The Rise of China and the Fall of the 'Free Trade' Myth - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/magazine/the-rise-of-china-and-the-fall-of-the-free-trade-myth.html <comment><USER2> I feel the article speaks to my own cultural bias, and I liked it but now I'm suspicious I liked it because I agreed with so much it said.

The last comment, about re-joining the TPP: It is unstated but I feel true (none the less) that if the US rejoins the TPP it will be a vastly different outcome to a US led TPP. Australia was screwed over by the last trade round, and significant economic disadvantage lay in the major US ally in the region (Australia is one of "five eyes" in the secrets sharing intelligence circuit) agreeing to roll over on trade for sectional US interests. The current TPP may suck, but it sucks a lot less regarding US demands on IPR, and other US favouring trade positions.

If the US rejoins, these will not be core issues for the current participants. If they negotiate a China facing TPP you can be sure its both favouring China, and very probably more equitable to the other participants than a US cast one, for clear reasons: It helps China in the long term, to the be the centre of the trading nexus.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think the author understands what free trade is:

"Regardless of the mystical properties claimed for it, the invisible hand of self-interest depends on the visible and often heavy hand of government. To take only one instance, British gunboats helped impose free trade on 19th- century China — a lesson not lost on the Chinese."

I.e. the gunboats _removed_ the Chinese heavy hand on trade. The "invisible hand" cannot operate when the government restricts it.

The role of government in free trade is to prevent forcible interference with it.

"It was Hamilton's formula, rather than free trade, that made the United States the world's fastest-growing economy in the 19th century and into the 1920s."

That's quite a reach. The US's biggest market at the time was itself, and the Constitution ensured free trade between the states. It was the world's biggest free trade zone.

"World War II proved only a brief interruption in Japan's policy of protection."

Japan was not an economic powerhouse before WW2. It was massively unable to compete with the US economically. It could not replace the combat losses of equipment. Etc.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't help these days that when you hear a 'free trade agreement' being signed between countries its usually not actual 'free trade'but highly regulated for mutual self interest.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't seem to really clash with the author's thesis that "free trade" advocates are not taking their own medicine.

<comment><USER6> Many are not, indeed. But if you care about the truth, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates. You have to challenge the arguments in the chapter on international trade of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's _Modern Principles of Economics_ , and you have to refute the central point. _The New York Times_ and Hacker News do not require that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder about this:

> But to grasp China's economic achievement, and its ramifications, it is > imperative to ask: Why has a market economy directed by a Communist state > become the world's second-largest?

Was China ever really a communist state? They've said so, of course, and talked the talk. But maybe it's more accurate to say the China remains a Confucian state. With an overlay that looks a lot more like fascism / national socialism than communism.

<comment><USER8> Come on. China is no utopia—it isn't even a country I would want to live in—but equating them to Nazis instantly discredits your arguments.

The Chinese model is unique, and why shouldn't it be? They are the first country in history of their size to industrialize and become a world power.

Let's stop making cute generalizations that only serve to make ourselves feel better and think of what we actually don't like about their system of government so we can fix it in our own. "The Chinese are Nazis!!" doesn't help anyone.

<comment><USER7> I never said Nazi. What I'm getting at is the emphasis on strong leadership, and the belief that businesses should serve the national interest.

<comment><USER5> You said "national socialism," which is, quite literally, the ideology that "Nazi" is shorthand for.

<comment><USER7> OK, so I should have limited it to fascism, given that "national socialism" has become so closely identified with German Nazism. It was opponents who labeled the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" as the "Nazi Party". And there was a lot more idealistic socialism there, before Hitler and his associates took over and created what we know as Nazism.[0]

0) [http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_19_04_06_znamenski.pd...](http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_19_04_06_znamenski.pdf).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very relevant book, [http://www.anthempress.com/kicking-away-the- ladder](http://www.anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder)

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't think China is the only winner of Free Trade here. China did have a large surplus, but isn't that most of the profits go to American and European companies? Why that money wasn't going back to America is a myth itself.

After three decades of industrialization, China's environment undergoes tragic damage, and the country gradually loses the ability to feed itself. Today China imports more than 20% of its food supply. As the aging workforce retires, China's future outlook is not very bright. I hope you understand, not all the grass is green in China.

</comment><comment><USER11> The most recent thing I have heard about china, repeated by people who man editorial positions in news papers you read, is that China is now the dominant super power. America just doesn't know it yet.

I suspect this is entirely true.

And as added ammunition for this article - the poor prime minister, but excellent finance minister of India - Manmohan Singh, focused on the Korean Model a lot earlier on. It influenced the way the Indian markets opened.

There's only 1 book written about MMS, and in that book theres a telling interaction, where Manmohan (Much before his days as PM) was upset that the author (then a reporter), didn't mention Manmohan's stance on the Korean model in an article.

<comment><USER12> True, but China is also at the very top of it's game, and it's success came at a rather extreme cost. Mind-boggling debt, smog in all the major cities up to LETHAL levels at times (and something like 80% of the time above cancer- in-10-years levels), no army to speak of, legendary levels of corruption (and centuries of history of corruption).

And to top it all off, China's labor market is currently the highest it'll be for the next century or so. It's all downhill from here. China's economic dominance through cheap labor is under severe threat, and they're losing. That loss is causing economic unreast (tens of millions of job losses) in the China.

China also legendary when it comes to outright lying about their accomplishments. From scientific advancements in Fusion energy to amounts of iron ore in ports, China has been caught lying so often that economists seriously think 80%-90% of government statistics are outright falsified, with often strong arguments about the remaining 10%. Unfortunately, their leadership is equally famous for believing the lies, right up to the point that they marched a fleet of ships under British cannons, with substandard hulls and without ammunition. You see, the general of that fleet had assured them the ammunition was there, several of his officers had written the central government that he was lying. Whichever was the truth, the fleet was devastated, the general survived and wasn't even fired. Thousands of soldiers and something like 40% of the total Chinese navy was lost. Legendary.

There are so many things that could go incredibly wrong here. Economists aren't kidding when they say China might start WW3. They might have to.

<comment><USER13> This. I mean I feel like anyone could make an awesome economy if they were given trillions and trillions of loans, told they could ignore all environmental regulations, and had, at least initially, a bottomless pool of cheap labor with no rights.

Of course it looks like they're "winning". They will lose, and ultimately it will be a tragedy for the Chinese people when standards of living collapse and the true ability to repress people with modern technology begins to show.

<comment><USER5> > This. I mean I feel like anyone could make an awesome economy if they were > given trillions and trillions of loans, told they could ignore all > environmental regulations, and had, at least initially, a bottomless pool of > cheap labor with no rights.

I mean, how is this different from the US or British Industrial Revolutions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Free trade vs protectionism is not a one dimensional spectrum. I can't recommend How Asia Works highly enough as a source of nuance in why protectionism has worked for some and not others.

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Joe- Studwell/dp/080212...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Joe- Studwell/dp/0802121322)

</comment><comment><USER15> Finally after the middle class in US has been hollowed out and everything that could be shipped over there was, we get the real story. There are scoundrels in (former) US government and industry who sold out this country lock, stock, barrel for their own greed.

</comment><comment><USER5> I more or less agreed with the thesis before reading the piece, but I found this piece quite interesting. I usually like Pankaj Mishra (and have since I read his stinging takedown of Niall Ferguson's work). Thank you for sharing this.

</comment><comment><USER16> The US has been the champion of free trade assuming that it was win-win or that if would win when others loose.

As soon as it looses while others are winning (in some areas) they are trying to bend (again) the rules on their favor.

The American era has been a waste: one country trying by all means to impose its agenda, to claim its divine right to progress and dominance, to unfairly try to control the rest of the economic actors. Let's hope the Chinese era is more fair and balanced.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Ha! Chinese economic policy is proudly mercantilistic. They have no pretentions towards a balanced playing field. China will do what is best for China.

<comment><USER16> As has the US, to the point (just one example) of lying on the Security Council to justify taking control of relevant geopolitical resources. It didnt even work.

Not only covertly America First, but also incompetent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I sense a lot of mood affiliation in the title that I'm sure will earn the New York Times a lot of clicks. China is the biggest success story of free trade in the history of the world, and the contrarian take presented here is absurd to the point of silly.

Liberalization is a matter of degree. You can't cherry pick a particular protectionist policy South Korea had and then say, "Oh look see they used import substitution and still had a good outcome." You have to also explain why that import substitution policy didn't ruin the Korean economy the way it did Argentina, or in an extreme example, Maoist China. And what you'll find is that they became much more liberal in other ways.

