Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist <comment><USER2> "The sense of self-satisfaction from being feted by the high and mighty did begin, on occasion, to creep up on me. And what a non-radical, ugly, corruptive and corrosive sense it was.

My personal nadir came at an airport. Some moneyed outfit had invited me to give a keynote speech on the European crisis and had forked out the ludicrous sum necessary to buy me a first-class ticket. On my way back home, tired and with several flights under my belt, I was making my way past the long queue of economy passengers, to get to my gate. Suddenly I noticed, with horror, how easy it was for my mind to be infected with the sense that I was entitled to bypass the hoi polloi. I realised how readily I could forget that which my leftwing mind had always known: that nothing succeeds in reproducing itself better than a false sense of entitlement."

Unfortunate that the most important thought was buried at the bottom.

<comment><USER3> "Academic research has found that people's susceptibility to flattery is without limit and beyond satire. In a study published in 1997, B.J. Fogg and Clifford Nass of Stanford University invited people to play a guessing game with a computer, which gave them various types of feedback as they played. Participants who received praise rated both the computer and themselves more highly than those who did not—even those who had been warned beforehand that the machine would compliment them regardless of how well they were doing. Yes, even blatantly insincere, computer-generated flattery works."

From: [http://www.economist.com/news/business/21639500-being- good-n...](http://www.economist.com/news/business/21639500-being-good- networker-pays-offbut-it-requires-skill-well-shamelessness-network-effect)

And thus the winners of the system justify our inequality.

<comment><USER4> Incidentally, this goes a long way towards explaining Marx's popularity. His philosophy flatters certain people, especially intellectuals, and tells them what they want to hear. For this, much can apparently be forgiven, even such minor details as "total nonfuctionality of the rest of his theories" and "hundreds of millions of corpses". Such minor trifling details are not important next to the fact that he says what many of us deeply, profoundly _want to hear_.

And so the eternal and ever-desperate efforts by intellectuals to figure out how to separate the things they want to hear from the bits of the theory that are wrong. But, alas, I'm pretty sure they're inseparable.

<comment><USER5> >"hundreds of millions of corpses"

Except that those millions of corpses were not caused by Marx or his theories but by a flawed implementation of it by some power hungry dictators.

In terms of tech, don't blame the spec if you didn't implement it correctly.

<comment><USER6> In Soviet Russia, the three main waves of repression were the Red Terror, the Collectivization, and the Great Purge. Only the last of those was caused by a power-hungry dictator, the first two were caused by committee leadership.

<comment><USER7> I'd dispute that the Red Terror and Collectivization were caused by committee leadership, since the authority of Lenin and Stalin was beyond question at those times respectively.

But what is more disturbing is that these actions were unapologetically intended to be violent; the lives of "bourgeois" or "kulaks" were considered to matter not at all because of their "class". The ruling ideology was that certain classes were "bloodsuckers" unworthy of life. See for example [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order)

A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea like class to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they're in a certain class is extremely disturbing. It is not clear to me that this was a Bolshevik innovation rather than something that is latent in Marx.

<comment><USER8> Two points:

1) It's true that there were uniquely powerful and dominant figures during both the Red Terror and the Collectivization. But those were people who genuinely had the support of the rest of the Party. Many of the other Bolshevik leaders were just as bad. In fact, Trotsky (the alternative on hand who usually plays the "if only the czar knew!" role to wishful leftists) was if anything worse, pushing for an immediate campaign of massive warfare and terrorism to be extended to other countries and being particularly brutal in putting down rebellions.

2) Thinkers trade in abstractions--thought is really just the application and generation of new abstractions. It's not clear to me that you can hold those thinkers responsible, though, when people proclaiming their ideology use their abstractions to ride roughshod over human rights (itself an abstraction...)

Take Adam Smith, who's a secular saint in the Anglosphere. The liberal version of British imperialism embraced him and laissez-faire capitalism to justify actions that cost tens of millions of lives. E.g. the Irish famine, the Indian famines, arguably even the Opium Wars/Taiping Rebellion. A typical argument for not providing famine relief by the Indian Famine Commission:

 _The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief [...] would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at all times, and thus the foundation would be laid of a system of general poor relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension._

This variant of capitalist ideology was the deadliest in the world during its time, until variants of Marxism managed to blow that record away. I think you can just as easily say, "A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea like property rights to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they lack property is extremely disturbing."

It seems to me that the only ideologies out there with clean hands are the ones that only exist in people's heads.

FTR, I think the healthiest approach is to reject all ideologies that pretend to be all-encompassing and use the analytical tools provided by them as needed. Epistemological, if not political, anarchism.

<comment><USER9> A philosophy that reifies _any_ idea to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they fit some category is extremely disturbing.

With Marx/Lenin/Stalin, it was class. With capitalists, it was property rights. With Hitler, it was race.

I'd say it's worth fighting for national defense, but not too many other things...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles? Is it possible that Marx's theory is nonsense and all the rich mixed-capitalism economies are right?

(Spoiler: I am from the former communist block.)

EDIT: (I hope you don't mind if I reply to everyone here in my original comment.)

Philosophizing on what Marx meant by what he said is lot like Bible-reading study. It is nice to speculate on what God meant when he said "You must kill those who worship another god [Exodus 22:20]" but it is more important to know how those killing in His name understood it. In our context, one look at Syriza's economic programme should end all discussions on what Marx really meant with the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Raising wages, employing more people in the state sector, subventions, subsidies, free healthcare and education along with stiffening the labour market, nationalisation of industries and raising taxes up to 75%. That all obviously sponsored by new loans once they successfully ditch their current debt.

That brings us bak to my original point: there is not a single example of successful Marxist economy, regardless of what part of the Marxist wish- thinking you embrace.

<comment><USER11> Marx was foremost an economist and philosopher not a revolutionary, his ideas laid the basis for the later historical movements - but they shouldn't be conflated with them, of course the actual historical events are much stronger in cultural memory.

As for prosperity: I think quality of life is significantly worse now (25 years later) in all post-soviet bloc countries outside the EU. Although yes, planned economies are very stifling towards innovation and individual enterprise and apparently cannot compete very well with capitalist economies.

<comment><USER12> So there is no example of Marxism working.

<comment><USER13> no, there just _is no such thing as "Marxism"_ as a nation-state level policy.

