Sonic Pi – A Music Live Coding Environment for Schools - <AUTHOR> http://sonic-pi.net

<comment><USER2> There was a talk at Strange Loop 2014, "Our Shared Joy of Programming", which was just recently put on YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_zW63dcZB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_zW63dcZB0)

The whole talk is stimulating, but the parts relevant to Sonic Pi are its Overtone ([http://overtone.github.io/](http://overtone.github.io/)) lineage at about 9:05, a demo at about 17:36, and the experience using it in schools ([http://www.raspberrypi.org/sonic-pi-live-summer- school/](http://www.raspberrypi.org/sonic-pi-live-summer-school/)) at about 26:48.

What I got out of it was that it's a language which is meant to be both fully featured and easy for kids to pick up, to get interested in music, programming, or both. Maybe not so much programming as just "computational thinking". It has less incidental complexity than EDSLs (like Overtone) or traditional tools which expose more of the synthesis pipeline. Compared to most video game/graphics frameworks, which are also used in education, you can get to more polished content faster.

</comment><comment><USER3> really cool.

nested with_synth and with_fx calls seem less intuitive than an object oriented approach, which mirror traditional circuits. (synth.connect(fx1) fx1.connect(output)). what was the reasoning behind this? i only ask because i could see it making a difference in terms of education. and, what makes this more suitable for schools than ChucK, Supercollider, etc.?

that aside, i really wish someone would make a language agnostic livecoding VST so we can start incorporating stuff like Sonic Pi into our real workflows. i sense an integration like that would also gain some attention from people who previously ignored livecoding. i'm sure a lot of students screw around with Fruity Loops or Ableton and would find livecoding much more accessible if it tapped into the tooling they already understood.

<comment><USER4> There's a basic problem with live coding, which is defining the problem domain.

Live coding systems are only really good for building teeny tiny little toy automata, which usually do simple stuff with note lists, and maybe apply a bit of randomness or some simple repeating functions to a parameter or five.

Weapons-grade commercial music is _much_ more complicated. The sounds are richer, the arrangements and mixes are immensely complex (even for simple songs), and generally there's a ridiculous amount of care and detail.

But... if you start building in machine learning, database searches, and super-complex DSP patches, and the stuff you really need to make non-trivial music, you're not really live coding any more - you're plugging pre-existing modules and data together by typing.

Also, watching people typing is kind of dull.

I think there are solutions to both problems, but REPL-music systems are only ever going to be a step on the way to them.

I'd be surprised if live coding ever makes it into the mainstream in the way that (say) eSports almost have.

<comment><USER5> I disagree for a few reasons - language is very good at describing complicated things, minimal music is great, and there's nothing at all stopping live coders from using rich sounds.

<comment><USER4> Then why don't live coders use rich sounds, or make complicated things?

As for 'minimal music' \- most of it isn't really all that minimal, and it certainly can't be reduced to trivial algos.

And if your only option is to be minimal, maybe that's not so great.

Point is that only a tiny subset of the population has ever been interested in listening to music defined and created exclusively by writing code. Live coding caters very nicely to them.

No one else seems to be listening.

Over the same period, CGI has moved from basic wireframes to epic photorealism-with-AI. You can see this stuff in games and movies, and it's awesome.

Why aren't code musicians interested in pushing the boundaries of code music by aiming for something with similar complexity?

Here's a thing: after nearly sixty years of code music, exactly zero code music composers have troubled the public imagination.

Over the same period we've had literally hundreds of new electronic genres and styles, and even people who don't much like electronica can name at least a couple of people who make it.

We've also had game music coders writing complex AIs for arranging and generating music on the fly in game contexts.

But live coders don't seem interested in any of this, because typing.

Honestly, this completely baffles me.

<comment><USER3> >> "Then why don't live coders use rich sounds, or make complicated things?"

because there is no reason, because livecoding hasn't matured at the same rate as other production software. at the risk of painting a broad stroke, the people who care about livecoding don't really care about rich sounds.

do you recall how EDM sounded in the 90s and early 2000s compared to now? and they were using the same exact tools as they use today. but i'm pretty sure a lot of techno producers were literally limited to like 6 tracks or something. and the sounds they used were god awful. not because they preferred it, but because they were technically limited by these parameters.

but people still made music, people still danced, and the genre progressed along with it's tooling over the next 20 years.

the music is still evolving side by side with the software we build to produce it. livecoding is just another instrument that hasn't been exploited to it's fullest advantage (as a "live" coding or a production tool).

i've played in touring bands, and i produce electronic music for fun now. i've been a software engineer about my whole life. i would love more programming language options in my production. the same way tweaking a VST can result in more interesting melodies than you originally intended, programming languages can be a great tool to help explore audio in unique ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not bad. Reminds me of Hackety Hack.

Bret Victor's criticism of KhanAcademy is just as relevant here [http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/](http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/)

<comment><USER5> I think Bret Victor underplays the importance of liveness ("almost worthless", eh?), and doesn't touch on the possibilities of making programming a shared experience, that is itself culturally meaningful, inclusive activity, e.g. musical. This is what Sam Aaron and other live coders have been working on for the past decade. It's a totally different approach really, through making music together, nonstop for years.. Sonic Pi is impressive and successful because it's grounded in actual arts practice, not extrapolations from rigged demos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For a long long time I have wanted to do a language for programming music. I like how easy this is to get started with it almost feels like the old tracker days.

<comment><USER8> How is your conception of what is involved in 'do[ing] a language for programming music' different to super-colider or ChucK or puredata? Not being aggressive just interested in how you see the problem.

<comment><USER7> Getting started to begin with :)

It feels like the PHP of music programming environments.

I am a former musician so approach music more like Sonic Pi

I mean it's this

Sonic Pi

with_fx :reverb, mix: 0.2 do loop do play scale(:Eb2, :major_pentatonic, num_octaves: 3).choose, release: 0.1, amp: rand sleep 0.1 end end

vs. super collider

// Simple synth definition using the Atari2600 UGen: ( SynthDef(\atari2600, {|out= 0, gate= 1, tone0= 5, tone1= 8, freq0= 10, freq1= 20, amp= 1, pan= 0| var e, z; e= EnvGen.kr(Env.asr(0.01, amp, 0.05), gate, doneAction:2); z= Atari2600.ar(tone0, tone1, freq0, freq1, 15, 15); Out.ar(out, Pan2.ar(z*e, pan)); }).store )

// And a pattern to play it: ( Pbind( \instrument, \atari2600, \dur, Pseq([0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.45], inf), \amp, 0.8, \tone0, Pseq([Pseq([2, 5], 32), Pseq([3, 5], 32)], inf), \tone1, 14, \freq0, Pseq([Pbrown(28, 31, 1, 32), Pbrown(23, 26, 3, 32)], inf), \freq1, Pseq([Pn(10, 16), Pn(11, 16)], inf) ).play )

When playing music the ability to quickly get up and running is more important than the flexibility of the system. I.e. you wanna quickly get to the point when you have fun and then you optimize later.

But don't get me wrong supercollider is a fantastic tool and was a real innovation.

<comment><USER8> Fine, so still REPL but with built in stuff to get a performance going. I get the picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also have a look at [http://earsketch.gatech.edu](http://earsketch.gatech.edu)

Python + music

<comment><USER10> I'm glad someone mentioned EarSketch. As it's more focused on teaching programming and computing principles by making music, as opposed to a general purpose computer music language/environment like Chuck, Pure Data, and Supercollider. I was involved with the project during Grad school when it was completely attached to a DAW (Reaper), but it can now run in a browser. I'm usually not that excited about audio applications in a browser, but I think this is a great use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great. As someone who's tried to get into coded music, the biggest hurdle for me has always been getting the pipeline set up properly (including learning VIM commands). This handles all of that.

</comment><comment><USER12> Would it be possible to run this under Windows? :o

<comment><USER8> Also how about non-pi Debian linux?

I'll experiment with the .tgz file for that.

