentralisation is the natural outcome.

<comment><AUTHOR> I emphatically do _not_ think that decentralization is the natural outcome, nor that it's optimal.

On this topic I would recommend one of Scott's most well-known essays, _Meditations on Moloch_ [1]. The meat of it is this:

> …in some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some > other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those > who don't take it die out. Eventually, everyone's relative status is about > the same as before, but everyone's absolute status is worse than before. The > process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – > in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to > make things any worse.

If top-town authoritarianism is at one extreme of the spectrum, then completely decentralized systems is the other undesirable extreme, equally bad if not worse: if there is no regulation, then there is no strong coordination, and a race-to-the-bottom situation ensues (in optimizing for X). If everyone is acting game-theoretically optimally, then anyone who tries to improve the situation gets eliminated. It might be locally optimal, but it's highly unlikely to be globally optimal.

Decentralization means being a slave to no one, which means being a slave to the incentive system, _which means being a slave to everyone else._

But I would also encourage thinking of it not as a dualism, a strict choice between bureaucracy and blockchains, but as a spectrum instead. This means that there's an entire world of valid choices in between. I would very much argue that the optimum can be found just by moving closer to the middle.

[1] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

<comment><USER14> Everyone is always acting game-theoretically optimally. A top-down authoritarian doesn't get his powers from a deity; there was a coordinated effort of a decentralized group of people to get him there and sustain him. He, or whoever pushed to get him in charge, _was_ that anyone trying to improve the situation. No reason the same mechanism can't act to make other changes to the status quo.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Everyone is always acting game-theoretically optimally.

This isn't true at all. The fact that the efficient market hypothesis doesn't seem to hold is already the proof of that, and the same reasoning applies to other social behaviors [4].

Furthermore, many, many, many, _many_ studies in neuroeconomics and behavioral economics (and related fields) [1] have shed light on the bounded rationality of human actors in decision making. Game-theoretically optimal decisions is a specific, well-defined thing that's different from making decisions based on the affects and biases of the preconscious and unconscious. You can't just tautologically define "game-theoretically optimal" to be whatever decision someone ends up making.

What does this mean? The direct implication is that it's neither game- theoretically optimal nor inevitable for stateless humans to enter into a social contract that eventually cements itself into a state apparatus.

A top-down authoritarian doesn't get their powers from a deity, yes, but it wasn't quite explicit coordination either. To demonstrate using a brief example, one of the models of the evolutionary stages of the social contract [2][3] is that states were a natural conclusion of tribal societies, which were themselves a natural conclusion of lineal societies, i.e. families. Lineal societies most likely weren't formed through explicit consent, i.e. early stateless infants probably didn't explicitly decide to enter into a social contract. There's basically no particular _a priori_ reason why families exist (for example, the Ik people in Uganda seem to have no or a very weak concept of using familial relations for survival, even to protect their young), and very likely that this evolution was just the model happened to win out due to random noise in history rather than actual optimality.

Again I would like to stress how much the current societal configuration is mostly just noise instead of signal.

[1] For an introduction, [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking- fast-a...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and- slow)

[2] [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nomadology](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nomadology)

[3] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118317.Anti_Oedipus](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118317.Anti_Oedipus)

[4] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review- inadequate-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate- equilibria/)

<comment><USER14> Your style of argumentation is peculiar; you are criticizing the decentralized outcome because "if everyone is acting game-theoretically optimally, then anyone who tries to improve the situation gets eliminated."

Yet now you write that everyone acting game-theoretically optimally is not actually possible.

So you were criticizing an impossible scenario?

Since I agree with you that _literally_ everyone acting game-theoretically optimally is impossible, I took your earlier use of the concept to mean something possible, that is, everyone acting as close to game-theoretically optimally as they are capable, and used the concept in the same way.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't contradict what I previously said. The ability of actors to act game-theoretically depends on the bounds of the rationality and the complexity of the scenario. A game of chicken is much simpler than a game of chess, which in turn is much simpler than capitalism.

The multipolar trap manifests itself in real life in lots of simple ways already. The original essay has some examples, but the tragedy of the commons is the quintessential example.

The multipolar trap as a totalizing behavior is not an impossible scenario, but just currently infeasible for most sufficiently complex scenarios given the bounded reality. Which _means_ it becomes a cause for concern as the bounds on rationality increase (through computation, through organization, etc.). _That 's_ why we should be wary of decentralized systems in the long run.

What you said was "everyone" was always acting game-theoretically already and therefore that what we currently have is game-theoretically optimal, which is what I disagreed with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As the manager of an IT organization, I explicitly use delay as a way to measure need. I usually sit on a purchase request until the requestor (sometime later) asks me, "Hey, what's up with that convenient but not essential thing I ordered last week?" Once I know they really need it enough to ask twice I will consider approving it.

<comment><USER16> I'll do this with support, if I respond too quickly then the issue becomes a conversation and the customer will become lazy. Adding a little delay forces them to think for themselves a bit more.

<comment><USER17> I've learned to do this with clients too.

Some of them would call or email me with some _really_ important, not previously discussed thing that they absolutely needed to have (but really didn't). Where in the past I'd immediately take this request seriously and discuss how many hours/days of work this would reasonably take, I now often give them an unusually high indication at first. If the conversation continues and it becomes clear that they really do want/need said feature, I'll come up with a more realistic indication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't really understand the author's (and some of the commenters') assumption that making a bureaucracy unpleasant and inefficient is a deliberate decision.

Certainly, once a bureaucracy _got to that point_ , it might have certain benefits, but I don't see how that implies there was a conscious strategy before.</comment>


What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong/

<comment><USER2> Pretty sure what I think I know about the Web isn't wrong, though I doubt this article will enlighten me if it is.</comment>


Morse.rb - <AUTHOR> http://judofyr.net/posts/morse.html

<comment><USER2> The really fun part is when you have to maintain code like this that somebody else thought was a good idea.

Adam's refactoring is actually quite clean: [http://refactormycode.com/codes/513-morse-code-encoder- decod...](http://refactormycode.com/codes/513-morse-code-encoder- decoder#refactor_39063)

Refactoring code is about making it clearer, cleaner, and easy to adapt in the future. Not this.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, this code reminded me of a Brian Kernighan quote:

 _Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it._

<comment><USER2> Nice!</comment></comment></comment>


Potential printf() uses that expose vulnerabilities  - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0129/#ID0ENQAK

<comment><AUTHOR> In my opinion it is an interesting article if for nothing else other than the fact that it puts you to thinking of the various possibilities.