Marx was a critic of capitalism, and did not propose any vision of how society should be constructed beyond "workers should own the means of production" (which, of course, has never been tried as a nation-state level policy, and was not tried in the USSR, Mao's China, etc.).

for more: [https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_mar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marxs_diagnosis_of_capitalism_shouldnt_be/co7s35m)

<comment><USER14> > Marx was a critic of capitalism, and did not propose any vision of how > society should be constructed beyond "workers should own the means of > production"

Marx -- mostly together with Engels -- actually proposed much more specific policy proposals than "workers should own the means of production", in the _Communist Manifesto_ and in other works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Marx really needs an intellectual salvage operation to rescue the sound observations from the ruins of Marxism. His works highlight a number of structural problems. In terms of solutions it's been a disaster, but the failure of a solution does not mean the problem goes away.

For example, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall) : includes observations on the effect of labour-saving innovation. This keeps coming up again and again here in the context of e.g. self-driving cars.

See also this line from the middle of the article: "Both [communists and social democrats], in addition to their other errors (and, indeed, crimes) failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx's lead in a crucial regard: instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals."

<comment><USER4> "His works highlight a number of structural problems."

But that's not very valuable. "Identifying problems" is easy. Step outside and point at something; you're probably pointing at a problem of some sort.

And we humans seem to be very susceptible to the argument

        1. I see a problem over there.
        2. I propose this solution.
        3. My solution must be correct because I identified the problem.

(If you have a hard time believing that, because it is so obviously fallacious when spelled out, start looking for it in political discussions. It is _unbelievably_ rampant, so much so that it is almost invisible because it is simply everywhere. As a bonus #4, "If you don't agree with my solution, you must not care about the problem and you are therefore a bad person." _Also_ unbelievably rampant.)

We are not so hard pressed for the identification of problems that we need to go looking at the writings of someone from over a hundred years ago with a terrible track record of his ideas being implemented. We just need to use our eyes for a minute or two.

 _Solutions_ , now, _those_ are hard. Based on how history has gone I do not see Marx having much to offer us there.

"instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice,"

Well, of course they did. The reason why Marxism always decays into tyranny is that it intrinsically requires liberal applications of force to even appear to work, because it does not match how people function naturally. Free societies don't look Marxist. Rational societies won't look Marxist. (Rational societies would probably be incomprehensibly strange to us, honestly, and won't fit into any of our preconceived notions. By _no_ means should this be interpreted as even _remotely_ a claim that our current society is rational.... ha! No. Also I appreciate the distinction between "free" and "rational".) Even if they solve the "problems" that Marx identified, it won't be with his answers.

<comment><USER15> I don't see so much of #3, but #4 is certainly rife, along with "I don't accept any of the solutions so the problem must not exist" (qv global warming).

The main reason for doing this would be to get good workable solution ideas into and out of the left in the 21st century. Greece is in a state of uneven collapse and there is a strong need to do _something_ to improve its situation from that of debt-austerity. Varoufakis is one of the men on the spot trying to find something that can actually be delivered with a good chance of working. There are plenty of other places in the developed world where people are experiencing deteriorating standards of living and lacking the political capability to improve them. (Another idea worth incorporating is Sen's "capability", which is freedom to do a thing plus the economic ability to do it).

One should not overlook the amount of force deployed in the name of making capitalism work either.

<comment><USER16> Why is the parent being downvoted? As cool as it might be to side with Marx, his solutions do and will always come up short.

The "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" is hardly a problem that needs serious examining especially in this day and age. Our solution to this problem was essentially inflation, and now we got ourselves in a bit of a mess because all that inflated money isn't distributed equally and the wealthier get wealthier as they're the closest to the new money. Most economists reject the idea as a whole. How is it worth examining then? When you convince professional economics to take it seriously, then what? What do you hope to find with it? Or do you just like the sound of yourself pointing out problems? -- this is what Jeff was basically saying.

Your second paragraph really has nothing to do with the rate of profit to fall, and now we're onto Greece? You really think that reckless spending by a government warrants a philosophical economic shift? No of course you don't because you think it was all innocent -- oh sure Greece just ran out of money one day and geez, it must be capitalism's fault!

There's economic downswings. This will always occur for a variety of reasons. Marx's approaches are all way too heavy-handed. You cannot strip someone's freedom and have them still care about their work, and Marx's approach nearly always ends up here. He's given way too much credit as a good, rational thinker for what I see as more just politically-rousing, pulling-on-your- heart-strings social revolution kinda writing. Yes, there's a place for compassion but it is not found in a _system_ and capitalism is a system.

Which brings me to my last point. Your note about not "overlooking the amount of force deployed making capitalism work" is not fair because you're basically equating rule makers with dictators. Capitalism can exist outside of the rule markers in a completely free sense (that's not to say it will be operating perfectly). End of the world happens. Me and my team of 100 people use gold to indicate value and thus begin trading and building value. In Marx's hypothetical scenario, he would probably start calling the shots and complaining about the class struggle. One is a system that runs off of people's free-will and desire for vanity and self-validation and all that. The other is fancy-sounding system that boils down to "You do this. You do that.", which fails the criteria of an autonomous system. Marx's solutions are thus not autonomous and should be immediately rejected on this merit alone.

My advice? Look for the light yourself. Find out what's not working in the current system. Strategize. Plan. Execute. Marx just isn't relevant anymore and, again, should be rejected on that merit alone. I'm all for learning from history and taking away important lessons -- relevant or irrelevant -- but Marx's economic principles are quite literally irrelevant. They have NO relevance with how we operate today. The solution is therefore INCREDIBLY RADICAL, which as we programmers should know, runs the greatest risk! This is why I reject Marx. It's nothing personal against him or because I have some capitalist agenda. I just think we can do better with what we got and should focus on that.

<comment><USER15> "overlooking the amount of force deployed making capitalism work"

I was referring to force that has been deployed in the name of capitalism, not hypotheticals. Things ranging from US's for-profit prison system with its unusually large number of prisoners to the United Fruit Company. Capitalism+colonialism in particular has a terrible record.

Yes, Marxism and Marxists as currently prevalent need to _really_ examine their failure record and revise accordingly. Capitalism _as a political practice_ also needs to stop disclaiming responsibility for its casualties. In neither case is it helpful to make arguments about how it might be come the revolution/after the end of the world, because in both cases people make unreasonable claims about how things might work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This made me think of a reddit comment[1] about an article I read recently.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_mar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marxs_diagnosis_of_capitalism_shouldnt_be/co7s35m)

</comment><comment><USER18> This article has some great stuff in it. I've been putting together some answers to some of these questions and it is currently very 'amateurish'. My economic training doesn't go much past Micro and Macro Undergrad courses and I'm to the point where I need some professional direction.

