Blackmail Should Be Illegal - <AUTHOR> https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/02/19/blackmail/ <comment><USER2> The argument against blackmail that rings most true for me is that if you want transparency and accountability for politicians, blackmail should remain illegal.

In a society where blackmail is fully legal, the incentive for journalists, politicians and corporations align fully _against the public_.

Consider: A politician is corrupt. He's shady and gaining huge personal wealth through corruption. Or a corporation is doing business practices in secret that would probably cause widespread concern among the public. In a society where blackmail is illegal, a journalist that discovers this is fully incentivized to publish the information. If he tries to blackmail the politician or corporation, then he will if be prosecuted if it's discovered.

OTOH, lets say blackmail is legal. Now the journalist has to balance serving the public interest through publishing with the now fully safe and legal option of simply threatening the politician or corporation to cut them in if they keep quiet, knowing also that since this is legal even if it's discovered they are off scott free.

In other words, legal blackmail means it's fully legal to "cut in" someone who discovers a shady practice on part of the proceeds.

I don't see any way in which legal blackmail doesn't keep the public less informed and more in the dark. The incentives for keeping secrets from the public are far higher in a world where blackmail is legal.

<comment><USER3> > In other words, legal blackmail means it's fully legal to "cut in" someone > who discovers a shady practice on part of the proceeds.

This isn't true. Cutting someone in is something that the hypothetical corrupt politician does. Blackmail is something the hypothetical journalist does. Either can be criminalized without regard to the legal treatment of the other.

And in fact, blackmail is a crime right now, and paying blackmail isn't a crime right now. There's no reason you couldn't reverse those two statuses.

> I don't see any way in which legal blackmail doesn't keep the public less > informed and more in the dark.

Scott Sumner has been writing recently about how the criminalization of blackmail is good because, if blackmail were legal, the public would be kept more informed and less in the dark. (And blackmail usually involves things like homosexual or adulterous behavior that he feels the public shouldn't know about.) I tend to agree with you on this point; blackmail is an act of concealment and legalizing it should produce more, not less, concealment.

<comment><USER4> > blackmail is an act of concealment and legalizing it should produce more, > not less, concealment.

And therein lies the debate, some view instead view blackmail as an act of coercion and legalizing it should produce more, not less, coercion.

After all, you can blackmail someone to take an action when they otherwise wouldn't.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean "instead"? More concealment (via blackmail) obviously means more coercion (in the sense relevant to blackmail), because the concealment only occurs if the coercion is acceded to. They can only go up or down together. But I was commenting on an implicit debate between someone who believes that legal blackmail will lead to _more concealment_ , and someone else who believes blackmail will lead to _less concealment_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a strong urge in democratic society, which I believe isn't wrong or incorrect in itself, to legislate the shared ethics of that society -- that is, to outlaw that which is commonly believed to be morally wrong. There are two problems that are encountered in this pursuit:

1) Not everyone shares the same philosophy, thus not everyone shares the same ethics. Where philosophical beliefs differ, there will be clashes over what ethics ought to govern legislation.

2) When writing law, what is being outlawed has to (a) not contradict the constitution(s) governing the land, and (b) be well-defined enough to be enforced.

A lot of the discussion around outlawing blackmail centers on (2)(b) - defining terms. It's surprisingly difficult to do, to the point that a lot of things that are commonly believed to be morally wrong can't be legislated. (2)(a) is why personal freedoms/liberties, and to what extent government should be limited, _must_ both be written into a constitution if they are to exist and be respected by the government/courts for a very long time to come.

Regarding (1), in a democratic nation, the prevailing worldview/philosophy is ultimately what determines what the moral fabric, and consequently the legal climate, of a country will be like. Of course religion (or lack thereof) will factor into this, since it strongly informs ethics -- there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, the US constitution explicitly allows the legislation -> ethics -> philosophy causal chain to arise out of any worldview, when it states that there cannot be a "religious test" for elected officials.

<comment><USER6> I can't disagree more. Legislation exists only _because_ of ethics. To discuss legislation without ethics is to talk about nothing at all.

If you want to write a full ethics-agnostic law system, I think you'll find it won't actually help solve the problems of a society that exists in the real world.

Edit: For example, try to explain _why_ "killing" is illegal in most countries, when some people believe that humans are just electro-chemical computers inside a meat-and-water-sack. Is a human really different than an ant, at the end of the day? If only we had a system to guide our laws that would help us function as a society... Maybe with some shared guidelines about _why_ things are done... we could call it "ethics" perhaps.

<comment><USER7> Killing people is illegal because it reduces the number of taxpayers. If ants paid taxes they'd be protected too. Killing people who don't pay taxes isn't okay because we'd rather make them pay than put them to death.

I'm joking, obviously, but I think there needs to be a separation between law and ethics because they serve different purposes. For example, I think all personal drug use is ethical, but some drugs become a problem when used on a societal scale.

Edit: And conversely, I think being pointlessly mean to people is unethical, but it's not something that can or should be legislated.

<comment><USER8> >Killing people is illegal because it reduces the number of taxpayers.

Hacker News intellectuals. Despite old people being a net drain on the system we don't kill them.

<comment><USER7> I didn't downvote you, but you clearly didn't make it to the second paragraph. I was (partially) trying to poke fun at those people.

<comment><USER8> Oops, your impression was pretty good because I swear I've seen people say that on HN before and rage quit after the first paragraph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The biggest problem with blackmail and extortion is no two people seem to agree on exactly what they are and are not.

I use these definitions:

To blackmail is to threaten to do something otherwise legal (usually divulge information) unless you are paid.

To extort is to threaten to do something otherwise illegal unless you are paid.

Blackmail is one of those odd two-rights-make-a-wrong matters like prostitution or insider trading, and it's tough for a lot of people to square the corresponding laws with their own morals.

Having been blackmailed before (as in 18 USC §873 Blackmail) I find most people's attitudes on the matter are heavily influenced by their personal histories with blackmail (or lack of histories) and subject to change.

<comment><USER10> > To blackmail is to threaten to do something otherwise legal (usually divulge > information) unless you are paid.

I would slightly edit that to:

> To blackmail is to threaten to do something otherwise legal (usually divulge > information) with the intent of forcing someone to perform a certain action > that they would otherwise not want to perform

For instance, you can threaten to spill the beans on a perfectly benign secret about your coworker unless they pass on a great promotion they were given and that you coveted

<comment><USER11> "I'm going to quit unless you pay me more."

Why doesn't that meet your definition? I'm threatening to do something legal (quit) unless you do something you don't want to (pay more money).

I'm confused.

<comment><USER12> What's wrong with the Wikipedia definition?

> Blackmail is an act of coercion using the threat of revealing or publicizing > either substantially true or false, and often damaging, information about a > person, to the public, family members, or associates unless certain demands > are met. It may involve using threats of physical, mental or emotional harm, > or of criminal prosecution, against the victim or someone close to the > victim

<comment><USER13> Ok, but then how is it not extortion to demand a raise or else you'll quit?

<comment><USER12> It's quite simple, really: since you're not a slave owner, i don't belong to you, so the "threat" to quit can't possibly be legally qualified as a threat (you never had the right to assume that I will continue to work for you beyond my notice period). It's a contract negotiation, not a threat, so not extortion. The same way that "we will cut off the internet access if you don't pay the internet bill" is not extortion from comcast, it's just a statement of fact.

<comment><USER14> You don't have a right to prevent someone from telling secrets they know either.

<comment><USER12> Actually, in some cases you do. But anyway, blackmail is not about telling secrets, it's about coercion under the threat of telling secrets. You know, kinda like how rape is about consent, not about preventing people from having sex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I prefer the definition as described in UK Law under the Theft Act 1968:

Blackmail consists of making an unwarranted demand with menaces with a view to making a gain or causing a loss.

This article seems to focus on ANY demand - your credit card 'threatening' to release information about your non-payment, for example. That is part of your agreement. That is not unwarranted. That is not blackmail.

Heres some clarification with case law (again, this is UK): [http://www.e-lawresources.co.uk/Blackmail.php](http://www.e-lawresources.co.uk/Blackmail.php)

<comment><USER16> My understanding was different: in a "legal blackmail" world debt collectors would try to dig up dirt on you to aid in the collection process:

> Credit cards charge unreasonable rates because there is no collateral. If > you don't pay, they can harass you, and damage your reputation via credit > reports, but mostly, as long as you don't mind losing access to credit, you > can run the no-pay strategy and it will work.

> In a legal blackmail world, that credit card company would then seek out > damaging information about you, to try and get you to pay. Since you would > often be unable to pay, that information would often get released. Other > times, you would end up lying or stealing to get the money.

<comment><USER15> From the link:

Unwarranted demand: A demand is unwarranted unless: (a) that they had reasonable grounds for making the demand AND (b) that the use of menaces is a proper means of reinforcing the demand.

i.e. the use of "menaces" needs to be proper. In this case, their contract is the proper means of enforcement. Digging up additional "dirt" not covered/mentioned in the relationship would be considered improper, and is therefore blackmail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is incredibly stupid.

