W3Fools Takes on W3Schools - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/w3fools-takes-on-w3schools.php <comment><USER2> I can't help but feel that all of that time and effort they spent criticizing and nitpicking could have been spent building something better. If this is something they really feel passionately about, rather than just a way to amuse themselves with angry rants, then all that energy could have been put to so much better use.

I guess it's easier to hate and claim to be taking the high ground than it is to actually put forth an effort to make the state of things better-which says more about them than it does W3Schools, and probably says a lot about human nature in general, really.

W3Schools is not without its many and varied problems, both in content and, as others have said, its own code base, but so is nearly every other tutorial or web programming site on the internet that's more than, say, a year old. The 'net is litered with old content that often can be difficult for new developers to filter out and know what's good and what's not. Just look at the volume of old, horrible PHP tutorials floating around, or even old Rails code. The main difference is that a lot of people will see W3Schools and assume it is associated with the W3, so they might take it as being a more reliable source.

I'm not sure how actively W3Schools is updated, but if they have a staff maintaining it and actively develop and write content for the site and they're not replacing the old with the new, then yes, that's just lazy and they _should_ be doing better, but tutorial sites containing old, bad code and coding practices is certainly nothing unique to W3Schools.

<comment><USER3> I'm really confused by the notion of the "In the time this article took, they could have built a better one" arguments.

I don't know how long you think it took ( <https://github.com/paulirish/w3fools> ) but it took a couple of hours of time from a few people over about a week.

I'm not sure the last time you built a website to scale and to the breadth of information that's found on w3schools (valid or not), but it takes a hell of a lot longer than a week.

And just because the creators didn't build a clone of w3schools, doesn't mean they aren't contributing useful information back to the various communities affected by the nonsense published at w3schools. Every single one of them are writing blog posts and submitting to open source projects, hosting podcasts, helping on IRC channels and forums, and building helpful websites to learn exactly the same stuff found on w3schools, except with valid information.

The creators of w3fools have no issue with the other resources that are available that they suggested as alternatives. For more specific beginner data, there are numerous walkthroughs and helpful answers littered across the internet with the correct information in them. Creating yet another site that puts together tutorials isn't what is needed. They want the beginners to be able to have a fair chance at good knowledge. Creating a site to slowly gain google juice over the next two years does nothing to help people today. Until w3schools stops showing up first for every "___ Tutorial" search in existence, the job of making it a notoriously questionable resource will do way more good than building a shadow site would do. If at least you are somewhat aware that you should fact check the things that you learn there.

I find it a little bit troublesome that the group that follows 'hacker' news is so willingly supportive of blatant technical misinformation. You can nitpick about some of the things that are brought up, but as a whole, it's ridiculous that the number one resource for technical information is so wildly out of touch with reality. You can question the method that this was brought up, but you should still have the desire to see good information in the wild.

And finally, yes, there are other out of date websites that have tutorials on them, but they don't show up first in google, and they don't sell certifications based on their misinformation to unknowing people who don't realize that the certifications mean absolutely nothing (and are potentially detrimental). Get mad at whoever you want, but objectively speaking, the site is a disservice to the community, regardless of it's ease. Getting bad information is _always_ easy.

<comment><USER4> Rather than creating a website to kvetch about the contents of one domain, I suggest you and your collaborators' time is better spent curating a set of resources that teach what you consider valid information that can be used by people wanting to get started in web development (it would also be far more beneficial to the web development community).

That one collaboratively edited directory of peer-reviewed resources would create a one-stop-shop for people looking for the best material on a specific topic or niche. By web developers for web developers.

Put those collection of related resources on MDC if you must (you say it's editable by anyone, so all your collaborators can participate at will, and have an aged and already authority-status starting point right on your doorstep).

One of the hardest things is to find resources for the beginner that teaches them high quality web development from scratch. Create a map for others and lead the way.

That I feel is a far more constructive approach than this angst-ridden site you've spawned. And it has a more immediate benefit of linking to existing and already indexed material on the web, and add/aggregate more authority.

A link from the zeldmans, heilmanns, sharps & blawsons and malarkey's of the web development community, and the reach they all have to a multitude of web developers can quickly give a high-quality curated resource a starting boost towards ranking the right material higher.

Since if all your collaborators are already heavily involved in creating web materials covering the subjects W3schools teaches, then there's already a set of authoritative sites existing. Those can all point to your master curation site, and consequently pass on existing google juice to those materials that exist and are fit for purpose.

Taking off W3schools from Google only promotes result number 2 up to the first place - is that really an improvement?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _authors did not contact W3Schools ahead of time._

I've seen a lot of aggression against w3schools but this is worse. An angry rant website. So much nitpicking. So much tantrums. They seem not to be interested in making w3schools better but want to destroy them.

From w3fools:

 _The markup of the W3Schools site itself is awful and does not conform to best practices: table in table in table in table, with lots of inline styles._

Completely irrelevant. Don't shoot the messenger.

I use what my search engine gives me. w3schools is usually on top. I learned a lot from w3schools and sometimes even directly go to it for reference.

edit: Apparently there was a previous discussion here, on a draft version. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082089>

<comment><USER6> Well there's a reason why everything that mentions w3schools gets down voted into oblivion over at Stackoverflow.

The site is horrible. Period.

> Completely irrelevant. Don't shoot the messenger.

Aha. Well, if they can't even get their own site right, why should I listen to them in the first place?

Sorry, but that's like hiring a Web Design whose own Web Site consists of nothing more than yellow 20px Comic Sans text on a blue background that uses a million blink tags.

<comment><USER7> > The site is horrible. Period.

They don't claim to be web designers. The web site is easy to use and a great resource for beginners. Their XPath tutorial was much better than other tutorials when I needed to get a quick start a couple of years ago.

The table discussion is irrelevant to the users. Most of them never look at the source code and is interested in the actual tutorials. If table based layout invalidates a site, you should stop using Google, HN and Stack Overflow...

<comment><USER6> > The web site is easy to use and a great resource for beginners.

Yep a great resource, for wasting a ton of precious time in which they could have learned how to do things __right __instead of using techniques from ca. 2000.

> ...interested in the actual tutorials.

Which are still the worst part of the site.

Example (just clicked on one of their JS tutorials):

> JavaScript statements can be grouped together in blocks. > Blocks start with > a left curly bracket {, and ends with a right curly bracket }. > The purpose > of a block is to make the sequence of statements execute together.

Pure BS. JavaScript has no block scope. {} aren't needed for "executing stuff together".

Another thing they tell people is that "var foo = 2;" and "foo = 2;", are equal, more BS.

> If table based layout invalidates a site...

There is a difference in using a table layout because it's a good choice (Google doesn't validate in any way, the just want to cut down traffic, which makes sense for them) and just using it because, well... because one has no better idea.

<comment><USER8> As an aside, ES Harmony will have block-scoped bindings.

<http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:let>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> None of the altenatives listed by W3Fools appear to counter the overwhelming advantage of W3Schools in that you can quickly look up information on a given html attribute or css selector. The site is essentially one big cheat-sheet.

Unless W3Fools puts up a credible alternative (the open wiki demand is unlikely to be entertained for an instant) then the war would seem to over just as the first shots are being fired.

<comment><USER10> What's wrong with Mozilla Developer Network HTML and CSS references?

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element> <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS_Reference>

Granted, the HTML reference doesn't have by attribute directory.

<comment><USER11> Couple of clever things about W3schools learning experience that are missing from Mozilla's site:

\- Working examples. W3Schools leads with them - Mozilla doesn't seem to have any.

\- The 'try it yourself' feature. Nothing cements learning like playing around with the concepts for yourself.

compare the img entry for both:

<http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp>

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element/img>

<comment><USER12> Thanks very much for that feedback. I'm summarizing the discussion in order to deliver some actionable feedback to the Mozilla team. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What a waste of time by w3fools. Why would you put the time and energy into tearing down another site? If it is the quality of the content, then spend that time creating quality content for another site.

You don't see facebook making a site showing why myspace sucks. You don't see google or bing making a site showing how yahoo sucks. Create the quality content and let your site speak for itself.

With tutorial sites like tryruby and railsforzombies (and HN just had a javascript one also), there is definitely a higher standard of tutorial that one could aim for. Just do it or shut up already.

</comment><comment><USER14> I started off my career using w3schools about a decade ago (which turned from playing with (D)HTML to distributed systems engineering) and I still find myself going there occasionally. It's a good reference. They deserve better.

</comment><comment><USER15> "W3Schools.com is not affiliated with the W3C in any way."

This does seem to be a pretty common misconception. I've seen quite a few beginners on StackOverflow, etc type of sites pointing at W3Schools as if they were the last word for something.

"W3Schools" was a pretty clever choice of name I guess...

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not so certain which ones are the fools.

</comment><comment><USER17> This, from the article:

"I linked to W3Schools' JavaScript tutorial in our 6 Free JavaScript E-Books and Tutorials post. I never came across the tutorials from Google, Mozilla or PromoteJS while doing my research for that post. I just checked, and although W3Schools' JavaScript tutorial still comes up as the top search result for "JavaScript Tutorial" none of the sites W3Fools lists were found in the first 10 pages of results for a search for "JavaScript Tutorial." This shows the uphill battle other tutorial writers face when competing with W3Schools."