There are probably some economics PHDs floating around this thread, and if you like talking about this stuff and would be willing to critique the stuff I've put together, ping me @afat.

</comment><comment><USER19> As someone who voted for his party (mostly for anti-corruption reasons), i think he was the worst choice for finance minister. I never understood what his (so called modest) proposal was in any way since it was always hidden in a nebulous universe of words that in the end amounted to nothing substantial. This article is equally vague. I know he 's a media darling, but he 's too narcissistic and argumentative to be taken seriously.

<comment><USER20> Seen from the outside, he seems an ideal person to me to be the finance minister. The issue is whether Greece can get a bit of runway to let it deal with the corruption problems or whether it should just be confined to the modern equivalent of the workhouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As someone from post-soviet country I find this bit offensive. Something like 'how I become erratic Nacist' and bunch of hogwash how modern nacism can learn from mistakes of the past.

But do not be mistaken, this guy is not stupid and probably can negotiate better deal for Greece.

<comment><USER22> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the problem with Soviet Union Communism, not Marxism (like the problem with Hitler wasn't nationalistic politics in general, but Nazism in particular)?

<comment><USER14> > Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the problem with Soviet Union Communism, > not Marxism

"Communism" was the name of the system Marx advocated (the title of his work with Engels is _The Communist Manifesto_.)

Now, Soviet Communism is distinct from Marx's Communism in that it is based in Leninist vanguardism, which still _calls_ itself Marxist, but radically departs from Marxism in a number of ways, both in terms of understood preconditions and program, in order to address the fact that Russia was _not_ an developed capitalist society of the type Marx's theory was based in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> His analysis points to the fundamental flaw in Marxism while not just ignoring but praising it: it rests on the notion that "binary oppositions" completely dominate world history and social dynamics. Class struggle, class opposition, is what defines left-wing thinking.

He's not wrong that Marx relied on manufacturing a sense of "binary oppositions" to drive his cartoon of history, but while such a story is great for creating drama it does a demonstrably, repeated, empirically terrible job as a way of either understanding history or changing the world, unless by "changing the world" you mean "changing the world into one vast prison camp".

It is far too easy to pass from benign academic twaddle about "binary oppositions" to "us vs them" to "you're either with us or against us... and we get to say which you are, not you." Marxism is _made_ for the power-mad, precisely because of this obsession with the "binary oppositions" Varoufakis is so enamoured of.

The insistence that "binary oppositions" dominate history does strongly inform the labour theory of value, but the analysis is transparently false. Labour _is_ special because human beings have a special place in any political economy, simply because there wouldn't be one without us. But the "binary opposition" he sees as being unique to labour is nonsense, and this would be obvious if the role of "binary oppositions" in his theory didn't serve as a major distraction to analysis.

Consider for a moment the "binary opposition" between electricity's value- creating potential that can never be quantified in advance, and electricity as a quantity that can be sold for a price. A kWhr that goes into a supercomputer to calculate the optimal shape of a machine part creates value of a kind and in amounts that is utterly unlike a kWhr that goes into driving a washing machine at a laundromat.

This is precisely the "binary opposition" that Varoufakis touts as being unique to labour. It is nothing of the kind. It was nothing of the kind in the days when a lump of coal could be used to heat a pauper's hut or fire a steel mill. All economic inputs have both an unquantifiable-in-advance value- creating capacity and a market value.

Humans are fascinated by conflict. Present us with a conflict and it will grab our limited attention, leaving very little over to ask, "Hey, all this sound and fury is kind of signifying nothing."

This is the most important role of "binary oppositions" in Marxism (and its bastard step-child, post-modernist literary analysis.) It uses this simple flaw in our attentional structure to allow people to smuggle claims that would otherwise be obviously false right under our noses.

Do capital and labour have somewhat different interests? Sure. Do they have many interests that are also shared, based on their common nature of human beings? Absolutely. This is not a binary opposition. This is an argument for a democratic clearing house where differences are aired and decisions made. There needs to be eternal vigilance that one side or the other (mostly the other) doesn't gain undue influence in such a place, but the false belief that the world is dominated by black-and-white "binary oppositions" is completely unhelpful in this enterprise. It sheds no light on our legitimate differences, and trying to fix things up later on by talking about "intersectionality" is a poor patch on a broken analysis.

We are not a set of 1's and 0's in binary opposition to each other, some with the bit flipped to "labour", some to "capital". We are human beings, full of contradictions far more complex and diverse than this ridiculous scientistic reductionism can possibly encompass.

<comment><USER9> > Consider for a moment the "binary opposition" between electricity's value- > creating potential that can never be quantified in advance, and electricity > as a quantity that can be sold for a price. A kWhr that goes into a > supercomputer to calculate the optimal shape of a machine part creates value > of a kind and in amounts that is utterly unlike a kWhr that goes into > driving a washing machine at a laundromat.

In fact, that's true of everything in a market economy. Everything I buy has more value to me than its market price (otherwise I wouldn't buy it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm going to reproduce a an r/philosophy reply, since I think it fits well

\---

[http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marx...](http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marxs_diagnosis_of_capitalism_shouldnt_be/)

I'm a doctoral student in philosophy, who focuses on Marx and Marxism. It's the only subject I feel confident speaking on with some degree of authority. I do want to point out that those who see this article as starting from an erroneous point of view are correct. There's several clarifications that should be made if one is going to understand Marx (and I emphasize understand, not support – not that supporting Marx's work is good/bad in and of itself).

First: The constant idea that Marx can be tied to the dungeon regimes of the 20th century is untenable. Of the tens of thousands of pages and approximately 50 volumes of collected works of Marx, at most 5 pages spell out what socialist society should or ought to look like. There's many reasons why Marx thought a discussion of what a future society should look like is a dubious endeavor. To summarize them curtly, imagine an ancient Athenian trying to envision wall street, it's very dubious they could. The material and social conditions they are in limit and structure the thoughts they can have, ipso facto to envision a blue print for socialism is rather futile. Within those 5 pages though, none of them say anything about death camps, non-democratic institutions, cults of personality, or STATE based economies as the ultimate goal of society. They consistently advocate for the full development and realization of the best aspect of our capacities and nature (e.g., 'the freedom and development of each is contingent upon the freedom and development of all'). Now one could ask what about the famous quote "dictatorship of the proletariat." It is important to note that in the mid 19th century context dictatorship did not mean exactly what it means today. It meant who has power in the state. So Marx would say we presently live in the dictatorship of the capitalist class (even if the state is prima facie democratic, that class has monopoly power of the state – I don't think this point is contested by anyone that follows campaign donations and its connection to voting patterns by representatives). Marx wanted the workers to have power over the state, but in a democratic fashion (hence his praise of the paris commune). When asked what does dictatorship of the proletariat mean, Marx and Engels responded, look at the Paris commune, that is what we mean (Marx later went to affirm that it also meant equal voting rights for all races and genders). I say all this to indicate that Marx is a critical philosopher of capitalism; he is not a philosopher of socialism. And the few things he did write on socialism are anathema to anything tantamount to the USSR, Pol Pot, Mao's China, etc.