First, the title should be "Why should blackmail be illegal?"

Second, the answer is: because you have the right to keep secrets, and you should not have to pay someone who happens to learn one of your secrets in order to continue to exercise that right.

[EDIT] You have the right to keep _certain_ secrets, like your bank account number or your sexual preferences, but not your criminal activity. So blackmailing someone by threatening to out them as gay or exposing an extramarital affair should be illegal on the grounds that you have the right to keep those things secret, but blackmailing someone by threatening to expose criminal activity should be illegal on the grounds that helping to keep that secret makes the blackmailer an accomplice to the crime.

<comment><USER18> You say that you have a right to keep secrets. Does that means that it should also be illegal to publicize someone else's secrets, _without_ any threat or demand for money?

<comment><USER17> That depends on the secret. You don't have the right to keep _anything_ a secret. For example, you don't have the right to keep your criminal activity a secret. But you do have the right to keep, say, your bank account number or your sexual preferences a secret. So yes, I think (for example) outing someone as gay should be illegal (I'd make it a civil offense, not a criminal one).

<comment><USER19> So if your friend catches your wife cheating on you, he should be the one getting in trouble for telling you? (Assuming this is a secret she'd prefer to keep from you)

<comment><USER17> Private disclosure is different from a public one.

<comment><USER19> Let's say you have a president, or something, who cheats on his wife, publicizing that should be illegal?

<comment><USER17> Again, the rules are different for public figures than for private citizens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I thought the answer was obvious - then realized blackmail is seemingly a more vague term than I'd previous thought. My previous understanding was that blackmail was ~"a threat to reveal illegal activity unless you were compensated" The reason this is pretty obviously illegal is that it's what builds up pyramids of corruption. Alice skims some cash, Bob demands cash or he'll turn in Alice. Alice skims more cash to pay Bob. Charles discovers Bob is blackmailing Alice and demands money from Alice and Bob etc etc. Pay- offs/golden-handcuffs CEOs on one side and short-selling and all manner of other mechanisms that have sprung up, are to skirt the rules of directly demanding money in return for silence.

</comment><comment><USER21> Well, it _is_ illegal in most of these places: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackmail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackmail)

<comment><USER22> This probably reads to some like "debate over its legality is unimportant because it is illegal". I think it's not known by a lot of people that it is illegal (in many places), and not initially clear from the article, with it appearing to argue that blackmail should be made illegal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _Economists have long faced an embarrassing question: If it helps deter > undesirable actions, what exactly is wrong with blackmail?_

First, what are those "undesirable actions"? Can they be derived from first principles?

If not, why can't blackmail simply be added to those (and that be enough justification that it's illegal)? In this case, it doesn't matter if blackmail "helps deter undesirable actions", since it's an undesirable action itself.

In the end, what a society finds an "undesirable action" (including things like murder or incest) is a decision. Some societies are OK with ritual murder, others allowed incest. Some tribal societies under study even allowed theft. (And of course the US e.g. allows judicial executions, which are still a kind of murder). In which case, there's no reason why blackmail can't just be added to the "undesirable actions" list ad hoc -- all the items are there in an ad hoc way anyway.

Second, blackmail implies a covert monetary transaction (to shush the blackmailer). As such, shouldn't it be in the open, with e.g. IRS knowing? Isn't it illegal as a blackmarket activity?

Third, isn't blackmail an invasion of privacy? If someone keeps secret that they're gay, and someone blackmails them for that, aren't they threatening with an invasion of privacy, which should be illegal? Individuals should be able to control their private information. In which case, I'm arguing that even publicizing the fact that X is e.g. into BDSM or whatever without their consent should be punishable (and in some jurisdictions such actions are iirc, regardless if the accusation is true).

</comment><comment> Joe-Z Can someone help me understand the context of this? Is this just some philosophical thought-experiment, or is there a real problem to be solved?

Also: If blackmailing becomes legal before soft drugs do I'm gonna be SO pissed :D

</comment><comment><USER24> Argument 5.

5\. It is especially wrong to gain money by hurting someone.

As long as the blackmailed keeps paying, the blackmailer doesn't do the hurtful thing.

But then I suppose the very act of blackmail is considered a harm. But if that is true, then it should be illegal. Like assaulting, raping, robing, stabbing someone.

</comment><comment><USER25> If blackmail should be illegal, it should be on the grounds that it is a form of harassment, like stalking.

Basically, the content of the harassment is immaterial.

</comment><comment><USER26> The worst form of blackmail in the US is probably the plea bargain. I guess there are literally thousands of innocent people serving jail time because they did not have a decent legal counsel to stop them from signing a bad deal.

</comment><comment><USER27> While RTA, I was reminded of this from a few months ago:

[https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-14/chinese- millennial...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-14/chinese-millennials- secured-loans-nude-photos)

> ... [the victim] reportedly sent several nude pictures to the lender to > receive a 4,000 yuan loan ($800) ...

</comment><comment><USER28> I think the author's hypotheticals are off. In a world where blackmail is allowed, I think transparency would just be more normal, and secrets would be more rare. For example, people would be more open about cheating, sexual preferences, etc. I think in that world, along with blackmail, many taboo things would become more normalized.

<comment><USER29> I think that would be true in a culture made of Homo Economicus, but I think you're going to have a rough time of that plan with Homo Sapiens. Status matters, and there's going to be some way to judge that status, and there's going to be some delta between the society's understanding of your actions and their assessment of the resulting status and your actual actions, and some way to blackmail with that.

I mean, we already at least have _subcultures_ that are fairly open about cheating and sexual preferences, but then those same cultures will nuke your social status into oblivion if you accidentally say the wrong racist word. (Let alone in a just a moment's poor judgment do it deliberately.) There's gonna be _something_.

But I would endorse the idea that there will be second-order effects, some of which may mitigate the problem. But I think that a lot of the people inclined to propose this wouldn't particularly enjoy them, either. For an example ripped from the headlines, as it becomes increasingly acceptable to nuke someone's political career for making a woman somewhat uncomfortable forty years ago (that's a deliberate satirical exaggeration, not a characterization of any real case), I've wondered if the people making that accusation are really thinking things through; do they _really_ want to limit all public office only to people who were _so_ socially clumsy and awkward when young that they never made a false move because they never made a move at all? I mean, hey, suddenly that would open up rather a lot of high power careers to me, sure, so I suppose I'm self-interestedly all for it in a sarcastic sense, but I'm not sure everyone's going to be interested in that being the criteria for serving in office or for that being the cost of leading a peaceful, unblackmailed life.

<comment><USER30> There is a difference between "making a move" and "harassment".

It doesn't take much intelligence or confidence to have sex with a child, too.

<comment><USER29> 'There is a difference between "making a move" and "harassment".'

Along with the fact that I suspect you _are_ trying to refer to a specific incident, I'd point out that in a world where everything is subjective and in the eye of the beholder/victim, no, actually, there isn't. This is relevant in the context of discussion of "blackmail", if your definition of "make a move" happens to be their definition of "harassment". Even if "heavenlyblue" thinks it's the former, it's not going to help.

<comment><USER30> No, there is: if the victim told you it's harassment, you immediately stop. You jail those who don't stop after being asked to stop.

Legally speaking you don't need to define the ways in which the law allows you to unconditionally communicate (verbally, physcally or non-verbally) with me. If I told you to stay back - then you should stay back and I don't owe you an apology.

You're trying to reduce everything to relativism. I think the real world is quite a bit more black and white in such cases. And we have jury for the cases that are gray areas.

<comment><USER29> Your definition does not correspond to the one being used "in the wild", and I think it's a motte and bailey argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It seems like there is a lot of overthinking.

Generally, we don't want people doing serious harm to other people for personal gain.

This covers muggings, murder, blackmail, other forms of extortion, etc.

<comment><USER14> It's amazing how this comment thread is full of people who do they comprehend the reasonable person standard of law, and think law is invalid because they can invent some pathological corner case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Blackmail is the contagion of corruption. It stretches the corruption like a fungi web through society- until it becomes to large to maintain or gets cut off from its food supply.

Its corruption growth that reveals most corruption. Thats why the sums usually grow so fast. Because the silence of the many, in this graph is so costly.

</comment><comment><USER33> Spillover effects and game theory all along. Sure, it is those who are interested to know the information are victims, but they do not even know and are not in position to defend themselves.

So, law steps in and declares that (only) way to profit from embarrassing true information is to release it.

</comment><comment><USER34> This seems like it is hard to justify as illegal only because the view is restricted to just two parties.

Blackmail is illegal because it leads to societal harm. Not because it leads to individual harm. That is hopefully a happy coincidence.

</comment><comment><USER35> For the uninitiated this is "rationalist" writing and makes numerous references to a Harry Potter fan-fiction written by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Some of the phrases and mannerisms might be confusing if you don't know about him and his following.

[http://yudkowsky.net/rational/](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Spoiler alert: it already is!

</comment><comment><USER37> There's a lot of conflation here between immoral and illegal, which the article itself even raises just to ignore it's own point and I'm left very unclear what the actual message is beyond "don't be bad!"