I myself code lot in C and I heavily utilize printf and don't believe that everything can possibly be taken into consideration in a real world non- academic situation. It's good to use the updated functions as the author says but not using low level string manipulation might not always be the case if you are coding in C.</comment>


Mobile Phones on Planes: Good or Bad? - <AUTHOR> http://economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10312057&top_story=1

<comment><USER3> Problem: if you have a "data but no voice" network with bandwidth and latency low enough to make web apps work well, someone will be able to implement voice on top of it.

Maybe it would be enough to make uploads slow.

<comment><USER4> I thought the same. Disabling voice service will probably work anyway - <USER2> like velvet rope does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the problem with cell ph...WHAT?...I DON'T KNOW!...HOLD ON A MINUTE!...SEAN???...OK!...OK!...SO WHAT IF EVERYONE ELSE IS SLEEPING...GIVE ME THE WEST COAST FIGURES...SEAN???...SEAN???...OK!...NO! NO! NO!... DO NOT LET JEAN HANDLE THAT!!!...Yes, I'll have a diet coke...NO, SEAN, NOT YOU!!!...AND MAKE SURE FRED KNOWS ABOUT OUR 3 O'CLOCK...What, my seat belt? OK...NO! NOT YOU SEAN!...I WAS TALKING TO THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT!...OK...WHERE WERE WE?...OH YES THE MURPHY CONTRACT...SEAN???...SEAN???

Who needs terrorists?

</comment><comment><USER4> The Economist seems to be linked quite often around here. Hackers like it?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Data & Text only, or I think the rate of in-flight violence will go up!</comment>


The future of loneliness - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/01/future-of-loneliness-internet-isolation <comment><USER2> In a world of selfies and shared profiles, how can someone whom has painful memories of seeing themselves in photos ever since childhood supposed to join the party?

How can someone who suffers from a pretty serious criminal record ever feel comfortable meeting new potential partners who will almost surely run a background check and discover unsavory things that really cannot be explained away?

I ask these question because I live them every day.

Self-esteem and confidence about your looks is the elephant-in-the-room here. I often feel Social is like welfare for the rich.

The people whom benefit the most are perhaps the same ones whom need it the least.

<comment><USER3> Is this much different than many other technological changes in history? Most benefit a large group of people, while having negative consequences for the smaller group.

I'm not sure what you mean about the photos thing, but there is obviously a benefiting party from the digital background checks. People can get a sense of folks they might date, and potentially avoid dangerous situations. It sucks that that hurts you (assuming your criminal record is not one that people ought to consider dangerous -- if it is, I'm really not sure what to say). But there is a huge group of people that benefit from the increased safety potentially offered by the ability to check up on potential dating partners.

Or, to put it succinctly, why does your interest in hiding your past outweigh the interest of others to know who they are dealing with?

<comment><USER4> Most benefit a large group of people, negative consequences for a smaller group, and provide extreme benefits to a small tiny group.

In terms of Social - Look at youtube videos with millions of views, people spending more time than ever reading about celebrities every ten minutes instead of people around them. Before internet people look at celebrities once a day during their TV sessions, and even before that, only listen about them on radio.

And because people's attention is generally a zero-sum pie, without taking into account population growth, people who weren't good at attracting attention to begin with will lose out.

<comment><USER5> Do you shop at supermarkets? If the store isn't Whole Foods, chances are that the checkout aisle is racked with People Magazine, US, and goes on down from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I used to think that the worst thing in life is to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone." — Robin Williams

</comment><comment><USER7> "Loneliness centres on the act of being seen. When a person is lonely, they long to be witnessed, accepted, desired, at the same time as becoming intensely wary of exposure."

We are all walking the line of putting ourselves out there enough in a meaningful, authentic way to feel an organic connection while also combating a fear (that of course varies with the individual) of vulnerability.

The internet provides a little sugar high to create an artificial sweetness of connectivity but fails to (on its own) provide the nutrients needed for a healthy, complete life.

<comment><USER8> Well spoken. Just perfect.

<comment> lindsey-lohan I liked it too

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel fundamentally different from this author about what the Internet is doing to my interpersonal relationships, but she makes some good points. I like Facebook very well because, duh, my friends are there. I have lived overseas back in the era when I couldn't possibly afford regular international telephone calls, and relying on aerograms (remember those?)[1] to communicate by postal mail meant a rather slow response time to anything I said to old friends back home.

After living overseas twice in my life (two separate three-year stays), I now live in the same metropolitan community where I grew up, as the author didn't when she had the experiences that shaped her opinion. ("My own peak use of social media arose during a period of painful isolation. It was the autumn of 2011, and I was living in New York, recently heartbroken and thousands of miles from my family and friends.") Some of the people I interact with online have known me since almost fifty (!) years ago, a few of them continually over all that while. Those friends who are still in this town I see in person once in a while, but I hear a lot more of their news in between face-meeting through online communication.

Because I've lived in more than one country, and some of my classmates and colleagues and one child have scattered hither and yon, there isn't anywhere on the planet where I can face-meet with all the people I like at the same time, but my second stay overseas (1998-2001) illustrated the power of the Internet to reduce feelings of loneliness and lack of connection while far away from most familiar friends, and helped me learn how to use online networks to enhance real-world friendships. These days, Facebook comes pretty close to being with all my friends all the time, and I like that. I come here on Hacker News, of course, pretty often, and here I can sometimes make a new kind of friend over shared interests.

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

<comment><USER10> I am torn. On one hand, social media has absolutely brought me closer to my family. My family is scattered between Bangladesh, Australia, Canada, and Germany, while my wife's is in Oregon and Washington. Nobody is close to where we live in D.C. But they can all watch my daughter grow up on Facebook.

On the other hand, it's hard to have deep relationships over social media. Tweeting and like-ing are pretty superficial. I feel like the internet has regressed in a way. My late-night conversations over AIM were a lot more meaningful than any interaction I've had over Facebook. Yeah, there's FB Messenger, but it doesn't seem as pervasive or as convenient as AIM was back in the day.

<comment><USER11> For me part of what makes the interactions subpar now is that one or more parties is participating via mobile devices and input on mobile is borked. I am overly eager to be brief since typing on the mobile is so painful. This makes it difficult to have nuanced conversations.

<comment><USER12> I think you hit the nail on the head. My two best college friends and I are all separated now but keep almost daily intellectual communication via gchat. I have to use my phone tho as I work for R&D for a big corp and chat is blocked.