So the W3Schools tutorial is #1 on Google, while Mozilla's vastly superior guide is buried. Right, that makes sense.

Exhibit A for Google's broken ranking algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow! I always wanted to do something similar for this community and had also started putting content together. But I understand, it is not a one-man job! Bravo guys!!

<comment><USER18> I didn't mean criticizing w3schools - I meant, I always wished for a better, refined and more practical oriented alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They did a terrible job of explaining WHY the practices from w3 are wrong.

FAIL.

</comment><comment><USER20> What horrible website those W3Fools have.</comment>


Java is Pass-by-Value, Dammit - <AUTHOR> http://javadude.com/articles/passbyvalue.htm

<comment><USER2> If "Object references are passed by value", then the "Object" itself is passed by reference, so the statement "In Java, Objects are passed by reference" it is a _full_ true statement.

You can pass "Object references" by value or by reference, anyway, since you're passing a "Object reference", _the object itself_ is being passed as a reference.</comment>


Online Book: Mining of Massive Datasets - <AUTHOR> http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The PDF is here: <http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds/book.pdf></comment>


Traceroute from a Norwegian Airlines airplane - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/watson/5442295 <comment><USER2> I can't excuse all the nodes in that traceroute, but the ones with a domain "direcpceu" are Hughes Communication satellite ISP nodes. Their satellites are geosynchronous, so, for two legs in each direction, those packets went a very long way before reaching the ground and coming back to the plane.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that. I was wondering where the transition from air to land was. Makes sense they route through Satellites. It makes it more interesting because your packets are going from 39,000 feet to space then to land. Awesome

<comment><USER4> This is implemented over Ku-band by Row44...

<http://new.row44.com/faq/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I started this trace-route within 30 seconds after the seatbelt sign was switched off (the wifi isn't enabled while taking off), so I imagine only a few people would have had the time to connect to the wifi at this point.

But in general, the wifi on one of these flights is very useless. I was hacking on a node.js project and used it to look up some ES5 related stuff on StackOverflow. I tried to post it to gist.github.com while in the air but wasn't even able to load the page (though google and SO loaded fine)

<comment><USER5> GoGo in-flight wireless in the USA is using a terrestrial network that piggybacks on cell towers. I've had 1.5 Mbit with ~400 mSec ping times, which is a lot more usable than the satellite systems.

<comment><USER6> GoGo uses their own equipment on ~400 AT&T towers across the US, networked together using AT&T's MPLS network.

Disclaimer: I interviewed at Aircell at one point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Next time you get the chance to ask astronauts something (in the Netherlands we had that once with Andre Kuipers I think), ask them to do a traceroute from space!

<comment><USER8> I wonder if Chris Hadfield would be willing, he seems to be pretty engaged with us on the ground: <http://twitter.com/cmdr_hadfield>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, look at those response times: impressive.

<comment><USER10> I've had a better experience from Norwegian planes than from some hotel WiFi networks.

<comment><USER11> and me. The Wifi is amazing considering you are at 39,000 ft.

<comment><USER12> ...and it's free. I'm super impressed with Norwegian Airlines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if it would be practical to install upwards facing antennas on cell tower and then have a tracking dish on planes track these to cut out the satellite when over (populated) ground. If a line-of-sight microwave link could be established, it should be possible to have high-bandwidth low-latency connectivity in the air.

What is the effective beamwidth of a microwave antenna that needs to maintain a 50-100km link? Would the ground antennas need to be tracking as well?

<comment><USER14> This is _exactly_ what Aircell does in the US. I'm not sure what spectra they're using, but the bandwidth would likely be quite variable, as planes with non-directional antennas will interact with one another over wide areas. Weather could also play a part, depending on the frequency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A minor nitpick: I think the author means simply the airline known as "Norwegian", formally "Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA". "Norwegian Airlines" makes them sound like our main carrier, while they are in fact a (very popular and vastly successful) low cost, point-to-point-only, no-frills one.

</comment><comment><USER16> Southwest apparently uses Row44 for in-flight WiFi. When it even works, it's absurdly slow. So slow that I'd gladly take a dial-up modem experience instead. On top of this, the company insists on slapping up a banner on the top of every webpage. If I click the "go away" button, I have to wait 30 seconds for the page to re-load. [Yes, I'm sure GreaseMonkey, etc. could rescue me] I fly on Southwest so often that I receive free WiFi, but I rarely use it. Even logging in is a multi-minute ordeal. I can't see how Row44 can generate enough revenue to justify its existence given the abysmal user experience.

</comment><comment><USER17> Well Google will probably peer someday with direcpceu.com (Hughes)

I think it's using a satellite network in orbit just like people with rural internet?

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

</comment><comment><USER18> I think Louis CK responded to this best: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3dYS7PcAG4>

</comment><comment><USER19> Am I missing something? Why is this on first page of HN. Not downplaying, I honestly don't know.

<comment><USER20> Same old reason. Members of HN voted up because they found it of interest.

Now, tell me, did you really honestly not know that? I bet you did ;)

<comment><USER21> I think GP is really asking "Why do people find this interesting?"

<comment><USER3> A better question is: "Who doesn't find tracing packets from 39,000 feet interesting?" =)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Eclipse Chaser's Guide to Your First Eclipse - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/science/eclipse-chasers-first.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 <comment><USER2> I think there are all of four tips in this guide. Mostly it's a profile of eclipse chasers. Tips:

1\. Get to somewhere in the path of totality.

2\. Get there the day before.

(There's already highway signs up near me in NC warning of traffic and I'm five hours away from the path of totality.)

3\. Stay mobile if you can to be able to drive to clear skies in case of weather.

4\. Don't bother with a camera; just observe as much as you can with your eyes.

I'll add a fifth. Reconfirm your reservation with your hotel. Mine called me yesterday.

<comment><USER3> My sister lives in Charleston - she says the hotels are full, even though many demanded a 3-night minimum stay.

If you're driving somewhere Monday afternoon, you might want to pull over - not just because that way you'll get to see the eclipse, but to avoid all the people craning their neck to see it _as they drive._

Monday probably should have just been declared to be a national holiday. No one is going to get anything done anyway.

<comment><USER4> > _Monday probably should have just been declared to be a national holiday. No > one is going to get anything done anyway._

I feel really sorry for people who can't just take a break to watch the eclipse. That ranges from people like emergency room surgeons and nurses, to subway train drivers, and to poor McDonald's employees who may not be in a position to risk their job to run outside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would just be happy to know how (where) to get solar eclipse glasses. I had a thought a couple months ago to order them, but I brushed it aside. About two weeks ago, I started to get serious, but it was already too late. I couldn't find anything that wasn't wildly marked up on Amazon. Finally, I found a set of 4 on REI.com with estimated delivery of August 18th, and I ordered them on the 10th. They were shipped on the 15th, five days later, with an estimated delivery of August 22nd... and a day later, that estimate has been pushed back yet another day by UPS. So I'll get them, and then have to figure out how to time travel to get any use out of them.

<comment><USER6> As discussed on another thread, one of the NASA guides says

> One of the most widely available filters for safe solar viewing is a number > 14 welder's glass, available through welding supply outlets.

[https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhelp/safety.html](https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhelp/safety.html)

While there's probably also huge demand for welding goggles right now, a majority of people shopping for eclipse viewing gear might not know that (some) welding eyewear would be safe for eclipse viewing. (It would be a good idea to ask an expert before using arbitrary welding gear to view the sun, in case different kinds of welding goggles block different parts of the spectrum to different extents.)

<comment><USER7> Potentially unsafe, but it can work:

Buy welding googles like these: ($5.29) [https://www.harborfreight.com/2-piece-welding-goggles- set-35...](https://www.harborfreight.com/2-piece-welding-goggles- set-35711.html)

And combine that with a real pressed CD. NOT a recordable CD!! It must be a real, aluminum colored, CD! (And one without a label.)

I did this to look at the transit of venus over the sun a while back. Worked fine, but my viewing time was limited.

However I must add that they advise against doing this, not because it's inherently unsafe, but because if you mess up (for example the CD has a scratch) you can hurt yourself, so......

<comment><USER8> Those are #10 welding glasses, quite bright.

If you use #14 or even #13, there's no need to stack them with anything. They are sufficiently dark on their own. #14 are even ISO 12312-2 compliant for the purpose of eclipse viewing.

Here's the best information on related topics:

[https://eclipse.aas.org/resources/solar- filters](https://eclipse.aas.org/resources/solar-filters)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since we live only 3.5h drive from totality, in a low-population density area, we're planning to load up the car with water, potato chips, kids and a sat phone and set off very early on Monday morning.

When I thought to check first, in early June, there were no hotel rooms available but you could get camping sites still. Interestingly the Eclipse doesn't seem to have overloaded the airlines in this area: you can still get a reasonable price ticket to Idaho Falls on Sunday for example. But there are no rental cars left..