If you're going to claim that liberalism doesn't matter you need to show your work. You need to show that in aggregate, countries that liberalize their economies do less well than countries with less liberal economies. But when you look at the data, you will find just the opposite: Countries that move in a liberal direction, like China, South Korea, and Chile, tend to improve their outcomes, while those that do not, like Argentina or Zimbabwe, tend to stagnate. And almost every wealthy country in the world is either highly liberalized or sitting on an ocean of crude oil. The fact that even liberal countries have illiberal policies doesn't disprove the benefits of liberalization.

Most likely, Asia succeeded in spite of protectionism, not because of it.

<comment><USER18> China succeeded because it was in the prime position to take advantage of western manufacturing looking to move production facilities elsewhere for wage arbitrage. Right place, right time to reap massive export surpluses - and they were smart enough to use the opportunity to have built up a domestic market/technical knowledge base when wages inevitably started to raise and manufacturers began to move elsewhere again. You're going to see a lot less 'liberalization', and probably some reversals, in China in the coming years.

<comment><USER6> Rather mostly China succeeded because it had a population larger than any other country. Production depends primarily on resources and human labor is one of the most valuable resources. It is no surprise that population count is strongly correlated with nominal GDP.

This should be completely obvious.

It also refutes the author's argument. Why has a market economy directed by a Communist state become the world's second-largest?! Would Friedman find it hard to explain why China, run by a Communist Party, has emerged as central to the global capitalist economy!? China has 19% of the world population but roughly 10% of the world GDP. It is 79th in GDP per capita at purchasing power parity. We should not evaluate a country's economic policies by looking at its nominal GDP without also looking at its population—this is nothing Friedman would have difficulty explaining.

<comment><USER17> > Rather mostly China succeeded because it had a population larger than any > other country

…is that also why India "succeeded"?

<comment><USER6> Yes, at least in the sense of succeeding the article talks about. India is the third country in the world by GDP at purchasing power parity, which is consistent with its population being second largest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article makes me sad. Not because I believe its true but because other people will.

I really don't want to write a 3000 word comment in response to this article. After all, only a few people will read it and those that do will not read it with the seriousness of a New York Times article.

I'm very disappointed in this piece. Half truths, omitted details, and bad history all rolled into Communist apologia.

For those who do not have time to read paste the headline: one sided "free" trade agreements benefit one side. Who would have thought? All other "conclusions" the author draws from this fact have no bearing on reality.

<comment><USER5> I don't really care for commentary like this. Either argue with the piece or don't; don't bore us with how you're sad that people will find it persuasive without bothering to refute any of its ideas.

<comment><USER19> > Either argue with the piece or don't

There are more options than A or B. By expressing displeasure with the article I can at the least demonstrate there are other viewpoints.

There is a large wealth of knowledge and information out there. All of it detailing how China owes its economic success to economic liberalization.

This article stands out for its contrarianism. That's why it will get some many clicks and comments as opposed to yet another study proving what we already know. If anything I should be lamenting the "death" of "popular knowledge". If knowledge isn't constantly in flux its "boring" and not worth reading. Thus knowledge must constantly change for papers like the NYTimes to continue to exist.

Imagine if a Creationist wrote an article in "Nature" (the scientific journal). What would you say in response? What would you say if it was well received? Would you rebut the same old lies over and over and over again or would you just be sad that the world never seems to learn?

<comment><USER5> Considering the piece is a polemic against a different view, I don't see how you could possibly read and it and walk away confused as to whether a different view exists.

<comment><USER19> Yes of course but you could be confused as to the popularity of the two views.

Again, why doesn't the journal Nature run a piece detailing how "evolution got it wrong"? Because it is incorrect and unnecessarily muddies the water. Because "Nature" has a shred of credibility and wishes to keep it. It is certainly possible to point to blind spots in our knowledge and say "Hah, you can't explain that!" Or to point at past errors and say "Hah, you're always getting it wrong!"

It is up to the paper or journal to screen such plainly and obviously fallacious information. Or at the very least categorize it in such a way that it is plainly evident that these are emerging or not-widely-held viewpoints.

<comment><USER5> It is less than "plainly obvious," to me, that Japan, South Korea, and China (not to mention the older historical examples of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, which are mentioned but get less attention in the piece) were all successful in their project of industrialization in spite of, rather than because of, common traits of the paths they all took to get there. Certainly I would not consider it comparable to arguing against evolution to claim the opposite.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


France wants Tesla to transform its old nuclear plant into a car factory - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/cars/2016/04/tesla-france-old-car-factory/ <comment><USER2> Segolene Royal .... not really a reference in realistic politics. Still it is interesting that a country with strong conventional car manufacturer would invite a disrupting company like Tesla to invest on its soil.</comment>


Facebook adds new google now like notification feature to it's apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.phonearena.com/news/Facebook-adds-new-notification-feature-to-its-iOS-and-Android-apps_id75121 <comment><USER2> its* apps</comment>


Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html <comment><USER2> For all people that think this is still a issue: it is not:

* Arch Linux: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_filesystem_hierarc...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_filesystem_hierarchy)

* Fedora: [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove)

* Debian: [https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge](https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge)

* Ubuntu: [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/Specs/Quantal/UsrMer...](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/Specs/Quantal/UsrMerge)

And this is true for quite a long time. I think the last distro that did /usr merge is Debian and this is already 3 years ago. So I find surprising that people still thinks that this is a issue.

The only thing that remains is the difference between bin and sbin that Fedora/Ubuntu/Debian still maintain (Arch Linux simply merged everything).

P.S.: of course, there should be still distros that use a split /bin /usr/bin, /lib and /usr/lib, etc. OpenWRT is one of them. However I think the major distros already migrated.

<comment><USER3> Arch still occasionally has some packages installed to /opt. Annoying as hell, but they expect to be there for some reason. Android-studio was the latest unexpected surprise for me.

<comment><USER4> I've seen distros choose /opt for software not built by the maintainers, but simply repackaged in binary form. This would include software like oracle/sun java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nitpicking:

If you look at the very early versions of the Unix manuals, before even /lib was invented, there was a notion that /bin was the "system" (section 1) and /usr/bin was "user software" (section 6). This fell by the wayside when they ran out of disk space on / and started putting section 1 commands in /usr/bin. At some point the system/user distinction was abandoned and everything but the games got moved to section 1 of the manual.

(Back in those early days /lib files used to be in /etc. So did /sbin. There's still a meaningful semantic difference between programs any user could run vs programs only useful to root.)

On *BSD there is no initramfs equivalent and the / partition still serves its traditional role of the minimal startup environment. And /home never existed before Linux - it was always something like /usr/home as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER6> I can't help think that initramfs is a pox on Linux. It seems to lead to all kinds of "solutions" that are bothersome at best to maintain unless you have big dollars at your back.

<comment><USER7> I've never quite understood it myself.

It's far from mandatory (I've run Gentoo for years without it) and when you have to fix stuff in the mkinitrd script, you just cry...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> NixOS is one of the few distros that recognizes and solves this problem:

[https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html](https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html)

A solution like theirs should become the default. Their transactional, package management too given the number of times my Linux packages got broken by some ridiculous crap. That even a smaller outfit could knock out two problems, one major, shows these bigger distros could be gradually knocking out such issues themselves.

<comment><USER9> It's a lot more work to retroactively impose a new FS layout on an existing distribution than to come up with a new distribution.

If e.g. Ubuntu did this then

1) They'd have to fix all of the packages in the main repository, and then PPAs?

2) Lots of third party software targeted on Ubuntu would break; this would cause a lot of users to want to stay on pre-change versions of Ubuntu, which probably means it would get forked.

<comment><USER8> "They'd have to fix all of the packages in the main repository, and then PPAs?"

The NixOS site made it look like they didn't have to do that with their solution: just give a meta-view on what's already there for the users.

"Lots of third party software targeted on Ubuntu would break; this would cause a lot of users to want to stay on pre-change versions of Ubuntu, which probably means it would get forked."

This could happen with any number of changes. Might still be worth it for at least major changes like making broken packages recoverable. I can't imagine myself getting off Ubuntu just because package failures can't brick my system anymore. Some developers might gripe about having to make changes but that makes them look like assholes, not Ubuntu.

I mean, VMS had this feature in the 80's with their versioned filesystem and transactions at app level. It's about time at least the package managers of Linux can do same reliably for apps. At least one of them did to their credit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting.

First there was /bin for the things that UNIX provided and /usr/bin for the things that users provided. Part of the system, it lived in /bin, optional? it lives in /usr/bin.

In SunOS 4 (and BSD 4.2 as I recall) the introduction of shared libraries meant you needed a "core" set of binaries for bootstrap and recovery which were not dynamically linked, and so "static" bin or /sbin (and its user equivalent /usr/sbin) came into existence. Same rules for lib. /lib for the system tools, /usr/lib for the optional user supplied stuff.

Then networking joined the mix and often you wanted to mount a common set of things from a network file server (saved on precious disk space) but there were things you wanted locally, that gave use /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib. Then in the great BSD <==> SVR3.2 merge AT&T insisted on everything optional being in /opt which had a kind of logic to it. Mostly about making packages that could be installed without risking system permission escapes.