</comment><comment><USER38> >> It is especially wrong to gain money by hurting someone.

No so.

With blackmail, you identify a problem that someone else has and you explain it to them (for free) and then you sell them the solution for a price. It's not so different from what big corporations are doing these days.

>> Saying embarrassing things about someone hurts them.

No, it makes them stronger and more authentic.

>> Blackmail discourages embarrassing activities, but some things just can't be changed.

But they can be destroyed.</comment>


Ask HN: Reviewing PRs in a language you don't know? - <AUTHOR> I'm an Android engineer with only basic knowledge of a few languages that are not Java. I'm responsible for a project that will now also include an iOS app. I have never worked with Swift before, but of course want to make sure that the new iOS developers are building up a healthy codebase.
I feel like I'll only be able to look at a higher level when reviewing their work (like architecture, patterns, etc.). I'm considering taking some Swift courses to get familiar with the language.
I'm looking for tips or experiences how to deal with this situation. <comment><USER2> I have to do this a fair bit. My background is PHP, but as a lead I often find myself reviewing JavaScript, and config files for CI/CD that I don't entirely understand. While I understand the basic syntax, there are a lot of functions and patterns that are alien to me.

So I focus most of my attention on test cases. Do they cover all the edge cases we discussed in sprint planning? Now that the implementation is done, can I see any more that area necessary? How clear are the test cases?

Then I turn to the general readability of the code. Are there any strange variable names? Any complicated blocks that could be made clearer? Any strange bits of magic that could have a comment? I might also look for other common anti-patterns - duplicated code, magic numbers, dead code.

Some of this depends on the idiomatic use of the language, and the code style the team has agreed on. There will be places where you'll be wrong, and the developers will be doing the right thing, despite it looking strange to you.

But pushing people to explain their decisions can make them better developers, as they'll have to think about why they code in that way instead of "I dunno, I just did".

</comment><comment><USER3> I would be very hesitant to be the only person signing off on the PRs. Maybe if your company has multiple people approving PRs. If you have no other choice, just try to make it clear to your bosses that you dont actually know the language so you can't guarantee that your reviews will be as rigorous as they would be in Java.

In my experience, it might actually be harder to notice high-level than low- level, because code patterns are kind of tied to languages. Some of the theory stays the same like factories or whatever, but the language-specific things tend to vary a lot.

Take Java, for example. If someone uses an enum or a public static variable or static class with static variables or whatever, those are kind of design decisions that might arguably have a "right" answer to an experienced Java coder. But a newer Java coder probably wouldn't really be able to readily distinguish between use cases, only say that they are correct and somewhat neat code. It's much easier to catch weird syntax or bad style than to say "ok but you probably should restructure these couple of files" in a language you're not super familiar with.

Anyways I kinda rambled but the tl;dr is 1) let your bosses know (to the extent that you're comfortable with) that it's not your primary language, and 2) it's fine to learn as you go, just be aware that there's stuff to learn

</comment><comment><USER4> It's weird that you have to be the one that reviews code when you don't know the language it's written in.

Is this a small organization or are there any staffing limits?

One possibility would be to take a Swift coder you trust from your team and have him/her do the review for you.</comment>


Debbie Harry Predicts End Of The Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.contactmusic.com/story/debbie-harry-predicts-end-of-the-internet_4098532 <comment><USER2> [http://catb.org/jargon/html/I/Imminent-Death-Of-The-Net- Pred...](http://catb.org/jargon/html/I/Imminent-Death-Of-The-Net- Predicted-.html) \- this is a meme Older Than Web, really.</comment>


DRM Needs To Be Banned Because It's Toxic - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/drm-needs-to-be-banned-because-its-toxic-111016/ <comment><USER2> This is definitely a thought-provoking article. There seem to be two key points: (1) separation of concerns - the govt should decide and enforce what should be allowed or not, not private manufacturers and (2) what's profitable or good for business today is not necessarily what's good in the long run.

I'm ambivalent about (1), but I buy (2). Yes, we know that piracy might kill the music industry, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's a bad thing. Industries and jobs have been dying since the beginning of time. A hundred years ago in India, you could get a job as a "fan-operator" (loose translation from the Hindi term "pankha chalak" which literally means fan-driver.) The folks would sit outside govt offices and pull some mechanical levers which operated fans directed at the bigshots doing "real" work inside. I also remember reading some stories in my Hindi class lamenting the death of the fan-operator's profession. Oh the irony of a privileged middle-class writer complaining about an unskilled almost-demeaning job going out of existence!

On a unrelated note, I especially liked this part:

 _As a politician, I have other concerns than sound engineering and profitable businesses. It is my job — it is my damn responsibility — to take a larger view and look ahead, decades ahead, generations ahead._

It's a pity how few politicians we have today that actually work towards that goal.

<comment><USER3> I disliked "As a politician, I have other concerns than sound engineering and profitable businesses. It is my job — it is my damn responsibility — to take a larger view and look ahead, decades ahead, generations ahead".

He's describing the job of a science fiction writer, not the job of a politician.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kind if like piracy? Yeah, we saw how well that worked out.</comment>


What I Learned from Researching Coding Bootcamps - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/what-i-learned-from-researching-coding-bootcamps-f594c15bd9e0 <comment><USER2> Good article (yet to read the paper). I believe learning of software development is a glance at the future of education. Diverse paths for diverse people. A myriad of options: college, bootcamps, internet; free, cheap, expensive; lectures videos, tutorials, documentation, blog posts, coding in the browser; teachers, tutors, colleagues, coworkers; templates, boilerplates, open source.

I think all of it is wonderful. Knowledge about software development is much more accessible than, eg, architecture. And much more aknowledged without a degree.

But, with the myriad of paths, come more risks of one choosing the wrong path, both from honest mistakes or being mislead by dishonest people. And these mistakes can be very costly.

I have a hunch that sometime in the future almost all knowledge will be able to be learned like this. It is a good thing to study the advantages and disadvantages of this environment.

<comment><USER3> The problem with self-guided learning are knowledge gaps.

When you are learning on your own you will be biased towards things that interest you more. But the boring stuff is as important in the real world.

You can interview a candidate that can impress you with fairly advanced concepts described in depth.

But you may feel disappointed if probing for gaps... Sometimes having gaps in certain concepts come with risks.

A simple example: If someone does not know how floating point numbers work (e.g: default number type in JS) for instance, they may want to use them for finance with disastrous results.

<comment><USER4> I'd rather someone have theory gaps, than toolchain gaps where the person googles how to do every other feature asked of them and ends up copy-pasting from stack-overflow in the interest of time.

If a project calls for knowledge in theory - hire one person who knows that aspect, and can either handle it, or teach it to others.

The rest should be people who know their craft. Finding those is hard enough.

<comment><USER5> Too much theory and not enough practice is obviously a problem, but not having a solid mental model of the computation you want to do mapping to the underlying is far worse, or not knowing that want you want is a solved problem and trying to hack up your own rather than using it.

Who would you rather hire, someone who knows what a logistic regression is but has to look up the API calls, or someone who doesn't and tries to write their own classifier from scratch, but doesn't need to look up any syntax?

<comment><USER6> That question can be answered only if I know what position you are trying to fill. Some jobs are more suitable for one kind then others.

I don't mind new hire to not know API either way - senior programmers should be used to working with APIs they don't know. Tech changes constantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I worked with a large group of a local graduates from a well-known coding camp. The results were horrible.

They would submit a lot of pull requests, but upon review it became very apparent that documentation was not being consulted resulting in unnecessarily hacky solutions. The reason: programming by trial and error.

In the face of that, the only thing I could do is: give them the benefit of the doubt by asking them to walk me through their problem solving approach. This insulted them, because there was no problem and solving approach, just bruteforcing code with live reload until the feature worked.

Unfortunately, sometimes the feature did not actually work, or would not handle edge or error conditions which caused the program to be unstable. Sometimes to the point of causing a live incident.

Since coding camp graduates graduate very frequently and because of referral bonuses, they were a majority in our team. They used their majority to deny code reviews (not allowing people to mark their tasks as finished), and took turns to pull off microagressions in a round robin manner so nobody is accountable enough to be retaliated against.

In the end, these people know they will not prevail through technical excellence but rather by pumping as much code as possible and by playing dirty: refer a lot of friends, become a majority, avoid situations where a relative rank can be established and bully any opposition until they quit.

<comment><USER7> I would say that although your situation is probably not unique, not all people from coding boot camps are like that. There are people who believe that an 8 week course will teach them all they need to learn, but this is true of all education, and I have seen similar results from people with 4 year C.S. degrees as well. Do they need to learn more, absolutely, but there are a number of students who understand that this is just the start of their journey.

Like anything, there is no absolute, and I like to evaluate each one on a case by case basis. Just because someone can't spend the time and money to go back and get another degree doesn't mean that person won't turn out to be a great developer with a little bit of practice and help.

<comment><USER3> If you are in an entry level software engineering job after having spent little time and resources, you have very little to lose by behaving in this way.