Second: Socialism is NOT - according to Marx - state based regulation and social programs. This is a common misconception. People argue that social security and Medicare are SOCIALIST (or that the USSR was socialist), they are in fact SOCIAL programs in a CAPITALIST society. Their existence is predicated upon revenues and taxes of people employed in a capitalist social relation. Socialism, according to Marx (and many other 19th century and early 20th century theorists) is workers ownership of the means of production. That means the same people that work in the workplace, own it democratically. So, McDonalds for instance would not be run by a board of directors that is divorced from the day to day management and running of the store. Instead the same people that work there, democratically run the workplace (read Richard Wolff's Democracy at Work for a good defense of why this system is both viable and just – there are hundreds of successful institutions like this, Wikipedia Mondragon if you're interested). Democracy prevents monopoly ownership of the means of production. Part of the reason Marx does not thing welfare liberalism (e.g., a capitalist society with strong social programs) is viable in the long-term is due to various contradictions and negative tendencies in capitalism. If value is created in production, and surplus value must be created and reproduced in the capitalist system to fuel its growth and development, then it follows that taxes and welfare programs are a leech on that value. What is good for capitalism in the long term (i.e., maximum surplus value) is bad for the working class, what is good for the working class (share of surplus value going back to them in higher wages or better social programs) is bad for capitalism in the long term. This seems rather obvious now; the system is prone for local and large scale crises. It's also important to note that this definition of socialism, that Marx used, is antithetical to the state-capitalist (socialist in name only) regimes of Stalin, Mao, etc. Those were non-democratic, authoritarian regimes, where the workplace was run by bureaucrats and non-democratically elected state officials. Thus not socialist, and not indicative of the possible failure/success of socialism.

Third, and finally: the comments on human behavior are rather confused. If one looked at a slave society we could make all kinds of 'natural human behavior claims' (notice the author says its human behavior to watch TV – tell that to a hunter gatherer) that are now obviously false. E.g., it's just human behavior to shackle people; it's just human behavior/nature that X race is illiterate, dumb, feckless, etc. It's just human behavior for one race/class/gender to be subservient, and for one race/class/gender to be dominant and hold leadership traits. What needs to be pointed out is that certain institutions and social relations bring out the good and bad in human behavior. They stunt, inhibit, or foster, our capacities. Some institutions and relations make us better, some make us worse. So it's foolish to read off from a particular society with all its unique and historical nuance, timeless truths about human behavior. Are twenty-first century Americans addicted to their property and possessive? Yes. Were ancient Greeks polytheistic believing the gods were tantamount to humans?Yes. Were X race of people in a position of servitude by Y oppressors? Yes. Does that mean these are timeless traits of all humans at all times? That's a rather impossible claim to be certain of. And in many instances demonstrably false (e.g., basically every race based claim in human history by oppressors is later shown to be false). According to Marx and Engels, we should foster and develop institutions and relations that express what's best in us, but if we maintain the mindset that we already know everything there is to know about human behavior and nature, and all future projects at amending and improving such things are futile, we are supporting an impossible to defend position (as philosophers and rational thinkers that's no good). Marx knew this very well. Hence why he ends Volume III of capital with the claim:

"In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature"

Overall this is a rather bad article. If one wants to understand Marx, just read Marx. Even if you don't agree with him, and don't want to support his ideas, the only way to be sure of what he said is to read him yourself. It's only fair – and actually quite liberal and open minded – if one is going to live in a capitalist society to read its best proponents, and also its best critics. Marx is the latter.

<comment><USER17> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9067911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9067911)

<comment><USER24> You should reproduce the text in the body, and I'll delete mine. It's way too unassuming as it is, I didn't even think of clicking on it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Greece is doomed with pontificating populists like Varoufakis, who are ever eager to take the path of least resistance and pin the blame on an unpopular minority, leading the government.

</comment><comment><USER26> So he wants to be a Marxist but he can't reconcile that with the economic facts he's learned, because Marxism is completely wrong. Too bad. We don't need to read his painful and boring rant.

<comment><USER27> Marxism is pretty spot on as theory of development of capitalism.

<comment><USER25> Marxism holds that the capital owner commits "wage theft" against the employee everytime he profits. It's sophomoric, flawed logic for edgy teens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I believe it was Margaret Thatcher that said "The problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Yanis should feel right at home in Greece, seeing as essentially they have run out of money from Germany.

<comment><USER25> Edgy teens love people who rail against logic, conventional wisdom and the established way of doing things, so Yanis should have a lot of fans in the West, just as Chavez did, just before he set Venezuela on a course for economic ruin, and doomed millions of its people to years of lost opportunity and economic chaos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> We should learn from history. Marx didnt have alll of the answers. The problem to solve is how to get diversity and freedom with integration and efficiency at the same time. I think the trick to this starts with a contemprary all- encompassing knowledge management system. Contemporary in that, for example, it is not tied to hierarchical ontologies, which we may need to upgrade knowledgment to avoid that.

</comment><comment><USER30> The most deliciously ironic thing is that the main Marx's grief with capitalism - the fact that the workers didn't own the means of production (or "capital") - was rectified exactly by the modern financial capitalism today's left love to bash.

If you take a look at blue chip companies (and I bet a lot of midcaps as well) a huge amount of their shares, often way over 50%, is owned by their employees. This fact doesn't necessarily help sell Che Guevara t-shirts or help your populist party win elections, though.

<comment><USER31> This is only kind of true. Much of the > 50% of shares that are owned by employees are owned by executives and former executives. Think about how equity is distributed at any startup. The average "worker" still doesn't own the means of production or capital. Definitely not by Marx's definition of ownership, and not by the common usage of the term in our day either.

Points for political snark, though.

<comment><USER30> I think this is dependent on the age of the company. Last one I've looked at was SocGen - an old French bank. 90% of their shares are owned by employees and I think somewhere around 7% by executives.