When Linux started getting traction it was kind of silly that they copied the /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin stuff since your computer and you are the only "user" (usually) so why not put everything in the same place, (good enough for Windows right?)

File system naming was made more important by the limited permission controls on files, user, group, and other is pretty simplistic. ACLs "fixed" that limitation but the naming conventions were baked into people fingers.

The proliferation of places to keep your binaries lead to amazingly convoluted search paths. And with shared libraries and shared library search paths even more security vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER11> > _good enough for Windows right?_

Only in the minds of people who don't know much about Windows.

The Windows model is, after all, for globally installed individual packages to be largely rooted at "/Program Files/%COMPANY_OR_PERSON%/%PACKAGE%/" with "%USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/%COMPANY_OR_PERSON%/%PACKAGE%/" as a root for per-user data. The former dates all of the way back to Windows NT 3.5, the latter "merely" dating back to Windows NT 4 (where it was "Application Data" rather than "AppData").

* [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cjacks/2008/02/05/where-sho...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cjacks/2008/02/05/where-should-i-write-program-data-instead-of-program-files/)

Unix and Linux people will recognize this as akin to NeXTSTEP's ~/Apps, /LocalLibrary, /LocalApps, and so forth from the early 1990s; and to Daniel J. Bernstein's /package hierarchy (for package management without the need for conflict resolution) from the turn of the century.

* [http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html](http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html)

* [http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html](http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html)

And a few years after NeXTSTEP introduced its directory hierarchy, SunOS 5 (a.k.a. Solaris 2) introduced the System 5 Release 4 /usr merge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what is more likely in our lifetimes - a sane Linux filesystem layout, or viable fusion power. Honestly I'm not sure.

<comment><USER13> gobolinux - [http://gobolinux.org/](http://gobolinux.org/) \- has had a completely different filesystem layout, for many years. It's languished in the past few.

archlinux has for a couple of years symlinked /bin, /sbin, and /usr/sbin to /usr/bin, and /lib, /lib64 to /usr/lib [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/arch_filesystem_hierarc...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/arch_filesystem_hierarchy)

If you make your own linux distro from scratch, you can get many of the open source pieces of a linux distro to use whatever layout you want, while some pieces do require patching and fixing ... but you do have the source :)

<comment><USER14> The problem with Gobo is that this progression never works:

New FS Layout -> User Adoption -> Profit

Because at the end of the day the layout of the filesystem is never the selling point on any given distro. It _always_ comes down to the software - either the amount of it, or the newness of it, and that is why people flock to Ubuntu and Arch respectively.

It is much more prudent to argue for filesystem improvements in _those_ distros, and get them implemented there, than to fork it out. Gobo demonstrated both the validity and the utility of the approach, but it is up to distro makers to actually use the evidence given that the traditional Unix layout is garbage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reasons why you _still_ might want to keep / and /usr isolated:

1\. NFS mounts. Your local or initial BOOTP image has a minimal root, your (non-root-writeable, BTW) NFS /usr has Other Stuff.

2\. Mount options. Root is often (and perhaps still _must_ be -- /etc/mtab for example -- I've stopped closely tracking discussion to make root fully read- only) writeable. It may also require other mount permissions, including device files and suid. Other partitions _don 't_ require these permissions, and there is some Principle of Least Privilege benefit to mounting such partitions without them. /usr requires suid, but not dev, and may be nonwriteable except for OS updates.

3\. Recovery partition. I'll frequently stash a second root partition, not typically mounted. It has minimal tools, but enough to bootstrap the system if the primary is hosed for whatever reason (more often myself than any other). Without a clean / /usr split, this becomes more complicated.

<comment><USER16> mtab is not a problem anymore. On Arch, /etc/mtab is just a symlink to /proc/self/mounts.

As for the recovery partition, you don't need the split for that, either. Just have a live system on the recovery partition that mounts the normal root FS. Then you can chroot into there for recovery tasks.

<comment><USER15> Right, that seemed to be the mtab solution Debian were angling toward. I think there were some odd edge cases where it didn't behave well, though I don't recall what those were. Perhaps the ability to specifically edit the contents to allow fixing of fubared mounts -- almost certainly loopback or NFS, both of which get quite twitchy at times.

I don't recall my precise thinking on a clean root vs. /usr split on the recovery partition, though it may have avoided some confusion over binaries. Or perhaps that you could mount the /usr partition itself independently if you wanted, assuming primary root was hosed.

Not being able to mount a separate /usr would negate that option.

<comment><USER16> > Not being able to mount a separate /usr would negate that option.

You can mount the root to e.g. /mnt and symlink (or bind-mount) /mnt/usr to /usr, if that's what you need.

<comment><USER15> Bind-mounting does give you some options. Still doesn't help if root's hosed.

And it _wasn 't_ an option when I'd first come up with this clever scheme.

One of my current challenges with Linux is identifying which information/education of mine is wholly outdated. This will happen to you in time as well....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The elephant in the room is /opt, /etc/opt, and /var/opt. The System V and filesystem hierarchy specifications say that those locations are, and I quote, "for third party and unbundled applications". Yet some distributions, like for instance Debian or Ubuntu, do not even include them, precluding commercial software vendors from ever delivering software for those operating systems (no, an unbundled application can never be delivered into /usr, because that is vendor's namespace, and an updated version from the vendor might very well bring a production application down).

/opt: application payload

/etc/opt: application's configuration files

/var/opt: application's data.

For applications with more than two configuration or data files, it is a good idea to create /etc/opt/application and /var/opt/application.

If your company is mature enough to understand what system engineering is, and employs dedicated OS and database system engineering departments, /opt/company, /etc/opt/company[/application], and /var/opt/company[/application] become very practical. If this approach is combined with delivering the application payload and configuration management as operating system packages, one only need worry about backing up the data in /var/opt, and that's it.

<comment><USER16> > Yet some distributions, like for instance Debian or Ubuntu, do not even > include them, precluding commercial software vendors from ever delivering > software for those operating systems

What? Why should it be impossible for a third-party package to just create /opt? They will probably need to extend the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but /etc/profile.d is very much standardized AFAIK.

<comment><USER18> Indeed Adobe Reader for Linux used to land itself in /opt on Ubuntu.

The power of run-as-su installers...

<comment><USER17> The FHS thing in Debian and Ubuntu must be relatively new, I certainly have no recollection of it back then when we looked into delivering unbundled software for it. And we did look for it, and we even combed through the Debian packaging specification back then.

Whatever it might be, or has been, if Debian and Ubuntu did get /opt, /etc/opt, and /var/opt and are now one small step closer to being System V compliant (from which FHS stems), I for one am very glad for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like that FreeBSD dedicates a man page, HIER(7), on this topic - [https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier) \- "layout of file systems"

<comment><USER20> The other major BSDs:

[http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD- current/man7/hier.7](http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man7/hier.7)

[http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?hier++NetBSD- current](http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?hier++NetBSD-current)

[https://www.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web- man?command=hier&sectio...](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web- man?command=hier&section=7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> /{bin,sbin} is for stuff you cannot live without (e.g., sh, mkdir, chmod, rm, ln, etc.)

/usr/{bin,sbin} is for stuff you can live without but expect to be there (e.g., make, grep, less).

/usr/local/{bin,sbin} is for stuff you/your local admin installed (e.g., mosh, cmake).

Also, I use $HOME/{bin,sbin} for wrapper scripts, binaries that I need but don't want to install system-wide (single-file C utils that come without man pages, stuff like that).

I'm not sure where the confusion comes from and I don't really see any advantage in merging / and /usr. On the flip side, I do think there's value in keeping /{bin,sbin} as small as possible (because that stuff _has to_ work).

<comment><USER22> Regarding your last sentence, why does having grep in /bin reduce the chance of mkdir working?

<comment><USER21> I doesn't reduce the chance of mkdir working but it does increase the chance of you missing a bug in the part of your source tree that needs to be rock solid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> MacPorts use /opt/local :)

<comment><USER24> And, interestingly, HomeBrew uses /usr/local "because Apple left it for us when they abandoned this whole mess" ..

<comment><USER25> /use/local/bin has the big advantage that it is in the default PATH.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The /bin vs /usr/bin split makes perfect sense but I always thought /sbin was superflous to happy to see it being deprecated by many distros.

I expect with the increasing moves towards app stores and sandboxing on all platforms that the days of installing packages contents all over the filesystem are limited and things like xdg-app are probably going to take over with an app being mounted into the filesystem in a sandbox as it is run.