It's either that or the alternative: working harder than everyone else, learning on your own time, try to push your career forward while completing low risk tasks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to teach front-end development at a bootcamp several months ago. What once was a great opportunity to share my 15 years of experience with various startups and fortune 500 tech companies ended up being a nightmare with management.

First and formeost, I liked most of my students. They came from all kinds such as: Background Actors, wives of programmers, students, military veterans, teachers, and a hodgepodge of characters. They were eager to learn a step-by- step procedure of HTML, CSS, and Javascript Fundamentals with a bit of web design elements.

What struck me as odd was the President/Founder of the bootcamp first hired me to do my job and observe the videos of what their past instructor did. So I did and found out he was too aggressive in his approach to teaching his students. He was talking too fast and went off in some awful tangents that wasn't on the itinerary. I told the founder, my boss at the time, about what changes I could do to make it less aggressive and with a flowable and presentable approach to the fundamentals of front-end development and he agreed.

In my first five days, things went well. Then the boss wanted me to stick with the previous itinerary while forcefeeding javascript trends in one week. It wasn't enough to teach them basic syntaxes, array methods, loops, and other things I learned in 1 year of CS studies (I finished my undergrad in Economics). He wanted me to feed AJAX, jQuery, Angular, and APIs with javascript in one week. I hesitated at first, but he insisted as his "board of directors" feel this would give my students a reason to keep buying more advanced courses in the school I don't want to give out.

I find out the real reasons for my services to my students is to not just give them a new career perspective, but to also have the boss read the idea proposals his students have as startup ideas and he would be the bridge to their funding. Except, he's the end of the bridge as an angel investor looking to own a huge chunk of their startup property before he prepares his elevator speeches to real angel investors. An another thing is he's also aiming veterans for their GI bills to be spent at his coding school.

I left after a month. I felt dirty and icky just looking back at it.

<comment><USER9> The incentives for the bootcamp model are just so completely broken. You suck in people with promises of a career, have them pay $10k each, and if they don't get a job it's somehow _their_ fault. It's really hard for word of mouth and reputation to kill a bootcamp because the demand outstrips supply right now. You could really suck, buy users with advertising, and make a killing for a looooong time.

I truly hope the future of education is something in which the incentives of the school are aligned with the students, and if the student fails the school doesn't get paid.

<shameless plug> We've been trying to do that at [https://lambdaschool.com](https://lambdaschool.com). We're a 6 month CS or Machine Learning/AI education, and instead of students paying up front we give them an education for free and take a portion of future earnings if they get a job in their field that pays >$50k/yr. If they don't get a job in their field it's 100% free.</shameless plug>

<comment><USER10> At the course I did the model was the education is completely free, if you then get a job afterwards you're expected to let the bootcamp try to get a recruiter fee from the company that hires you.

Or you stick around, freelance out the space on the projects they help you find and then give them a 10% contribution of those earnings and also teach the next cohort how to code.

Seemed to work pretty well.

<comment><USER9> That model works as well, but then the school is disincentivized from getting you work at most companies that don't pay a recruiting fee. If we get a recruiting fee we deduct that from the total owed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _My kitchen is a disaster. My whole house is just a mess. Anything that is not directly related to [the bootcamp] or to keeping me up and functioning, just goes by the wayside. […] I don't remember the last time I had a shower._

Hmm. Maybe the bootcamps _do_ give you a more realistic preparation than I had previously thought.

</comment><comment><USER12> Companies here value skills in specific programming languages/tech stacks over skills in core Computer Science. They are hiring bootcamp graduates (who are overall weaker), over stronger applicants, just because the bootcamp graduate will hit the ground running quicker.

It makes learning Computer Science in university less valuable, since university graduates lack knowledge in specific programming languages/tech stacks. It's like saying, "You know all that stuff you learned about memory management, virtual memory, I/O subsystems, CPU schedulers and so on? Yeah that doesn't matter if you don't know Angular X.0"

Does anyone else see a problem with this?

<comment><USER6> I see a bit of problem with it too.

However, someone who learned "about memory management, virtual memory, I/O subsystems, CPU schedulers" should have easy time to get up to speed in same stack as bootcamp graduate. Bootcamp graduates have to learn basic concepts during bootcamp (that computer follows instructions, how conditions and loops work, how to debug systematically, how to split task to smaller ones, etc). CS graduate shold match them in short time.

<comment><USER13> There are good and bad code schools, but knowing about compiler design and binary trees is probably not going to help you that much with your web monkey job. I think you and many others drastically overestimate the value of the CS degree, and you certainly don't appreciate the difficulty of being able to learn several complex web stacks in a few months starting from zero. The pace set is brutal if you already know the languages.

CS grads should ideally know nothing about the practice of programming. Dijkstra never wrote any code except with a fountain pen. A CS course should give you his skillset: being able to analyze programs in an academic sense. This is assumed to be representative of job performance by people who have no other measure. At the very least it should not be expected that it takes less time for the CS grad to pick up the bootcamper's skillset than it took for that person to acquire it. Most likely it will take far longer unless you're focusing on resume-driven development. The reality is that CS courses aren't likely to give you much of an edge in a coding bootcamp, let alone the workplace. In the long run there may be an advantage to the CS degree if the bootcamper can't pick up the relevant bits on the job, but otherwise the real difference is that you can expect the bootcamp grad to be productive immediately.

<comment><USER6> I strongly disagree with "CS grads should ideally know nothing about the practice of programming." and it does not even describe real life CS grads. Not knowing theory is a problem, knowing also practice is not a problem.

If you was able to learn compilers and implemented one ( as most of those courses require) then you not just have aptitude, but already can read code, can debug, learned to split code to smaller chunks developed etc. In practice, all CS already encountered databases, sql, at least one Web framework, did projects etc.

Web stacks are not that complex and complex parts repeat between frameworks. They seem complex if they are first thing you learn.

<comment><USER13> Condescending, incoherent, and wrong. If you think that CS is about how computers work in practice you should take that up with Dijkstra and Knuth. It's an absurd position. If you think that 'can read code, can debug' is the benefit of a university education then what about that takes four years to teach?

I'm a self-taught programmer. I talked my way into my first coding job with no experience and learned as I went. For the theory side of things I went with MIT and Stanford's online coursework, and the relevant papers when appropriate (e.g Turing 1936, Shannon 1948, McCarthy 1960). These days I'm getting into Haskell and J -- I hate being outgolfed by the array languages. Recently I audited a couple courses for a local coding academy. At the coding school, the default expectation is that you will be working with a framework that you have no prior knowledge of, possibly in an entirely new language, and expected to complete three to five projects per day, with specifications, unit and integration tests, and a meaningful commit history, five days per week for twenty-odd weeks. Most people require significant amounts of study time outside of class. This is not descriptive of CS coursework. It's almost like there are two related-but-distinct bodies of knowledge are being pursued in different ways!

If you have the idea that bootcamps are easy then I definitely invite you to try one sometime. Discard the idea that what the university and bootcamp are offering are somehow equal. A CS education may or may not be a better preparation for a career in programming, but it's not good job training, and that's on purpose. If things were otherwise, coding schools would not need to exist, would they?

A CS degree is a loosely-correlated proxy for being able to code. It happens to be very easily measured. This leads small minds to believe that it is a good proxy, especially if they happen to have CS degrees. I'm sure the rationalizations and condescension come naturally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > I couldn't work because I really needed to do job searching full time.

This is the part that don't quite understand. To me, the period when you search for jobs is exactly when you should be working as freelancer or working on side projects.

Working helps you get into the coding zone so that you are more prepared for coding sessions during interviews.

Working helps to add your resume and things to talk about when the interviewer asks "what have you been doing recently?".

Working should also be the natural next step to do after completing a bootcamp to put all the knowledge into practice.

I can't think of why it would need a full-time commitment to send CVs, practice algorithms and attend interviews.

<comment><USER15> Job search is a full time activity if done right. It doesn't leave you time to do freelancing.

<comment><USER16> You're corroborating a quote from the article, which I don't think deserves downvotes.

Would you like to expand on your point? It might be illuminating for people already established in the industry.

<comment><USER17> Different guy here responding

If you have a job, then you can only interview on lunch breaks or after work. If you have a shitty job then you have incredibly short lunch breaks and get off work late. You'll miss a lot of interview opportunities.

You also might not have time to do the various different screener exercises that many companies require of junior developers to make sure you actually know how to do something more complicated than fizzbuzz

If you've got two juniors of similar skill levels, and one of them needs this job significantly more, that may also weigh in your hiring decision

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the answer.

For myself, it is easy to forget this reality. Once your career is bootstrapped the story changes so much. I've changed employers only 4 times in 23 years, one of those was an acquisition, and the other three times I only interviewed with four companies (total, not each job change). Since getting my first job, I've never _not_ gotten the phone screen/onsite interview/job offer.

Ok that all sounds very braggadocio. Sorry.