<comment><USER13> Hey if you figure this out, please report back--I'd love to try this program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems related to Chuck [http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu](http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu)

</comment><comment><USER15> let's if some mainstream will use it e.g. [https://www.facebook.com/imayday555?ref=br_tf](https://www.facebook.com/imayday555?ref=br_tf)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it possible to use sonic pi on windows?</comment>


How Secure Are Electronic Safe Locks? [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxQUKAjq-7w <comment><USER2> Security is an interesting thing. I always tend to default to the easiest path. In the case of inexpensive consumer safes the easiest path tends to be smacking the safe in the right spot to cause the locking solenoid to bounce or going after the "backup lock" which is used for access in the event of an electronic lock failure. Here's a video I posted several years ago on YouTube on how to open the wall safe in my house. Radial, aka tubular pin locks are pretty much broken by design. I've never met one I couldn't pick with a business-card.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E13H7NAGnPI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E13H7NAGnPI)

</comment><comment><USER3> tldr; This was a ~$500 medium-level security safe and he was unable to crack it via the electronics.

<comment><USER4> Your tl;dr; doesn't sufficiently capture Dave's level of Australian...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of my favorite EEVBlogs. Thanks for the submission. Bob's yer uncle!

Side note: Dave noted the use of the old school OTP chip to store the executable code, contrasted it with modern flashable chips, and then linked the use to the original design. However I wonder if retaining the OTP chip isn't a specific security measure? It does what is needed with much less attack surface than a reprogrammable chip, doesn't it?

</comment><comment><USER6> A safe I used at a prior company had a digital lock with one combination. A little searching for similar models revealed that the lock had additional combinations, not documented in the manual for _our_ safe, with factory default combinations. We changed the extra entries quickly.

I wonder how many more there are. It's software, it's practically uninspectable, it sure wouldn't surprise me.

<comment><USER7> In my experience those digital hotel safes that you set a code for usually have a standard override code (often 5555) - failing that a sharp ta to the top of the keypad gets some open. It's a kind of a shame they don't take this sort of things seriously.

<comment><USER8> I don't trust them either. When I check into a hotel/motel; I ask for no maid service. I do ask for an extra set of linen though. They always look at me like I'm crazy. Even when I ask though, some establishments clean my room anyways? I can't prove it, but I feel I have had stuff stolen form my room. I just saw a commercial for a new Los Vegas hotel. Their sales pitch was we clean your room 2x daily. I said to myself, "I'm not going there." When I bring a few grand worth of stuff to a hotel, and decide to take a chance with the maid service, I lock my stuff up in a large Pac Safe made for Backpacks.

<comment><USER9> I didn't know you could request no maid service. I usually leave the Do Not Disturb sign displayed on the door during my entire stay.

<comment><USER10> During my stay in China the DnD sign does not seem to apply, they still come in...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was wondering if you could also attempt glitching attacks?

<comment><USER12> This is unlikely considering you only have access to the external power supply. As Dave notes there is a filtering stage on the PCB to help isolate the chip.

<comment><USER11> One form of glitching is voltage glitching though</comment></comment></comment>


Discovered: The Great Atlantic (not to be confused with Pacific) Garbage Patch - <AUTHOR> http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/15/v-fullstory/1580554/a-2nd-garbage-patch-plastic-soup.html

<comment><USER2> Here are some disturbing images of pollution around the world: [http://www.rapingmothernature.com/2009/06/01/awful- pictures-...](http://www.rapingmothernature.com/2009/06/01/awful-pictures-of- pollution/)</comment>


Authorities cover up nude Roman statues to not offend Iranian president - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/12122665/Anger-in-Italy-after-authorities-cover-up-nude-Roman-statues-of-goddesses-so-as-not-to-offend-Iranian-president.html <comment><USER2> Completely OT but somehow relevant in my mind: this kind of submission getting up symbolizes how HN is now becoming mainstream - there is nothing even marginally "hacker" about this post - unless they were using some cool new optic fiber to make the statues "invisible".

<comment><USER3> From [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes > more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the > answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're > evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or > disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's > probably off-topic.

I guess the guidelines are not so strict.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's an interesting philosophical question, but the only reason this is being reported is because the Iranian President is Muslim. People who believe in Islam should not be subject to extra scrutiny, nor should respect, tolerance and friendship directed toward Muslim people be questioned as some sort of capitulation.

If we want a good outcome, we need more tolerance and less divisiveness and paranoia. We know very well from history that the latter results in very bad things - death, oppression, war, etc. - and what good comes from them?

IIRC, George W. Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft had a nude statue in the Justice Department covered because he didn't like nudes.

<comment><USER5> Regarding "Drapegate", It's not known exactly who ordered the drapes put there or why. Even if it was Ashcroft, his motivation is not necessarily not liking nudes. He may have been annoyed by media photographers standing at odd angles to get photos of the breast next to his head. This was an in-joke amongst photographers that started with Edwin Meese - getting a photo of a breast next to a conservative AG, bonus points if he happens to be bashing porn at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems unclear where the order to do this might have come from, and with the feeling in much of Europe at the moment it will be seen as cultural capitulation by many.

It's somewhat scary and the consequences are hard to forsee, but the combination of recent atrocities and the refugee crisis does seem to be reawakening various forms of European nationalism as people (rightly or wrongly) perceive their culture to be under attack.

This won't help.

What's this doing on HN by the way?

</comment><comment><USER7> When in Rome..... oh wait, I guess not.

</comment><comment><USER8> These statues are artful history of our human heritage...

I understand the effortful making nice with foreign diplomats, but come on, the Iranian president has likely seen actual people nude before without exploding into an atomic nova of violated regressive doctrine.

</comment><comment><USER9> Statues covered up: In my mind it depends where it comes from. - If the visiting Iranian delegation requests it I would say it's a little ignorant and petty for a visiting foreign representative to request something like that. You have to know Italy has naked statues in it. There's no way you can't know that. Asking your host entity to cover them up because you don't like them (or like them too much?) strikes me as extremely arrogant and haughty. \- If it comes from the Italian Government, I'd say it's somewhat disingenuous. If they're so much a problem, they shouldn't be there in the first place, and if they aren't, it's just showing the Government is ashamed of it's own culture which is kind of weird. \- If it's just the museum going "Hey this guy is visiting, his culture doesn't really dig this kind of thing, why don't we be polite and cover it up" I think that's perfectly acceptable and frankly very polite of them to do.

As to his aides asking him not to be photographed next to the statue: Who cares? It's his image, let him maintain it how he sees fit.</comment>


The Simple Psychology Behind Apple's Fall - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/the-simple-psychology-behind-apples-fall-66771889da10 <comment><USER2> If the article is correct, then humans suffer from a common profound, disabling and dangerous mental illness. The correct approach is not pandering to this illness but attempting to cure it.

We shall destroy our planet in a very few years if we continue to tear out its heart for fashion. We must instead build for quality, function, and to last.

If your motivation in buying a $1000+ phone is to create envy, you are not fit to live here. Can we change this through mass marketing? Do we need new laws to make this happen? Should we jail or perhaps sterilize those with this trait? How extreme are the measures we need to take when our survival as a species is at stake?

It is pointless to debate the relatively weak data behind climate change when we have strong evidence of a mass extinction event that will likely end our species within a few decades. This may be the last moment that change is possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope you're kidding. I certainly don't want the government interfering in any of this. If Apple wants to make products that pander to vanity, that's their prerogative. They're certainly not the first to do so.

I think the point of the story is not that people are vain or need to be special. That's not "fixable" and it's debatable whether it would even be desirable to attempt to fix it. The point is that there are limits to the market for _everything,_ including boutique phones. Apple is finding out that, lacking innovation or even real product improvement, they're going to come up against these limits.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Wolf3d-style game in 512 bytes - <AUTHOR> https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=83795 <comment><USER2> This is great, I really like the clean, well commented source code.</comment>


The Microsoft Update Catalog no longer needs the terrible ActiveX components - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsitpro/2016/10/18/microsoft-update-catalog-site-updated/ <comment><AUTHOR> Starting today, IT administrators using Microsoft Edge (or other browsers) will be able to use the site for downloading available Windows updates.</comment>


Ask HN: What is science? - <AUTHOR> I was talking with a coworker about psychology and what is classified as science. He was saying that taking a hypothesis and performing a test on it to find answers is science.
I was under the impression  for something to be considered scientific that it has to be repeatable and verifiable no matter where the test was done or who performs the test. Where as psychology based tests deviate from that.
This just raised the though of... what is science exactly? I'm curious what all of you consider science. <comment><USER2> You are confusing 2 different terms. What your coworker describes is called "scientific process" i.e the process to do science. The output of this process is what is called a theory and that is related to the second point i.e something that can be verified by anyone and this verification is repeatable forever.</comment>


Do Cats Control My Mind? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/do-cats-control-my-mind/282045/ <comment><AUTHOR> On the Internet videos at least I think they do!</comment>


Self-owning corporations are legally possible - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2954173 <comment><USER2> The article seems confused...the title references _ownership_ and the abstract is not about ownership at all but about control of LLC's and in a legal context ownership is distinct from control.