<comment><USER27> Funny. I always thought the /bin vs /sbin split made more sense than / vs /usr. I very much prefer that my shell's autocomplete does not stop on binaries that I have no business running as a normal user, so I like that root-only tools are in /sbin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> One outcome of this that drove me nuts back in the day on Debian system was libpcre was installed in /usr and grep was in /bin. This meant perl regex were not supported because the maintainers of Debian didn't want the dependency on /usr from things in /bin, and didn't want to "bloat" / with something as distasteful as libpcre.

</comment><comment><USER29> How badly would things break if we tried to "fix" this split today?

<comment><USER30> Probably not too badly if we took a phased approach.

1 - Establish a new, consistent filesystem hierarchy. New code should use the new hierarchy. Move the legacy stuff to the new hierarchy and symlink the old locations to avoid breakage.

2 - After some time, make the legacy locations read-only. This will highlight any non-conforming code.

3 - After even longer, delete the legacy paths.

It would maybe be even easier if we could redirect writes (I'm not too versed in filesystem capabilities) from the legacy paths to the new ones.

<comment><USER31> > Establish a new, consistent filesystem hierarchy.

systemd is kind of enforcing this already, preferring /usr (where most of the packages go) over naked paths. This is the trend on relatively modern desktop systems, which thankfully preserves standard fs hierarchy while mostly keeping everything in one place. (Unfortunately there are bunches of non-desktop uses for Linux out there.)

See also [https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate- usr-i...](https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is- broken/).

> It would maybe be even easier if we could redirect writes (I'm not too > versed in filesystem capabilities) from the legacy paths to the new ones.

Quite a few distros (and users like Rob Landley) use symlinks from /bin to /usr/bin and the same goes for /lib. sbin is sometimes linked to bin. This does some of the redirection.

(I am not aware of the /usr/tmp and /var/etc stuff mentioned in the message.)

> After even longer, delete the legacy paths.

Nah. Millions of scripts are writing she-bangs like #!/bin/sh and I don't really expect to see this being changed...

Workarounds using `env` is kind of crippled since a.) it introduces an extra level of dependency and indirection and b.) it stops the user from reliability passing options to the interpreter (Linux only cut at the first space, with all sorts of other *nixen doing different things with multiple spaces.)

<comment><USER32> Still, clutters and confuses new users. In wonder if some of the fs apis could hide the silly/redundant directories?

<comment><USER33> I much prefer compatibility symlinks actually existing in the file system over some complex, hidden pathname resolution override riles lurking in the kernel. That way, Windows lies.

<comment><USER31> > lurking in the kernel. That way, Windows lies.

Windows implements many overrides (e.g. "My Documents") as NTFS junctions with some hidden (+ system?) property set. (Sometimes you will find a proper hidden property handy, like in this case.)

Stuff like CON, NUL in non-UNC paths do hurt, though. Device files from an age without directories....

<comment><USER33> Don't get me started on Windows' bizarre, barely-documented behaviour. Magical filenames pointing to devices and file virtualization are bad enough... just try to decipher whether a given registry path is what it appears, or is redirected through yet more hidden virtualization magic some time. And we haven't even come to the truly wondrous series of overrides that occur when looking up names in the NT object namespace...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I want to react to the signature FUD: GPLv3 is clearly a superior copyleft license to GPLv2 despite Linus' latently permissive opinion on the anti- TiVoization clause.

<comment><USER35> It's not FUD, and GPLv3 is not clearly a superior license. It may surprise you to learn that different people value different things and have different opinions, and so want different licenses. GPLv3 is really a pretty extreme license that imposes a lot of restrictions that a lot of people simply don't want. If GPLv3 does what you want, by all means use it, but don't denigrate the choices other people make.

<comment><USER36> I wonder if people even know what those restrictions are and how exactly the anti-tivoisation clause works. It does not forbid anyone from running software on tivoised devices, which is what some people seem to think it does. All that it requires is that if you distribute the software primarily to be used on a User Product (as GPLv3 calls it), then as part of the installation information (which in GPLv2 used to just mean install and build scripts), you must also provide the signing keys for the hardware.

This also does not mean that GPLv3 makes software signing impossible and that you must forbid users from rejecting unsigned software if they so wish. It doesn't mean that you have to distribute every secret key that you use for signing software. It merely means that you have to give your users a way to install software on the User Product as they see fit, if they see fit. It's up to the user to decide to override any signing feature or not. It's very much in spirit with GPLv2 that required installation scripts. As far as GPLv3, hardware signing keys are just another part of installation scripts (the actual term used in GPLv3 is "Installation Information").

[http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/03/gplv3-user-products- clause....](http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/03/gplv3-user-products-clause.html)

[https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl- guidech10.html#...](https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl- guidech10.html#x13-820009.9.2)

<comment><USER35> Or to put it another way, GPLv3 mandates that your hardware be insecure (because you cannot prevent a malicious actor from installing malicious software on someone's device, which would normally be done by requiring all updates to be codesigned by the manufacturer). And it's not just limited to software that would be installed on the hardware; companies like Apple won't even allow employees to install GPLv3 software on their work computer because if a single piece of GPLv3-licensed code makes it into iOS, even completely accidentally, the license demands that Apple release their root signing keys to the world, completely destroying the security of hundreds of millions of devices.

Also don't forget the patent stuff in GPLv3. That's not quite as scary as the anti-TiVoization stuff, but it's still pretty significant for large companies.

<comment><USER37> > GPLv3 mandates that your hardware be insecure (because you cannot prevent a > malicious actor from installing malicious software on someone's device, > which would normally be done by requiring all updates to be codesigned by > the manufacturer).

I think that's wrong: [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.en.html#GiveUpKeys](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.en.html#GiveUpKeys):

> I use public key cryptography to sign my code to assure its authenticity. Is > it true that GPLv3 forces me to release my private signing keys? > (#GiveUpKeys)

> No. The only time you would be required to release signing keys is if you > conveyed GPLed software inside a User Product, and its hardware checked the > software for a valid cryptographic signature before it would function. In > that specific case, you would be required to provide anyone who owned the > device, on demand, with the key to sign and install modified software on his > device so that it will run. If each instance of the device uses a different > key, then you need only give each purchaser the key for his instance.

It sounds like a manufacturer could ship a GPLv3-compliant User Product with two signing keys: a secret one known only to the manufacturer, and a second per-device key than can be used by the end-user to install modified software. Such a manufacturer _wouldn 't_ be forced to disclose _their_ signing key because the user already has access to an equivalent.

I also imagine it would be kosher for the device to provide the user the _option_ , in the name of security, to permanently clear the second per-device key, so only manufacturer updates can ever be installed.

> companies like Apple won't even allow employees to install GPLv3 software on > their work computer because if a single piece of GPLv3-licensed code makes > it into iOS, even completely accidentally, the license demands that Apple > release their root signing keys to the world, completely destroying the > security of hundreds of millions of devices.

If Apple is behaving that way, it's Apple's own fault, not the GPLv3's. They could have chosen to design their software in a way that would have given them better options if they are ever forced to comply with the GPLv3, but they chose not to.

<comment><USER35> What you've just described is a completely insecure hardware platform. Giving out a second private key that can still be used to install third-party updates is just as insecure as giving out their normal private key, the only real difference is if anyone actually looks at the code signature they can tell the difference between third-party and first-party code. Allowing the user to lock out that second key doesn't fix anything because 99.99% of users will never do that, or even know it exists.

> _If Apple is behaving that way, it 's Apple's own fault, not the GPLv3's. > They could have chosen to design their software in a way that would have > given them better options if they are ever forced to comply with the GPLv3, > but they chose not to._

That makes no sense. What you said is basically equivalent to "That's Apple's fault, they could have just designed their hardware platform to be completely insecure".

GPLv3 is fundamentally incompatible with having a secure hardware platform. This is _absolutely_ GPLv3's fault.

<comment><USER38> >GPLv3 is fundamentally incompatible with having a secure hardware platform

That's funny because Chromebooks ship with GPLv3 code.

<comment><USER35> I'm not familiar with the security model of Chromebooks. How does it work?

<comment><USER38> Out of the box, they only accept Google OS updates. For reference, the OS is basically Gentoo+Chrome.

If you've a mind to, you can put the Chromebook in "developer mode" with a magic sequence of commands (requiring physical access as it's a boot procedure). This gives you root. To protect naive users from being exploited, a Chromebook in developer mode will display a nasty warning on boot. This warning lingers on the screen for an annoying amount of time, accompanied by a beep. The only way (and it's undocumented) of skipping the wait and the beep is with Ctrl-D; pressing any other key while on this screen results in the Chromebook being completely reset. All this is to ensure that it's virtually impossible to run under developer mode unintentionally.

If all this gets too annoying and you want to use the Chromebook as a fully general device, you can blow it away by replacing the bootloader. Doing this requires disabling write-protection on the flash, which requires opening the case.