I can easily imagine that a just IPO'ed company would have a vastly different shareholder structure, though.

<comment><USER32> I just Googled SocGen's ownership and it looks like the employees own more like 7.5% of the company, and I'm assuming there's a power law in place where the C-Level execs own a vast majority of that bit too..

[http://www.societegenerale.com/en/measuring-our- performance/...](http://www.societegenerale.com/en/measuring-our- performance/information-and-publications/share-capital)

<comment><USER30> Well, I'm clearly misinformed.

I thought that maybe my source meant the relative size of non-public shares, but even then it's ca. 49% employee ownership.

Yeah, sorry for that. I stand corrected.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Teacher Bar Exams Would Be a Huge Mistake - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/teacher-bar-exams-would-be-a-huge-mistake/267133/

<comment><USER2> It seems to me that part of the problem is that people are attempting to fix education at a level higher than the school itself. In other words, by adding regulation at a State or National level, you disregard the skill of the people running any particular school - the principal of the school and ancillary people in place to govern that single school.

I know one data point is not science, but serves to illustrate my point. My brother-in-law is a successful businessman to the degree that he no longer has to work, and mostly doesn't. His children go to a small, non US, school, which is autonomous. It is governed by a small school board (who do not govern other schools.) The board has accountability, but is largely autonomous.

So, one of the subjects the kids can take is Business related. He looks at the cariculum, and essentially volunteers to teach it. Of course being successful in business doesn't imply he can actually teach, but it really easy to find out, and guide him, improve him and so on.

He has enormous credibility with the students (since they all want to retire young as well) and he brings a wealth of information and experience to them which is not in the book. He might not be the perfect teacher, but if the kids WANT to learn from him, then he hardly needs to be.

This year he's piloting a program that will see all the high-schoolers (14 years old and up) start and run a real business. Real in the sense that they get investment from outside, by pitching to investors - real in the sense that they will be registered like any other business, pay taxes and so on. Not all will go on to be entrepreneurs, but any that do have all the skills before finishing high school.

Oh, and of course, he's only teaching a couple periods a day. It's the perfect marriage of skill, availability and willingness to pass it on. And it's only possible because the local school governance evaluated him, recognized the value, and we're able to creatively use that value.

It's impossible to replace all the teachers with people like him. And it's impossible to replicate him at other schools. Bt running a school is hard enough, without having them conform to some national ideal of what someone thinks every teacher should look like.

If we trust our principals, and local school committees, then ultimately they are motivated to do the best they can for the children, with whatever resources they have. Sure it's not fair, some schools will do better than others, but at least they can do the best with what they have.

<comment><USER3> Without national requirements we would end up with half a generation that has never been taught evolution as fact, and a lot who had to pay every day. Trust is only good when it is warranted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the authors misunderstand the art of teaching in some fundamental ways. While discussing the many obstacles to entering the teaching profession mid-career, for example, they claim that courses on adolescent development or lesson planning are of "questionable value ore relevance to STEM education" and go on to suggest that mastery in one's subject area (in this case, engineering), is equatable to being qualified to teach.

The fact is, one needs to learn how to teach effectively. While having great command over your subject area is certainly important, a deep understanding of child or adolescent development and the tools of the trade (lesson planning, assessment techniques, educational technology) are equally important.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have two close friends who, right out of college, became teachers in California. Neither of them had teaching degrees; instead, they both started teaching with "emergency credentials" when that program was active. I really have no idea if they were _good_ teachers, but they both seemed like they could be.

Within two years, both of them had independently concluded, "This job _sucks_ ", and they had returned to school to get advanced degrees within their initial field of study.

The thing is, they both _loved_ the teaching part of teaching. Instead, they were both surprised at how much the paperwork and bureaucracy killed their spirits day after day. From their description, it was as bad as the worst Dilbertesque office drone position.

I guess setting up hoops to keep bad and under-qualified teachers out of schools is one way to go, but if your goal is to _improve_ the quality of education, there needs to be focus on making the job a satisfying and attractive career choice. A lot of people think this means "throw money at the problem", but I honestly think, "minimize the non-teaching overhead part of teaching" would be just as effective.</comment>


An empirical study on the correctness of formally verified distributed systems - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/05/29/an-empirical-study-on-the-correctness-of-formally-verified-distributed-systems/ <comment><USER2> One has to be careful and read the paper and understand the systems brought under review.

The fine article states, _" Does all that hard work on formal verification verify that they actually work in practice? No."_

The systems under investigation (Ironfleet[0], Chapar[1], and Verdi[2]) are not general-purpose "formal verification" languages and tools. They allow you to develop a high-level specification in a formal logic and extract an implementation from it.

The conclusion is odd. The systems produce implementations that are free of errors (so long as the specification itself is correct). The study finds that the majority of errors happen at the interface between the verified and unverified components of the system. This is reason why "formal verification" doesn't actually work in practice.

The article mentions The Amazon Paper[3]. It's a fine retrospective of Amazon's use of TLA+ and formal methods to find errors, produce correct designs, and test ideas. Yet the paper isn't about TLA+ or formal methods in general.

If you're interested in the analysis I'd read the paper first before this summary and draw your own conclusions.

 _Update_ links:

[0] [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/ironfle...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/ironfleet-proving-practical-distributed-systems- correct/#)

[1] [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2837622](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2837622)

[2] [http://verdi.uwplse.org/](http://verdi.uwplse.org/)

[3] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/tla/fo...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/tla/formal-methods-amazon.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> > The conclusion is odd. [correct implementation]

> (so long as the specification itself is correct)

What is odd about the conclusion? It seems 100% obvious, as correct formal specifications don't appear magically from heaven (though that sometimes seems to be the assumption). Without a correct formal specification, your proof is "worthless" (by itself in terms of correctness of the whole). And how do you "prove" that the specification is correct?

Having a correct transformation from spec. to program does not _guarantee_ a correct program any more than a correct compiler. In fact, you could argue that you have made the problem harder:

         fuzzy requirements -> program

vs.

         fuzzy requirements -> formal spec -> program

For a large percentage of problems, the really hard part is the one from "fuzzy requirements" to whatever, and there is no formal mechanism, at least that I can imagine, that will make that step provable.

This dawned on me when I was doing formal specification at University (in Z, IIRC): it turned out that at least for that language, the specifications tended to be lengthier, more difficult to understand and more difficult to map to requirements than program code. So even if I could prove the transformation to code as 100% correct, and even if I could automate that with 100% accuracy/reliability, I had still made the total problem _harder_ than before!