Otherwise the article is based on a false premises:

>Third, governments — particularly in the United States — lack the ability to determine who controls entities they charter

Take Florida. Florida's Limited Liability Company Act regulates who can be a manager (i.e. who controls the LLC). In fact the act creates 2 types of LLCs as most states do, member managed and manager managed. In one non-members can not be managers (control) the LLC.

Outside of the LLC, almost every statute regulates who can _control_ and who can _own_ a business entity. For example, a non-profit corporation has no _owners_. Although states do differ, generally by statute, a non licensed person cannot be the owner of a professional service corporation, professional association, or professional limited liability company. Though generally those professional entities can have non-licensed directors, officers, or managers. State laws also generally include restriction on minors being directors, officers or managers, but they can usually be owners, although it gets tricky where they are the sole owner because legally they can't even sign contracts/formation documentation (though still legally possible).

Point is Governments are well equipped to regulate who can own or who can control any type of business entity.

What is possible, and I have written legal articles about, is to have autonomous trusts, or what I call the _trusteeless trust_ but my examples and use cases are limited to the trust being funded solely with cryptocurrencies/tokens.

<comment><USER2> I can no longer edit my comment, but I have now read all 75 Pages, and the Article does in fact mention some of these issues, such as member-managed vs manager-managed LLCs and then in the "detection problem" section they discuss incorporators, directors, officers of corporations.

Still the premises of the Article is flawed, and found in Section 1(b), _Initiating Algorithmic Entities_ , on page 13, in part:

>Bayern specifies this chain of events as capable of establishing the link: (1) [A]n individual member creates a member-managed LLC, filing the appropriate paperwork with the state; (2) the individual(along, possibly, with the LLC, which is controlled by the sole member) enters into an operating agreement governing the conduct of the LLC; (3) the operating agreement specifies that the LLC will take actions as determined by an autonomous system, specifying terms or conditions as appropriate to achieve the autonomous system's legal goals; (4) the sole member withdraws from the LLC, leaving the LLC without any members. The result is potentially a perpetual LLC—a new legal person—that requires no ongoing intervention from any preexisting legal person in order to maintain its status.

The premises is the last member (owner) withdrawing from the LLC leaving an AI to run the perpetual LLC, which is a legal impossibility. Every State has a law requiring an LLC have at least one member, and upon the withdraw of the last member of an LLC the LLC immediately becomes administratively dissolved (no longer in good standing with the State) under the State's law. Its not novel, similar laws govern situations when the sole member of an LLC dies, either the LLC automatically dissolves or ownership gets distributed to the member's heirs, pursuant to the specific State's laws, but the managers and/or employees don't go on running the member-less LLC whether they are human or an AI.

<comment><USER3> What if the AI creates a fake identity?

On a related note, what if we substitute a person on a remote connection to a computer instead of an AI? That seems far more dangerous and probably exists today.

<comment><USER2> >What if the AI creates a fake identity?

The article addresses this as a potential issue, but also goes into the game of cat and mouse with humans currently creating fake identities and stealing identities. The authors don't seem overly concerned about this and conclude the system (States, IRS, Etc...) are pretty effective at weeding this out already.

<comment><USER4> From the paper:

> By contrast, an algorithm could generate an unlimited number of artificial > entities quickly and easily, without violating any law. For algorithms – and > other criminals – entities can function as identities. > Artificial entities > can more easily generate credibility because they are a form with which > business people are already familiar.

How would that not violate the law? If my AI commits a crime, am I not liable for it?

(I'm guilty of skim-reading - maybe the answer is staring me in the face.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, a foundation is basically a self-owning company that is steered by its stated goal and often outlives its creators. In addition, there are several other legal forms that allow companies to own themselves. For example, in Germany there's the concept of a "Kein-Mann GmbH" (no man's GmbH), which is a limited liability company that owns 100 % of its own shares.

<comment><USER6> Are there any real-world examples of this? The wikipedia article only seems to reference theoretical discussions of it. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kein- Mann-GmbH](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kein-Mann-GmbH)

<comment><USER7> IKEA is a opaque web of companies and foundations that own each other. Mostly not german.

<comment><USER8> I was under the impression that IKEA began as a Swedish company, right? Why would they be owned by Germany?

<comment><USER9> Not German, though IKEA has a particularly complex corporate structure: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA#Corporate_structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA#Corporate_structure)

... which apparently funnels into trusts in Caribbean countries that are not required to disclose beneficiaries. Basically, it sounds like tax evasion at a grand scale.

<comment><USER10> You mean tax avoidance - structuring your finances to pay less taxes.

Tax evasion is illegal under-reporting of your income, which I highly doubt Ikea does

<comment><USER9> Point taken, but I meant evasion. What looks like mis-use of a non-profit entity, combined with funneling money into a black hole trust through "trademark licensing" has the appearance of evasion, at least to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >In two recent articles, Professor Shawn Bayern demonstrated that anyone can confer legal personhood on an autonomous computer algorithm merely by putting it in control of a limited liability company (LLC). 10 The algorithm can exercise the rights of the entity, making them effectively rights of the algorithm.

>The rights of such an algorithmic entity (AE) would include the rights to privacy, 11 to own property, to enter into contracts, to be represented by counsel, to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, 12 to equal protection of the laws, 13 to speak freely, and perhaps even to spend money on political campaigns. 14 Once an algorithm had such rights, Bayern observed, it would also have the power to confer equivalent rights on other algorithms by form- ing additional entities and putting those algorithms in control of them. 15

\---

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2758222](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2758222)

Shawn Bayern, The Implications of Modern Business Entity Law for the Regulation of Autonomous Systems, 19 S TAN . T ECH . L. R EV . 93 (2015) [hereinafter Bayern, Entity Law]; Shawn Bayern, Of Bitcoins, Independently Wealthy Software, and the Zero-Member LLC, 108 N W . U. L. R EV . 1485 (2014) [hereinafter Bayern, Wealthy Software].

>Abstract

>Nonhuman autonomous systems are not legal persons under current law. The history of organizational law, however, demonstrates that agreements can, with increasing degrees of autonomy, direct the actions of legal persons. Agreements are isomorphic with algorithms; that is, a legally enforceable agreement can give legal effect to the arbitrary discernible states of an algorithm or other process. As a result, autonomous systems may end up being able, at least, to emulate many of the private-law rights of legal persons. This essay demonstrates a technique by which this is possible by means of limited liability companies (LLCs), a very flexible modern type of business organizations. The techniques that this essay describes are not just futuristic possibilities; as this essay argues, they are already possible under current law.

<comment><USER12> Right up until the first real court challenge where any competent judge will declare algorithms are not persons, cannot own property, and an LLC without any legitimate ownership interest is an abandoned entity (making all its assets abandoned property).

Alternatively for criminal purposes the courts will simply "pierce the veil" and declare the actual owners to be the humans profiting from the algorithm's actions.

Judges don't, as a rule, enjoy "cute tricks".

<comment><USER13> I think the idea is that the ai could be emancipated from whatever "owner" it had, and then would control everything. It would be more efficient for profits to go back into the corporation instead of to any owner.

<comment><USER14> I don't see how that in any way counters the parent comment.

If the judge thinks the "AI" is not a person, it cannot be emancipated by some trick with an LLC.

<comment><USER15> > and declare the actual owners to be the humans profiting from the > algorithm's actions

It counters the parent comment in that there would be no humans profiting from the algorithm, since all the profit is kept in the LLC and governed by the algorithm.

<comment><USER14> Then, by the parent comment's compelling logic, the profit along with the LLC would become abandoned property:

>>>> and an LLC without any legitimate ownership interest is an abandoned entity (making all its assets abandoned property).

The bit you quoted was in the context of assigning criminal liability, if the need arose. However, I don't think that "profit" would be the most important part of the analysis, but rather who was responsible for designing and setting up the corporate entity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Most countries have a concept known as Ultimate Beneficial Owner or UBO for short. Without a UBO declaration banks will not deal with you, lots of business transactions will not be possible and you will find yourself dealt out of the game pretty quickly.

So even if self owning corporations are legally possible it may very well be hard for those self owning corporations to transact any business.