Disclaimer: I own a Samsung ARM Chromebook. For all I know the precise details may vary across the Chromebook line, though I believe they all work similarly. Fuller details are here: [https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer- information-f...](https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information- for-chrome-os-devices/samsung-arm-chromebook)

<comment><USER35> Interesting, but from your description it sounds like if I can get my hands on someone else's Chromebook I can still put it into developer mode and install my own software on it, right? Sure, this mostly prevents someone from using a Chromebook that someone else installed malicious software on, though if that other person had time to open the case they could even get around that. But this doesn't solve the case of I have a device with private info on it, you get the device, and want to bypass the security measures on the device to get at my data. Or in other words, it doesn't solve the situation seen in the recent Apple vs FBI case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Today I learned that /usr actually means user, not Unified System Resources. Damn, one less thing I can nitpick about.

</comment><comment><USER40> I thought 'usr' stands for "Unix System Resources"?

<comment><USER41> I think someone made that up retroactively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Well this partially answers my question at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11647487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11647487)

</comment><comment><USER43> I love the quote in the signature :

GPLv3: as worthy a successor as The Phantom Menace, as timely as Duke Nukem Forever, and as welcome as New Coke.</comment>


Looking for an open source project which needs some documentation - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I'm finishing up a certification as a technical writer and need to create a piece of technical documentation as a requirement. I am looking for an open source project which still needs some documentation to explain installation / features / new features / updates to users. Specifically, I am interested in creating online html help. <comment><USER2> I am working on an opensource project that parses news websites and blogs to create ebooks. The idea is anyone can create a parser for a new website so that others can download ebooks from that source.

The project isn't finished but we do need some help with documentation so that people will know how to create parsers.

If you are interested, I can explain more and reach you out personally.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply. I'd like to find out more about your project. Could you give me a link to the project page?

<comment><USER2> [https://github.com/eink-news/eink.news](https://github.com/eink- news/eink.news)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had a lot of fun building a small app with Ratpack several months ago, but its online manual is full of TODOs. If you're comfortable with Groovy or Java, I'm sure they would welcome your contributions.

[https://ratpack.io/manual/current/](https://ratpack.io/manual/current/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Take a look at Kubernetes [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes.github.io/issues](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes.github.io/issues)

</comment><comment><USER5> no idea there was such an academic specialisation (at least not with any substantial focus on software documentation)

we try to hire folks having this domain interest and ideally with academic qualification such as the OP describes, but _never_ had any success--always been a priority, i suppose we just gave up after a while.

(some limited success cross-training black-box testers, but that's not a group we want to cannibalize because those stars are hard to come by as it is)

</comment><comment><USER6> Froxlor! It needs some bad!

</comment><comment><USER7> www.opensourcebeehives.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! This looks like a really interesting project. I'd be happy to help by contributing documentation.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Weekend project for Halloween in WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://apps.playcanvas.com/playcanvas/halloween/2012

<comment><USER2> It looks cool, but I'm colorblind (like 10% of male humans) and reading the text (which looks like a menu and/or instructions, I don't know) is absolutely impossible to me.

I pushed the luminosity to 11, and after staring for a while I deciphered "TO GO FULLSCREEN". That's it.

Please, let me play :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry! The other programmer working on this is colour blind too, but he obviously wasn't effected.

The instructions say:

        Click to focus
        W-A-S-D to move
        Mouse to look
        Spacebar to go fullscreen

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there a way to lock the mouse when not in full screen mode?

<comment><AUTHOR> Chrome should capture the mouse when you click. Firefox only allows pointer lock in fullscreen mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> very cool. Throughly enjoyed.</comment>


Managing Software Engineers - <AUTHOR> http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-software-engineers

<comment><USER2> _"... dog-friendly policy ..."_

Note this is at the top in _"Building and keeping a good software engineering team, Attractive"_. Greenspun felt this was one the tipping points for leaving grad school to start ArsDigita.

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone heard of a VC who blogged about "10 things I learned from ArsDigita case?" I find that story fascinating and hope that VC community learned something from it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Excellent article.</comment>


Expect a $300,000 tab if you're a woman in the tech industry - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/631455/a-scientist-cacluated-the-cost-of-not-being-a-straight-man-and-she-wants-a-tax-cut/ <comment><USER2> Life Tip: Most of the time, things at work are not going to go your way. Most of the time, you will not be rewarded, recognized, or even treated fairly. You will also always see others with seemingly the opposite experience. This is baseline normal.

Now, when this happens to you, you might be tempted to ask if things are stacked against you for one reason or another. When you get to this line of thinking, you should revisit the reasons why life is good, instead of fanning the flames of political cancers.</comment>


Cracking the Who You Show Your Work Code - <AUTHOR> https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you-show-your-work <comment><USER2> I'm not usually one to point out typos, but the name "Austin Kleon" is misspelled three times in a row.

</comment><comment><USER3> Took me ages to parse this title. More appropriately:

Crack the "To Whom You Show Your Work" Code

<comment><USER4> Trying to make a play on "Cracking the coding interview". Didn't work

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This vibes with other things I've read/heard, about the key to success being networks. If you've got a large enough network, someone in your network knows someone who really cares about the work you're doing, if it really is that awesome.

And, like the article says, you don't know exactly who that is. So you should be showing your work regularly to people, _in search of_ the right audience, a parallel concept to finding product market fit.

<comment><USER6> success = looks + personality + networks + luck

<comment><USER7> Normally if you're networking with people who just want to be around attractive people, it's probably a token relationship with someone who doesn't have any real power</comment></comment></comment>


The Anti-Mac Interface (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/papers/anti-mac.html

<comment><USER2> The paper features Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini's 1993 Sun film as a model Anti-Mac interface.

Tog, ironically, was one of Apple's first usability consultants from 1978 to 1992, designing many familiar elements including hierarchical menus, time-out dialog boxes, and the "package" illusion for software application folders.

See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Tognazzini> and <http://asktog.com/starfire/>

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of what's mentioned is already brought to the Mac with Automator and QuickSilver. Voice controlled QuickSilver would completely blow my mind.

Direct manipulation however, will remain deeply rooted in the way we interact with computers, because we often deal with a single object. Is a greater problem in the lack of flow between applications, which is IMO the most evident distinction between web and desktop apps.

Standard input/output piping worked great, and we're seeing a lot of it resurface in the way we're able to mine and mash data on the web these days, but concepts that would mimic REST on the desktop just don't seem to have taken off in time.

Interesting article in many other respects too.

</comment><comment><USER4> From the discussion of WYSIWYG interfaces:

> _"For example, a word may be printed in italic font for emphasis, as part of > a book title, or as part of a quotation, but the specific meaning is lost if > it is represented only by the fact that the characters are italicized.... > [Markup languages can] preserve the semantic meaning inherent in the text > and have rules for converting the text and semantics into their appearance > on the printed page."_

A lot of technologies (like CSS and XML) have taken exactly this approach. Semantic meaning is stored with an object, and the particular appearance can be converted across an entire document with a single change. I see "readability" [0] linked from HN fairly often; it's a technology that leverages this quite well.

[0] <http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Completely OT, but I love the icons in Figure 2. I'm getting a serious case of early '90s nostalgia just looking at them.

<comment><USER6> "Say boy, check out that icon! Mwahhh, that sucker's huge!" (Tiny Elvis for Windows 3.1/95/NT)</comment></comment>


Is America having second thoughts about free speech? - <AUTHOR> http://theweek.com/articles/753274/america-having-second-thoughts-about-free-speech <comment><USER2> Possibly, though part of me suspects (somewhat worryingly), this is becoming a trend worldwide. That pro free speech parties and politicians seem to increasingly be a minority in many places, and that restrictions on freedom of speech that would have been seem as unthinkable years ago are now being offered as serious suggestions.

As for why this is happening... well I think the media attention on extremists and online trolling seem to have led a lot of people to think 'free speech' is somehow a bad thing that helps their opponents, in the same way the war on terror caused privacy and encryption to come under fire because of 'national security concerns'. I worry that freedom of speech has become villified as something 'the bad guys' use.

But that's just my take on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author here seems to be a bit naive about how free speech really is in the "free market of ideas" model and how much better it is than the "communitarian" approach. His vision where everyone's opinion and speech has equal weight doesn't come close to the reality of the situation in America today, where those with financial wealth can effectively pay to amplify viewpoints they favor. No one really cares what I think, but lots of people know what Tom Steyer and the Koch brothers' opinions are.

<comment><USER4> Good point.

Also, consider it not just in terms of the amplification effect of wealth, but the suppression effect of threats of violence.

The "free marketplace of ideas" assumes the participants act in good faith to offer their ideas to the public, and respect what they decide. But if you wish to call for systemic violence against groups, it has the effect of silencing them out of fear (E.g., Yiannopoulos calling for Leslie Jones to be doxxed, or the KKK marching through my old hometown to let blacks know they should be afraid).