It's aggravating. But then later when I can continue a conversation via keyboard the depth and intimacy is much greater.

Maybe as speech to text improves it'll get better.

<comment><USER13> I've found that Google's speech to text works surprisingly well for me, and I'm not the very best at clarity and enunciation.

I generally know what it's going to mess up in advance so I can just fix that.

Of course, this isn't very useful for an aurally communal work environment like most offices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > My own understanding of loneliness relied on a belief in solid, separate > selves that he saw as hopelessly outmoded. In his worldview, everyone was > perpetually slipping into each other, passing through ceaseless cycles of > transformation; no longer separate, but interspersed.

Social groups, cultures, parents and children, friends. All of these concepts rely on the concept of a connection between solid selves, that allow for the passage of data/information from self to self. The resulting construction is called a culture, a social group, a relationship. It only exists because there exists other conceptual constructs that serve as comparative references.

> Perhaps he was right. We aren't as solid as we once thought. We are embodied > but we are also networks, living on inside machines and in other people's > heads; memories and data streams. We are being watched and we do not have > control.

People's memories and imaginations, these are subject to play and replay, and can result in both (il)logical and (ir)rational inference, independently or socially established. These have been philosophical questions long before they became digital.

</comment><comment><USER15> I utterly loathe online social networks / social networking. They've become a showcase for society's worst and little more.

Great for people who want to sell you something, or push a political ideology on you, or whore attention for themselves but totally devoid of any actual substance.

I've given them their fair shot. I keep a FB account to occasionally touch base with friends back home and that's it. Twitter is a joke and I wish it the worst. The rest aren't even worth mentioning.

</comment><comment><USER16> So, slightly off-topic, but serious question: I don't use FB on principle (tracking, walled garden, evil in various ways), but I also don't know how to convince my "normal" friends to communicate in other ways... Does anyone have suggestions to avoid falling out of contact with faraway people? I emigrate every now and then, and I have yet to maintain connections after having left another city. It's rather frustrating, but is something as evil as FB or Skype or Google+ really the only way to approach this problem?

EDIT: I've re-activated my Diaspora account, but obviously no "normals" are to be found there ;) Perhaps I should start campaigning.

<comment><USER17> Honestly, if you don't have any better reasons not to use Facebook I think you should just stick to it and keep a minimal profile. I'm pretty sure that as soon as something becomes mainstream enough to be used by "normals" you will classify it as evil and not use it out of principle.

<comment><USER16> I hear what you're saying, but my gripe is not at all it's "mainstreamness" \-- it's that FB plays notoriously fast and loose with privacy as well as copyright: I'm not quite prepared to sign off copyright to everything I post (notably photography, for example). Plus, it's also got to do with a US-based company knowing precisely what my social graph looks like that makes me uneasy (although as I said Google mostly knows already, so ok).

> if you don't have any better reasons

Finally, I am curious: don't you think freedom is a reasonable reason? If Diaspora were magically to become mainstream, I'm unlikely to classify it as evil in the same way I would with FB. (i.e. you can transfer away your data, spin up your own server, etc.)

EDIT: also, be the change you would like to see -- if I'm still on Facebook, my friends would have _even less_ incentive to move away than currently, where at least I can convince most people to email me.

<comment><USER17> I'm with you on the copyright stuff. That's why I don't post anything on Facebook - my photo albums and feed are completely empty.

What I'm saying is that you want a tool to keep in touch with your friends and Facebook is that tool. If you don't use it for anything else I wouldn't say freedom is an issue, no.

Anyway, you have some valid and fair points so I won't argue about the rest (privacy, incentive to move away/email etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _My own peak use of social media arose during a period of painful isolation > . . . recently heartbroken and thousands of miles from my family and > friends. In many ways, the internet made me feel safe._

I can relate to this. My peak use of social media was while I was attending university on the other side of the world.

But since a couple of years ago, almost everyone I care about is only a local call away from me. Over the last couple of years, I have drastically reduced my social media usage, and it wasn't because of the Snowden revelations. I just don't feel the need to ping someone on <insert your favorite social network here> when I can just call them up or, even better, meet them IRL.

Having lived for a decade in the second-largest country in the world, my sense of distance also seems to have become a little weird compared to those of others in my home country. Oh, Granny is only a five-hour drive away from me? Why even bother talking on the phone then? I'll just drive there and see her in person this weekend. The less electronics there is between us, the better.

Social media is a fallback option for when there aren't any low-tech alternatives. But if you have healthy legs, there is no need to use a wheelchair with NSA trackers attached to it.

</comment><comment><USER19> "This period coincided with what felt like a profound shift in internet mores. In the past few years, two things have happened: a dramatic rise in online hostility, and a growing awareness that the lovely sense of privacy engendered by communicating via a computer is a catastrophic illusion."

For the most part I enjoyed the article and found it thought-provoking, but I didn't agree with this. A dramatic rise in online hostility? Speaking personally, I haven't seen that.

In my experience, online hostility now is much like it has always been. I've never found it to be in short supply. My Internet use from the start has been closely linked to online discussion forums, and whilst some communities are friendlier than others, I've never known a time that disagreement online was a minor concern.

My favourite website is probably Reddit, which admittedly does house some of the most negative aspects of the human experience, but also some of the most positive aspects. For the most part, you get what you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER20> I can not remotely fathom the use of twitter or even facebook. I have accounts with both even wrote a facebook app but posted maybe a dozen things total and haven't touched either in years. It is utterly unimaginable to me to upload photos of myself at random or post random statements. I haven't a clue how this is keeping in touch.

Likewise the notion that one is in continuous contact with others is also totally alien. I own a couple generations of iphones and androids, wrote some apps for them but otherwise leave them in a drawer. They're there right now batteries dead.

I do not know what percentage of people also think this way, twitter seems to have low penetration but facebook enormous. One thing though is that such people are not posting on the web and so would be under represented.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've always had trouble making friends, I'm weird and kind of intense, while at the same time painfully friendly.

Back in the internets earlier days it felt like I could find friendly people everywhere. It became a safe haven for me, a place I could meet people who shared my interests. I found one of my better friends to this day through an online radio station.

Hell, even early Xbox live was friendly, I had lots of really good conversations with people while playing Gotham Racing.

It really feels like now though I can't even get a conversation started online anymore. Everyone with mics on black is in private parties, IRC rooms seem increasingly unfriendly. The attitude has changed.