In fact, if I had an "executable specification", which was a hot thing at the time, how was that different (in principle) from a somewhat peculiar programming language? So then I had come back to:

         fuzzy requirements -> program (executable specification)

Except that the "programming language" was a bit weird. Now if we had specification languages that were easier to use, more high-level and easier to map to and from fuzzy requirements, _that_ would make the whole thing more interesting.

And of course, there are domains where writing things down separately/differently several times and then determining whether the different written down versions match is a big win (which is also why unit tests are a big win).

<comment><USER2> There are examples of big wins with formal methods in industry. I linked to the Amazon paper in my original comment. There are others from Microsoft [0][1] and in high-assurance safety-critical systems such as the Meteor Line 14 in the Paris Metro [2].

I found the conclusion odd because it claims from the study that formal verification methods do not work _in practice_.

One common complaint I hear from opponents of or developers ignorant of formal methods is that we cannot possibly specify the entire software system: it's too complicated.

We don't have to. We can specify the important parts formally and get big wins: critical components that are correct by design.

> _And how do you "prove" that the specification is correct?_

It depends on the level of assurance required by the project. Often a model and a model checker is good enough over a large enough state space. Sometimes you might require proof.

Regardless of which approach taken these are far better guarantees than a pile of unit tests and integration tests. They only prove the presence of errors: not their absence.

And for highly distributed, concurrent systems I think I've spent enough time trying to grok hand-waving diagrams, execution traces, and log files to realize that I've been wasting enough time. These systems are too complex to reason about locally in source code alone. Whether the prover can be proved is irrelevant: the most important part of using formal methods is that it requires you to think in precise terms with no hand-waving.

 _Update_ links:

[0] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/leslie_lamport.pdf)

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/10/with-cosmos-db- microsoft-w...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/10/with-cosmos-db-microsoft- wants-to-build-one-database-to-rule-them-all/)

[2] [http://rodin.cs.ncl.ac.uk/Publications/fm_sc_rs_v2.pdf](http://rodin.cs.ncl.ac.uk/Publications/fm_sc_rs_v2.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> > There are examples of big wins with formal methods in industry.

No one is disputing that, not the paper, not I. Even from the abstract: "results are encouraging".

> it claims from the study that formal verification methods do not work in > practice.

Again, since when is "results are encouraging" the same is "this doesn't work in practice". Where do they make that claim?

I think they rightfully put a limit on what "works" means in this context, and show that just because you have formally verified _your_ system (or parts thereof) doesn't mean the whole is bug free. Remember Knuth? "Beware of bugs in the above code, I have only proved it correct, not tried it"

>> And how do you "prove" that the specification is correct?

> It depends on the level of assurance required by the project.

Sorry, and again: how do you prove that the _specification_ is correct? (See also the sibling comment with the quote from Alan Perlis). Correct with regard to what? Itself? How would that work? Another specification?

> these are far better guarantees than a pile of unit tests and integration > tests

In some cases that is certainly true. Distributed systems in particular are hard to test.

> They only prove the presence of errors: not their absence.

And as the paper shows, neither does verification, for various reasons, some of which, such as boundary conditions can be and _were_ captured by tests. No one is disputing the verification can be useful, it is the absolutism that's an issue.

Absolutism is always wrong ;)

<comment><USER2> The paper is fine but I took the quote that stood out from the article as the premise which made the conclusion seem odd to me.

> Sorry, and again: how do you prove that the specification is correct?

How do you prove that the proof is correct? By writing another proof of the proof?

In practice it's not terribly useful to wring our hands around this issue. I'll leave that to the mathematicians. If you want to know if your specification is correct you either use a model checker to automatically check that some invariants hold over a universe of states or you use a theorem prover in which you trust the kernel.

If you want to know whether you specified the correct properties, invariants, etc then you'll have to have someone review your work. With an interactive theorem prover at least some of this work can be done by the assistant but at the end of the day it's about thinking and testing your assumptions.

> Absolutism is always wrong ;)

Ha! Cute.

I had thought the idea that formal verification will produce software free of all errors is well debunked these days. Maybe I'm wrong. I've always used to to prove only that certain properties hold. To prove the entire system is free of errors would be quite difficult and expensive indeed!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Did anyone else find this disturbing: "Chapar used UDP, but did not handle packet drops because it assumed the network layer was reliable."?

This is a serious case of missing the forest for the trees.

<comment><USER4> It demonstrates a difficulty of formal verification. You can prove the program matches the specification, but how do you know the specification is correct?

 _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_

<comment><USER3> Very true. It's also an almost unbelievably basic design error to make in a distributed system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Woot!

We had a crack at a formally specified networking component 30 years ago, and it was hard in part because the tools were lacking or hard themselves to reason about. Tried to move to simpler logics but in effect ran out of time. Actually, our funder ran out of money and keeled over...

<comment><USER6> Things are getting better if you go to model-checking. Check out this TLA+ tutorial that covers interesting use-cases:

[https://learntla.com/introduction/](https://learntla.com/introduction/)

<comment><USER5> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's repost of summary of this paper back when I posted it on Lobste.rs:

"In high-assurance systems, certification usually mandates that many forms of verification are used since one might catch problems others missed. Sometimes, the problems are in the verification tools themselves. The authors review tools that seem to have only used formal verification on select aspects of their distributed systems. The added techniques of code/doc review, observing things in debugger, component-based testing, and network/file fuzzing caught a bunch of problems.

Interestingly, the verified code did exactly what the spec said it would. Like with CompCert, the formal verification made the implementation flawless in terms of conforming to the spec. The spec errors were mostly at interfaces as the founders of software engineering found in the 1960's. I always say to bulletproof those by throwing everything you can afford to at them. That numerous components didn't work the way the authors guessed reinforces why high-assurance software always lists everything in the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) along with what was verified and how. If you don't fully understand a 3rd-party component, then there's no way you can say your own component correctly uses the other one. This is also why projects such as deepspec.org are going from hypervisor code all the way down to the hardware. An example of a lightweight method is to build monitors for 3rd-party components that watch traces of its execution to spot inconsistencies with specifications that reflect user's expectations. This has been used in both embedded (Copilot) and enterprise (NonStop) systems."

</comment><comment><USER7> 1\. where is consul? 2\. less used means less reported bugs (not less bugs)</comment>


Chrome users oblivious to Heartbleed revocation tsunami - <AUTHOR> http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/04/18/chrome-users-oblivious-to-heartbleed-revocation-tsunami.html <comment><USER2> First, this is _(was)_ an editorialized title, and of the worst sort: written to pre-seed a partisan angle into the thread.