<comment><USER10> I am exceptionally glad I work from home, Boise is going to be a mess come Monday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am beyond excited for this event. I'm traveling to the totality on Friday/Saturday just in case. I think the media/online buzz over this event will be overwhelming, and frankly, I'm glad. Our country could really use something like this to bring us together!

<comment><USER12> > Our country could really use something like this to bring us together!

Yes! I'm also hoping many Americans come away with a newly discovered appreciation for our many parks, National Forests, and Bureau of Land Management wildernesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was considering flying down to the Smokey Mountains to do some hiking, and eclipse seeing. But from the sound of things, it's going to be a complete madhouse. Coupled with the prices for everything, and the risk of poor weather(thunderstorms are predicted this entire week), not worth it. The eclipse in 2024 is going to be literally dead center over my house, I think I'll wait it out, and check out the mostly total eclipse this time around :)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for this. All the hype makes it sound like this is an exceedingly rare event, but it looks like the 2024 eclipse will sweep over a huge part of the US population as well.

<comment><USER15> Yep, but after that, you've got a looong wait for the next one in the USA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Gonna be watching this from the black rock desert. Not in the path of totality, but should be an incredible place to watch from!

Possibly not the right crowd, but if anybody from here will be out there as well: we'll be at 10:00/Esplanade watching on Monday morning.

</comment><comment><USER17> I remember from past eclipses, one of the interesting things is that all light gets the eclipse shape (light though opening in tree leaves for example).

Someone said a colander makes a good pinhole camera to cast shadows and see eclipse shapes.

(Don't look through the colander at the sun though.)

</comment><comment><USER18> So as someone who did not plan for this monumental event, what are my options to see the totality? I live in NYC and can rent a car.

<comment><USER19> Be prepared to sleep in the car. If you know anyone along the path, ask to sleep on their lawn or something. Start driving down probably a couple of days out. [http://www.eclipse2017.org/2017/maps/whole- us.jpg](http://www.eclipse2017.org/2017/maps/whole-us.jpg)

You probably won't get home Monday.

<comment><USER20> Flights New York - Nashville for Sunday - Tuesday (I didn't check Monday evening return flights) seem to go at a bit over $1000, and some still available hotels $300 to $1000 per night.

Could also check prices to fly to some other cities on the path in the map. Kansas City?

<comment><USER21> KCI (the airport itself) is in the path. I've been through there recently. Huge place; standing in a parking lot there will be enough to catch it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Don't forget to check with your local optometrist for viewing glasses, got some for 1$ donation per pair.

</comment><comment><USER23> Do you guys have any recommendations where to get to totality from philly?

That's not totally booked up.

<comment><USER24> Hang around an airport that caters to general aviation. Ask who's planning to see the eclipse from the air. Offer to pay for gas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Where can I find glasses to see the eclipse? Most good ones are out of order on Amazon.</comment>


Travis Kalanick Resigns as Uber CEO - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/21/15844836/uber-ceo-resigns-travis-kalanick <comment><USER2> It's about time. Although I feel sorry that this transition had to come at difficult period of time for him, but this shake up for Uber was long due.</comment>


The Epic Online Orchestra - <AUTHOR> https://epiconlineorchestra.com/ <comment><USER3> It's fascinating how different sequences of chords can evoke emotional states associated with everything from sadness, love, wonder, outer space, etc. Not sure I agree with all of the examples in the app, but I could spend hours on it searching for better sequences.

<comment><USER4> That's essentially the basis of modal studies. Learning the theory behind modes and how to play within them gets you pretty far fast.

<comment><USER5> It's still unclear whether the emotional affectives of specific intervals are socially acquired or somehow inherent.

You'd hope the musicology would be able to provide some answers by looking at musical cultures that do not use western tuning systems (particularly 12TET), but as best as I can tell, the results from such comparisons just muddy the waters even further.

<comment><USER4> Regardless of the genesis of how we discern music, specific modes have characteristics that are fairly universal.

For example, the aeolian mode is a much darker, sadder mode than the ionian mode. Why is that? I'm sure there's an intense debate there. I just study the theory, not the higher order biology/physics of why the music speaks to us the way it does. But the characteristics of modes and how they resolve are fairly established at this point.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, but this probably wrong. Labels like "darker, sadder" are not inherent to the intervallic series of a particular mode. You could make some objective observation such as "there is more dissonace in the 3rd, 7th and 9th members of the harmonic series when comparing the notes that make up the major chord". But "darker, sadder" are emotional labels that are probably but not definitely socially constructed.

I had the experience once of seeing one of the greatest Indian vocalists of the 20th century live. The audience was almost entirely people of Indian ancestry, and clearly very experienced at listening to this sort of music - <USER2> was not. Indian music doesn't use harmonic relationships very much, but does have a much more clearly developed and articulated "theory of melody" in which specific intervals in an ascending or descending of a melody have particular meanings (within the context of a given raga (scale/mode)).

The audience would gasp out loud as he did certain ascents/descents. I kept looking at the person I went with (who had grown up listening to Indian classical music) and it was clear that to him the meaning of the note sequence was completely obvious. To me, there was no meaning at all.

As I mentioned, musicology research that I'm familiar with is still a bit ambiguous about this. It is possible that people from very different musical cultures might agree with your characterization of the intervals that make up aeolian as "darker, sadder", but I'm not aware of any definitive studies that show this clearly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Outer space", Jebediah approved!

<comment><USER7> Right out of Dvorak Symphony 9!

<comment><USER3> Good ear. One of my favorite symphonies but didn't notice that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heart shaped box: [https://epiconlineorchestra.com/E/C/A/A/E/C/A/A?autoplay](https://epiconlineorchestra.com/E/C/A/A/E/C/A/A?autoplay)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is amazing! What is the license for the exported samples?

<comment> ani-ani This is not legal advice but I do have some experience with sample banks. In the absence of more information, I would approach the exported samples as if you were using them from Sonuscore directly. The license for that is here:

[https://sonuscore.com/guests/manuals/Free_Orchestra_Chords_M...](https://sonuscore.com/guests/manuals/Free_Orchestra_Chords_Manual_English.pdf)

If you read that license, you'll notice that the featured website does not appear to really comply with the license of the samples they're using. Like most sample banks licences, it specifically disallows redistributing the raw samples. That is, unless they got a special license.

<comment><USER10> Seems like Sonuscore are well aware of the existence of the website, and happy with the result:

[https://www.facebook.com/Sonuscore/posts/check-out-the- onlin...](https://www.facebook.com/Sonuscore/posts/check-out-the-online-app- the-epic-online-orchestra-featuring-our-free-orchestra-/1723321331067441/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish there were 7 chords too!</comment>


How Experienced Developers Can Handicap a Lean Startup - <AUTHOR> http://kevindewalt.com/blog/2009/11/06/how-experienced-developers-can-handicap-a-lean-startup/ <comment><USER4> In my past life as an "enterprise" programmer, most people at best paid lip service to doing the "Right Thing." Most code I saw was incredibly bad, written by programmers who knew they would switch groups or companies, or go into management, before they had to seriously maintain it. Programmers I met who worked in an "enterprise" were not into their work. Few of them knew of anything outside of their prescribed Java or sometimes C++, or followed anything new or interesting in their field. I could mention something like The Mythical Man-Month, or talk about looking up an answer in Knuth, and get blank stares. Explaining closures to all but a couple was like talking to a wall. This was at a top-tier company, in one of the most prestigious groups in its IT organization.

I think real experience and talent as a programmer shines in the ability to find a solution which is both correct and takes the same amount of time to write as garbage. This is not always possible, of course, but I would caution against coding without thinking about this trade-off.

In the case of the original article, the author cites the foreign key debate. Truth is, because reasonable and good programmers disagree on which is better, this is not even a good example of quick-and-dirty versus the-right-thing. If anything, it's an example of difficulties in storing data in traditional relational databases.

</comment><comment><USER5> I guess an even more experienced developer knows when to use his best practices, and when to leave them be for the sake of the project...

<comment><USER6> _Unfortunately I found that foreign keys in my Rails migrations were a constant source of headaches. Moreover, I decided to migrate to Heroku during the project and had to re-write the foreign keys for Postgres instead of MySQL. What did I learn about customers in this process? Nothing._

While I agree with Mr. Dewalt's basic message, identifying integrity constraints as something a "lean startup" shouldn't worry about for a production application containing _his customers data_ undermines his implicit claim of data management competency - experienced database developers know how to design and organize their schema so that details like dbms-specific foreign key implementation are trivial. When foreign keys cause you serious pain relative to your other data management problems it means you're doing something wrong.

What he didn't learn about his customers in the hour at most it should have taken him to get the keys right (thus helping ensure his customers data is not corrupted by application, framework or provider infrastructure bugs) pales in comparison to the lesson he will learn if their data is silently corrupted.

<comment><USER7> The initial success of MySQL is evidence against your assertion.

When MySQL came out it was the first widely used database that explicitly said that speed of development and operation matters more than correctness. Experienced DBAs were shocked and horrified. Over time the database has matured, however its initial success stands as a testament to the principle that there are a lot of problems (particularly in the web area) where people care that the site does what they want and is responsive, but are tolerant of occasional problems.