I feel increasingly isolated, I feel much like I did before the internet.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wish the internet would be a place where you could organize the co-renting of large apartments to counteract this lonely society.

Also, facebook is not the place where you really can discover the people who live around you, by advertising your skills, interests and potential deals you could have with neighbors. One way to have enough privacy for this, would be to limit the distance or amount of people you can see near you.

I don't really see that much success in social networking app when dealing with localization...

</comment><comment><USER23> I was reminded this video I saw some time ago with a similar title… It's in my YouTube favorites and I'm pasting it here for your consideration: [https://youtu.be/c6Bkr_udado](https://youtu.be/c6Bkr_udado)

You can also have a look at the TED talk the description references. Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER24> "All distances in time and space are shrinking. Man now reaches overnight, by plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel ... Man puts the longest distances behind him in the shortest time. He puts greatest distances behind himself and thus puts everything before himself at the shortest range...

What is happening here when, as a result of the abolition of great distances, everything is equally far and equally near? What is this uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near--is, as it were, without distance?

Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness [sic]. How? Is not this merging of everything into the distancelesss [sic] more unearthly that everything bursting apart?"

\--Excerpts from The Thing, Martin Heidegger circa 1971

</comment><comment><USER25> Here's an interesting Forbes article about what happens when you unplug for a while; [http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2013/02/06/feeling-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2013/02/06/feeling- disconnected-5-reasons-to-unplug-from-technology-after-work/)

It's more of an issue of technology making us interact in ways that are less human. Check out their link on the study about cell users being less likely to display prosocial behavior.

<comment><USER26> Before there was facebook and twitter, there were televisions. It boils down to entertainment and how readily available it is vs how readily available spaces to safely interact with real people are.

If you live in a house, who are you going to go hang out with? Your 2 neighbours? Everybody else takes time to get to. Or you can sit down on the couch and just watch some TV and be entertained without going anywhere. There's never any conflict with a television - hence it is so appealing. You have no real ups, but no real downs. People are largely very risk averse (would much rather not get 2 dollars than lose a dollar)

The solution to people interacting with each other again, is TV/Internet blackouts after 6pm at least half of the week.

When the city I lived in had an electric blackout for 3 days - people came out of their homes and actually talked to one another, it was great. Then everybody went right back to their televisions...

There's no money to be made from people learning to get along with one another and simply talking, playing cards, going for walks... So, not going to happen :) More make-up, clothes, tv-shows and making sure people medicate themselves with overpriced drugs. If people learned to get along via come outside and talk method, the current economy would undergo severe restructuring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I enjoyed this article until they started focusing on "selfies" and social media. Loneliness and human interaction over the internet is a very interesting subject but I feel like the author has only used facebook and instagram. There is no reason to limit this topic to communication platforms built upon exposing your own personal life and connection that with you communication. I think that communication over IRC, blogs, reddit, comments like this and chans are more "pure" in a way and more interesting.

</comment><comment> switch007</comment>


Show HN: Feedback on our app to help Freelancers manage project/client leads? - <AUTHOR>

http://www.jobbrew.com
Would love some feedback on the idea, landing page for an app we hope to launch early next month.
" Jobbrew is an app that makes lead management for freelancers as easy as bookmarking on delicious. Most freelancers scour the web for new clients, they respond to some, bookmark others. Quite often converting a lead to a client takes multiple rounds of discussion or a timely reminder. Still even for the most careful of people, it's easy for some of them to slip through the cracks.
Once you `bookmark` or add a lead on Jobbrew, we'll send you an email(on your chosen date), reminding you to follow up. It also gives you a historical record of all client leads you've collected so far, giving you a vast reserve of people to reach out to during the 'great depression'.
We'll also send personalized list of  new leads straight to your inbox(or your feed reader), along with you weekly indepth stats related to your freelance business on how you're doing, eg. conversion rates, best sources for leads etc. " <comment><USER2> Your interface looks quite similar to some drafts I made a while back about a similar system. I'm still not sure if red, white, & black are easy to the eyes - I think blue is better.

The "Leads" page looks very confusing - there's a lot going on and I'm not sure where to focus. More whitespace would make it easier to digest. A better solution would be to hide the things I don't _rally_ need to see right now (for example, all the contact info for each of my leads), as long as they are just a click away. You also _need_ search.

More important however I still don't get it. What is it exactly that you do? How can I discover clients through you? I do find my self bookmarking sites that I intent to contact for a redesign/consulting gig but never actually do it - is this the problem you are solving?

ps. have you looked at toutapp.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> There're a couple of problems we're trying to solve, which are all related.

1\. Find leads - we aggregate leads from various sources and send them to your inbox etc.

2\. Manage leads - any lead you add/bookmark (via a bookmarklet or forward to a secret inbox), we'll send you reminders to follow up.

3\. Stats - we send you weekly stats to help you gauage your conversion, which sources work best for you etc.

Ultimately we would want features like adding templates just like tout app. But that's not our core feature.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.jobbrew.com> (clickable)</comment>


Show HN: A sample project for Golang - <AUTHOR> I have been using golang at work and personally for more than 2 years now. A problem i faced when I started and the problem new gophers even today is how to structure the project. Most (if not all) golang tutorials seem to be very simple and do not describe how to structure a large application. Following project is an attempt to Showcase a manageable project layout for services in golang.
https://github.com/spy16/droplets
This project is far from complete. Would like to hear some feedback from the community before continuing on this. <comment><USER2> I really appreciate the work done to help newcomers to answer the question "how to structure Go project propertly", but unless you're building N-th microservice in the company with already established project structures, you don't really need to ask that question.

Every single Go program starts with a simple layout - empty directory and main.go file.

Once you start adding things, you create more .go files in the same folder, and only when it grows bigger you start thinking of moving some abstractions into separate packages.

The key difference with most other languages is that in Go folder means "package", not "namespace for bunch or files". It's a crucial difference that important to keep in mind with Go. And what is (sub)package? When do you need new subpackage? It's just a higher level way to abstract logic or system component - make it more isolated than just concrete type, change the naming and usage API to be more clear and self-sustained.

Before that, you don't have to create new packages (=folders) in Go.

The vast majority of all Go projects will never need `internal` or `cmd` folder, not to mention `pkg` or `web`.

Just start with main.go and let it grow naturally. The simpler and easier your package is, the better.

<comment><USER3> When using a single folder structure, how should one go about creating multiple functions with a same name?