Second, it's especially amusing to see people try to find reasons to dig into Google over Heartbleed, given that Google found and rapidly published Heartbleed; other providers talked about speculative countermeasures for Heartbleed as potential "competitive advantages".

Finally, the post is wrong. It correctly explains that Chrome uses CRLsets for high-profile sites instead of full CRL checks or OCSP, but incorrectly attributes the reasoning to performance. That, as it turns out, is not the reason for Chrome handling revocation the way it does. The real issue is that revocation doesn't really work: browsers (at best) "soft-fail" revocation (when Google's Adam Langley built a revocation-stripping proxy, he found for instance that IE reacted to it merely by removing the EV indicator from the URL bar), because hard-failures cause serious reliability problems.

The Netcraft article certainly is written to convey the notion that Chrome is cavalier about TLS security. But people who follow TLS know that to be a ludicrous narrative, in the truest sense; worthy of ridicule. The reality is that the Chromium team has apparently thought more carefully about revocation than almost anyone else, came to an important and counterintuitive conclusion about it, and made the design decision that maximized user safety given the constraints.

</comment><comment><USER3> Checking: "Check for server certificate revocation" does not persist. When I check it and then reopen the settings tab it is again unchecked.

Does anybody else see this ?

Chrome Version 34.0.1847.116

I've reported it twice now.

<comment><USER4> Wow, you are right. I was chuckling to myself looking at this article thinking _Good thing I am smart and enabled this check_. Then I read your comment, checked my settings and indeed the setting is no longer enabled.

I understand that the CRL isn't fool proof, but if your connection isn't in a position to be MITM'd it still provides protection against some things, for example if the target website DNS has been hijacked.

edit: 34.0.1847.116 m

<comment><USER5> For Chromium version 33.0.1750.152 Ubuntu 12.04, The settings change is persistent.

Related question: Is anyone seeing degraded browsing performance as a result of this change yet? It is my understanding that these CRLs are spiking in size to multiple megabytes, no?

<comment><USER6> Same goes for Chromium 34.0.1847.116 on Arch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The standard explanation for this is [https://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/02/05/crlsets.html](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/02/05/crlsets.html)

The short version is that any attacker against whom certificate revocation might matter is by definition in a position to MITM connections, and can simply interrupt the certificate check.

<comment><USER8> And the correct interpretation of 'interrupted revocation check' is 'invalid certificate'. Now, of course there's the problem that the CAs are apparently unable to provide constantly-running OCSP servers, making such an interruption more likely to be due to technical inadequacy of the CA than due to an ongoing MITM attack, but that is first and foremost a problem of the CAs, not of a browser vendor.

<comment><USER2> Congratulations, you just broke every user accessing the Internet through a captive portal with an HTTPS login interface, and every user trying to access the Internet through crappy proxies. Which is one of the reasons why other browsers don't hard-fail on revocation checks.

<comment><USER8> And what exactly is the alternative? If any intermediate proxy/captive portal can say 'oh, everything is _fine_ ', how are we going to protect against MITM attacks?

<comment><USER2> Out-of-band online CA checking is a weak design that doesn't work in practice. If revocation is required in a strict sense, then the solution will look something like "nuclear HSTS-style OCSP stapling". But to my mind, a simpler alternative would be for browsers to support something like TACK, so that instead of trying to knock down known-bad certificates, we just had a much better infrastructure for asserting which certificates are good.

All that aside though, it's awfully silly to kick Google for noticing and pointing out this security problem with revocation checking. Other browsers are often literally _pretending_ to do revocation checks that aren't actually meaningful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Trading security for performance seems to be a recurring issue among many projects.

<comment><USER10> There's no platonic ideal of Security that exists in a vacuum, unaffected by the economic/convenience/performance/etc costs. The clearest example here is post-9/11 security, but this trade-off exists in EVERY security system, far from being an "issue" with certain projects. As far as I'm aware, this is considered a pretty fundamental tenet of security in a pedagogical context. Now of course there's still room to disagree with the level to which each project sets its security/cost-avoidance slider, but it's hardly black-and- white.

<comment><USER11> There are also contexts in which the trade-off doesn't actually exist. Extraneous complexity breeds performance problems _and_ security problems.

The horrible mess of ancient cruft that comprises the existing certificate infrastructure is a more fundamental cause of the problem here than what this or that browser does to try to mitigate the damage.

<comment><USER2> The problem isn't the certificate infrastructure; it's the protocol.

Online revocation checking could be made to work. We know the shape the solution will take. It will look like a redesigned version of OCSP stapling (where instead of connecting out to an OCSP server, the TLS server itself relays the revocation assertion over the TLS connection), but for chained certificates, and with an HSTS-like persistence mechanism so that attackers can't skip revocation checks by simply not sending the Certificate Status extension.

This is a lot of work to get certificate revocation, which is a rarely-used feature. But dynamic certificate pins are useful all the time, and solve some of the same problems as revocation. They also happen to be a persistent, cached attestation that accompanies a TLS connection.

So, perhaps the right thing to do is (wait for it) push for TACK:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7562185](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7562185)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Was there a reason Cloudflare was singled out? Akamai is doing the same mass- revocation of certs as well.

<comment><USER13> I don't see how bringing that up would have added anything to the article. He probably mentioned Cloudflare because they had done the most PR around the incident.

<comment><USER12> Akamai scale > Cloudflare scale.

<comment><USER13> I don't follow the point you're trying to make. Steve Ballmer has 70 lbs on Tim Cook, so any article that mentions Cook must mention Ballmer on account of his greater size?

The article was just about how there have been a lot of revoked certs lately and Chrome won't see them. Cloudflare just provided an easy source for the first part. Mentioning Akamai wouldn't have made any difference to the substance or the narrative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What a sensationalist title. The real title is "Chrome users oblivious to Heartbleed revocation tsunami" which makes much more sense.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why is this not the default option?

<comment><USER16> The article states "However, most Google Chrome users are left in the dark, as Chrome performs neither type of check for non-EV certificates by default. Instead of conventional revocation checks, Google Chrome relies on an aggregated list of revocations, dubbed CRLSets, which are compiled by Google. The revocations from GlobalSign's CRL have not yet appeared in Google's CRLSets and hence Chrome users will not be warned if presented with a potentially compromised, but revoked, CloudFlare certificate.