But when I consider my first job search: over a period of nine months I sent out over a hundred applications, received several hundred rejections (some companies like to reject you once for each internal department that doesn't like you), and finally scraped a handful of interviews, some mealy mouthed "maybe if" not-quite-offers, and finally a real job offer. I also had the unbelievable arrogance to walk out of an interview because they used a 4GL and I wanted a _real_ programming job (I was polite about it, I waited until lunch and just said that I didn't feel that I would be a good fit)

Hone your craft, it gets better.

<comment><USER17> I'm actually on the other end of this, have had to design a few of those screener questions myself.

They're a pain but they do help with screening out those who can talk the talk but end up being overly confident spaghetti machines.

I know I'm missing out on people who are good but don't have time to prove it to me, but the cost of a bad hire is much more costly than missing out on a good one, and there are so many people to sort through

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've never gotten a good answer on another scenario: what if someone already has software development experience but no experience in a particular stack and they take a boot camp class to learn? Are they marketable if they know how to interview well?

For instance: a .Net full stack developer who takes a boot camp to learn how to develop for Android or iOS.

<comment><USER20> One of my developers was a CS grad who took a bootcamp to learn Ruby/Rails. She parlayed that into a $100k job out of the gate doing Ruby/Rails consulting work, and has been one of our top developers ever since. I've talked to her about her bootcamp experience, the main pain points for her were:

\- Unsure about whether the cost and time spent were actually worthwhile, or whether self-learning might have been a better option \- Bootcamps are not optimized for those who come in with basic programming skills

That second point was also exposed by a close friend of mine who decided to abandon her career in the aerospace/defense industry (she was an aerospace engineer) and do a bootcamp. She was top of our class in college, and she had done a fair amount of basic programming in tools like Matlab. She parlayed her bootcamp experience into a great job as well, but she often found that she was way ahead of the rest of the class. Luckily I've recruited from all of the bootcamps in my town, so I recommended a very good bootcamp with great instructors to her, and her instructors worked to put together a shadow curriculum of work to do while the rest of the class was still working through the main curriculum.

So, YMMV. If you can afford the cost of the bootcamp, it's a proven method to learn new skills and turn that into a new job, but the more programming experience you have, the more you'll find yourself far ahead of the rest of the class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> But do bootcamps train people to program well?

The metrics they measure against are money and job based. Which gives me the impression that we either don't know how to determine if people know how to program, or that no one really cares. We need some kind of standardized test or similar. I know of the Advanced Placement CS exam[1], but we need something more practical and not focused on a particular language.

[1] [https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer- scien...](https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer- science-a/exam#2016)

<comment><USER13> Nothing trains people to program well. Colleges teach fundamentals like lambda calculus, but fail to teach practical skills. Bootcamps have the opposite problem, and the actual industry seems to assume that trained developers spring up out of the ground like sowing dragon's teeth.

The requirement of 'not focused on a particular language' is actually something that I would be forced to disagree with. That leads to things like HAGGIS[0].

Generally we can probably say that determining whether people can program is difficult at best, but HackerRank[1] seems to have a good model. Problems are given in English with examples of input and output, and the testee may select from some five dozen supported languages. Programs use standard inputs and outputs.

Alternately I would support the use of a standard language. People do okay with computers even though they're not _really_ Turing machines; it would not be harmful to concede conceptual purity to satisfy some real-world constraint. Python or Ruby would probably be fine. In a bootcamp environment I'm afraid it would have to be JavaScript.

Either way, the part about "more practical" conflicts with the "not focused on a particular language" part, and the right answer is whatever is furthest from HAGGIS.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAGGIS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAGGIS) [1] [https://www.hackerrank.com](https://www.hackerrank.com)

<comment><USER21> I didn't know abotu HAGGIS, thanks for that link.

I vaguely remember that in the 1990's the US Advanced Placement test for CS was done in Pascal. The point has to be a focus on fundamentals. There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at bootcamps in 6 months.

> Colleges teach fundamentals like lambda calculus, but fail to teach > practical skills.

College CS programs in the USA are focusing more and more on appeasing recruiters and HR folk with keywords than in teaching CS fundamentals. And I think that's a tragedy.

<comment><USER13> > College CS programs in the USA are focusing more and more on appeasing > recruiters and HR folk with keywords than in teaching CS fundamentals. And I > think that's a tragedy.

If true, I am sure we would agree on that score.

> There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is > useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at > bootcamps in 6 months.

I believe that what gets taught at bootcamps is how to tackle new things, and professional standards of code quality. More learning how to learn. I do dispute the idea of "any programmer is useless if they don't know X" for any X. It's too strongly worded, for one thing. If you qualify 'programmer' as someone with 4-6 languages under their belt then yes, if that person doesn't know their algorithms they're probably going to be less productive -- writing BASIC in every language. That is unfortunately far from useless. But the subset of coding tasks you'd assign to junior developers are probably not going to inconvenience you much if you don't know how to do an A* search.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting quote:

 _> Also, we noticed that at least four students happened to be married to programmers, and at least seven others had parents, siblings or other important people in their social circle who were programmers._

</comment><comment><USER23> On the flip side of of bootcamps, are orgs like 42.us org, which aside from being a nonprofit, is also completely free! Much emphasis is placed on code review by your fellow students, with it being required that your projects must be graded by them. They just opened a new campus in Fremont that even inclides a dorm room for free for about 11 months. Disclaimer, I attend 42 at the Fremont campus

</comment><comment><USER24> _A year and a half ago, my wife, Kristen, was an English teacher. Now she is a full-time software engineer at Microsoft. I followed her journey with excitement as she went from writing her first "Hello World" program, then her first full stack web app, to getting an apprenticeship and finally a full time job._

Damn that is impressive

<comment><USER25> Is it a case of who you know?

<comment><USER26> It's not in the sense that I didn't have any connections and she got in on her own. It is in the sense that I have a CS degree and have worked in industry. I helped her on occasion get past a bad explanation in a tutorial and I could talk her through how technical interviews work.

<comment><USER27> I think a post from you and her on what she did during that year between deciding to enter tech and getting the job at Microsoft would be incredibly interesting and helpful.

Particularly, what resources did she use? More top down things (Udacity, FreeCodeCamp, jumping into building projects), or bottom up (online computer science classes, Berkeley CS61, SICP, etc).

Thanks!

<comment><USER26> The article has a link to her blog in that first paragraph (though links on Medium don't stand out that much). FreeCodeCamp was one of a number of things she did.

<comment><USER28> I read both your posts and her series of blog posts which where interesting to follow along. It wasn't clear to the reader how it is that she got past the HR screening for Microsoft as a non-cs graduate. I'm starting to believe that maybe she made a good impression by doing that class under that MS engineer who then made her students interview with actual Microsoft employees?

<comment><USER26> She has a new blog post, which may answer this more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> For people who are interested in a story (technically anecdata, I know, but I can't resist to chip in), here's mine.

I have taught a coding bootcamp 2 times now. The selection/recruitment of students -- not done by me -- was fairly loose in some cases. The only thing the bootcamp selection was strict on was that people completed their undergraduate degree (which is financially easier to do in Europe).

__Succesful Students__

What I noticed is that there are people who will be successful. These people somehow have a strong background in logical thinking. It can be by doing predicate logic in philosophy courses, being data oriented from your biology studies or even being hardcore at knitting [1].

Another thing I've noticed is that they learn quick and won't ask a lot of questions. They will use a search engine and will only come to you with difficult questions. They know how they learn quite well -- at the very least.

The final thing I've noticed is their determination. Some people come to a coding bootcamp with the expectation of "fix me, I need a job in this industry." The most successful students don't take anything for granted and know that they need to learn everything they can get their hands on.

__Unsuccessful Students__

What I noticed is with students who aren't successful is that they don't think logical -- their attention/focus does not allow it unfortunately. They may or may not ask a lot of questions. And they will completely fail the bootcamp if they don't ask fellow students for help. Also interesting is that they did not learn the terms or basics well enough.

In one of my groups I've noticed that one of my best students was coaching one of the least successful students. It was intensive, and the explanations and questions were sharp. Yet, by my surprise, it didn't do much. At the end of the bootcamp the student was still one of the least successful students. It makes me believe that not everyone can do a coding bootcamp, since the right mindset is required to start one. Teachers can only help you when you're open enough to receive the knowledge. I don't know to what extent that idea is true, but I want to find out.

__Unsuccessful Students Becoming Successful Students__

I have seen not so successful students become quite successful. They had an insane amount of grit and understood how they needed to learn the material. Compared to their other unsuccessful counter parts (in the beginning at least), these students are more structured and disciplined.

__When To Take A Bootcamp__

Even for not-so successful students it can be a great tool, provided they self-teach 1 to 2 months after that. However, unfortunately, it is not for everyone. If you don't think in a logical fashion, learn fast then at the very least you need to make that up in determination -- or in time after the bootcamp. I feel a bootcamp is as tough as nails if a student only learned bullet points from presentation slides during their academic years. Programming is more akin to learning a music instrument (i.e. it takes practice), and not everyone has experience learning that way.