Yes, I am aware of all of the possible shortcomings. However requiring people with good ideas to understand more theory before they can get things done does not help motivated newcomers to get interesting things done. And lots of newcomers getting interesting things done leads to successful startups. Which is how a crappy but convenient database (MySQL) got traction in the first place.

For a classic essay on the tradeoff between convenience and correctness, see _Worse is Better_ at <http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html>.

<comment><USER8> _When MySQL came out it [...] said that speed of development and operation matters more than correctness. [...I]ts initial success stands as a testament to the principle that there are a lot of problems (particularly in the web area) where people [...] are tolerant of occasional problems._

I wonder if this would still be true today? Things are very different from 1994, when MySQL was born.

Back then, the Web was so small it was almost possible to visit every site. Site designers, site developers, and customers were all trying new things constantly and learning what worked. There weren't many expectations because everything was so new.

Today, my guess is that people have a much higher standard for e-commerce. But that's just a guess.

<comment><USER7> People want to believe that their money is safe. But people are still pretty tolerant if something like twitter has an outage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Articles such as this are what fuck up the computing industry.

If you want software engineers to be recognized as actual engineers they have to conform to a code of ethics and other standards. When the employer says "let's just cut this corner", the engineer says "NO we cannot!" instead of trying to justify and rationalise it.

I dislike the term software engineer and I think computing science would be better and more applicable. A scientist doesn't shy away from his responsibilities and he sometimes tells the truths that hurt.

We already _always_ ship buggy code. That part is done for you. What this article advocates is going further and questioning almost everything that can lead to a proper design.

</comment><comment><USER10> So basically the author is saying that experience says foreign keys are good, but in practice foreign keys make development and switching data providers harder.

Seems like an experienced developer would have written a data access layer that wasn't so concerned about how the underlying data store managed foreign keys. Almost all senior level developers know that foreign keys are a performance inhibitor and plans for eventual denormalization of data.

I'm wondering if this person is _actually_ an experience developer or not. He starts out saying one of the problems he solved would be to _"figure out a way to speed up the data processing"_ , yet he doesn't understand how foreign keys play into this and had to work around normalization?

I also wonder exactly why it took so long to rewrite the application because of foreign keys. I've never migrated from mysql to postgres but if the process was so time consuming to warrant a blog post like this, I really question the amount of experience this individual really has.

<comment><USER11> If the purpose of your foreign key is to ensure data integrity, then no amount of denormalizing can help. The point of FKs is to enforce business rules in a central location (e.g. don't ship a part to a non-existent customer, if a customer's address changes then there's only one place to update, etc).

The alternative to FKs is to write your own "middleware" or "business rules engine" and guess what, that doesn't get you to market any quicker either.

<comment><USER10> My point was only that it seems the author of the post has limited experience with foreign keys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am having an experience that is in some ways strikingly similar to the one described.

I want to iterate on my game's level design abilities to choreograph various enemy AIs with detailed scripts - things like "this group will spawn over here and take this path over there, shooting at these intervals."

But figuring out what the best paradigm, the best data format and tooling to help me iterate on the choreography is - is a guess. I can make a bells + whistles solution, but it might not be the right one. But neither is it something that can just wait and becomes obvious at some later date - <USER2> technical solutions and the design solutions are intermingled and have to be resolved together. So even though I'm my own customer, I'm still in the "lean" stage of this feature.

So I'm trying to stick hard and fast to "stupidly simple" means of tackling each problem I encounter. Instead of making one all-powerful choreographer system I've started with the stupidest, simplest one I could think of, hedging my bet by allowing multiple systems to coexist, while making the key pieces of data I already know I need, like spawn positions and trigger targets, sit in a different layer where they're easy to edit and interchange.

Essentially, I want to ride on the "80% solution" for a while and then gradually accumulate the rest, and I think the key to making that work is to know where you are uncertain and start fencing off the most suspicious areas so that you can build the eventual shift into the architecture - <USER3> modularity so much as "this code will someday become legacy code, so treat as if it already is."

I'm really sleepy right now so this might seem more profound to me than it is.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's always the developer's fault eh?

Marketing: We need these features now to close $1 mill deal Dev: but... but... we can't implement them in 2 days... we need more time Marketing: Go figure out something...

Marketing: Remember that Y features we asked last month? well, sorry, the customers decided to go with X... Dev: Uh... Uh...

Perhaps once in a while we should switch side: hey management/marketing/sales/CEO, do whatever you need, without modifying our software, to close out deals and to grab huge market share... go figure out something...

<comment><USER14> And believe me, if your sales and marketing team are any good they'll be sweating blood trying to do that. But it may not be possible. In fact, pounds to pennies it isn't.

(Won't it be a founder selling anyway? I reckon it's a tremendous advantage if your biz dev person/people know one end of Textmate from the other and can do prototype-building spadework, too. It's hard to really get how a job feels if you've never done it. Marketers gotta code and coders gotta market...)

Big, slow thinking sessions ignore this: in an early stage startup you don't know what you're selling. You don't know until you sell it. So you need to find out by showing people endless variations on your core theme, and an iota of effort put into making one which doesn't sell is wasted effort, and wasted effort is death.

You are going to kill nearly all your features. That's code which gets discarded, but it's served it's purpose - working out what the business really is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the title should be "How _Enterprise_ Experienced developers can Handicap a Lean Startup". This is really just limited experience. I once saw a very simple project list used by 20 people turn into an enterprise nightmare with 29 tables and a 3-month development cycle.

Wouldn't it seem to be a mismatch from the very beginning?

<comment><USER16> In most enterprises, 29 tables and a 3-month development cycle ARE quick hacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "The problem with efficiency is that it has nothing to do with whether or not what you are currently doing is the right thing to do."

[http://blogrium.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/why-efficiency- is-n...](http://blogrium.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/why-efficiency-is-not-as- important-as-you-think/)

Hacking together a solution may be more efficient in the short term, but it may also distract you from discovering an effective solution. Diving into a solution before understanding the problem is often a recipe for wasted time. Regardless of whether your solution is a hack or a gem, you're committed to seeing it through. Take time to frame the problem before you commit to taking a stab at it.

Measure twice, cut once. Teak or balsa.

</comment><comment><USER18> _Solving problems TRW (the right way) almost always takes longer than quickly hacking together a solution._

I would rephrase this to:

 _Thinking about_ solving problems TRW (the right way) almost always takes longer than _thinking about_ quickly hacking together a solution.

Or graphically, with "t" as "minutes thinking" and "d" as "minutes doing":

      The quick way:

      ttttttdddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

      The right way:

      ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttdddddddd

If you want to do something right the first time, thinking about it almost always takes longer. But actually _doing it_ can take less time, often _much_ less time.

When trying to convince my customers to do things the right way, I often tell them, "It's not how soon we get started, it's how soon we finish."

<comment><USER19> Sure -- but I don't think this is the point of the article. Let's say your ratios are correct, and you want the "t" to "d" ratio to be high in most cases, for shorter overall "t+d".

The article is saying that you often want to get through each of the following lines as fast as possible:

        ttd (release)

        tttdd (release different feature set)

        td (release totally changed and simplified app)

        tttttttttttttdddd (now we understand the problem, do a good job)

<comment><USER20> Don't forget that some of those final t's are because you already invested a lot of other t's and d's into doing it the wrong way.

<comment><USER21> Sure, but

ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttdddddddd

Startups have areal risk of running out of money, just before they complete enough d. However with

ttd,

I have a shot at cashflow with that d, which I can invest back into more (nt +nd)

Established companies dont have that risk so they can do

ttttttttttttttdddddddddddd

While for startups it makes sense to do

ttddttddttddttddttddttdd... etc.

<comment><USER15> For a minute there I thought you were going to do

      tddtddtdd

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Bugs in the application resulted in garbage in the database that wasn't > discovered until a couple years and terabytes later. One of my colleagues > had the joy of spending 6 months as "data garbageman" cleaning up the > database.

Cleaning up should be faster.

It's strange that thing A is optional but without doing thing A up front you can get yourself in a mess such hard to clean up. If thing A is optional cleaning up the mess resulting in not doing thing A and having bad luck should be much easier. Db guys tend to overlook interesting problem how to get out of the mess. They just have pie in the sky rules and if you don't use them all and get yourself into trouble then it's your fault so suffer!

</comment><comment><USER23> I think the difference between the best practices for "lean startups" vs "enterprise" is overstated. The benefits of fast feedback still apply to large projects - the only real difference is that big companies won't necessarily die from inefficiencies like over engineering. And the fact that, over anything but a very short timeframe, the right way is also the fastest way still applies to startups. Sometimes a shortcut is in order - but you can't sustain that for as long as it will usually take to become established.

Real experience teaches you how to choose the right balance.

</comment><comment><USER24> Warning: unscalable databases and spaghetti code can make your startup fail.

</comment><comment><USER25> If Ruby on Rails causes nothing but headaches for those who insist on silly frilly things like data integrity, I will theorize that perhaps the problem lies with RoR, not foreign keys.