I'm creating a web service with Gin, and I have moved each http request handler into its own file. I would like to be able to pass these request handlers to Gin's router with pageA.Handler, pageB.Handler, pageC.Handler, etc, but compiler won't let me because function names have to be unique. Creating unique names for each handler function works fine, but personally it somehow feels messy.

Am I thinking anti-golang way, if I want to namespace these request handlers?

<comment><USER4> Sort of yes. I have never tried Gin and I actually suggest you to use something else, like gorilla/mux, but that said what you describe sounds like several types implementing an interface...

<comment><USER5> If you have never tried Gin why suggest to use something else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You might like to read my BP from 2017: [https://grisha.org/blog/2017/04/27/simplistic-go-web-app- par...](https://grisha.org/blog/2017/04/27/simplistic-go-web-app-part-2/) I have been using this layout in many projects and it worked out really well. When having multiple packages under the same github repo, you sooner or later will run into the problem of what happens if it's forked, I have work-around here: [https://grisha.org/blog/2018/10/18/relative-imports-hack- in-...](https://grisha.org/blog/2018/10/18/relative-imports-hack-in-go/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the work done.

Current project structure felt like non-Go way to me, let me explain why, I always thought go packages should be independent (not sure about sub-packages though)

`encoding/json`, `encoding/gob` they do share concept of encoding/decoding, but contain totally different implementations, types, models, logic inside. whenever you change something in `encoding/gob` package, you don't need to touch `encoding/json`

but in proposed structure. whenever you want to add some logic, you would end up adding stuff in multiple places, starting with `domain`, then `stores`, then `delivery` (but this is exception, since this would be changed anyway as this is view layer), then other places.

Wouldn't it make sense if you update only specific package (except view layer)

let's say, you have `user` package with all necessary models, storage, business logic related to user and dependency from `core/db` package. Now you want to add avatar to user, change only in `user` package and that's all.

same with auth mechanism, call your package as `auth` and have a dependency on `cookies`/`session` and `user` package, if you want to add OAuth2 only change auth, no need to add yet another model to `domain`, want to add token based auth, again just change auth package set/create necessary tokens on top of `session` package using `user.Entity` or `user.GetID(authedEntity)`

<comment><AUTHOR> You are totally right. It would be ideal to have a package called `users` which does everything related to user. But if proper care is not taken while laying out the packages and types that go inside, you might quickly run into cyclic-dependency issues (for the lack of better example: post requiring User type and User requiring post type). This does not happen in encoding/json or enconding/gob because of the fact that they are completely different domains and are simple enough. But in this project for example, they belong to the same domain and user and post entities have a relation between them.

I am not saying it's not possible to move towards the pattern you are suggesting. But since i decided to demonstrate Clean Architecture in this, i went with the current pattern which shows clear boundary between layers. In other words, what is used and what you are suggesting are just 2 patterns having their own advantages and disadvantages. It is probably not appropriate to call one or the other `non-Go way`.

But now that we have discussed this, i am interesting in trying that as well. Not sure if i should refactor or create a new project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I personally love the idea of template projects especially when they follow best practices. I'm a long-time user of [https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter](https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter) and [https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter- pypackage](https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage) which I've modified for my purposes. Has anyone used the golang equivalent under [https://github.com/lacion/cookiecutter- golang](https://github.com/lacion/cookiecutter-golang) ? Any thoughts as to whether it's on par with commonly used practices?

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a useful repo for how to structure a Go project: [https://github.com/golang-standards/project- layout](https://github.com/golang-standards/project-layout)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks, I started learning golang few weeks ago, and had a problem with how to structure my code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Welcome to Golang!. I'm glad you found this useful. But i advise you to look at other patterns as well. This is just one of the patterns that can be used and may not be suitable for all usecases. For example, for smaller projects a much simpler layout with main or importable package at the root would work really well. Just to give an idea, my other project [https://github.com/spy16/radium](https://github.com/spy16/radium) follows a very simple straightforward layout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice work i really like it

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove-eclipsing-nsas.html?_r=1 <comment><USER4> The Drug War seems so out of control and Orwellian at this point, that I unfortunately can't think of any way to stop it, as long as the general public thinks that it's somewhere in the range of "overbearing but necessary" to "annoying and probably evil but doesn't really affect me".

I'm excited by the chinks in the armor that have come with marijuana legalization/decriminalization, and I think once that spreads across much of the US, some of the Drug War will have lost its teeth, but I don't imagine it will make a large dent the surveillance industry.

Now that we have built the infrastructure, conceived of parallel construction, etc there will always be a shadowy enemy lurking in our midst that we need to turn it on. Its kinda like having a giant military-industrial complex. You really can't sustain it without war, yet it has its own momentum and seeks to sustain itself, so it makes war more likely.

<comment><USER5> > The Drug War seems so out of control and Orwellian at this point

A friend of mine, a MBA/PHD fellow who happened to give lectures on one of the most prestige US University, as well as working for very prestige Hedge Fund in NYC, is a great example of this.

In 2007 we was pulled over for a missing stop light. The car was his grandmother and he wasn't aware. As the cop approached him from the right side to look into his glove compartment while he was reaching for registration, the cop noticed a pill on the floor. It happened to be some sort of para-morphine tightly controlled drug that his grandmother used for a pain from her cancer.

No amount of explanation was enough for this cop. Even when his grandma showed up at the police station with bottle of same drug to explain.

Shortly after his life got ruined very quickly. Of course both University and his job found out and he was removed from his duties due to "very strict no drug policies". No amount of explanation was enough. He tried to get another job and over 3 years went from looking jobs at Universities to trying for McDonald waiter, but even they did not want to hire "a druggie".

As he had some savings, it wasn't the worst part. But as he got 6 years parole, being mandatory forced to go to some sort of AA meetings where for 45 minutes a week he had to listen stories of people who couldn't hold a cigarette cause that's how much they got their hands stung by needless, was worst of all nightmares. He even got approached by few drug dealers who happen to often visit those premises to try to recruit new members, and was somewhat glad he had some savings set aside, otherwise he might have gone and really start dealing!

Also he couldn't move out of State until the end of his parole (it would be considered violation) and had to check once a week to the local police station and bring updated drug test, even though he had to pay for those tests from his own pocket. If you think you just come to overcrowded NYC police station and drop a piece of paper at some drop box, then you wrong. Those "visits" usually took about 3-6 hours, depending on how busy they were. Sitting in the line in such a place every week for so long has to be nightmare on its own...

Not to end this tragic story too sad, eventually once his parole ended he moved to his uncle to Alaska and find some peace working on a fish farm. But his drug record will remain in the system for at least next 15 years.