[1] (following knitting instructions is very algorithmic -- it's a whole new world if you've never seen it. Here is an example of a pattern: [http://vintagecraftsandmore.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/V...](http://vintagecraftsandmore.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/Vintage-Crafts-and-More-Counterpane-Knitting-Pattern- Dahlia-Design-Instructions-1.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER30> With all due respect for the Author (and I don't doubt in any way that his results are correct) I am surprised that a research with 26 participants can lead to _anything_ , even if the Author himself specifies that in the "Limitations" of the paper:

>Our research focused on a small sample of students in coding bootcamps in one part of only one country. Other students may have had different experiences, especially in other bootcamps, in other places, and in other times. Additionally, while our stratified snowball sampling provided a range of experiences, we can make few claims about the commonality of experiences or causality.

The sample is IMHO simply too small to give to the outcome any more relevance than anecdotal data.

<comment><USER26> I don't have too much time to reply, but this is something I didn't know before starting grad school, so I thought I'd write briefly.

As a qualitative research project, the goal was not to find out how many students have which outcomes or experience. The goal was to find a range of experiences and how those experiences are viewed by students. For a qualitative project, 26 is actually a large sample and I intentionally sought a range of demographics, bootcamp stages and outcomes to capture a large range of viewpoints. The goal here is depth on a few people rather than breadth across all bootcamps everywhere. I hope someone does a proper quantitative study as well, finding the size of groups and correlations between factors and success. I chose qualitative methods because I wanted to discover viewpoints, which is something quantitative research is not well suited for.

I believe my research demonstrated the existence of several groups and viewpoints. For example, some students successfully change careers and I found what it meant for them, while others struggled and I found what it meant for them. Similarly, I found that some people took a year or more to change careers, so I can say that this is the case for some people. I can't say how big these groups are, just that they exist. Whenever I cite numbers (such as at least four students married to programmers), that is not intended to show how many students are married to programmers, but to suggest future researchers, bootcamps, and students might want to consider it and look into this more.

<comment><USER30> >I believe my research demonstrated the existence of several groups and viewpoints.

I am not in anyway contending that, all I was noting was that your demostration (of what I would have assumed to be self-evident "there exist several groups and different viewpoints") is backed by so little data (and as written on the paper "a small sample of students in coding bootcamps in one part of only one country") that the title "What I Learned From Researching Coding Bootcamps", swiftly followed by a graph with "big numbers" such as "Graduation rates of coding bootcamps compared to Computer and Information Science degrees in the US. " seemed to me like a "quantitative" study. And notes like "Also, we noticed that at least four students happened to be married to programmers, and at least seven others had parents, siblings or other important people in their social circle who were programmers." do seem like a statistical approach.

<comment><USER26> I definitely see how the graph with numbers at the top and numbers mentioned inside the paper could be misleading. I hope I made it clear enough in the post and paper what the limitations are that people don't misinterpret my findings even if they may be disappointing in my methods and their limits.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft to charge 7$ per user monthly subscription for windows 10(Enterprise) - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2016/07/14/microsoft-confirms-windows-10-new-monthly-charge <comment><AUTHOR> This seems pretty ridiculous, for an enterprise network with 20,000+ end users, where is the incentive to pay $140,000 per month with minimal, if any, increased profit margins using windows 10 over windows 7?

<comment><USER2> Support?

Those end users probably average more than $50,000 annual cost, so while $140,000 looks like a nice big number, the context is $80,000,000 per month of other employment costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I guess now we get to find out if King Nadella can extract a tax from his subjects.

To me, Windows (and MacOS) are so relatively set that I could go without upgrades for a long time. I don't see how these are services...

</comment><comment><USER4> Can non enterprise users purchase enterprise licenses to avoid the worst of the Telemetry, ads, etc?

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if security patches will be free.</comment>


Idea: Digital Will Agency - <AUTHOR>

So slightly morbid but I suspect HN users would be the type of people that would desire something like this.
A lot of us build up significant digital footprints.  Web sites, blogs, source code, artwork, etc.  We might desire some of these resources be transfered to family or published in perpetuity.
A prime example I can think of and the spark for my idea is the work of Richard Stevens:
http://www.kohala.com/.  It would be nice to ensure things like this survive indefinitely.  Perhaps also unreleased works that an author, coder, or artist may wish to pass on unfinished if something bad happens.
The technical side would be fairly commonplace.  Basic file hosting like rsync.net but HTTP interface as well.  In your actual will you could have instructions to find a private key that "activates" the service, whatever that entails.  Perhaps the company has agents that carry out some sort of actions too like shut down accounts, provide notice to user groups, or whatever.
Legal regulations might be hairy and of course some assurance that the company itself isn't ephemeral, perhaps by affiliation to some long standing institution.
Just a passing thought.  Plausible or craziness? <comment><USER2> We've considered expanding into this realm in the future. We will probably launch next weekend. Senotable.com.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best developer/hacker focused blogs? - <AUTHOR> I am sure we all read Coding Horror, Spolsky, Zed and Hanselman, but can this community help me identify some of the other great developer/hacker focused bloggers? <comment><USER2> Currently in my RSS reader:

* Coding the Wheel - <http://www.codingthewheel.com/>

* Good Math, Bad Math - <http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/>

* Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP - <http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/>

* Polymath Programmer - <http://polymathprogrammer.com/>

* The Endeavor - <http://www.johndcook.com/blog/>

* Programming Praxis - <http://programmingpraxis.com/>

* Pragmatic Bookshelf News - <http://www.pragprog.com/news/>

* Sutter's Mill - <http://herbsutter.wordpress.com/>

* Schneier on Security - <http://www.schneier.com/blog/>

<comment><USER3> Second on Coding the Wheel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > I am sure we all read Coding Horror, Spolsky, Zed and Hanselman

Not so much.

<comment><USER5> But how do you find out about the latest FogBugz release?!?!

<comment><USER6> HN seems insistent on keeping me up to date about it. ;)

<comment><USER7> Agreed. HN is the best aggregator for hacker/dev content

<comment><USER8> The post you replied to appears to be referencing FogBugz specifically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like Steve Yegge's archive, especially the original "internal amazon blog" (2004-2005): <http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/blog-rants>

Planet Apache can be interesting (an aggregator of apache committers). Extreme variation in quality, but James Duncan Davidson and Sam Ruby and a few others make it all worth it: <http://planet.apache.org/committers/>

Anton Chuvakin for security: <http://chuvakin.blogspot.com/>

<comment><USER10> Sam Ruby has his own Planet set up too; I find it to be pretty relevant: <http://planet.intertwingly.net>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What I do is use sites like Hacker news to discover other sites - if I like a story, I'll check the rest of the site to see if the author writes consistently good stuff, and if so subscribe.

I've found a lot of cool stuff that way.

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/>

<comment><USER13> I just recently started reading that site (thanks to HN). Wow. I've never felt so inadequate as a programmer.

<comment><USER14> Yeah its a great site whenever you feel your ego getting to big, it knocks you down a few points

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't have any specific blogs for you at the moment, but go with someone who is smart but unknown. Unknowns have to produce good content to stay afloat. At this point Coding Horror and Spolsky can get away with just about anything because of their success. It's too easy to assume that the big names are correct without critically thinking about their words.

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99426>

</comment><comment><USER17> The best blogs for me, are those that are not for the great hacker public, but for smaller audiences. Blogs about mathematics, data mining, computer vision, and so on. Coding Horror, Spolsky and the alike only talk about generalities and aren't really useful to me.

<comment><USER18> Also, datamining blogs? :)

<comment><USER19> <http://followthedata.wordpress.com> is one

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sites I like from my feeds, aiming for variety:

* Joseph Miklojcik (emacs, lisp, languages) <http://jfm3-repl.blogspot.com/>

* Mauricio Fernández (functional, with ocaml focus) <http://eigenclass.org/R2/>

* Colin Percival (tarsnap, freebsd security) <http://www.daemonology.net/blog/>

* Matthew Garrett (mobile linux, power management) <http://mjg59.livejournal.com>

* Brad Fitzpatrick (memcached, pubhubsubbub) <http://advogato.org/person/bradfitz/diary.html>

* Chris Neukirchen's Trivium (all links, great jumping point) <http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/>

</comment><comment><USER21> I enjoy DadHacker a lot, partly because I enjoy anecdotes, but mostly because Landon writes extremely well and seems like a nice guy without an agenda (unlike Joel and friends). I also used to read _why's blog from time to time before he vanished.

Mostly I just follow HN and proggit. I'm not very big on blogs.