In this case, the norm of debate is an illusion. And if you're not concerned with debating in good faith, there are no obstacles to using deceit and lies. Speech just becomes a tactic of oppression.

In this light, rather than treat individual speech as absolute, _overall_ free speech can be maximized by not tolerating those whose speech silences others. Fundamentally, I think it's heterological. Quoting from Karl Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies":

> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we > extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not > prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the > intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

<comment><USER5> Your examples are rather one sided. Don't forget the organized groups planning violence against Trump supporters during the election, or Hollywood's calls for violence after the election, or the numerous attacks on politicians and police officers.

> In this light, rather than treat individual speech as absolute, overall free > speech can be maximized by not tolerating those whose speech silences > others.

Taken to the extreme that allows the powerful to silence anyone they choose. You can always argue "I'm offended" by your remarks, therefore you must be silent. But as we've seen (for example, claims that "it's impossible to be racist against white people" and simultaneously defining every conservative position as racist or otherwise prejudiced) the left defines this so that they can do and say anything they like, while the right is always silenced.

> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we > extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not > prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the > intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

Are you prepared to defend a tolerant society against leftists whose intolerance for disagreement extends even unto violence?

<comment><USER4> Ahh yes, the "minorities-are-the-real-racists/sexists" argument. I guess for those who have always been on top, attempts to curb their abuses could look like free speech violations.

And don't talk to me about violence like it's equivalent on both sides. I had the KKK try to march through my town after Trump was elected. I went to UVA and probably walked past where Heather Heyer was murdered a hundred times in school. The only killings from the left are from isolated nuts. The killings from fascists/supremacists are organized.

> Are you prepared to defend a tolerant society against leftists whose > intolerance for disagreement extends even unto violence?

I'm not worried, because the left is punching Nazis and white supremacists. Ask your grandfather if you need to understand why punching Nazis rather than giving them platforms is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article, as a lot of recent conversation about this, (deliberately?) conflates free speech as social and legislative ideals.

When it comes to the government telling you what you can and cannot say, we need to be extremely protective of free speech.

But when it comes to what speech we allow in our _social_ fabric, is "free speech" even a desirable ideal? Should we be able to e.g. continually insult our coworkers without expecting to be fired? Should we be able to lie about our friends and expect them to still hang out with us? No one is actually advocating we have no standard for appropriate speech; rather, they just don't like what falls outside it.

<comment><USER7> Free speech absolutists like the author (and myself) don't believe that speech should be without consequence in the marketplace...only without consequence from the government. We will always make value judgments about what people say. And that's great.

What I'm particularly concerned about in the social arena is speech being _disproportionately_ punished. If I say something that is against the consensus, by all means push back. You can even choose to not associate with me - or attend an event I'm speaking at on campus. But to prevent that speech from occurring at all via punishments like banishment or expulsion goes too far.

Let us remember that in the 1960s, speech promoting civil rights was incredibly non-consensus and "dangerous". So too was speech in favor of gay marriage during the 1980s. "Dangerous Ideas" can sometimes lead to much needed societal change. To discover the good outcomes you also near to hear the ones that really are terrible.

<comment><USER8> How is an association choosing not to associate with you any different from banishment or expulsion? Let us remember that in the 1960s, speech promoting civil rights was incredibly non-consensus and "dangerous" and resulted in banishment and expulsion for countless proponents. So too was speech in favor of gay marriage during the 1980s. I am not in favor of legislation limiting speech, I am just pointing out that the distinction you draw between what goes too far and what does not is founded in your own opinionated perceptions and not in reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> College kids sure are taking a beating these days. I don't like the trend ether, but let's be clear that we are talking about a small percentage of students making a lot of noise.

And these students, right or wrong, do have a leg to stand on. They attend these schools, the controversial speakers generally do not. They pay tuition to be there, while these speakers do not. These students have some sense of ownership over the institution they attend and it seems natural they would want to defend it from what they perceive as propaganda or hate speech. Where they go wrong, in my humble opinion, is when they seek to ban speakers outright instead of opposing them in other ways. I can't criticize their motivations, only their tactics.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Isn't it far better to encourage bad ideas to come out of the shadows, where > those who espouse them can do battle (and face defeat) in their name?

In an ideal world I would agree. However, we are in a far from ideal world and our experiences since the Internet began show that this rarely happens in the real world.

CGP Grey did an excellent video on how the dynamics of speech tend to play out on the Internet: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc) tl;dw: we self-segregate and our "tribes" rarely end up interacting in a meaningful manner. The consequence of that is allowing hate speech to exist in a space invites more hate speech in a self-reinforcing cycle (probably the best example of this is 4chan).

We've also seen what happens when hateful speech is banned. When reddit banned /r/fatepeoplehate the amount of anti-fat bullying on the site dropped precipitously. Does this not point the way forward on how to deal with hateful speech?

<comment><USER11> > Does this not point the way forward on how to deal with hateful speech?

Yep, private entities should have every right to do (or not do) business with whoever they choose. One could even argue this was the intended meaning of "freedom of association" (if they wanted to get modded down in an practical display of this theory in practice if they were so inclined I suppose).

The main argument I usually see from the "pro-free speech" folks is once you give the government the power to ban "bad" speech then there's nothing stopping them from using this power against your "good" speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As an American there are a few principles that I would be willing to die defending, and free speech is one of them.

"Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils."

<comment><USER13> "It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees."

<comment><USER14> "When you're dead, that's it. There is no more. You're dead. The game is over. You've lost everything, completely. The only consolation is that it was going to happen sooner or later anyway."

<comment><USER15> What's left is how others remember you.

Galileo and Stalin are famous dead people, but most of us would rather be remembered as Galileo than Stalin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think that the lack of shaming and the increase of a certain thin- skinnedness is causing this.

I'm (or anybody else) am able to say what I want. You are also free to not associate or listen to me. If your feelings are hurt, stop listening.

<comment><USER16> Most of the thin-skinnedness I observe is from so-called free speech absolutists, who want to say offensive things in public without fear of being shamed. But what they call shaming is actually their opponents exercising their own right to free speech. The freedom of speech that allows you to say something offensive is the same freedom that lets me criticize your offensive comments.

You say stop listening if your feelings are being hurt. That's one option. I can also call you out for being insensitive to my feelings. If you can't handle that criticism, then stop airing your views in a public forum, for your own good. Freedom = responsibility. You own your words.

<comment><USER2> True, everyone should be allowed to criticise and counter each other's comments and what not, and those who get offended by that while shouting about freedom of speech are hypocrites.

But at the same time, it feels there's a tendency for these things to go between criticism and into harassment, with the latter being outright encouraged by certain groups on all sides of the political spectrum.

For instance, quite a few people have seen themselves doxxed for things said on social media sites, with people going as far as to contact their employers to get them fired or attempting to get their families to disown them by tracking them down and yelling at them about their associates words. That can be for anything from attacking others online to merely saying something uncomfortable (like a joke someone disliked at a conference) to hobbies or interests that simply aren't safe for work.

Is that a fair response? Should freedom of speech have 'expose someone and attempt to destroy their career' as an allowed reaction to a comment online?

How about (in some extreme cases) trying to have them blacklisted from an industry? I've seen that before, and it's just as chilling to see it happen with someone for being politically incorrect as it was for someone being a 'communist sympathiser' back in the Cold War.

Criticism is fine, but there has to be some line between criticism and calling out and basically exiling someone from society and destroying their future chances of making a living.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What are they gonna do, arrest people for voicing their opinions?

<comment><USER18> Yeah, this happens quite routinely in the UK now.

<comment><USER19> Citation needed, or please reduce the phrase "quite routinely" to something less hyperbolic.

People have been sent to prison for abuse on twitter, but that doesn't count as voicing an opinion.

<comment><USER20> Here you go, although you could easily have found this yourself by searching for 'uk arrests free speech':

[https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine- peo...](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-people-a-day- in-fight-against-web-trolls-b8nkpgp2d)

As this article lies behind a paywall I'll give you the choice of two regurgitated versions. You might not like the sources but if you ignore that and just look at the content you'll survive the ordeal.

RT: [https://www.rt.com/uk/406467-hate-crime-twitter- troll/](https://www.rt.com/uk/406467-hate-crime-twitter-troll/)

Independent: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for- offensive-f...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive- facebook-and-twitter-posts-soar-in-london-a7064246.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hilariously ironic this got flagged. I thought it was a balanced, centered, and well written article.

</comment><comment><USER22> First, the First Amendment protects the speaker from being punished by the State for his speech. That's it. It does not protect the speaker from losing their job, or social ostracism, or anything else.

Second, no one is rationally a "free speech absolutist," which is an absurd position. For example, no one thinks their doctor has a right to lie to them, and that deliberate lies by a doctor to a patient must not be punished by the state.