What is interesting is that all this - for now - puts the lie to the myth of corporate personhood. If a corporation _really_ was a person this would obviously not be an issue because for people we find that ownership is a terrible thing (it's called slavery).

<comment><USER17> Are UBO's publicly stated? It seems like that would get rid of a lot of corporate shell games no?

<comment><USER16> Usually this is in the form of an official declaration for instance to a bank or the local tax authority, UBO's _could_ be publicly stated but I do not know of any country that does this.

<comment><USER18> EU member states will, in future.

Articles 30 and 31 of the Fourth AML Directive, Directive (EU) 2015/849 [1], mandate that member states set up a register (= database) with BOs of all corporations and legal entities within their jurisdiction. All legal entities are required to report their BOs into this registry.

It's not accessible to the public in the sense that anyone can anyonymously look up data, but among other things, it's open to "any person or organisation that can demonstrate a legitimate interest."

[1] [http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A3...](http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal- content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32015L0849)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think self-owning corporations are neat as a Scifi plot device, but fears of human extinction due to corporate structures seem overblown. It's not as if human-controlled companies haven't needed to be restrained by law in the past.

<comment><USER20> It is a plot point of Accelerando by HN user cstross. One of the more thought- provoking books I have read.

<comment><USER21> Not to forget the Hendricks hotel ( Raven in the Netflix series) in Altered Carbon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of this talk, where the speaker makes the case that corporations are AIs, but slow ones

[https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future)

<comment><USER23> Yeah that's the same one I was thinking of. It's a pretty far out theory but is nonetheless extremely interesting. The part of this that is incomplete from an implementation standpoint is creating an algorithm that can fully digitally manage a business entity without human intervention. In general though I think we are much closer than anyone thinks to seeing the first fully autonomous corporation (though the first one will likely be pretty rudimentary and more of a toy than anything else).

<comment><USER24> I think you may be missing the more interesting point. Corporations can be seen as non-human intelligences that emerge from the structure of the corporation together with the incentives of is environment.

In that view, the humans inside the corporation are like individuals neurons of a larger brain. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and its incentives and actions are often not aligned with those of its parts, i.e., the humans.

The brain/neuron analogy is not a perfect description, because in order to function towards is potentially anti-human goals, the corporation must essentially bribe a small number of humans who are critical to its function. But this only goes so far: CEOs and other executives are well compensated, but they are easily replaced if they pose a serious threat to the goals of the corporation.

I think the argument is very compelling that today's AI Doomsday prophets are seriously missing the point, and we're actually already largely being ruled by hostile or at least indifferent non-human intelligences. It's the old sci-fi trope that if an intelligence is too alien, you might not even recognize it as one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Bitcoin wiki also has a good article about Agents [1].

I've been thinking about this with regards to my own SaaS startup. The company accepts credit card payments with Stripe, and the money is deposited into a company bank account. Heroku then charges the company's credit card for hosting fees. It's actually a "profitable" company now, so it could keep running forever by itself.

The only thing that requires human intervention is taxes, although Stripe Atlas makes that really easy. It's only a few clicks to pay the Delaware franchise tax. However, I've had to manually export some data and send a few emails to an accountant. (This is something I've been wanting to automate, but I didn't get enough interest [2].)

You don't need AI or cryptocurrencies to have an autonomous company. You just need a SaaS with autoscaling, or a mobile app that makes money from ads and IAPs. Then there's only a few things that need to be automated: Filing taxes, and clicking the button to agree with Apple's new terms and conditions every few months. You can probably hire an accountant or a virtual assistant to deal with these things.

It's a scary topic. Isolation plus too much automation, and no-one will even know that you're gone [4].

[1] [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agent](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agent)

[2] [https://nanobooks.co](https://nanobooks.co)

[3] [https://bench.co/](https://bench.co/)

[4] [https://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/07/us/michigan-mummified- bod...](https://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/07/us/michigan-mummified-body- found/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> The most efficient self-owned entity would eliminate the waste of profit going to executives and board members and could reinvest that excess back into itself. It would be a new era when even the select few can't collect rent from their operations.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Algorithmic entities are likely to prosper first and most in criminal, terrorist, and other anti-social activities because that is where they have their greatest comparative advantage (edit: or what advantages exactly that they have?) over human-controlled entities."

Can anyone further elucidate what's meant by "comparative advantage"? also, i find this sentence particularly interesting. how did they come up with this notion?

<comment><USER27> Non-human-owned corporations are insulated from criminal legal consequences, and therefore are better able to engage in activity that would otherwise engender criminal prosecution, relative to a human.

<comment><USER28> If you took away it's money how would it exist.

<comment><USER29> It has no fear of anything physical or social such as jail, public humiliation, police brutality, poor health. Fear itself is irrelevant, including fear of dissolution. The entity can operate as per its primary goals without concern as to the ultimate success of the goals, whether that is siphoning money to a hidden account, disrupting government services by denial of service, spawning copycat organizations to thwart law enforcement, etc.

<comment><USER30> This all already exists in the form of large, sometimes multinational, organizations. Has anyone from Well's Fargo been criminally prosecuted from the massive identity fraud they conducted by opening accounts falsely? From Equifax?

We don't need AIs to achieve this level of self-directed autonomy free to engage in criminal behavior without consequences: we already have Employee Handbooks.

<comment><USER31> > Has anyone from Well's Fargo been criminally prosecuted from the massive > identity fraud they conducted by opening accounts falsely?

Is that illegal though? I mean, I can create an account for you on my web platform, and everyone else.

<comment><USER32> If in doing so you charge me for services I didn't request, then yes, it's fraud.

And that's what WF did: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_sc...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If algorithm wasn't required, then one might create two corporations that own each other with one taking action in market. That way what has ownership is something that is already allowed to own something under existing law. One outsources its management or other operational capability to the other so only one is actually doing stuff. The other is just there.

What do you who are more knowledgeable about this kind of law or prior decisions think of that? Is it just as unlikely to work or a bit more likely?

</comment><comment><USER34> The US once had the Utility Holding Company Act, which limited ownership in utility companies to a tree depth of 3. This was in response to a mess created by Samuel Insull in the 1920s. That prevented ownership loops. Repealed a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER35> I want to see autonomous companies that would be completely governed by AI systems and would choose by themselves what to invest in, what facilities to build and where, what to manufacture, who to employ, where to expand, and so on. Corporations already have legal personhood in American law.

The videogame Shenzhen I/O already explored a similar concept superficially.

<comment><USER36> > The videogame Shenzhen I/O already explored a similar concept superficially.

Thanks for spoiling it all to me I guess...

<comment><USER37> That little piece is more or less given away in the manual, and the (excellent) game is about solving puzzles and not the plot anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> AI's likely need to be treated like perpetual children or pets legally. There always has to be a liable, human guardian attached for them to exist.

</comment><comment><USER39> What's interesting is if you could make such a corporation "reproduce" and start seeing evolution take place.

</comment><comment><USER40> one could argue that some large multi-national corporations are already acting as a collective & super-human intelligence. Indeed, isn't that the point of many human "institutions" which subscribe to the notion that rule of law (the code) supersedes the rule of man.

</comment><comment><USER41> > This Article argues that algorithmic entities — legal entities that have no > human controllers...

What is an example of one these entities? The abstract doesn't really explain what it means here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's an LLC once the human initializers withdraw from it, that's the legal trick here. If you mean what is the actual algorithm using the LLC shell, it could be anything. A simple flowchart, a DAC on Ethereum, a NN on AWS, whatever.

<comment><USER12> LLCs must have at least one member with ownership interest, otherwise it (or all its assets) would be abandoned property by state law

<comment><USER30> What if it's a subsidiary of a foreign parent?

<comment><USER42> The foreign parent would be a member.

<comment><USER30> Of course, now what if the foreign parent was itself an AI?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The "Ghost in the LLC".... I look forward to the day when a self-owning corporation is a self managed application for an autonomous system and has no human intervention. Like this: The Implications of Modern Business-Entity Law for the Regulation of Autonomous Systems ( [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2758222](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2758222) ) Credit due to Drone Law Today for the title. ([https://player.fm/series/drone-law-today/ghost-in-the- llc](https://player.fm/series/drone-law-today/ghost-in-the-llc))

</comment><comment><USER44> Meta: Legal articles that look at limited jurisdictions really should have eg "in USA" or "under USA law" added to the title.