</comment><comment><USER22> A few of my favorites that I didn't see people list; note that many of these are sort of combined personal blogs and programming-related (like mine - <http://joeganley.com>):

\- <http://wilshipley.com>

\- <http://lbrandy.com>

\- <http://nedbatchelder.com>

\- <http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/>

</comment><comment><USER23> Raymond Chen's very Windows focused The Old New Thing - <http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/>

</comment><comment><USER24> pkrumins has an especially enriching blog

<http://catonmat.net>

</comment><comment><USER25> Two I have in my reader:

Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP - <http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/>

Igvata - <http://www.igvita.com/> (Ruby based, sometimes too terse)

</comment><comment><USER26> <http://research.swtch.com/>

</comment><comment><USER27> Information Aesthetics - <http://infosthetics.com/>

The Frontal Cortex - <http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/>

</comment><comment><USER28> I can't believe raganwald's homoiconic hasn't been mentioned yet:

<http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/tree/master>

</comment><comment><USER29> Misc daily links:

\- <http://www.arjansworld.com>

\- <http://jasonhaley.com/blog/default.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER30> <http://hackety.org/>

…

Oh, damn :(</comment>


Skeptics StackExchange Q&A site - [citation needed] - <AUTHOR> http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/

<comment><USER2> Feels more like a discussion topic than Q&A. Interesting topic though.</comment>


Ask HN: SQL ORM in production? - <AUTHOR> SQL is second nature to me. I am no expert at it, maybe an intermediate user, but I'm definitely a fan. And a believer in well formed relational databases. So I would rather a service call into a database via a stored procedure or function call. I know this tightly couples the application to the database: stored procedures aren't easily migratable but you can via a good ORM just migrate the schema and data and then switch connection strings and should be good to go more or less. That and then there's the issue that the queries that the ORM might craft can't be as optimized as a hand rolled one at least in my experience. And then the overhead of defining relationships in models. Most recently I've worked on microservices in C# with entity framework core and it was dog slow compared to raw SQL. So the question is what is your take on ORMs? <comment><USER2> They are good query composers for simple queries (I'm thinking about Ruby on Rails and Django), useless for complex ones.

They're very useful to decode results in objects of the language and extremely useful to migrate the database.

I don't know about C# but probably the slow downs you're experiencing are in the decode phase.

I'm ok with stored procedures but I'd use them only where it makes sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm super biased but I still hate them. There's something powerful and simple being able to execute parametered queries. Alas if the industry is going this way then I'll have to adapt.

<comment><USER2> Parametered queries == prepared statements? Rails' ActiveRecord creates prepared statements and even caches query results by default. It's pretty useful to write stuff like Book.where(genre: 'scifi').count or Author.where(name: 'Frank Herbert').books.order_by(:publishing_date).first.title. You get the result immediately. Of course title = sql(select title from books ... ) would be quite ok too ( * ), but it turns out that some simple queries are quite long to write. I tend to use SQL only when I have to start looking at the documentation of the ORM.

( * ) I know no tool that can write queries like that but it would be great.

<comment><AUTHOR> See that conciseness I don't see as a benefit. I do acknowledge the downside of having a query in a method and maybe having to tweak the same type of query in a handful of methods any time the schema changes. It's a good way to introduce bugs I guess. At that point I would just use stored procedures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We mainly do DB construction ourselves, and for C# use LinqToSql and our own repos to integrate with it.

This is mainly because entity framework is terrible. It's slow enough that the lack of speed which is worse in Linq gets negligible. It's unproductive in that it's really verbose and unintuitive in how it works, especially code first. And worst of all, it's migrations often break, leading to a lot of time fixing it.

So if you're doing C# I'd probably keep doing raw sql if I were you.

Django by contrast has an excellent ORM, and with node you have stuff like prisma (though it doesn't have a mssql driver.

So really, I'd suggest you looked into python for your services.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it's generally pretty low effort to maintain a repository layer with raw SQL exposing your domain or entity objects (depending on the complexity of the whole project), so the most aggressive I get with an ORM is something like Dapper. RepoDb also looks promising.</comment>


Show HN: Shoelace 2.0 – a forward-thinking library of web components - <AUTHOR> https://shoelace.style/ <comment><AUTHOR> Shoelace author here.

Last night I released Shoelace 2.0, an open source library of common UI components.

These components work with any framework, can be loaded via CDN, are fully customizable with CSS (no preprocessor required), and install easily with a simple script + stylesheet. They were built with Stencil.js, which is a fantastic tool. The end result compiles down to vanilla web components.

Each component was designed from scratch to be lean, customizable, and easy to use. Accessibility is a common question folks have about component libraries. I'm definitely not an expert here, but I've spent a lot of time trying to get it right. I would like to echo the experts and say that accessibility only starts with components, but hopefully having a good foundation to build on will encourage others to think about it more at higher levels.

I hope you'll take a second to check it out! I'm happy to answer any questions you have about the project, how it's built, etc.</comment>


Little things that matter in a software engineering interview - <AUTHOR> https://link.medium.com/Mdp0vxJOmS <comment><AUTHOR> Not letting me repost now. Here's the link meanwhile: [https://medium.com/@guimonz/little-things-that-matter-in- a-s...](https://medium.com/@guimonz/little-things-that-matter-in-a-software- engineering-interview-afbd39caa36)

</comment><comment><USER2> Link shorteners are banned on HN; you could repost this using the underlying URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, will fix. Thanks</comment></comment>


How do I get people to sign up for our beta? - <AUTHOR>

Twitter is noisy, but people stick with it because of the value we get.   We have a new service that vastly improves the signal-to-noise ratio.  With our service, users are required to tag posts, they can also follow topics - not sources, and we have a unique tagging engine that lets you do several things, like follow compound tags.  With these features, our users can get more value than from Twitter, but with much less noise.  There are many other benefits, such as getting interesting content from sources you've never heard of before.
We're launching our beta later this month and we need users to test our service, but I'm not sure how to drive traffic and get people to sign up for the beta
In addition to driving traffic, I'd like to get feedback about the concept.
The website is http://www.poundwire.com
To learn more about our product, you can check out my startupli.st interview here: http://bit.ly/h2Odh8
Any feedback you have is greatly appreciated: poneppo [at] poundwire.com <comment><USER2> Right there with you: we're definitely getting sign-ups for our startup too (www.venturocket.com), but I would prefer a faster pace.

If I may sort of hijack your post and summarize your question: how do you get people to sign-up for something about which they know nothing other than what the splash page is marketing?

<comment><USER2> Thanks to both of you! :) You both have really great landing pages. I esp like LifeLitUp, really awesome bg img. I've signed up and Liked both.

As for further info on Venturocket, there isn't anything to read about us yet as we've been keeping totally silent until recently. But here's the "10-second teaser" version of Venturocket:

We solve the universal problem of padded resumés and hyperbolic cover letters by getting people to put their money where their mouth is: to actually be _exactly_ what they say they are, producing perfect and instantaneous match results between opportunity providers and opportunity seekers such as employers and job seekers, entrepreneurs and co-founders, and startups and investors.

Our beta will be ready soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really like your landing page, so I gave it a Like, and put in my email address.

If it makes you feel better, I'm in the same boat (minus the informative interview you had).

I upvoted you, I want some answers too. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> What's your site? I'll check it out. That's at least 1 more for you ;)

<comment><USER3> <http://www.lifelitup.com>

My startup is achievements, like Steam, but for real-life. A bit of a twist on Tourism.

I'm a New Zealander, so I'll be adding -lots- of NZ stuff (attractions, scenery, walks etc). It doesn't stop with NZ, we've currently got a heap of English and Canadian goals, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Give away something, anything for free in exchange for signing up.

Try what hipster did - <http://sanfrancisco.usehipster.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I like it, but we don't have any money or anything to give away beyond the promise of a useful service...

How about high-fives, hugs, or handshakes?

<comment><USER4> How about a free PDF (either funny or useful)?

Also, see <http://www.rewardlevel.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clickable - <http://www.poundwire.com>

</comment><comment><USER6> Great interview! Concept is definitely something that fills a need, noise on Twitter makes it seem overwhelming.</comment>


RelativeWave Acquired by Google, Giving Its App Design Tool Away for Free - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/relativewave-gets-acquired-by-google-and-starts-giving-its-80-design-app-away-for-free/

<comment><USER2> Awesome! Looks very similar to Origami -> [https://facebook.github.io/origami/](https://facebook.github.io/origami/)

I have never used either, but both look so much better than working off static PSD comps. I would be curious if a person who has used both can chime in on their impressions.

<comment><USER3> We use both at work (along with Pixate depending on the situation) and based on conversations I had today with our IX guys the main difference seems to be that Form makes it easy to mirror on your phone and actually play with the interactions, where as you can't do that with Quartz/Origami (the playing with interactions). I'm sure there are other differences as well (I'll see if one of our guys will come and comment here), but at the end of the day they both seem to have their place depending on the situation.

I definitely agree it's 100x better than PSD/static mocks however and I hope Google continues to put resources into this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a way to quantify the usage of tools like this? I mean, how many people actually use RelativeWave on a daily basis?

NoFlo, Origami, RelativeWave are all offering this visual programming, but any example I saw was becoming too complicated to follow before it was useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is so much of this stuff OSX only. Is it just developer market share is it something about Apples ecosystem that makes people knock out these great looking useful programs that never I see through Windows.

<comment><USER6> OSX is Unix and, from my own informal observations, it's very popular among the developer crowd. I spend more time on a Mac than I do on Linux these days and I'm very happy.