So boys and girls don't "do" drugs....

<comment><USER6> I'm very sorry about your friend, and oppose the DEA, but this is probably something your friend told you to save face if he was wealthy, educated and actually convicted.

Edit: there seems to be some confusion in the replies about my point. This isn't an endorsement of drug laws. We who oppose legal injustice need to have an accurate understanding of how these laws work and what is actually likely to happen in order to be taken seriously, and to prioritize our advocacy for legislation and DoJ rules. I don't believe this story is likely to be true, and that helps me to focus on things that actually happen every day.

<comment><USER7> Your skepticism is not objectively meaningful so i'll offer some of my own useless skepticism. This is probably a belief which helps you sleep at night. I hope you are never forced to confront the reality of our justice system.

<comment><USER6> I really appreciate that you're writing this out of concern for people. I am quite concerned about our legal system, probably more than most (like many in this thread who are similarly concerned), and work regularly to improve it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sadly not much has changed since 2013 and now that we can (hopefully) move past the Trump train wreck and look towards the future via Clinton's policies, it seems to can expect even _more_ of the same from the next president.

Leaked emails shows she sides with law enforcement regarding encryption, publicly she is calling for an "intelligence surge" as a core part of her national security strategy, and in interviews she still strongly stands by her support for the Patriot Act:

[http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/clinton-wont-budge-mass- surveillanc...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/clinton-wont-budge-mass-surveillance- stance-leaked-emails-reveal-1586175)

The people who will end up getting appointed to the various leadership roles is the other big question. Hillary's advisers contain many hold-overs from the Bush-Cheney era, including ex-DHS lead Michael Chertoff who strongly supported the TSA full body scanners (made by the company he went on to work for), who I hope aren't given big roles.

Regardless, all of those cyber contractors in DC, Maryland and Virginia must be excited that their gilded age was given a 4yr extension and likely a further expansion. Not that they were ever at much risk of losing it - <USER2> the majority of the candidates were hawkish from the start of the primaries, the pull of influential thinktanks, and of course the media, with the NYT - <USER3> between fawning over Hillary - publishing daily articles citing 'anonymous intelligence sources' supporting various causes.

There's also been almost entirely silence over surveillance policies from the tech industry/community as far as I can tell. Although typically our industry isn't very political or partisan (until things actually go down like SOPA), so this is not entirely atypical.

Note: most of this is regarding military/defense but it seems to spill over into federal drug and criminal investigations. Drug policies are another big elephant in the room.

<comment><USER9> > _it seems to can expect even more of the same from the next president_

This is the saddest thing about this election. Everyone is so distracted by the Trump buffoonery that a Generic Politician (tm) is going to take the reins and continue policies we've been bitter about for years. And most will see this as a "good thing" ("At least it's not Trump!")

<comment><USER10> Trump gets blame, Hillary gets blame, Dubya gets blame but hello, what about the guy who is in charge for the past 8 years, will he be held accountable?

<comment><USER11> Who is in charge?

<comment> wu-ikkyu Nobody. It's a runaway train. Blaming any one individual is naive and pointless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The drug war is not about drugs, never was, and never will be. Only really stupid, foolish idiots think it's about drugs and those people are used to carry out its atrocities (certainly not the first time in history that's happened). I'm tired of mincing words: If one supports the drug war, one supports murder, slavery, hate, and oppression. It's not possible to support the drug war and be a decent, moral human being.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to take this opportunity to enumerate some of the benefits of legalizing all drugs:

1\. Instant 50% reduction in prison population. More than half of all prisoners are there for drug crimes [1]. It costs 20-40k/year to house a prisoner [2]. There are approximately 2.2 million prisoners the US [3]. That equates to an instantaneous savings of $6.6 billion.

2\. Elimination of the DEA. Instantaneous savings of $2 billion [3].

3\. Massive reduction in crimes that are _caused_ by drugs. E.g. theft, assault, etc. Personally, i'd estimate that as making up the bulk of the other 50% of all crime. Of course, I can't back that up with any data, but it makes logical sense to me that the majority of crime that happens is in one way or another connected to drugs.

4\. Drug cartels disappear essentially overnight. Yes, they might switch to kidnapping or extortion or something. But those are not hyperscale businesses. They would evaporate to the point of irrelevance almost immediately.

5\. Street gangs disappear or dramatically lose influence. Why fight a turf war if there's no money to be made on the turf? Sure, some will still happen. But they'll be dramatically reduced and the ones that remain will be severely underfunded.

6\. Police and the communities they serve will no longer be enemies. Drug use is a victimless crime, and people resent being shaken down and arrested on suspicion of drug dealing and/or using. If drugs were legalized, police would only arrest people who are antagonizing others. This would go an enormous way towards healing the divide between police and citizens.

7\. No more impure, uncertain drugs. Things would be labelled correctly and their doses standardized. This should dramatically reduce accidental overdose deaths, and improve the health and wellbeing of addicts by eliminating the nasty stuff their drugs are cut with.

8\. Reliable, cheap supply for addicts. Being an addict involves an enormous amount of wasted time and money. It's extraordinarily difficult to hold a job, because just getting the drugs takes lots of time, waiting, and exposure to risk. Now, there are other reasons it's hard to hold a job as an addict, but these are big factors.

9\. Massive reduction in social stigma around addiction and drug use. This is a double-edged sword, of course. But I think on balance it'd be a good thing. It would make it easier and less shameful for addicts to seek treatment. Taking it out of the underworld would make families more aware of their member's possibly spiraling problems, and give them an earlier opportunity to do something about it.

10\. The way i'd like this to be structured would be that the government would sell these drugs in unmarked shops at essentially their marginal cost of production (which is extremely low). They wouldn't advertise, obviously, and you could implement reasonable age controls by checking ID in a similar way to alcohol. Now, that system is imperfect obviously. But that's ok I think. It's not like kids don't have access to drugs now. Monitoring and maintaining open lines of communication with these people will allow them to be studied and given access to treatment options and help. They can be guided into jobs and offered medical help with detox.

I say all of this as a former heroin addict. It's easy availability would make it somewhat harder for me not to use it. On balance though, it seems extremely clear to me that it's the right thing to do. The synergy of all the policing/crime benefits would be extraordinarily profound. The enormous reduction in crime and improved relationship between police and their communities would make police even more efficient at stopping what remaining crime there is. It would not surprise me in the slightest to see something like a 75-80% reduction in all crime within the first couple of years.