You probably don't actually need a database at all , given that the integrity of data stored is not paramount. You don't get any points for "We have this data. We have no way of assuring it's correct or is what we want it to be - but we have it!"

On the other hand, given that most start-ups don't bother with things like a business plan (at least one which doesn't end with "Step 3. ????? Step 4. Get bought by Google"), perhaps it's only appropriate that such start-ups do away with other fundamentals of reality, such as data integrity.

</comment><comment><USER26> The problem here is that the devils are in the details.

Should you use small variable and function names because they are easier to type? Throw away all error-checking because without customers errors don't matter? Or as this article says, perhaps toss out FKs because they might be difficult to refactor?

Trying to make the argument that it's one way or the other is really taking a very complex decision and boiling it down to comic-book level. You need to do enough of The Right Thing in order to make it to your first value inflection point, not just whatever it takes to score a couple of dozen freebie users (although every user is awesome!) Without some idea of where you are in your startup process and what your next value point is, you can't make those kinds of decisions. They're weighted choices.

Look at it this way: assume that you hacked something together doing almost the "wrong" thing every time and ended up 2 months later with a couple of hundred freebie users. Perhaps a dozen or so are even paying for your code, say ten bucks a year. But guess what? Your income won't support the amount of maintenance you have to do on your sloppy code, and customer growth is inadequate to pay for anybody to help you out. Somehow the bills have to be paid, and instead of sales and growth you're spending a large portion of your time as "database garbage man"

So you're stuck with crappy code and not enough resources to maintain the customer base you currently have. It's called "getting upside down" in a project. Not a happy spot to be in. (And it can happen without the lean code problem)

The best scenario is where you make the conscious decision to do a few quality items _even at the expense of customer growth for a few days or a week or two_ and then consciously make the decision _not_ to do a bunch of other things because the hit is too much.

It's complicated.

<comment><USER9> It's not that complicated. Quality takes time.

As Greenspun said once, if we want software engineers to be treated with respect, we need to force employers to respect a certain minimum standard of quality.

Regarding your example...by releasing something badly designed/programmed into the wild and taking money from customers, you are committing fraud. It needs to be seen this way otherwise we will never be forced to take the time to create quality software.

<comment><USER26> So if I wrote a really buggy program but you could still use it to make a million bucks in the next week, I would be committing fraud?

Could somebody please defraud me like that? Please?

<comment><USER9> You're being too literal. What I'm saying is that, at the moment, there is no harmful consequence for buggy programs. Buggy programs that people buy means $$ from the initial sale of the product and your company continues to live and you get paid in $$ to maintain and fix the buggy program.

As long as the software can run, we're rewarded for creating it, no matter its quality.

In our own minds, we have to treat that as fraud and need to feel awful about it.

<comment><USER26> What I'm saying is that people judge the value of the program on just that -- it's value to them. The quality of construction can certainly affect perceived value but a perfectly-constructed program which provides no value is useless. No, it's worse than useless, because it's an example of craftsmanship-over- function.

All the quality in the world isn't going to make a pointless program worth anything. But a crappily-written program that provides lots of value is a great thing no matter how horribly it was hacked together.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


So you think you could build your own Groupon? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/02/15/so-you-think-you-could-build-your-own-groupon/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to apply "Everyone thinks they can race cars but only a few are very good at it" here especially to the Groupon model.

Why?

Well because, unlike Facebook, Twitter etc as the article states Groupon's website appears to people as very simple, in the fact that it is like an eCommerce site.

Thus everyone thinks, all I need to do is get a few merchants to offer me X off a product and I can easily get Y people to buy it. Hence the saying applies because, everyone thinks they are great at sales, although only a few are extremely good at it which is why Groupon are so good at what they offer because, they have built a great sales team, focusing on contacting merchants as well as the sales copy themselves and this is why many of its rivals aren't anywhere near Groupon's scale because, they haven't focused on this aspect of their business.</comment>


Are Lawyers Getting Dumber? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-08-20/are-lawyers-getting-dumber- <comment><USER3> Here are the stats for Brooklyn, the school cited in the article: [http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brooklyn/](http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brooklyn/)

The school has a total unemployment rate of 12.3%, and an underemployment

Yes, that unemployment rate is worse than the national average for all workers. This is typical of law school grads.

Brooklyn's Median LSAT score has dropped 7 points in four years. It's 25th percentile LSAT score has dropped 9 points in four years, from 162 to 153.

Those are massive drops. I work in the LSAT field. At 162, students will avoid making mistakes in formal logic. E.g. "All cats have tails" can be drawn as C --> T. You can also say "not T" \--> "not C".

At 162, students will almost always get this right, even with harder sentences. At 153, students will repeatedly make logical mistakes and come up with things like Tail --> Cat.

(They wouldn't make that error on a simple sentence, but they would with different subject matter)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

Post-2008, legal employment went south, and law school tuition costs soared. To study law now you're looking at $200,000 in debt.

So most smart students avoid law school unless they get a full ride scholarship to a T14 school.

Meaning that a larger and larger portion of remaining students are....less analytically capable, to put it gently.

\</comment><comment>----

People ask: if there's a glut of lawyers, why are legal services not getting cheaper. But there's a certain minimum standard you need in a lawyer.

A bad lawyer can do a LOT of damage, and the damage won't show up for years down the road.

<comment><USER4> What does the tilde mean in your Cat/Tail example?

<comment><USER3> Oops, that was a convention from LSAT forums. It means "not". I changed the comment to just use "not" instead because it's clearer here, thanks.

<comment><USER5> Interestingly, ~ for logical negation is also a convention in C, which I think is more widely known among HN users. I would have predicted (wrongly, obviously) that the LSAT might use the symbol from logic, ¬. Any idea how they chose the tilde?

<comment><USER6> ~ on the US keyboard is in the same location as ¬ on the UK keyboard, and ~ is in ASCII. I have seen both in math books, but ~ is even used in some books which were printed before computers.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, according to the wikipedia article on ~, it's the original negation symbol in logic, and "Modern use has been replacing the tilde with the negation symbol (¬) for this purpose, to avoid confusion with equivalence relations."

I wonder when that started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My (now) ex-wife was a law student graduating in 2002. IIRC, that year had far more students than jobs, and the rumors from 2003 (from other friends in the school) were even worse, so I think the job situation predates the 2008 wall street issues.

I've often wondered about the disconnect: How do we have too many lawyers, and yet legal services are still too expensive? To a degree, there IS a correction underway - prepaid legal services are far more common than they were. In another way, the burden new grads face (massive debt, limited job market, basically no employment during law school) means that many people choose NOT to pursue employment as actual lawyers, so the supply of law school students !== supply of lawyers.

<comment><USER8> A lawyer can only represent a single entity during any given billable unit. This means the independent lawyer is completely dependent on other individuals for their entire income which must support all of their outlays.

If a lawyer is entitled to the same work schedule (40 hours/week) as everyone else, then those 40 billable hours must be paid enough to support those outlays. That is why legal services are expensive. You are not just paying for a unit of work, but rather, subsidizing a lawyer's entire lifestyle.

<comment><USER9> And do lawyers typically incur considerable expenses during the course of their business? I guess I'm not really sure what outlays you are talking about.

<comment><USER7> Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw access are essentially required to look up relevant cases. (to rile your fairness sensibilities, look into how much of a near- monopoly is enjoyed over public info there). That can be, IIRC, thousands/month.

Then, depending on your area of work, you've got issues like software to record and cite websites, continuing legal education requirements, etc.

Not the most expensive profession in terms of base costs, but not cheap either.

<comment><USER10> Lawyers who bill their time by the hour also bill their Lexis/Nexis or Westlaw fees back to their client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> An actual drop in average scores is probably attributable to a different phenomenon in law schools. Traditionally, law schools would teach classes to prepare students for taking the bar exams (which ironically has very little to do with the actual practice of law) and there has been a major push back to curb bar based teaching for a more practical approach so instead of teaching how to pass the bar they teach how to practice law.

Additionally, the actual score to pass both the State Bars and Multi-State Bar has generally increased state by state in order to keep the number of licensed lawyers artificially low. Example, in Florida the passing score is 136 but 10 years ago would have been 131. Those 5 points are not arbitrary they keep a lot of people out and/or force them to retake the bar at a substantial cost. Some failure can be attributable to the historical increases in the passing score, but not in significant drops in average score.

<comment><USER12> > "Traditionally, law schools would teach classes to prepare students for > taking the bar exams"

Really? When and where? In fact, the opposite is true. Traditionally, law school classes have little to no relation to the actual bar exam (or to the actual practice of law, for that matter - unless you do constitutional appellate litigation).

In recent years, some (many?) school have begun teaching to the bar, so to speak - so as to raise their bar passage rate. This has happened primarily post-crash (and the resultant contraction in the market of high-paying legal jobs), to (1) help their students look somewhat more marketable and (2) just as important to them, make the schools look better (both to prospective students and prospective employers).