Third, Christopher Hitchens summarized my own opinion when he gave this speech, and he did it far more eloquently than I ever could, so I'll just link to the speech here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY)</comment>


Notice of data breach at Teachable (formerly Fedora) - <AUTHOR> I just received this email (to an address I'd used to sign up to a course on https://bitfountain.teachable.com/):
Dear <chaghalibaghali>,
We are writing to inform you of a suspected data breach involving accounts created between September 17, 2013 and November 21, 2015. We have reason to suspect that personal information related to accounts on Bitfountain (joined 2014-08-19) may have been compromised. This includes the email addresses and passwords associated with the school's Teachable (formerly Fedora) account.
As a precaution we are enforcing password resets for potentially affected users.
You can reset your password here: https://sso.teachable.com/secure/teachable_accounts/password/new
If you happen to use this password with any other service, we highly recommend updating your password there as well.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your understanding in helping us keep Teachable safe.
Team Teachable <comment><USER2> I got this too. There's zero incentive for startups to protect data privacy of their users when the repercussions are just that they have to shoot out a broadcast email to their old users asking them to spend hours resetting passwords.</comment>


A new kind of school tackles the software engineering talent shortage - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-new-kind-of-school-tackles-the-software-engineering-talent-shortage/ <comment><USER2> It starts by saying 'By 2020, the US Bureau of Labor estimates that there will be 1.4 million new developer job openings and only 400,000 computer science graduates to fill them. What to do?' as if those 1.4 million jobs can only be filled by CS grads, implying there's sort of problem.

It then describes the Holberton School, which does not produce CS grads, as if it might help.

If there are jobs that can only be held by CS grads, then this new school won't help. If non-CS graduates are able to handle these job, then how many of them will have the appropriate training by 2020?

The "1.4 million new developer jobs by 2020" is one of the fake "the sky is falling" reality distortion reports. See [http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages- mi...](http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-microsoft- report-distorts/) ("STEM labor shortages? Microsoft report distorts reality about computing occupations"), which says.

> The Microsoft report projects a labor shortage over the next eight years by > incorrectly assuming that only individuals with a bachelor's degree in > computer science can fill jobs in computer-related occupations. Data > analyzed for this memorandum as well as other studies show that less than > one-fourth to less than one-half of workers in computing occupations have a > computer science degree.

> Further evidence that there is no shortage of workers in computer-related > occupations is apparent in wage trend data. For example, from 2000 to 2011, > the average hourly wage for workers possessing at least a bachelor's degree > in computer and math occupations rose less than half a percent per year, > compared with the sharp wage increases we would see if a labor shortage > existed in these occupations.

It then goes into the details of these, and more.

How many grads by 2020 will be able to work in the field? [https://www.mainstreet.com/article/stem-jobs-take-twice- long...](https://www.mainstreet.com/article/stem-jobs-take-twice-long-fill- pay-really-better-longterm/page/2) says _3.9 million_.

Regarding the school itself, I have no problems with technical colleges, career schools, 'Hochschule' (to use the German), and the like. I think we need more of them.</comment>


The Awesome Highlighter - be nice, highlight - <AUTHOR> http://www.awesomehighlighter.com/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, I could see this being useful. One drawback is that it takes away the original url - if I send my friend an un-highlighted CNN url, s/he can see it's from CNN.com, whereas you can't with a highlighted article.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I avoid clicking on tinyurl.com links for this very reason.

And are long urls a big deal? I found a titanium spork the other day on Amazon, and my friends were fine with the giant honkin' link I IMed. On blogs, forums and the like, you can always hide the giant url behind some hyperlink text.

The only good use of shortened URLs I've seen is in IRC channel topics.

<comment><USER4> Tiny URLs got a resurgence in a world of SMS and Twitter.

(Full disclosure: I have a simple URL shrinking service myself, <http://ri.ms> \-- not pretty, but functional)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been thinking about something like this forever. I think it could easily be the future of forum quoting!

For example, let's say you want to demonstrate that someone is being inconsistent in his argumentation spanning multiple pages in a forum topic. Well, would be great if you could go in "quoting mode" while writing a post, you could first highlight everything you want to quote by browsing the topic normally and highlighting what you want to show and then you can "pop the stack" and come back to writing the post (obviously this preserves everything you previously wrote) and the quotes would be there.

In fact, you could quote sources outside the site... and it could be used outside a forum context. The future of quoting, I'm telling you!

</comment><comment><USER6> I have to say something about all of this...My name is Joel, I am on the team that built the awesome highlighter. Thanks for all the comments, positive and negative. We're working hard to clean up the product and put out new features. If anyone has questions or suggestions you can find us on twitter:

<http://twitter.com/hooande> <http://twitter.com/lukebrdn>

We hope we'll see you guys in Boston

</comment><comment><USER7> I look forward to all improvements and they should make this a firefox plugin for max adoption and ease of use :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to see something like this that overlays multiple people's highlights; the more people highlighting a section, the brighter that section gets.

It might help with arguments where nobody can even agree what the debate is actually about, or what the relevant points are.

<comment><USER9> Yes, the GPLv3 drafting process had something like this. Implementing this in a firefox plugin that logs into a web highlighting service might be a clean way to go about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool... <http://awurl.com/kydnwg8299>

</comment><comment><USER11> I would argue that this solves a problem which doesn't exist, how about you?

<comment><USER12> The problem exists, at least for me. I even see it happening here. Someone posts a link to 5000 word blog entry and then posts a comment about whihc bits are interesting. This might be good improvement on signal to noise ratio.

If they can add more features to this, like pinned comment notes on a web page, they can find a demand from web designers as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Could this sort of thing be done with a bookmarklet? That way the highlighting wouldn't depend on a server.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is cool. I only have one complaint: The highlight color buttons are way too small.

</comment><comment><USER15> cool idea, but first thing i tried is nytimes.com and it failed.

<comment><USER16> The two sites I tried (cnn.com / bluwiki.com) don't work either...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> would be useful on a lot of submissions to ynews

</comment><comment><USER18> try also my :

<http://markkit.net>

featuring a bookmarklet.</comment>


Ask YC: feedback on my music recommendation site - <AUTHOR>

http://theperceptron.com
Enter the name of an artist you like and get back other artists you might also like.
the perceptron's suggestions are based on actual people's music tastes: artists on the same label, artists who admire each other, artists who have played together, artists mentioned together in the press.  Further, the site learns your music taste and uses what it knows to adapt its recommendations.
I would love to hear the HN community's thoughts. <comment><USER2> Seriously, WTF! I repeat, WTF! Your 'app' only has one feature, which is music recommendation, right? So it has no other features to make up for it.

I go there and type 'Billie Holiday' and the first result that comes back is 'Iron Maiden'. Then comes a bunch of other seemingly random artists like Michael Jackson, Taj Mahal and so on. I don't see Ella, Louis, Anita or any of the people who usually belong to the Billie group.

You can't release an application with one feature, and that one feature does not work. This is not reverso world where the opposite of working actually works.

This is like a car being released that does not have a roof, and engine or tires. Fix your 'startup' and try again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, you've made a good point. Billie Holiday -> Iron Maiden != good recommendation. That sort of insanity will be filtered out as more music taste data is collected from users.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

<comment><USER3> Classy response after some pretty rough comments! Keep iterating and releasing. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You clearly need to focus on a more algorithmic approach as the results you're returning are in no way better than a completely random selection from the same genre

[http://theperceptron.com/recommendation/artist/the+rolling+s...](http://theperceptron.com/recommendation/artist/the+rolling+stones?h=true)

<comment><AUTHOR> Recommendations come from a number of sources, some good, some evidently not so good. However, the bad sources will get slowly suppressed as the site gets more user feedback.

I'm working real hard on the algorithm right now to get the cream floating to the top sooner, and people's comments on HN have been really helpful.

Thanks very much.</comment></comment>


NASA Wants Your Ideas for Digitizing Rocket Scientist's Notes  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/nasadata-2/ <comment><USER2> I think if they took the reCaptcha approach to get the text in a usable manner then used that to catalog and cross link the information.

After cataloging the information I would put it into some kind of photo viewing software that handles large sets of pictures well. Microsoft has an interesting product with seadragon that could handle this:

<http://livelabs.com/seadragon/>

Though I think that the software would need to be modified to do text search and hyperlinks in order to be the most useful to the largest number of people.

</comment><comment><USER3> They could use reCaptcha for the text. The results on <http://recaptcha.net/digitizing.html> look promising.

</comment><comment><USER4> They need a secondary goal. "Getting it out to the public" is incredibly vague. One of these would work:

1) Inspire high school kids to pursue a career in engineering 2) Get younger kids excited about the space program 3) Recording the notes for historical purposes

All of these seem to beg different formats and different presentations. I wish they had given more details about their secondary PR goals here... It's NASA, I know they have them.