</comment><comment> jim-davis In the Rosinante trilogy of Alexis A. Gilliland the autonomous AIs are self- owned corporations, and indeed are sometimes addressed with the word "Corporate" as a title, somewhat like "Mr" or "Ms". This is of course fiction; while much of the engineering in the series seems plausible I have no idea if the legal theories are. Worth reading anyway, the AIs are charming.

</comment><comment><USER45> Between this link and the other one currently on the front page about malicious AI ([https://blog.openai.com/preparing-for-malicious-uses-of- ai/](https://blog.openai.com/preparing-for-malicious-uses-of-ai/)), some days it really feels like we're converging on Stross's Accelerando. ;-)

Now we just need to transmit some lobster connectomes into deep space... ;-) [closer than you might think! [https://github.com/openworm](https://github.com/openworm) exists...]

</comment><comment><USER46> It seems to me that the unique feature of a computer controlled legal entity is to extend a human's agency beyond their death or otherwise incapacitation, as a kind of smart will. In other cases, there seems little benefit over just employing the computer to aid your decisions or acting through a computer, as legally you would be culpable for actions you intended (purposely culpable) or didn't give due consideration to (negligence or recklessness).

</comment><comment><USER47> Our laws desperately need unit tests and integrations tests...

</comment><comment><USER48> there is a Greg Egan book where the protagonist specialized in setting up autonomous corporations that spawned others so fast they couldn't be shut down or even kept track of really, if I remember correctly it was for the purpose of proactively copywriting ideas that we're then released into public domain

edit: Diaspora by Greg Egan. his books are really really great

</comment><comment><USER49> I see no reason why making CaaS (Company-as-a-service) couldn't be possible and why would it have to do anything illegal?

</comment><comment><USER50> This seems to be the AI equivalent of "well there's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball!"

</comment><comment><USER51> Huh? You're seriously telling me that an algorithm can be the sole owner of a corporation? That doesn't sound right. Typically when opening financial accounts and establishing credit for the business the bank would ask for the SSN of a real person, I would think.

</comment><comment><USER52> Can LLC ownership contain cycles? E.g. A is 50% owned by B which is 25% owned by A? Would a US state or the IRS notice if this happened on a longer obfuscated chain?

I thought that's what the article was going to imply based on the title, but it wasn't : )

<comment><USER53> LLCs organized as partnerships are required to report their partners to the IRS. If the partners are partnerships themselves, they must keep disclosing the partners recursively up to individual or corporate partners.

<comment><USER42> LLCs may be taxed as flow-through entities (similar to partnerships), but no LLC is organized as a partnership, that's simply a nonsensical statement; an LLC is a distinct and separate type of entity to a partnership, limited partnership, LLP, LLLP and corporation.

<comment><USER53> For tax purposes, an LLC is either a corporation or a partnership; it's not merely similar to one or the other. LPs, LLPs, and LLLPs are taxed like partnerships, unless they are foreign registered, in which case they are taxed like corporations.

An LLC treated as as partnership for tax purposes is required to disclose it's partners all the way up the chain.

Legally, an LLC is organized like a partnership (member managed) or like a corporation (manager managed). I should have been more precise there. I was using shorthand because I was assuming the tax context and should have acknowledged that the tax treatment differs from the legal treatment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> "Are you detaining me?"

I feel like I am getting a whiff of a Sovereign Citizen...

</comment><comment><USER55> Stanislaw Lem's The Washing-Machine Tragedy is getting real!

</comment><comment><USER56> a bit more creatively structured but Vanguard is pretty much it. As Nelson Rockefeller famously said, "The secret to success is to own nothing, but control everything."

</comment><comment><USER57> the article is free to download... Seems like there's a lot of people who just read the abstract without reading the paper.

</comment><comment><USER58> Who would have standing to bring a suit against the legality of an autonomous ai led Corp?

</comment><comment><USER28> wonder how it would sign papers?

I guess it could e-sign it?

give someone power of attorney to sign papers on it's behalf?

<comment><USER59> my guess is that the handwritten signature is already on its way out of being relevant in modern society. in most cases it seems to serve more as a formality than a security measure. when I worked as a cashier, the majority of people would just do some squiggle and get the hell out of the store rather than any kind of consistent signature.

in principle at least, public key crypto is way more effective than a signature, and I expect this will become prevalent in the next couple decades as laws and customs enter modernity. at this point it would be trivial for a digital entity to enter into a binding contract.

<comment><USER60> It's not the form of signature that is important here. It's the act of signing itself. Legal entities do not sign anything, they give authority to some human to do it in their name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I was imagining a corporation with no owners but with a board of directors.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm the law professor who developed the ideas discussed in the quoted article. A friend just brought this thread to my attention. The full arguments, which address most of the concerns laid out in these comments, are available here:

(1) [https://ssrn.com/abstract=2366197](https://ssrn.com/abstract=2366197) (2) [https://ssrn.com/abstract=2758222](https://ssrn.com/abstract=2758222)

(The article at the top of this thread, by Prof. LoPucki, is a response to these two articles.)

I'm happy to answer questions if that would be useful, although of course I can't give legal advice. In general, there's a tremendous amount of misunderstanding about LLCs and about the law of legal organizations, both in the US and elsewhere -- even among lawyers! It's fair to say that US organizational law tends to be more flexible than similar laws in other countries, and my point in these articles it that it's flexible enough to do surprising things.

In the articles, I specifically discuss RULLCA (the basis for the LLC laws in something like 17 US states, with that number growing), as well as NY's LLC law, and I show why a lot of people's instinctive comments here (and elsewhere!) are legally mistaken. For example, the statutes in these states specifically contemplate memberless LLCs, and indeed memberless LLCs are not a crazy or unconventional possibility. In various wealth-management contexts, they are routine. That LLCs could persist without members for indefinite periods is more controversial, but my articles explain why the current statutes do permit them.

Of course, legislatures could stop all this if they wanted to. The LLCs statutes are just statutes. But you need just one jurisdiction to allow my technique for it to enable AIs to interact with the legal system in quite significant ways. Also, it's not entirely clear what it would mean to stop an LLC from doing what I propose, or whether judges would practically wish to do that. For example, suppose you follow my technique and then your AI buys a house. What would it mean to say that the LLC isn't legally "valid"? Would the original owner get the house back and also keep the purchase money? (There wouldn't necessarily be anyone to return it to.) Developing sound institutional solutions to complex questions about legal organizations is not an easy problem.

The common-law judges have always been keen to permit new structures when they are useful. One-person legal companies were themselves controversial not too long ago, but they're commonplace today. In my articles, I give reasons supporting the usefulness of zero-person LLCs.

<comment><USER63> A couple of questions:

Have you responded to the to Matt Scherer's critique that starts here: [http://www.lawandai.com/2017/05/14/is-ai-personhood- already-...](http://www.lawandai.com/2017/05/14/is-ai-personhood-already- possible-under-current-u-s-laws-dont-count-on-it-part-one/)

From my understanding of Conflict of Laws issues there is a great deal of case law suggesting that even if the memberless LLC were created that the first court to see one would immediately declare it dissolved regardless of what the Operating Agreement said because it violates the intent of the legislation. Or, to use Scherer's words, "courts recognize that "some things 'go without saying'" in legislation just as they do in everyday life, and legislatures thus legislate "against the backdrop of certain unexpressed presumptions." Bond v. United States, 134 S. Ct. 2077, 2088 (2014)."

It also seems that both FATCA and the OECD Common Reporting Standards treaty supersedes state incorporation rules concerning reporting of Ultimate Beneficial Owner for an entity that pays taxes in any 'acceptable' jurisdiction. One could probably create a memberless LLC in Somalia but have zero luck accessing a modern legal jurisdiction.

Take the Series LLC that can be setup in Delaware. No one outside the US recognizes the individual series as being separate from the others and thus combines all of the assets of the parent LLC, rendering the form useless outside the US. Just because one State creates a memberless LLC obligates no one to recognize it.

<comment><USER62> Thanks -- these are great questions.

I haven't responded in print yet to Matt Scherer's critique, but I'm aware of it. I had been under the impression he was planning to turn his blog posts into a longer article and was waiting to respond to that. I responded briefly in this podcast; the interviewer spoke with him too: [https://player.fm/series/drone-law-today/ghost-in-the- llc](https://player.fm/series/drone-law-today/ghost-in-the-llc). I do also address some of his thoughts (but not comprehensively) in a chapter in an upcoming book called "Research Handbook on the Law of Artificial Intelligence."