That isn't even to address the benefits to narco-states like Mexico. There it would be truly transformative. Terrorism would lose its largest funding source [5]. Border patrol agents would stop facing well-funded adversaries. The civil war in Colombia would stop. Corruption in government would be reduced to standard corporatism. The list is just endless, and it's not like drugs aren't available now.

What, really, is the marginal harm of making them slightly more available, when weighed against all of this? In my opinion, the drug war and its effects are the greatest ongoing crime against humanity in the world right now.

[1] [https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...](https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp)

[2] [http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average- cost...](http://thelawdictionary.org/article/what-is-the-average-cost-to- house-inmates-in-prison/)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Enforcement_Administratio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Enforcement_Administration)

[5] [http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-financing/tracking-down- terrori...](http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-financing/tracking-down-terrorist- financing/p10356#p1)

<comment><USER14> For the most part, I completely agree with you. I'm supportive of drugs being legalized and sold - even the drugs I wouldn't personally do. I do think your first two points are slightly flawed, however.

 _1\. Instant 50% reduction in prison population. More than half of all prisoners are there for drug crimes [1]. It costs 20-40k /year to house a prisoner [2]. There are approximately 2.2 million prisoners the US [3]. That equates to an instantaneous savings of $6.6 billion._

It will cut new admittance to prisons. Anyone currently serving time would need their sentences pardoned or legislation passed that allows for their released. Over time, still savings.

 _2\. Elimination of the DEA. Instantaneous savings of $2 billion._

We'll still need some enforcement of the controls we put in place, though we can do it through other branches -likely something like a combination of the FDA, USDA, and the ATF. Lesser cost savings, but much better sort of spending.

Furthermore, I'm definitely into having marked shops for some drugs. I think smoke shops/coffee shops (for pot and hash) would be an improvement to the culture and give some alternative to bars. I'm fine with some hallucinogens being sold in a marked shop - and anything else that proves to be about as safe. I'd also make sure anyone working in the shops - either marked or unmarked - had some training or have training levels - basic knowledge for cashier with more advanced knowledge person on premisis at all times.

<comment><USER13> > We'll still need some enforcement of the controls we put in place, though we > can do it through other branches -likely something like a combination of the > FDA, USDA, and the ATF. Lesser cost savings, but much better sort of > spending.

Under a partial legalization regime, yes. Personally i'm thinking they should all be legalized, though. The drug shops can be self-funding by charging slightly above marginal cost.

> Furthermore, I'm definitely into having marked shops for some drugs. I think > smoke shops/coffee shops (for pot and hash) would be an improvement to the > culture and give some alternative to bars. I'm fine with some hallucinogens > being sold in a marked shop - and anything else that proves to be about as > safe. I'd also make sure anyone working in the shops - either marked or > unmarked - had some training or have training levels - basic knowledge for > cashier with more advanced knowledge person on premisis at all times.

Ya I agree. I'd like to see the 'less harmful' drugs, like marijuana and hallucinogens completely legalized. Like, you can buy them at 711 legalized. For 'harder' stuff like cocaine, meth, heroin, et al, i'd like to see them sold by the unmarked government-run drug shops that don't advertise or try to encourage consumption in any way. That feels like the best balance of interests.

<comment><USER14> For the first bit - I actually meant with full legalisation in government run shops with that. What you describe - I'm pretty fully in agreement with. Just details.

I mean, they'll have to have ways to verify potency in production. Heroin, if injected, will probably get some oversight like a drug. A infrastructure for the stores - I'd imagine in the states it'd be contracted out to someone private, but that still costs money. Spot tests for potency. USDA would wind up involved in the actual plant base: I don't know who covers imports from other countries where it is also legal. Then you have tax collection, cleanliness standards, and things like that.

Overall, I think it would save a good amount of money - especially when you consider 5-10 years out. The better part is that once it levels out some, the costs seem more are more predictable.

Edit: Accidentally deleted to much on a rewording, and added it back in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's crazy that "decades of Americans' phone calls" is even a thing stored some place.

<comment><USER4> and text messages, and skype calls, and...

<comment><USER16> I thought Skype calls used to be P2P

<comment><USER17> The Skype developers tried to let us know many many years ago: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/fishywang/318591561](https://www.flickr.com/photos/fishywang/318591561)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ohh that BS war on drugs again! How come banks get to get away with measly fines for laundering cartel drug money for do long? 100s of billions of dollars per year of drug money flow through the banking system, sure its profitable to pay the fines when you have so much guaranteed cash flow every year. Banks Get caught red handed laundering drug money. Banks don't Get shut down, CEO s don't go to jail?! Wtf? Ohh no messing with banks is hard , let's just wiretap every potential criminal in the country citizens won't do anything to resist this any way. They will just swallow this BS war on drugs story. I'm just a regular citizen I got nothing to hide!

<comment><USER19> Banks have better lobbyists.

<comment><USER18> Scarface was not too far from the truth. Except these days they don't bring in bags of money through the front door.... Well I take it back. May be in Mexico it it's still the case! Lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like The Wire could make a come-back

</comment><comment><USER20> "The Northwest HIDTA has recently utilized Hemisphere to track known Canadian phones roaming in the U.S. on the AT&T network" \-- we are really going to have to do something blatant and disrespectful for Canada to finally hate us, aren't we? This seems well outside the scope of the DEA. Monitoring the phones of citizens of other countries can't lead to good/happy things.

</comment><comment><USER21> Seems kind of fishy the timing of this. Right after AT&T announced plans to purchased Time Warner.

edit: Nevermind I'm blind.

<comment><USER19> What is fishy about this, if anything, is that if it's supposed to be a hit on AT&T there was a much more recent accounting of their troubling shenanigans in facilitating parallel construction just yesterday:

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is- spy...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on- americans-for-profit.html)

Maybe the repost is supposed to be a diversion, is what I'm implying. However, I see the new story has been posted already:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12787065)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> EFF has further information on this:

[https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere](https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere)

I ran across this trying to see if there was earlier public mention. Rather good conspiracy containment if not.

</comment><comment><USER23> Piece in the Daily Beast says it's not just Drug Agents, but that it's also used by local municipalities and to investigate medicare fraud among others.

<comment><USER24> [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is- spy...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on- americans-for-profit.html)

 _However, AT &T's own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud.

Hemisphere isn't a "partnership" but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company's massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public._

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have easy solution to really cripple global drug trade. Stop drug money flows = cripple drug flows. If a bank gets caught with drug money laundering - all executives loose bonuses and golden parachutes, their salaries go down to average household salary for that year. Done! Watch them Then really clean up the banking system in a couple of years!