</comment><comment><USER5> The idea for the celebration location is easy: obviously they should celebrate it on the moon.</comment>


Ask HN: Need some advice/learning resources on online marketing - <AUTHOR>

I am wondering what approach one should take to plan and execute promotion of their product(s) online. The scenarios I'm interested in are:
1)snowday2011.com like projects where one or two products based on a particular event or hot trend are sold. How to quickly reach the target market, bring in visitors and turn them into customers?
2)Marketing a new brand for clothing line? A clothing line that will start with 10-15 t-shirts based around a particular niche concept.
How to determine the target market? I'm looking for not just visitors but customers who will actually buy the product online(not many shop online in country like India)
How to reach them online? Where to find them? How to approach them? How to make it viral? How to make my visitors/customers promote my product? How to retain them and make a community of customers? <comment><USER2> Dude - you are asking a lot of questions here. Each one of your questions has a whole book (or many books) written on them.

I interpret what you are asking as 'How do I run a successful business?'

Not enough space to answer here.</comment>


Group IQ: What makes one team of people smarter than another? - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/12/19/group_iq/?page=full

<comment><USER2> Actual paper is here : [http://www.uvm.edu/~cmplxsys/newsevents/pdfs/2010/science.11...](http://www.uvm.edu/~cmplxsys/newsevents/pdfs/2010/science.1193147v2.pdf)

I remember when this first came out. It hit a lot of the things I've noticed myself -- the way you can create a group rhythm that lets people build on each other.</comment>


Surviving injuries from falling - <AUTHOR> https://mosaicscience.com/story/falling-science-injury-death-falls <comment><USER3> All children should have something like a year of Ju Jitsu, which teaches falling as a daily part of class. I had three years, and it has saved me from injury on half a dozen occasions. On one occasion, I fell down a full flight of stairs head first, and instinctively performed a dive roll that resulted in no injuries and me landing on my feet and walking away from the stairs, thrilled at my good fortune. I'm not particularly graceful, and I've saved my wrists from breaking by knowing how to fall flat when I tumble on the street. Falling happens, and knowing how to fall is a basic skill all children should learn.

<comment><USER4> I'm a huge proponent of having kids do Judo. It's pretty safe, teaches people how to fall (and also defend themselves), and is amazingly good physical activity.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. For falls from relatively low heights, just having an instinctive reaction to protect vulnerable areas like your head and hips, to spread the impact over as wide an area as possible, and _not_ to do things like reaching out with locked arms can avoid or mitigate many potential injuries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a (washed up) climber, falling is something I think about a lot. It turns out that sit harness used by recreational climbers are unsafe. In a catastrophic fall, the harness directs force into the lumbar spine in an anterior direction. An old study on industrial fall arrest found that loadings in this orientation can produce spinal injury around 4kN (don't quote me on this number, it's been a year since I read the paper.) It gets worse. If a falling climber rotates during the fall, load will be applied left-right above the pelvis. This orientation decreases the spinal injury threshold further.

A chest harness, on the other hand, loads the body in a vertical orientation applying compressive force to the spine. This pushes the survivability margin out toward 7kN and beyond the maximal loading forces you can experience in a factor 2 fall.

<comment><USER7> Unsafe for what? Almost all of the fall forces should be dissipated by a dynamic rope, not the harness.

<comment><USER6> Very high factor falls. A factor 2 fall can kill you even if you don't hit anything on the way down.

<comment><USER7> If you're healthy and using a normal, dynamic rope, no it won't. It won't even hurt. A factor 2 fall onto webbing or dyneema can totally mess you up though, even from a couple of feet.

<comment><USER6> Take a 60 foot 1.95 factor fall and get back to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tangentially relevant, one of my favorite journal articles.

"Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials."

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/)

<comment><USER9> I almost don't want to read it.

That way I can continue to hold the mental image of the control group jumping from planes without parachutes.

Edit: read it. Definitely worth the read.

<comment><USER10> I imagine them jumping with _placebo_ parachutes. It looks just like the real thing, but with minimal deceleration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "Scientists are now encouraging people to learn how to fall to minimise > injury"

Learning to fall and/or crash is one of the most important skills you pickup when you start mountain biking or skateboarding or other similar sports where crashing and crashing hard is a way of life. The amount of freaky stuff I got up from when I was hugely into mountain biking is somewhat mind boggling to me now.

</comment><comment><USER12> Excellent article. Can attest to the great value of learning to fall well from alpine ski racing and training experience. Learning the moves to they are 'instinctive' and happen without thinking, pull in or press together limbs so they don't get snagged, roll, etc. Mostly, stay aware every microsecond and keep working with whatever bits of control you retain.

Very key concept also mentioned in the article -- fear of falling increases likelihood of falling. Work to learn to fall, don't fear it, fall well, and it won't happen so much and won't be as damaging when it does. While I did have my share of injuries and close escapes, decades later, the ability to react, slip-but-not-fall, or fall well still comes in handy. I still think about getting some formal martial arts training to add their techniques to the skill-set.

Good to see the knowledge getting into more scientific study and therapy situations.

<comment><USER13> I have the same experience. I fell in almost 120km/h in a slope earlier this year, but know how to not become a ragdoll. I was completely fine, except having to walk far up the hill to retrieve some of my gear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This gentleman fell 18,000 feet and survived. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Alkemade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Alkemade)

This gentleman also fell 22,000 and survived. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Magee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Magee)

<comment><USER15> [http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a5045/434...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a5045/4344036/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> «Young people break their wrists because they shoot their hands out quickly when falling. Older people break their hips because they don't get their hands out quickly enough. You'd much rather break a wrist than a hip.»

I once broke my wrist while landing from a unicycle fall (while trying to jump on a sidewalk). I felt unlucky to have a broken wrist, but maybe it saved my head.

<comment><USER13> I think some protection gear make people not learn to fall correctly. For instance wrist protectors for snowboard. When falling lightly without it, you quickly learn not to save yourself by planting your hands in the snow. But when having them, you don't get that feedback, so when a worse accident happen your instinct is wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> TL;DR - maximize deceleration time whenever and however possible - <USER2> your legs into a roll if you are falling straight down or crumple your arms if you are falling forward or backward. Also remove fall risks by wearing better shoes and removing slippery hazards.

</comment><comment><USER18> The martial art Aikido has a focus on falling techniques, which are used to allow for training – To practice Aikido, someone has to be the victim, and it is best if they remain uninjured when thrown to the ground ;)

<comment><USER19> Victim!? Uke is the attacker! :)

<comment><USER20> quit nageing him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In military parachuting, how to fall is one of the first things you learn.

The PLF (Parachute Landing Fall) is taught as a safe way to distribute the force of your impact with the ground gradually over more surface area of your body as opposed to just the bottoms of your feet.

The former can bruise the hips shoulders and occasionally ring your bell, the latter breaks ankles.

When jumping a typical static line square or circle (ie T 10-D) parachute your descent speed (full combat load) can be as fast as jumping off the peak of the roof of a one story home without a parachute. Your lateral speed can often be 10 knots.

<comment><USER15> Although I posted it elsewhere, what's your take on the argument between military and flat-relaxed falling here:

[http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a5045/434...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a5045/4344036/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article does not prescribe techniques to fall properly.

<comment><USER23> Right at the end it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was in tumbling as a young child and involved in wrestling for many years after that. I've had numerous serious falls that have resulted in no injury (other than some bruising). While others that have had similar falls have had fractures.

I can definitely testify to the importance of making falling an instinctual response. When I had my most recent and only fall since being a fully grown man (30 years old, off an unsteady step ladder) I felt my body go completely limp right before my ribs smashed into the step ladder and my subsequent hitting of the ground. While falling I just knew I was going to be hurt, however I ended up only having the wind knocked out of me and a slight bit of bruising at my ribs.

I'd encourage healthy people to take up an activity that teaches them how to fall instinctually based on my own experiences.

</comment><comment><USER25> Many comments mention martial arts which help during a fall. I have 14 years of kung fu (I am dreadful) and 20 of volleyball (both pure amateur). This combination saved me many times, in various situations. I am also the only player in my team who instinctively makes a roll ever time I fall for the ball.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder whether it's actually good advice to hold the handrail when using stairs. It may reduce the risk of falling, but doesn't everyone dragging their hand across the same bar transmit a bunch of germs?

What I tend to do is hover my hand over the rail, without actually making contact unless it's necessary.

<comment> aaron-lebo Hopefully you are pulling your Howard Hughes routine everywhere else.

Those doorknobs are the real killers.

<comment><USER26> Are you implying that it's illogical to avoid some shared surfaces, if you can't avoid all of them? I don't really have enough evidence to argue either way, so I just avoid touching things when a convenient alternative exists.

<comment><USER27> Maybe I'm just lucky, but form other people I only get the flu or a cold.

Maybe you can explain what kind of disease you expect to get from touching objects other people have touched?</comment></comment></comment></comment>