Subsequently, "here has been a major push back to curb bar based teaching." But I don't think the same people who disapprove of teaching to the bar are those behind the movement to teach more real lawyering (workshops, etc.) - <USER2> think those who dislike the trend are professors and other legal academics who refuse to admit that they are teachers in (what should be) a vocational school - not philosophers.

All too many law professors are wannabe PhD's of economics, policy and/or philosophy who believe they missed their true calling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> (spoiler/answer warning for those who haven't yet taken the test at the end)

HN-pertintent question on #8 -

The test question describes a scenario in which a businessman's location is broadcast on TV against his wishes. The possible answers for why he doesn't have a claim are "because he did not suffer harm" and "because it was newsworthy".

Meanwhile, given the current trends of (face recognition, phone cameras, wifi tracking, license plate readers, and even credit bureaus themselves) I would have expected the actual answer to be closer to "because the TV station can record and broadcast whatever the fuck they want" (phrased more appropriately for a bar exam, of course). At least this seems to be the general principle referenced whenever private sector mass surveillance is discussed.

Each of these activities does have its own confounding factors (commercial/non, business relationships, governmental support, public/private broadcast), but essentially creates a similar situation where an individual is broadcast against their wishes, and whether their activities are _newsworthy_ is questionable. And the only goal of much private surveillance is to cause financial harm to the surveilled.

What exactly gives? The only plausible resolution I've thought of is that since the case law is not settled, these two opposing concepts are actually fighting and it's not as cut and dry as we think (which would imply that stating it as settled is supporting anti-privacy). But I'm interested in any other explanation.

<comment><USER14> Not a lawyer: in this case it was newsworthy, and out of the applicable defences that's the strongest.

<comment><USER13> It's a stronger (sounds better) defense if it holds up, but it's also rebuttable.

My question is not about whether this answer is the right choice, but about the creation of the answers. Bar exams focus on abstract concepts, so if the general lack of privacy in public spaces is such a thing, I would have expected it there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Average LSAT scores took a dive for class of '14 too. The schools lowered standards circa 2011 as fewer students applied. Three years later they graduate and, yeah, their scores are lower on average.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are plenty of dumb lawyers out there that passed the Bar just fine. What it sound like is that the law schools have lowered their standards to keep admissions high to compensate for the lower applicant numbers, with pretty much the results you'd expect. And that we could see this coming by examining admission rates and last scores three years previous.

</comment><comment><USER17> Statistically speaking the ones who didn't pass the exam disn't pass so you'd need to rerun the whole article and compare the average scoring of those who pass with the average score of those who are in the profession now.

If you average the score with those that don't pass, you get incomparable results because you are counting both lawyers and dropouts.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I had a passing comment in that grain as well. At one point the head of the NCBE (Moeser) is pointing out that the average of the 25th percentile of LSAT scores was decreasing at the school of her biggest critic.

To me, that screams data mining. The average score of the 25th percentile is a very strange statistic. Why not use something more conventional like the median of the entire population? Then you could honestly say: the majority of people at this school are getting worse. The use of an obscure statistic makes it seem they went hunting for a statistic to spin a story upon.

<comment><USER19> One reason might be that according to statisticians the LSAT is only very correlated to bar passage rate until you get LSAT score of 150+, which is about the 50%th. Essentially, getting smarter stops helping you pass the bar after you get to about average. This makes sense because the bar is a minimum competency test.

So a school having the class drop from 170 to 160 shouldn't have much of an effect on the passage rate. But if they start letting in a large number low LSAT scores (below the 150 threshold) you'll really decrease the passage rate. Even if the median is still the same.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Do you have data on 150+ being a significant threshold for bar passage?

I work in the field, it would be good to have a hard number to present to students.

Anecdotally, I notice a big difference in those who can't break 150 vs. other students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Law school tuition fees rise constantly, without any respect to the market. Sounds like a recipe for failure. Of course less students enroll, when the proposition of the 120K loan looks worse and worse.

<comment><USER3> Not just less students. The best students will avoid law school if it costs 200K and has poor prospects.

So the people left will be....the sort of people less likely to pass a bar exam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They are getting less in-demand due to the post crisis glut. I know grads from top schools who still can't find anything other than contract work from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER22> Re: Cost of lawyers, I'd love to try to get H1s. Smart, hardworking.

Why only software engineers?

</comment><comment><USER23> These are probably the same students who asked to be excused from exams because they were too shaken by the verdicts of certain cases vigorously reported by the media.

</comment><comment><USER24> On a tangent but, we have self-driving cars, perhaps we should have lawyer robots as well soon ;-)

Maybe point Watson to all the case history and see what he can do.

It is funny how we read the article yesterday about the "New Aristocrat" class. Maybe automation will replace the Aristocrat class at some point for a change...

<comment><USER25> Professions that require human judgments will be the last to fall to the machines. We won't have automated lawyers until we have strong AI.

<comment><USER26> Yep. The law isn't necessarily "logical" as one judge can interpret situations or deem "justice" differently from the next.

<comment><USER27> Furthermore, as someone I know is fond of saying, the law doesn't compile cleanly. If you think you've uncovered a loophole that lets you murder someone in a tiny slice in Idaho ([http://loststates.blogspot.com/2011/08/loophole- landwhere-cr...](http://loststates.blogspot.com/2011/08/loophole-landwhere- crimes-cant-be.html)) and no one can do a darned thing about it... well, no, you almost certainly won't just waltz away untouched while the legal system shrugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me of the movie "idiocracy", where the protagonist got his law degree at Costco.

</comment><comment><USER29> The article paints Moeser as a villian -- she refuses to accept the fact that their system broke and compromised the integrity of the results on an exam, and instead insists that the students are just getting dumber, the eternal complaint of the aging generation, and are getting worse at taking an exam she declined to ever take herself. It's mind-blowing she is allowed so much power to shape what American lawyers look like, but this is coming from a profession that works very hard for 3 years to completely remove moral reasoning from their repertoire and replace it with bureaucratic rule-following.

<comment><USER25> > completely remove moral reasoning from their repertoire and replace it with > bureaucratic rule-following

Spoken like someone who truly has no idea what lawyering is about.

<comment><USER29> I have plenty of experience with lawyers who graduated from high-ranked law schools. I won't claim to speak for everyone, but at least in my experience, discussing moral considerations or moral consequences of the law with them is like talking to a wall. Something happens to them in law school: they concern themselves with only what can be argued in court and precedent, probably because they must in order to do their jobs. I have heard so many different paraphrases of the quote "right and wrong don't have anything to do with the law or a courtroom" from so many different lawyers. I can only imagine the moral hardening that must take place to work in a the kafkaesque legal system that generates so much horrible injustice every day almost by design and sleep well at night; the claim of a lack of ability to moral reason is not really an attack on the character of lawyers, but rather a cry of sympathy for people doing adapting as they must to survive and still work in the field.

People who inflict enormous amounts of suffering upon others as part of their jobs (prosecutors, cops, prison guards, criminals, judges) develop these attitudes as a defense mechanism.

<comment><USER30> > I have plenty of experience with lawyers who graduated from high-ranked law > schools. I won't claim to speak for everyone, but at least in my experience, > discussing moral considerations or moral consequences of the law with them > is like talking to a wall.

You should find some different people to talk to. This attitude is not only not the norm among my friends, colleagues, and classmates (virtually all of whom went to good law schools), this attitude is almost totally unknown to me.

It's true, of course, that lawyers have to understand and accept that legal outcomes are not always moral outcomes. So it's true that "right and wrong don't have anything to do with the law or a courtroom" in the narrow sense that when law and morality conflict, law typically carries the day in court. But don't mistake this practical understanding for a lack of moral awareness more broadly.

Believe me, nobody knows better the injustices perpetrated by our legal system than lawyers. This, after all, is why many people _become_ lawyers.

But also consider that some of the injustices widely believed to be generated by our legal system (though certainly not all, such as racially-biased mass incarceration) are, in fact, not injustices but are simply widely misunderstood. I would say that legal reporting is about on par with science reporting in terms of the misinformation and half truths that get spread around.

Also remember that a lot of the injustices widely attributed to the U.S. judicial system (and here I _am_ talking about mass incarceration) are not primarily products of the judicial system. They are products of the legislative system (i.e., Congress), which the judiciary is constitutionally bound to obey. Lawyers and judges have very few tools to minimize this damage while also performing the job that our system of government assigns them.

<comment><USER29> To your last point, I would argue the injustices are not misunderstood they are in fact injustices, and I'm talking about details far beyond racial discrimination, though I don't mean to minimize the consequences of that.

The vast majority of our cases are settled through plea bargains; this is in essence a coerced (we must assume false -- if we are to accept innocent until proven guilty, none of these cases are proved) confession, little different from in banana republics where your signed confession is required for the authorities to recall their torture or confinement. Once a prosecutor has you in his sights your choices are to fight back, demand a trial, and have the prosecutor throw the book at you and ask for the maximum most extreme sentence, try to lock you in a cage for years to be repeatedly beaten and raped and destroy your ability to succeed in society for having the audacity to demand your rights, or accept the punishment the justice system has decided to dole out to you with a plea. So we trust prosecutors to only push cases they truly believe are just. But the promotion scheme for prosecutors is such that those prosecutors who believe any winnable case is a just one get the most convictions, and therefore the most power.