Unless it was done in a portable way (and this one feels like it's done as Mac-native), making a Windows version is a whole lot of work for a very uncertain RoI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats!</comment>


Tails transition to a new OpenPGP signing key - <AUTHOR> https://tails.boum.org/news/signing_key_transition/index.en.html

<comment><USER2> The question that comes to mind is: why? Every transition incurs additional risk. So what is the benefit?</comment>


Conway's Game of Life, Implemented in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/camjackson/conway_rs

<comment><USER2> Conway's Game of Life, implemented in Objective-C:

[http://www.warplife.com/life/](http://www.warplife.com/life/)

If you'd like to beta test, send your device's UDID to firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Here's how we could actually measure AI - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/06/beyond-the-turing-test/

<comment><USER2> The rush to redefine a better Turing test seems pretty misguided in light of the fact that we all agree that "Eugene" in fact fails any reasonable interpretation of it, quite badly, and the real problem here is the credulousness or even outright lying of the people who ran the test.

A bot that could persistently convince a person of average intelligence that it was human across an extended period of time would still be quite the thing. A bot that could convince me that it was human would require someone to leap some pretty significant AI barriers that so far nobody has even come close to. It may not be the touchstone of "true AI" because that's a very slippery term, but it's a legitimate milestone, and the fact that it's 2014 and "Eugene" is still the best we have(give or take a bit) is evidence _for_ the idea that it's a hard test, not evidence against!

It doesn't matter what test we use... credulous or deceptive people are still going to prematurely cry "success!". Twiddling with the test isn't solving the real problem here. (Again, as always, step one is solving the problem is _identify the problem_. It's often harder than it seems at first....)

</comment><comment><USER3> Was the Turing Test ever about measuring _intelligence_? I always thought that it was about _thought_ , i.e. the existence of conscience.

The test was in essence a call to empathy: a reminder that, if an entity was so complex so as to exhibit such behavior that we couldn't distinguish it from an educated fellow human, it would be impolite to treat it as "inhuman" or "a thing".

So why use it to measure intelligence, when other tests like I.Q. are designed specifically for that?

<comment><USER4> Yeah the Wired article is altogether crap. It describes the Turing Test as being about 'imitating human conversation', missing the point entirely.

<comment><USER3> Well, 'imitating human conversation' is what the published versions of the Test seem to be about.

Unfortunately it seems the current state of the art has only devoted to imitate the superficial parts of it. I'm not aware of anyone trying to build SHRDLU-like model for conversation that tried to understand _and remember_ what is being said, rather than merely reacting to it.

<comment><USER5> IBM's Watson and the OpenCYC project are doing that.

 _a Cycorp engineer informed the system they would be discussing anthrax. Cyc responded: "Do you mean Anthrax (the heavy metal band), anthrax (the bacterium), or anthrax (the disease)?" Asked to comment on the bacterium's toxicity to people, it replied: "I assume you mean people (homo sapiens). The following would not make sense: People Magazine."_

[http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~klinger/articles/thinking_la_times_6...](http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~klinger/articles/thinking_la_times_6_21_01.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here [1] is a list of some Winograd schemata devised for testing artificial intelligence chatterbots. It boggles my mind how diverse an AI's knowledge of the world and relationships contained therein would have to be to resolve these, especially when you think about how natural that process is to us, up to the point that we don't even recognize the ambiguity.

[1]: [http://www.cs.nyu.edu/davise/papers/WS.html](http://www.cs.nyu.edu/davise/papers/WS.html)

<comment><USER7> Compared to other tests, it would be easier to work those into everyday conversation. That way, you don't have to know you're judging a Turing test to discover one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article mentions language processing, interpreting audio and visual material, and playing games as goals that have been set for AI, and then suggests as an alternative goals that "can expand with our own abilities and desires."

But there is little mention of creativity, empathy or emotion - aren't these the types of dynamic, responsive cognitive abilities that are uniquely human? Certainly there's an ethical dimension to the question of whether we should strive to recreate these in AI, but they seem like the type of goals that depend on complex and dynamic intelligence, that would be the most difficult types of tests for computers to pass.

<comment><USER7> >But there is little mention of creativity, empathy or emotion - aren't these the types of dynamic, responsive cognitive abilities that are uniquely human?

I wouldn't say "uniquely human", other animals show signs of all of those. Still, they're not really represented in machines. I don't believe that machines are incapable of it, or that people are trying to avoid implementing it; more that the basics still need improving before we need to worry about it.

On the other hand, it's possible that people are working on AI from the wrong angle, and creativity, empathy, and emotion are needed at a much lower level and would make imparting knowledge to machines easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this article badly misunderstands the whole point behind Turing's test: that we don't have a definition of intelligence. We just have a model: us. Lacking a definition, coming up with measures is foolhardy, and yet here we are with an article attempting exactly that.

> Machine learning researcher Hector Levesque of the University of Toronto > proposes that resolving such ambiguous sentences, called Winograd schema, is > a behavior worthy of the name intelligence.

> Humans are also exceptionally good at recognizing faces.

> We could further ask for the computer to interpret audio-visual phenomena > and then reason about them.

These qualities are neither sufficient nor necessary conditions of intelligence. Would Hellen Keller pass the last two? Computers are getting very good, very quickly, at facial recognition. Once a computer beats people at this task, would it be intelligent?

What Turing was getting at was to devise a test which didn't measure anything: it merely exploited the fact that we just have a model. Until we face that, such "revisions" are absurd.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a budding AI researcher. I don't believe there is any specific test to measure AI.

Let me explain. We humans are smart, we have common sense reasoning, this is what computers really lack and gives them the disadvantage in communicating with us like fellow humans.

We can recognize this, and I believe the best AI test is just simple to throw it out there where a lot of people can use the system and when they are done, if they agree that it's smart, it's smart and we can call it AI. There's no rule, there's no trick such as trying to fool someone. It could be a casual chat, it could be a serious chat about some topics that both party learned before hands, it could be a game playing of sort.

</comment><comment><USER11> You know, I think a machine capable of recognizing puns would be very close to some measure of real intelligence.

This thought was instigated by some friends talking about some animals. "There was a herd of them?" "Yea, I _heard_ them. Ayyy!" A machine recognizing puns must be able to recognize auditory similarity, while recognizing that their meaning is related in some undefined way while being distinct words.

</comment><comment><USER12> Has no one read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"? I think all this conversation would be greatly enlightened if we start thinking on the opposite way: when AI is so advanced, how can we tell human and machine "behavior" apart?

Putting it another way: is the Philip K Dick's Voigt-Kampff test the inverse of the Turing test?

<comment><USER5> There are lots of ways to be intelligent without being very humanish. Unless someone is really trying to imitate human intelligence specifically, such a test would probably be really easy.</comment></comment>


The Strange and Twisted Life of "Frankenstein" - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein?currentPage=all <comment><USER2> Torn by revolution, gasping at the quick pace of technological change, divided by debates over racial equality, early 19th Century Europe produces a crop of batshit-crazy writers, and Mary Shelley. She writes a book that treats on themes of parenthood, which is completely misunderstood for two centuries.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://archive.is/eBI2E](http://archive.is/eBI2E)

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a book called _The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein_ that argues that _Frankenstein_ was actually written by Mary Shelly's husband, Percy Shelly.[1]

A later book, _Shelley Unbound: Discovering Frankenstein 's True Creator_ makes the same case.[2]

[1] - [https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Wrote- Frankenstein/dp/0943742...](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Wrote- Frankenstein/dp/0943742145/)

[2] - [https://www.amazon.com/Shelley-Unbound-Discovering- Frankenst...](https://www.amazon.com/Shelley-Unbound-Discovering- Frankensteins-Creator/dp/1936239604/)

<comment><USER5> I had never heard of that authorship controversy. The biggest one I've heard is the claim that Truman Capote and not Harper Lee wrote To Kill A Mockingbird.

<comment><USER6> Outside of that one book, there is no authorship controversy vis a vis 'Frankenstein' which would certainly explain why you were not aware of it.</comment></comment></comment>


Desert256: a better vim color scheme previewer - <AUTHOR> http://macwright.org/desert256/

<comment><USER3> Handy tool. I'm curious how many of those examples are used by any significant number of people. Perhaps I'm color-biased towards what I'm used to, but I can't imagine anyone except perhaps the author using some of these: <http://macwright.org/desert256/#color/hhviolet> <http://macwright.org/desert256/#color/olive> <http://macwright.org/desert256/#color/tomatosoup>

<comment><AUTHOR> Same, when I flip through colorschemes there are plenty of simply ridiculous ones. I'm looking to implement some sort of voting to make this better - <USER2> that the actually-used schemes float to the top, but using the Google+ Button API makes me uneasy...</comment></comment>


Maelstorm: aphyr toolkit to help in writing toy Raft implementations - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom <comment><USER2> This looks great! I'd previously been pointing people at [https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/labs/lab- kvraft.html](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/labs/lab-kvraft.html) (which has a golang Raft test suite).</comment>


A Homemade Style of Terror: Jihadists Push New Tactics - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/us/terrorists-find-online-education-for-attacks.html

<comment><USER2> Thx! I wonder if wae are simply too late with every counter measurement...</comment>