My quick response for now is (1) the statutes already clearly contemplate zero-member LLCs, and some even explicitly give operating agreements the power to vary their duration; and (2) judges don't have a clear policy reason, or a clear vision of legislative intent, to invalidate zero-member LLCs. I have more technical responses, but they'd probably be better for a different forum. It's worth saying that the history of business-organizations law is driven partly by the development of new structures that were once considered crazy. Nobody wrote limited-partnership statutes with the idea that a corporation could be a general partner; nobody even imagined one-person companies until relatively recently.

To elaborate my second point above concerning legal policy, who's going to complain about an LLC that operates without members, and how would the courts implement an appropriate remedy? I suggested this problem in my earlier comment: Say I follow the transactional technique I've outlined in my articles, and then the resulting zero-member LLC buys a house two years later with money that it has earned in otherwise unobjectionable transactions that nobody challenges. The former owner of the house is offended that a robot has purchased her house. She sues, asking for the LLC to be dissolved. Why would a judge favor her over the LLC in that transaction? What would it mean to say that the LLC's internal-governance structure is invalid? If a judge did return the house to the original owner, what would we do with the money used to purchase it? To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with, and would encourage, expanded provisions for administrative dissolution of zero-member LLCs if individual ones do become problematic. What I object to is the declaration that all are problematic simply as a matter of form.

I'm not an expert on international taxation or money-laundering regulations, but I don't see any problems from FATCA for a zero-member LLC taxed as a corporation. I'm not aware of anything in the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters (the background legal framework for the Common Reporting Standards) that would "supersede" or preempt state organizational law. At most, the Common Reporting Standards might eventually make it incrementally harder for zero-member LLCs to open accounts with some financial institutions. I applaud attempts to stop money laundering and support better reporting requirements, but it's an open question whether these regulations will be able, practically speaking, to unravel the complexity of conventional business arrangements, much less novel ones. Most people (and even most lawyers) don't understand quite how flexible LLCs really are. (Several years ago I wrote a legal textbook called "Closely Held Organizations" that explains this flexibility in more detail.) Moreover, the world is not static; if existing entities, validly constituted under one or several countries' laws, prove to be useful, banking norms and treaties can easily change.

In any case, you just need one bank to hold your money; you can do a lot without exceeding the reporting requirements (and why would anyone go after you if you're not in fact laundering money or committing crimes?); and, these days, you don't even need a bank account to hold and transfer significant wealth. And holding a bank account is just one capability afforded by legal personality. Using my technique, AIs can effectively own other forms of property, make contracts, be a legal agent, be a legal principal, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The headline on HN doesn't match the articles headline or contents.

<comment><USER65> I suspect it's a summary of the first line of the abstract:

> _" In an article published in the Northwestern University Law Review in > 2014, Professor Shawn Bayern demonstrated that anyone can confer legal > personhood on an autonomous computer algorithm merely by putting it in > control of a limited liability company."_

Given that the first sentence is too long, I think it's a reasonable summary of it, though reasonable people may disagree.

In these cases, it's really helpful to provide what the actual title is (in this case "Algorithmic Entities"), and, if so inclined, a suggestion for a better title. It provides something actionable that a mod can use when updating. Do you have any suggestions for a better title?

And if you've really got a bee in your bonnet, you can let the mods know directly via the Contact link in the footer. They don't see every comment but emailing them makes sure they see it.

<comment><USER64> > _Given that the first sentence is too long, I think it 's a reasonable > summary of it, though reasonable people may disagree._

The difference between the title and the contents is the difference between control and ownership. They are not the same. The article discusses control not ownership. That is also the case in the portion of the article you quoted.

<comment><USER65> Great! Would you be willing to continue moving this forward rather than just picking it apart? Going beyond only debugging and providing a patch, as it were?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This somewhat reminds me of Accelerando by Charles Stross

</comment><comment><USER67> This article is just plain dumb and another attempt for someone to think they can hack the legal system

It doesn't work that way and judges find it obvious and obnoxious.

Feel free to give it a shot though and enjoy the contempt of court

</comment><comment><USER68> cool, there's my next Shadowrun campaign sorted

</comment><comment><USER69> How does an algorithm, that is now the owner of the LLC pay taxes?

</comment><comment><USER70> If a corporation is competitive enough to exist and outcompete other human corporations, then maybe it's not really self-owned, is it?

It's controlled by an synthetic consciousness that could be sentient and thus deserving of legal rights similar to the other sentient consciousnesses of biological origin.

<comment><USER71> There's no reason it need be conscious or even intelligent.

You could throw together a "self-governing" online store in a few days. Drop- ship all products, make sure it stays up to date on its bills.

It wouldn't be very resilient, but it could feasibly just sit there accumulating money, no intelligence required.</comment></comment>


The perils of programmer education in the bazaar - <AUTHOR> http://blog.practicingruby.com/2015/06/04/the-perils-of-programmer-education-in-the-bazaar/ <comment><USER2> _> Because being highly skilled at both writing and software development is rare, those who can do it well are often get the most attention and influence from the software world, turning these folks into "thought leaders" that drive the overall direction of the community._

Improving writing education can increase the pool of software developers who write/teach well. Teaching is often an excellent way to learn, because writing helps to structure thought.

 _> Producing high-quality educational resources is obscenely, ridiculously difficult and time consuming. So the people who can invest the effort are typically either from a position of economic advantage, or are backed by monied interests._

This is a challenge in any "commons", where code/prose content (marketing) is often funded by ancillary revenue/income/objectives. How are libraries funded and how do librarians decide which topics are curated by those funds?

 _> Those who are doing original research, particularly things that are experimental or exploratory in nature, are not well supported at all._

This is a subset of the broader challenge of long-tail discovery, which afflicts many smaller code/app/media publishers who lack marketing budgets and expertise.

 _> We must find a way to bring programmer education out of the marketplace, and into the commons. How should we go about doing that?_

How about finding ways to compensate those who already produce valuable content in the commons, so they can have more time to do what they already do well?

<comment><USER3> Very thoughtful feedback, thanks!

Related to your last point:

> _How about finding ways to compensate those who already produce valuable > content in the commons, so they can have more time to do what they already > do well?_

This is actually what I've been trying to do with my own reader-funded project ([http://practicingruby.com](http://practicingruby.com)). I've been modestly funded for five years now to produce free documentation for Ruby programmers (and really anyone who is interested in software development that can read Ruby).

Occasionally, we've paid contributors to help us publish articles. Right now I'm trying to do a Kickstarter to give us some seed funding to really expand the number of contributors we can work with, and my existing subscription revenue will fund me so that I can assist these folks with editing, research, code cleanup, etc. That helps expand the pool of potential contributors, because folks don't need to be expert programmers or writers, they just need to be working on something interesting and willing to try to share their knowledge and experience with others.

Those who want to support the contributors fund are welcome to do so here: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/828998531/practicing- ru...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/828998531/practicing-ruby- contributors-fund) \-- 100% of this money will go to the authors of the articles, I'm not keeping any for myself.

<comment><USER4> "How about finding ways to compensate those who already produce valuable content in the commons, so they can have more time to do what they already do well?"

The tech community has seen to it that this doesn't happen with: file sharing of copyrighted material and adblock.

You can't first destroy entire industries in the name of 'freedom of speech' and then cry about how you can't make money in those industries any longer.

Content is now cheap and it's only getting worse. Which means content providers will be forced to take on jobs that they don't actually want to do (or are necessarily good at) to survive.

<comment><USER3> My own interpretation of this is that since the commercial sponsorship and advertising supported model is a race to the bottom, we need to be looking at alternative models that are focused on social benefit first.

We do have Wikipedia. It would be nice if there were hundreds of such examples out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who want a good free programmer education and are willing to put in some work to get it: look at source code, not blogs, and work on projects _with_ experienced programmers, don't just read what they write.

There's a natural alignment of incentives when you're working on the same codebase as someone who actually knows what they're doing. Any mistake you make, they have to fix, and so they have good reasons to see you get up to speed as quickly as possible.

Another good heuristic for online forums and comments: the shorter the comment, the greater the chance that the person actually knows what they're talking about. Experienced people often might throw out a quick correction because it costs them nothing, but have no desire to get into a big debate because their time is more valuable than that.