<comment><USER25> An "easy solution" in the Trump sense, ie. simplistic and ignoring common sense and reality.

<comment><USER18> Banks launder drug money. It is a fact. HSBC, BofA, JPM ... all of them are involved.

Fines clearly dont work. We have drug epidemic currently in the united states. What other solutions do you suggest that will stop the drug money flows? I say bend over the banks - but no one of course will do that ;)

<comment><USER26> I wish someone did a detailed analysis on the whole drug supply chain, in order to determine the best place in the chain for intervention.

I bring this up as I remember a fascinating security economics paper that examined the economics of spam and its non-obvious conclusions regarding a good intervention point: [http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2014/readings/trajectories.pd...](http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2014/readings/trajectories.pdf)

Does anyone here know of a similar study for the drug supply chain?

<comment><USER18> The best places for intervention: 1. banks and offshore accounts (full transparency) 2.Transportation via private planes. Make it impossible to move large amounts of money using non transparent mechanisms. Make it impossible to move drugs via private planes. (most large drug shipments are moved via private airplanes).

[http://nypost.com/2015/05/22/smuggler-with-ton-of-cocaine- cr...](http://nypost.com/2015/05/22/smuggler-with-ton-of-cocaine-crashes-his- plane-into-the-ocean/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> (2013); related to current reporting discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788853](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12788853)

</comment><comment><USER28> This should be flagged as being from 2013...

</comment><comment><USER29> anyone else laugh at the 2003 version of powerpoint for those sweet pie graphs... are we really that worried?</comment>


Going Fast Slowly - <AUTHOR> https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/thatslow.html <comment><USER2> Looking at the static picture is somewhat misleading. The lines of code you see in the current baseline snapshots are not all the lines that were ever written for that project.

A fairly large and extensive commit _affecting_ many lines can have a small impact on the absolute number of lines (which can even shrink). We _change_ as well as _delete_ existing lines, not only add new ones.

The lines which are replaced by new lines should be regarded as deleted lines, and so the figure of how many lines there are now should be supplemented with how many lines were deleted since the beginning of the project: how many additional lines of code exist in the repo's history, which no longer appear in the current baseline.

The invisible lines that disappeared in the history are the underpinning for the current lines; they enabled the new lines to be figured out, which took work. Someone had to write each line, and it has to be counted in the LOC output.

It is not entirely clear cut. If you make a trivial change in some existing line, it's not the same thing as a brand new line. Yet, according to the line- based diff tools, it looks like a deletion and addition of an entire line. Minus this, plus that.

</comment><comment><USER3> >> Varnish has been in existence for 10 years, so that's 15K lines per year. 200 workdays a year makes that 75 lines a day. _7.5 hours of work per day gives 10 lines per hour._

You can't really say that, though.

Let's roll back the clock to when the project was new and say, only 10k lines of code. Maybe that first 10k was written in a month. Fleshing things out, then adding features like crazy. Coding in a euphoric state.

Once you've reached a certain amount of code, you're doing maintenance. Fixing bugs. Re-factoring code. I can see 10 lines of code per day. I notice that in my own projects. I might write a few thousand lines in a week and then as time goes on, I write a few hundred, then a few tens, then maybe just a couple edits.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. One of my past jobs was maintaining a mature codebase that had been under incremental development for over a decade. Most of the bug fixes I made involved anywhere from 2 hours to 2 days of investigation, usually followed by a one or two line change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "I no longer think about code lines as an asset to be accumulated, but rather as an expenditure to be avoided."

Good quote. Took me until my 30s before I started realizing this myself. Seems obvious in retrospect.

<comment><USER6> "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." -- Bill Gates

<comment><USER7> Also relevant: [http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The two CVEs against Varnish were both utterly bogus "trophy-hunter" CVEs in > my opinion. (But don't take my word for it, judge for yourself.)

ok

> CVE-2013-4484: Varnish before 3.0.5 allows remote attackers to cause a > denial of service (child-process crash and temporary caching outage) via a > GET request with trailing whitespace characters and no URI.

:|

</comment><comment><USER9> >> And eventually I no longer think about code lines as an asset to be accumulated, but rather as an expenditure to be avoided.

Maybe I'm a bit odd, but I got into programming with code golf, using lots of J, K, and others. So my growth has been the opposite. It was just last year that I realized it's okay (and maybe necessary?) for other people to read/understand my scripts.

<comment><USER10> Even if slightly correlated I believe you are talking about a different issues and scale.

It is definitely good if other people can read your code, so you use great name convention and maybe add comments here and there, but is definitely better if people don't have to read your code because your code simply doesn't exist.

If you can achieve the same result with a careful design, a lot of hours of thinking and very few hours of typing, supposing that the design and the code is understandable by your peers, your code will be "more valuable" that if you achieved the same result with a lot of code.

Code is a liability is not ab asset.

<comment><USER9> That's true, I shouldn't have compared my experience as a grad student in science to a project like Varnish.

> Code is a liability is not ab asset.

That's a great quote. I guess there's a sweet spot. Maybe, if only a handful of people need to be able to understand what you wrote, then the sweet spot can be skewed toward the terse end of the spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Slovak proverb: "ponáhľaj sa pomaly" \-- Be not hasty, when you hurry.

<comment><USER11> English has "more haste, less speed" which I think carries the same message.

<comment><USER2> What I don't understand is why the most literal translation into English, which is equally succinct, doesn't "work" somehow. Namely the translation: "hurry slowly".

It's just so awkward. Yet the grammar isn't bad; there is nothing wrong with "walk slowly" or "eat slowly".

"Ponáhľaj sa pomaly" is perfectly euphonic to the Slovak ear, while "hurry slowly" seems clumsy somehow. We need to make it more sophisticated somehow, like "make slow haste", or "slow haste makes faster" or whatever.

What is the reason ...

I suppose; if everyone said "hurry slowly!" it might wear into usage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> EWD talks about lines of code as "lines spent" instead of lines produced, this is 1988 :)

[https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103...](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> I really like Douglas McIlroy concept of negative code _.

Also, the varnish source is really nice! Pen kode ;)

_[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/103807/what-i...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/103807/what- is-negative-code)

</comment><comment><USER14> Using git can you also see the times a single line was changed? I bet the numbers jump quite a bit. Sure you've got a 200 line program but over time you've written 20k lines!</comment>