And consider juries; as a juror you are instructed (falsely) that you are required to judge a case simply on the facts and that you must leave your ability to be a human being and do moral reasoning at the door (hence, morality has no place in a courtroom -- the jurors, who decide the case, are explicitly told they may not use it), and lawyers are even legally prevented from informing the jurors of their rights.

I think you're very right about the source of these problems -- they come from lawyers in so much as almost all of our legislators are lawyers, trained into this profession and having gone through all of this before they create laws. But it's not the trial lawyers or judges who created these issues, and many of them get into the game in order to make things better. But I think to succeed in a system requires acceptance of the system; it changes you. I'll concede that it's likely there are many, many people in the legal profession for whom my analysis isn't particularly accurate and I'm encouraged by your vigorous repudiation of my pessimism (I don't want to be right), but I think there's some truth there to what I'm saying. And I'm not suggesting that there is an easy solution; the problems are emergent, systemic, and very deep.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Sold startup, joined FANG, tired of FANG. What's next? - <AUTHOR> I ran a startup, sold it, then joined a FANG member as a software engineer. I've been there long enough to become bitterly disappointed at the reality of daily existence - politics dramatically affecting products, and management seems to be an exercise in avoiding being around problems.<p>I need to move off my team, the disappointment I feel is deeply affecting my mood. I have 3 years of experience at a FANG, and a successful startup that sold, but I'm not sure what the best move is.<p>- Apply to another FANG and use my current position as leverage for a bigger comp package?<p>- Apply to another FANG, and since they don't have preconditions about my role at this FANG, shoot higher than a worker bee so I have more control over outcomes?<p>- Transfer to another team, don't work like it's my startup, keep my head down, and appreciate my current salary?<p>- ??? <comment><USER2> Recommendation: Read the book 'so good they can't ignore you' \- it's directed at answering your question exactly.

(summaries of this book aren't particularly useful but the book is great. i was initially skeptical.)

It would likely note:

\- You have high career capital

\- You should use your career capital towards getting more autonomy and more purpose.

This is a decent summary of the book as a teaser, I highly recommend reading the whole thing if it seems like it'll help you [http://contentfiesta.com/book-notes/so-good-they-cant- ignore...](http://contentfiesta.com/book-notes/so-good-they-cant-ignore-you/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do another startup for something you love, don't sell it.

Gives you both autonomy and purpose as said by another commenter.</comment>


Patents and Innovation: Evidence from  Economic History [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.27.1.23

<comment> M8R-fhlcjm Patents provide the incentive to invest in R&D by providing a form of guarantee on their investments.

Generally speaking, the countries with the strongest patent rights produce many of the innovative companies.

<comment><USER2> > Generally speaking, the countries with the strongest patent rights produce > many of the innovative companies.

The article suggests that the available evidence does not support this conclusion. It seems that in historical technology fairs, countries with a weak or no patent system in place performed as well as other countries, both in terms of numbers of inventions they presented, and awards they received.

The article also describes some instances where patents clearly inhibited innovation - for example in the US in 1916, aircraft production halted due to patent disputes between Wright and Curtiss.

<comment> M8R-fhlcjm That's assuming the article is right, but a look around the world shows the opposite - generally speaking the stronger the patent rights, the stronger the innovation. Weak IP African countries vs strong IP in American, European, Japan, Korea.

<comment><USER3> Oh come on, you can't seriously be using Africa as an example here. Most African countries lack basic infrastructure and many haven't had a peaceful decade in the last 50 years. IP is a type of law, so countries with weak rule of law probably have weak IP. But I think there is a solid case to be made that the other rule of law issues swamp IP in terms of suppressing innovation.

<comment> M8R-fhlcjm not so long ago (few hundred years) the new world (America) was behind African infrastructure and yet pulled itself up.

<comment><USER4> One common sense argument is that as industry developed and competition increased, the dominant players were able to perform regulatory capture to ensure that they could rule the market through easily-gamed IP laws.

<comment> M8R-fhlcjm Except advancement of western civilization was much more due to technological innovations than 'gaming IP laws'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Same journal, also from Vol. 27, No. 1, same subject: <http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.27.1.3>

TOC at <http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.27.1>

<comment><USER6> I'm less anti-patent than most people here, but I think that's a very good article. In particular, the treatment of pharmaceuticals is not the absurd "if we just got rid of patents, innovation would continue at the same rate" argument that some patent opponents advance, but a more nuanced take on what other changes could be made to the larger system to maintain appropriate incentives.

<comment><USER7> When it comes to pharmaceuticals, one has to remember that the vast majority of the costs involved are with the late stage trials that society mandates. That medicine is properly tested is not a bad thing, but there may be other ways to finance such tests without having to resort to monopolies.

<comment><USER8> You can't lump all clinical testing into the approval process. Drug companies have to do a certain amount of clinical testing just to see if the drug does anything. To make a computer comparison: just because you don't get your OS POSIX certified doesn't mean you don't need to run any tests.

This graphic suggests that pre-FDA clinical trials still account for about 30% of the cost of developing new drugs: [http://blogs- images.forbes.com/aroy/files/2012/04/fda_05t2.j...](http://blogs- images.forbes.com/aroy/files/2012/04/fda_05t2.jpg). Even if you assume that all of the costs after that are allocable to the regulatory process (which is a liberal assumption--it's unlikely that drug companies would need to do zero human trials in the absence of regulation), developing a new drug is still a billion dollar endeavor.

The reason drugs are such a great example of the applicability of patents is because they're the worst case scenario for the economic issue (free riding) that patents address: high capital costs for a product that is trivially reproduced. That dynamic exists independent of the regulatory process, and exists in other capital-intensive areas too (Tesla has a raft of patents on its technology, and Google has patents on self-driving cars, etc).

The reason patents often seem ridiculous in the software context is that by and large they are not a bad scenario for free-riding. The capital requirements for software inventions tend to be very small.

Looking at capital requirements also exposes a weakness in the article, which uses historical data. Capital requirements for new inventions was much lower in the past than they are today. The era of "lone inventors" is largely dead outside the software realm. We live in the era of "big science" where it costs $1 billion to get anything done. Patents are a lot more relevant in the face of high capital costs than in the face of low capital costs.

<comment><USER6> Note that I was commenting on the article from the parent to my comment, not to the one from the OP (which I found much less persuasive, and where the historical focus does seem like a real weakness). Even if a monopoly is the best way to incentivize pharma research, patents aren't the only way to achieve it - even today there is a complex set of mechanisms outside of patents, such as clinical trial data exclusivity for FDA approval.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just another link in this subject: <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2016968> \- the problem with patents is the scalability of the system. It can work reasonably when there is an index - like in the chemical patents now - but without efficient search it is a minefield for inventors.

</comment><comment> M8R-fhlcjm from the article:

        "In countries without patent laws, inventors depend entirely on secrecy, lead time, and other alternatives to patents in protecting their intellectual property."

This has been shown time and again, remove patents and you remove the incentive to disclose.

<comment><USER3> Who cares? With so many patents issued in the US there is basically no disclosure anyway, at least as far as a small company or individual is concerned. In addition, many modern inventions are so complex that it is almost impossible to identify every patent they might violate. Even large companies get hit by this sort of thing, just look at video codecs.

<comment> M8R-fhlcjm That's a cop-out given the abundance of search tools, regexp, CTRL-F, etc...

<comment><USER3> That's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen posted in this forum. I can't tell if you're genuinely ignorant or just trolling. You're saying that the reason patents covering a given product are so difficult to identify is that nobody knows about regular expressions? That has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

The difficulty isn't in finding patents based on keywords or patterns (Google patent search can do that all day long), the difficulty is in identifying patents that might cover a given device or product. If you've created a cell phone you can't just search the patent database for "cell phone". A patent could cover some piece of the device and never even reference cell phones, or a patent could cover a method of doing something that you didn't even realize was novel enough to warrant patent protection.

This requires careful study of a given patent, by lawyers but also by engineers. It is an expensive process with potentially tens of thousands of patents to sift through for a reasonably complicated product.

<comment> M8R-fhlcjm Given your example of cell phones, there's a lot more costs to bringing a new type of cell phone to market than the ~$50k on patent searches.

Since we're talking about driving innovation, someone who genuinely advances the technology is able to gain some protection on their investment in R&D by applying for (and hopefully obtaining) a patent(s).

If all you're doing is bringing another same-old cell phone to market then the question is what benefits are you bringing - or rather, does society benefit more from your same-cellphone than the someone who is innovating and introducing something new and novel.

<comment><USER3> But even an innovative cell phone is covered by thousands of existing patents, many of them unknown until someone sues. That's the problem. There is no such thing as "pure" innovation. All new technology somehow involves older technology, and in many cases it isn't clear which existing patents cover a particular device or product so the only thing to do is wait to be sued or not release your new (an innovative) product at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Economists effectively assume that capitalism is unnecessary - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/2015/10/25/economists-prove-that-capitalism-is-unnecessary/ <comment><AUTHOR> Steve Keen is a very interesting hetrodox economist that I highly recommend to HN.