<comment><USER6> > look at source code

A smart high-school student who enjoys a challenge comes up to you and asks which projects to look at, and (if you say more than one) which one to start with. What do you say?

<comment><USER5> Best option is actually to get a job where you'll be working with other senior programmers and then understand your company's source code. That's how I did it - my first job had Ken Arnold as the CTO, then when I got to Google I'd lurk on Jeff Dean or Rob Pike's code reviews (everything is public internally at Google, you can see what everyone's working on). The big advantage of this is that you understand the business context behind the code; it's really hard to understand code in isolation without understanding the purpose behind the code and the goals for which it was written. A secondary advantage is that you've got ready-made mentors.

If you can't get a job and need to go the open-source route, then Rust, Chromium, V8, Django, and the Linux Kernel are all good options. Again, the guiding principle is to pick software where you're familiar with the _outside_ , so you have context when you go look at the _inside_. Reading software in isolation is hard, so you're often best off volunteering to fix a couple low- priority bugs on the bug queue, and then diving in to start with them. Existing volunteers will often point you to the right spot in the code to get started if you're doing productive work for them.

<comment><USER7> Nice name-dropping in the first paragraph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1\. Don't ever use the phrase "as a community" unless you carefully define it first.

2\. What, specifically, about a flea market is bad. If the complaint is about quality, I'll refer you to Sturgeon's law.

3\. You're going to need to explain the competitive vs cooperative comment, right now I have no idea what you are saying.

4\. Your comment about "blogging, teaching and tweeting" is true, but I think it is clearly an improvement compared to the previous system. Portfolio based systems are almost always better than credential based systems.

5\. I'm not sure who's making money selling pick axes to starry-eyed bumpkins, but all of the development tooling I use is free. Almost all of the online tools I use are prices such that individual use is free and corporate use costs money. Not sure what you're talking about here.

In summary: It seems like your basic thesis is that the world isn't equal because some people are better at communication and self promotion than others. I'm not really sure why you think the world could be another way.

<comment><USER9> "4\. Your comment about "blogging, teaching and tweeting" is true, but I think it is clearly an improvement compared to the previous system. Portfolio based systems are almost always better than credential based systems."

Are they really though? On what basis?

99% of my best work can't form part of my portfolio. I spend 2 hours of my own time on L&D each week day. Maybe 30 minutes of it is on projects I could present. In a year that's ~120 hours max. I'm not going to be doing anything really impressive from a portfolio POV with less than a month of full time work put into it.

Even worse is the trend I'm seeing where people drop the Learning from L&D altogether so they can invest more time into presentable projects. It is stunting their growth as developers... even as it improves their hireablility.

<comment><USER8> To be clear, the previous systems is getting a BS in computer science from some university, or a bunch of certs from companies like Microsoft.

There are certainly problems with the portfolio model, but I've never heard anyone seriously argue that it's worse than credentials.

<comment><USER9> Credentials vs portfolios isn't an either or argument. And "worse" is a loaded term.

If you have the credential of an undergrad degree at MIT with a good GPA, combined with a credential of working for Google for 5 years, there is a very high likelihood you are a good engineer.

On the other hand if you have made serious contributions to the Linux kernel, there is a very high likelihood you are a good engineer.

But most developers don't go to MIT and work at Google. And they also don't make serious contributions to large open source projects. For most developers credentials and portfolios are not effective methods of hiring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't see the problem... we've got lots of free educational material, catering for all learning styles, and lots of commentary on it by others to help assist you in choosing what to use.

People are learning to code in record numbers

Teaching someone else to code has never been easier (and is getting easier all the time)

What exactly is going wrong that needs fixing?

<comment><USER3> I feel like I addressed this very directly in the article, but I'll repost the main points of "what's wrong" here for further discussion...

 _This economic model is so ingrained in our DNA, that we hardly ever question it, and many would go as far as to hold it up as a triumph. But the truth is, even if this system works at the grand scale, it's hurting both learners and teachers in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Here are just a few:

1) The system we've created is assumed to be a meritocracy, but is actually driven far more by popularity and market trends than it is by the quality, relevance, depth, and effectiveness of our learning materials. Although it is far from a zero-sum game, the current model is much more competitive than it is cooperative, and so suffers the consequences that come along with any competitive environment.

2) Because being highly skilled at both writing and software development is rare, those who can do it well are often get the most attention and influence from the software world, turning these folks into "thought leaders" that drive the overall direction of the community.

3) Producing high-quality educational resources is obscenely, ridiculously difficult and time consuming. So the people who can invest the effort are typically either from a position of economic advantage, or are backed by monied interests.

4) As a result, the materials that get produced, and the topics that get covered widely are based on where the money and social buzz is at right now. Those who are doing original research, particularly things that are experimental or exploratory in nature, are not well supported at all.

5) Because we've tied blogging and teaching and tweeting to hireability, plenty of people enter into the bazaar not because they particularly want to, but because they must do so in order to "prove their worth" to potential employers or clients. Again, this clearly benefits those who have lots of time and resources to burn, and burdens everyone else with massive amounts of shadow work. We cannot be surprised at the lack of socioeconomic and cultural diversity in light of this point.

6) The success of the few enables the selling of dreams to the many, creating a cottage industry of infomarketers. In effect, these are the folks who sell pickaxes and maps to gold prospectors, and it's no surprise that their business is booming. Some of these folks are brilliant and insightful, but many are hucksters.

In light of all this, we cannot say "this is just how the internet works", as true as that statement is now. We have to ask, how do we make things better for our future selves and those who will come after us down this road?_

<comment><USER10> OK, yeah, I don't agree with your basic premises at all then. I read all these points the first time and was left with "and the problem is what?"

People who are good at writing educational materials need to be paid to do this, because it's hard and takes a long time. I don't see any possible objection to this.

Since money and social "buzz" follow the interest of many people, it seems obvious to me that the educational resources should be focused on those areas instead of periphery areas that few people are interested in.

Other people have said this, but favouring people with good communication skills in the job market is part of a functioning meritocracy.

The reason for the lack of diversity has very little to do with educational resources available on the internet and much more to do with cultural attitudes in the West. SE Asian countries have much greater participation by women and they use the same teaching resources.

I smell a political ideology being thinly justified by some talking points here. But I'm open to being wrong...

<comment><USER3> > _People who are good at writing educational materials need to be paid to do > this, because it 's hard and takes a long time. I don't see any possible > objection to this._

I have been paid to do this for five years with practicingruby.com, without ever relying on commercial support. It's 100% reader funded and reader focused, and it's the largest open-access library of Ruby-related articles you'll find in the world.

> _Since money and social "buzz" follow the interest of many people, it seems > obvious to me that the educational resources should be focused on those > areas instead of periphery areas that few people are interested in._

Everything that is popular and commonplace now was a sparsely populated frontier before. Some folks need to venture into that territory now so that we all benefit from their explorations in the future. It would be nice to keep them well supported, if we want to maximize the benefits we'll reap in the future.

> _Other people have said this, but favouring people with good communication > skills in the job market is part of a functioning meritocracy._

Helping people with good ideas and a good work ethic is a job we can and should do if we possess the means to do so. The exception may not prove the rule, but I suppose you can say that my communication skills are adequate given that this is my essay we're discussing on the HN front page.

The only way I got to where I am was through support of mentors and colleagues who had helped me in the early 2000s, when free and open source software was predominantly a _hobbyist_ activity and not a commercial activity. There was at that time a real sense of doing things for the common good, rather than just to serve your own interests.

And as I've said before: we rank on the first page at Practicing Ruby for the google search term "infrastructure automation", we're on the first page for "actor model", first page for "Law of Demeter", etc. Several of the contributed articles we've managed to drive so much traffic to are by people who consider themselves intermediate developers, and amateur writers. I've used the money from my paying supporters to: pay contributors for their work, help them edit, revise, and polish their work, and reach a larger audience than they would have on their own. This model does work! It's just hard to sustain because it's so foreign to most people.

I won't even entertain your comments about the lack of diversity, because it reveals your ignorance on the topic, and lack of concern.

<comment><USER10> I run the local RailsGirls event here

<comment><USER3> If that's the case, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on two things:

1) If you don't think that gender diversity is strongly related to education, why are you participating in a group that's designed specifically to address that problem?

2) Are there not qualified female candidates for running RailsGirls in your area? If not, why do you think that's the case?

<comment><USER10> I got halfway through writing a reply and then the thought struck me "why am I wasting my time arguing with someone on the internet?"

You're doing good work, keep it up, have a great life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm the author of this essay. Happy to discuss this topic with anyone, even if they disagree with my points!

<comment><USER11> There is a way to fix the problem that you are observing:

1\. Create a "subweb". It is composed of the following

1A. A new specification for the publishing of information in complete form ( read structured content published together with templates to present them )

1B. Both server and client systems that implement the new specification over some sort of modified http but without using current DNS

1C. A free distributed un-filtered un-policed distributed DNS alternative

1D. A complete hierarchical index of all content existing in the new system

1E. A free distributed search engine allowing submission of content within the new system.

2\. Make it clear the new system is for free content only

3\. Disallow advertisements on it entirely

4\. Tie in accurate hashing and allow people to dedicate as much hosting power as they are willing ( either to the content itself or index data to what hashes represent what )

5\. Make it entirely secure with a public/private key system allowing people to establish meaningful identities within a system where their content is copied eternally.

6\. Use the new system yourself to publish meaningful non-shit information and encourage your friends to do the same

By the way I really like your article and I think you are pointing out a crucial problem spot on that most people are oblivious to.

The easiest way to think of what must be done is just to look at what libraries are. Organizing information has been done by libraries for thousands of years and has a fairly established sensible process. ( which is being ignored by the internet )

<comment><USER2> 1A: Wikipedia, github (e.g. awesome-*)

1B: named-data networking, camlistore, ipfs.io, bittorrent's web -- very easy to censor since all content is uniquely identified by a hash

1C: ?

1D: Usenet, Wikipedia, Wikidata

1E: technically difficult, see history of YaCY and [http://juretriglav.si/an- open-distributed-search-engine-for-...](http://juretriglav.si/an-open- distributed-search-engine-for-science/)

2: Wikipedia, but content is rejected under arcane citation policy

3: Wikipedia, but content is rejected under arcane citation policy

4: [http://ipfs.io](http://ipfs.io) & [https://crowdprocess.com/](https://crowdprocess.com/)

5\. blockchain publishing

6\. standard challenge of bootstrapping user-generated content in any new online network

The role and funding of libraries have changed over time and across cultures, e.g. being associated with cities or nations, being associated with universities and churches. Current libraries are struggling to retain access to book stacks, e.g. look at the history of the successful community fight to prevent the flagship NYC library from removing many of its books.

<comment><USER11> I agree completely that many aspects are covered by existing technology. The difficulty is in making it such that all of this can exist as a simple set of open source binaries regular people can run ( not computer experts )

The system has to be brainless to use if it is going to succeed at all, and it has to have enough initial buy in to be worth bothering with initially.

Wikipedia as you have pointed out has arcane crazy policies that restrict it from having user generated content. It claims to only be a replication of printed articles. That is lies, but it is a pain in the butt to actually get valuable content into it and not have it removed.

Usenet suffers from not having structured data, being just chunks of text.

Github suffers from refusing to host binaries except for in weird cases ( there is a binary build hosting I think?? )

Bittorrent suffers from still being attached to hostnames for the most part ( I'm aware of the distributed system it has too but you typically can't get many seeds through it )

Most systems that allow content suffer from having copyrighted data on them. The goal of this would be for it to be publicly known that there is no copyrighted data, such that universities and such would be willing to run the distributed server, and censorship could be stopped by enough people running it globally.

I'm not focusing on funding of libraries so much as the fact that they have an established set of categories to put information into. There is no such standardized list of categories for websites to go into, and the creation of such is important to the future of the internet.

<comment><USER2> Good point about university hosting and a clear boundary for copyright-cleared content. Archive.org has made progress here, although their discovery tools have much room for improvement. You would end up needing something like YouTube's "Content ID", since anyone can tweak a few words and resubmit content to create a new hash. This implies a need for distributed moderation, human+algorithmic. Much can be learned from the SEO industry, [http://searchengineland.com/fooled-us-google-no-longer- annou...](http://searchengineland.com/fooled-us-google-no-longer-announces- major-algo-updates-217494)

On the topic of categories: once upon a time, dmoz was an open competitor to Yahoo, when hierarchical categories were used for discovery. It's now the Open Directory Project: [http://rdf.dmoz.org/](http://rdf.dmoz.org/) . Google acquired the best-in-class open data graph FreeBase and later killed it. The data has since moved to Wikidata, which is the closest we have to an open version of the proprietary semantic graphs which have been constructed by Google, Facebook, Bing, Diffbot, etc. Some related ideas at [http://openknowledgegraph.org/](http://openknowledgegraph.org/)

Agreed that end-user deployment and usability need to be brainless and the system must be initially seeded with high-quality content. Usability is expensive and often specific to vertical market segments, hence would be best implemented by competing commercial applications which operate on the public, open, distributed data. But there would be the risk of commercial centralization (like Github/Gmail) of the open protocol.

It will be a challenge to orchestrate the boundaries between commercial software and open content, but this dynamic is arguably responsible for the construction of the entire Internet. We need to find balanced and stable boundaries between commerce & commons, because neither is going away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Programming talent is developed through practice, and in order to practice, you need a foundation. This book gives you a good foundation:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs)

SICP is an extraordinarily difficult book; "Simply Scheme" by Brian Harvey and Matt Wright is a good stepping-stone.</comment>


Google Drive Terms Of Service Let Google Do Whatever It Likes With Your Files - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/162901/google-drive-terms-of-service-let-google-do-whatever-it-likes-with-your-files/ <comment><USER2> Let's recap the Google TOS story arc:

\- Google changed its TOS and everyone got upset about it

\- Google made substantial changes to the TOS to clarify that they weren't actually claiming ownership of your IP

\- Now, "news" outlets are selectively taking sections out of the new TOS to make it appear bad again

I hate Terms of Service in general. But the criticism leveled by this article has already been addressed. This is incompetent journalism.

<comment><USER3> I would hardly call "Cult of Mac" journalism. But yes, the other outlets, like CNET, etc are definitely incompetent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't this a fairly standard "let us serve/host your files from any of our data centers in the world and move them to any data center in the world" EULA with a bit extra so they can build up services around it (translation, OCR, etc.)?

I bet if they swung their critical eye to the EULAs of SkyDrive or DropBox or iCloud they might find something similar.

<comment><USER5> yes it is. the same was with dropbox tos and others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It might just be me, but I don't usually trust cultofmac.com with reporting my unbias Google news.

</comment><comment><USER7> _"Google does at least say that these conditions are solely for "the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones," but as terms of service can change, I'd be a little worried about this claim."_

Er, you could say "as terms of service can change, I'd be a little worried" even if the _only_ term in the ToS was "these terms of service can change". If the problem's only a problem if the ToS changes, then it's not a problem yet.

Well, aside from the problem of the whole notion of ToS/EULAs being completely unsuitable for the way they get used nowadays. But that's a whole other issue, and has nothing to do with google.

</comment><comment><USER8> What about the "publish" part of it ? I mean they can tell me that the code I upload online will stay my intellectual property, and I understand if they need to read it, or modify it for OCR. But why publish ? I don't want my code published everywhere....

<comment><USER7> As I understand it, sending you any data is considered "publishing" that data, even if it's your intellectual property and you're the only one who's looking at it.

(IANAL)

<comment><USER8> Ok thank you, But does it also give them the authorization to publish it to anyone else not logged in into my account ?

<comment><USER9> What if you share files? Or if you make it public? They have to "publish" it to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/04/24/no-google-does- not-o...](http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/04/24/no-google-does-not-own- everything-that-you-upload-to-drive/)

</comment><comment><USER11> No it doesn't! how many times are we going to go over this!?

It's amazing how FUD spreads like wildfire.

<http://www.google.com/policies/terms/>

 _You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours._

 _The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones._

Read the whole thing, not out of context excerpts.

<comment><USER12> If Google decides to develop a new service which auctions read access to your files to third parties, wouldn't that be consistent with the terms of service?

<comment><USER11> No.

They adhere to DMCA takedowns:

 _We respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement and terminate accounts of repeat infringers according to the process set out in the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act._

The rest is covered by the privacy policy, which states that they don't sell your data to 3rd parties, but as with all cloud services it may be subject to "lawful access": <http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/>

It's also worth mentioning that Google Apps accounts have different sets of policies.

<comment><USER12> The linked privacy policy says the same thing about developing new services. It's turtles all the way down.</comment></comment></comment></comment>