He is very difficult to categorize: he is a liberal Australian academic who is an admirer of _both_ Keynes _and_ Hayek, and has built upon and synthesized both of their work. He does a lot of computer simulations of economies using real-world behaviors (e.g. mark-up pricing) and has generated results and opinions that are guaranteed to annoy pretty much everyone.

He blogs at Forbes (which is funny, given his politics):

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/](http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/)

And has a great book out that takes on classical economics:

[http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised- Expanded-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded- Dethroned/dp/1848139926)

<comment><USER2> I had never heard of him but the title of this article is beyond a literary device- it is bait-and-switch. It is dishonest. You expect this from from shifty clickbait websites hawking beauty tips and lists of top 10 ___ "they" dont want you to know about. But you cannot take anyone serious who writes an article like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> The title is a joke. Yes, it's provocative, but give the guy a break: he's a small time economist at a second-tier university in an island nation who is saying some of the most interesting things about economics in the world today.

You would be doing yourself a disservice not reading his stuff based on a blog post title.

<comment><USER2> Well, your description of him hits a little too close to home so I guess I have to give him a second chance.

Also I wrote "hawking". haha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Multiple commenters say "The title is a joke" \-- but Keen is just reporting the direct implication of the Arrow Debreu theorems which economists regard as foundational for economic theory (not practice or empirical analysis).

So maybe a _literal_ title would be "Economists prove that Economic Theory says Free Markets are Unnecessary". The joke is on mainstream economic theory.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. If you read the article, it is not asserting "Capitalism is Bad", it is saying that the rationality assumption implies that we don't need the market. If everyone was perfectly rational, we would all coordinate without the market.

<comment><USER5> I read it more as you need all knowing agents to make capitalism work which is the same requirement for a command economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No they don't. And there are many school of thought in economics.

For Austrians, the knowledge problem lies at the core. A lot of individuals, each with limited knowledge and limited processing power try to do their best. An emergent feature is capitalism. This is Adam Smith "invisible hand", because it is an emergent feature of a complex system. You can't observe it directly, but it works.

The article correctly quotes Hayek, but shows a poor understanding on why Hayek said so in the socialist calculation debate, or its later work, or other schools of thought.

You don't need people with 100% clarity, only that they do their best, and act upon what they believe is true. That is called purposeful action, in Mises' human action. We all make mistakes, but we also revise our opinions when proved wrong, and when replaced by the next generation!!

And entrepreneurs make big bucks when mistakes persist for too long, and an opportunity remains unexploited. You can basically see profit as a reward for helping everyone.

<comment><USER3> This is an interesting argument but I don't know any proof that it is correct. It seems very vulnerable to "adding up" or aggregation problems, where local optimization clearly can work, but when you have lots of independent local optimization, the aggregate effect is bad.

Have the Austrians proved that large number of actors each doing the best they will reliably aggregate up to global optimality? (That would actually be darned impressive given the well known problems of getting stuck on local optima.)

If not then there's no clear argument against government action to prevent or deal with bad local optima. And without any strong account of how and when markets fail, the scope of government action needed is potentially broad.

By the way, Shrekli is a pretty good example of "profit as a reward for helping everyone."

<comment><USER7> > If not then there's no clear argument against government action to prevent > or deal with bad local optima.

There may not be an economic argument, but there's a political one.

In theory, government can move you from a local maximum to a global one. _In practice,_ though, government moves you to a maximum likelihood of [them] getting re-elected, not to a maximum of any economic utility function.

More bluntly: You worry that the free market is going to produce a sub-optimal solution? Okay; that's a valid concern. But you think Congress is going to make things _better?_ Have you looked at Congress lately?

(And, yes, of course I know that the Ayn Rand unfettered free market is not the answer. We really do need regulation. I get that. But be wary of the assumption that government can do better than the market at optimizing aggregate results. Government is a very blunt hammer, not a fine adjustment.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The necessary sub header from the article: _Actually they've done no such thing. But they do effectively assume that it's unnecessary all the time._

This article is just a short rant about how simple, traditional, econ 101 models from the 19th century assume purely rational actors whereas the author has decided that not everyone is a "Nostradamus" with infinite knowledge and wisdom.

Nobody believes the rational agent assumption to hold at the individual level, but it is _sometimes_ a useful approximation that can build the foundation of a macroeconomic model that _sometimes_ makes sense. It's also a necessary stepping stone on the way to more complex models. An unnecessary article with a clickbait title.

That said, his book _Debunking Economics_ is very good and I'm glad that he's advancing the state of modern economics by relaxing traditional assumptions and building better models based on more realistic heuristics. But I don't think this should be getting voted up HN.

<comment><USER3> You greatly underestimate the depth of the problem. Mainstream economic theory provably leads to economies that are unstable -- they don't converge to equilibrium, and in fact can end up arbitrarily far from equilibrium. This is not due to old or simple models, it is baked into current foundations.

Keen makes fun of the assumptions economists use to avoid that instability -- more the representative agent assumption than unbounded rationality. The representative agent assumption is that all economic actors in the model behave exactly like each other, and like the theory predicts would be rational. Without that, the models would not converge. With that assumption, as Keen points out, we can simply delegate all economic decisions to a central planner. If this is a joke, it is one the economists are playing on us all the time.

<comment><USER8> "Mainstream economics" moved away from convergence in the 1950s to the Solow- Swan exogenous growth models and more recently the controversial endogenous growth models such as the AK and the R&D models. They allow for differences in savings rates and human capital respectively that determine whether or not different economies will reach a steady state or converge with one another. But this is all academic fluff: I doubt anyone at the Fed is plugging data into any of these simple models that professors use to illustrate high level empirical trends ex post facto.

Ultimately, your comment is much more concise and insightful than the post itself. You get to the heart of the matter: central planning vs. free markets. No organization can know enough about every variable that affects an economy to do a perfect job of governing it. On the other hand, without central planning there is little incentive to build infrastructure, protect borders, provide affordable education and healthcare, and create a place where people (excepting Ayn Rand) generally want to live.

Could we have a better system? Probably. Almost everything in the world can be "improved" in one way or another depending on your viewpoint and agenda. But I think its a bit dramatic to hold the viewpoint that "the economists" (whoever they are) are playing a joke on us all the time. They're fallible humans playing their part in a fallible system just like you and me.

It would have been great to see a careful consideration of the other side's viewpoint and a proposal for a better system rather than a short, click baity rant.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the positive words about my comment.

I have a lot of respect for economists who are deeply engaged with empirical research.

My own problem is primarily with hard core "free market" theorists who lack humility and have an outsized role in promoting economic mythology. Keen paints with too broad a brush, but the people he describes do exist and do have way too much influence.

Realistic ways of addressing most of the items on your list (infrastructure, education, healthcare, quality of life) are quite explicitly condemned by these theorists.

This economic mythology depends heavily on ideas about optimality that don't survive the problems with Arrow Debreu, the limitations of representative agents, etc.

The economic profession should be explicit about this. Every respectable economist should agree that (say) "We know free markets can't be generally relied on to produce good results. Government intervention is often required to avoid serious problems." That would help undermine the mythology.

The American Economic Association (and others) should make some kind of official statement along these lines, and should reiterate it whenever the assumption that "the market is better" comes up in policy discussions.

But for whatever reason mainstream economists typically want to avoid making explicit comments about the problems of "free markets".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Someone demonstrated a while back that the perfect market hypothesis is equivalent to P=NP. In other words, the "rational actor" so beloved of classical economics is, at best, not possible with current technology.

<comment><USER10> And if you did have a machine that could optimally solve NP-hard problems, why not just switch to a centrally planned economy?

<comment><USER3> There would still be the problem of collecting accurate data to permit the algorithm to work. This would be expensive and people could lie to their own advantage.

BUT! Most economic models assume acquiring the necessary information for decisions is free AND they assume your agents always faithfully serve your interests. So once again these modeling assumptions have made the world safe for central planning. Praise the economists!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mises anyone?

</comment><comment><USER12> You might as well conclude that freedom is unnecessary because that is the implication.

<comment><USER13> Freedom is unnecessary for Capitalism. Look at China.

<comment><USER14> I believe you'll find that many who would consider freedom to (more or less) equal capitalism have settled on definitions of all relevant terms that cause "freedom = capitalism" (for their definitions of both terms) to be a tautology. "Freedom", "capitalism", "coercion" and others will have been stretched in some places and narrowed in others, nuance and odd corners trimmed off until it all fits together, nice and neat, pleasing to the eye in its simplicity and certainty.</comment></comment></comment>


On Mailbox and why I hope to see less free services - <AUTHOR> http://mgalligan.com/post/43093651270/on-mailbox-and-why-i-hope-to-see-less-free-services

<comment><USER2> I've used taskbox since it's beta. It competes in a similar market but doesn't store you emails so you don't have to worry about "downtime" like what mailbox is having currently.

<http://bit.ly/Y1mEc6></comment>