The CRLSets deliberately do not cover all CRLs in an attempt to reduce the total size of the aggregated list. In effect, Google has traded the completeness of their revocation checking for a speed advantage over rival browsers as downloading CRLs or making OCSP requests imposes a performance penalty."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've enabled mine since Steve Gibson said we should do it 2 weeks ago on Security Now.

<comment><USER18> I've got mixed feelings about Steve Gibson. He's clearly very, very smart. But he does tend to be a little overdramatic, and I recall him railing against raw sockets in Windows XP a number of years ago.

How good is his security advise?

<comment><USER19>
      http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/steve_gibson/

<comment><USER20> I like the one there that calls him a crackpot in 2006 for accusing the NSA of spying by exploiting Windows bugs.

[http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/steve_gibson/gibson_wm...](http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/steve_gibson/gibson_wmf_backdoor.html)

<comment><USER2> That is an extremely misleading summary of the page you linked to; to start with, Jericho is at pains _not_ to reject the idea that the USG uses Windows bugs to spy. Your comment might say more about your credibility than his, unfortunately.

<comment><USER20> It "might"? Does it or doesn't it?

<comment><USER2> I don't know what the circumstances of your comment were. Did you just not read it very carefully, or did you deliberately misstate it?

I originally wrote that your comment _did_ say more about your credibility (&c &c), but edited it because I realized I didn't have any business attributing motive to what might have been a totally innocent error. Sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mkr-hn Glad I read HN. Why isn't this checked by default?

<comment><USER2> Because it doesn't work; it's a double bind: either you hard-fail on revocation checks, in which case users can lose connectivity if they happen to not have connectivity to the CA (as in the captive portal case, or with broken proxy/cache servers), or you allow the user to connect anyways, in which case attackers can simply override the revocation check.

It also involves you telling a CA which sites you're visiting.

<comment><USER21> Why are we not using DNS for this?

<comment><USER2> Using DNS for what? CAs? Are you asking "why don't we take the crappy PKI we have right now and just _give_ it to the world's governments"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Please use original title.

Also see previous discussion about this decision: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7557149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7557149)

</comment><comment><USER23> Pretty funny. Chrome has always claimed to be more secure because it makes it a pain in the ass to browse sites with expired certs - something almost always just site error. But not they've messed up in a very visible revocation case and are least secure. :)

Too bad it didn't break CloudFlare. I really hate that service. Several web sites I use, if they give me an error from a form or such, CloudFlare will just give me a cached page and I have no clue what was wrong because I can't read the actual HTTP response sent to me. ;/

<comment><USER2> They haven't messed up. They've thought more about the revocation issue than almost anyone else on the Internet, and come to the conclusion that the costs aren't worth the benefits. They appear to be right; SSL revocation is a debacle, and, for most browser configurations, is mere theater.

Here's a starting point for understanding how under-designed online revocation is for SSL/TLS:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643907](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643907)</comment></comment>


Why engineers make great CEOs - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-opportunities/why-engineers-make-great-ceos/article5984318.ece <comment><USER2> I've found that many organizations tend to have a 'dominant function', and CEOs tend to come from that function. So if engineering calls the shots in your company, or is the main driver of success, the CEO tends to come from engineering. If the company is driven by sales, the CEO tends to come from sales.

That's why you see so many oil company CEOs who are geologists or engineers, tech company CEOs who are developers, and CPG CEOs who are marketers.

<comment><USER3> There are national trends too - the UK will draw from finance more than many countries, Germany from Engineering. If I had to guess I'd imagine that the US was more likely than many countries to have CEOs with a marketing or product background.

<comment><USER4> US seems to draw heavily from the "Law" function, with equal parts MBA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps this is not indicative of a rise of engineers who become interested in management, but individuals already interested in management (or are of that mindset) choosing to get a degree in engineering instead of Business. Given the tremendous value of an engineering degree, especially as a guaranteed high level of income, it makes sense practically minded managers would prefer such a safety net.

<comment><USER6> > Given the tremendous value of an engineering degree, especially as a > guaranteed high level of income, it makes sense practically minded managers > would prefer such a safety net.

Practical experience (of a practicing engineer) shows that the value of an engineering degree outweighs that of one's work only in the first couple of months, or even weeks, on a job. The skills of incompetent engineers are in significantly less demand than that of incompetent managers (sadly). Unlike an MBA, the engineering diploma isn't worth the paper it's written on the moment people realize you're clueless. It's not a very good safety net :-).

<comment><USER7> That level of basic incompetence is not in scope for a discussion of CEO candidates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Engineers think the world would be a better place if only Engineers were in charge. Marketing types think a good customer sense is critical to the top job.

Its like government - military men think a military leader is needed; business wants a businessman etc.

I think the best leader would be - a leader. Someone who gets competent advisors, makes decisions and inspires the crew to do their best.

</comment><comment><USER9> "They're detail-oriented, analytical and trained in systematic problem- solving. Engineers' basic qualities make them good candidates for the top."

There's a significant element missing in this line of thought and it involves emotions/people. By this reasoning, a robot might also make a damn good CEO.

<comment><USER10> I'd argue that being too detail-oriented may be a bad quality for the average CEO. The CEO's job is first and foremost to see the big picture, develop the grand vision and general roadmap and then hire the right people to delegate implementing the details to. There are people who can do both and those are the truly great CEOs. But unless your name is Jobs or Bezos, you probably shouldn't try to do it.

<comment><USER11> I was with you until the last sentence. Great CEOs may not be found on every street corner, but there are a lot more of them in the world than two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "the life of an engineer, it seems, is not as rosy as originally anticipated".

Ok this affects me at the moment. Why? Because I have two incompetent bosses. Basically I have junior / intermediate level programmers telling me what to do (and getting paid more than me for it). They took the promotion for the money. I do the "smart" work and make the technical decisions (when they make technical decisions they are often poor choices, basically from lack of experience).

Its at the point that I am going to take the next management position that comes up.

<comment><USER13> > I do the "smart" work and make the technical decisions (when they make > technical decisions they are often poor choices, basically from lack of > experience).

I believe everyone thinks they're the only one smart, special snowflake.

<comment><USER12> My team leaders suggest options and they are usually either very poor design decisions (like I would have made in my first couple of years of coding). Or they just don't know.

Maybe I sound arrogant, but when you have to override 75% of their decisions for something better, then I think I am more experienced than them.

Then there was having to dig onto code written and commented by them.

       # open file
       file.open(filename)

It honestly looked like one of the blog articles about how not to write comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Engineer-turned-CEO here.

Engineering teaches you a lot of the analytical / architecture skills you need to build and run organizations, but you won't be ready to lead until you learn a decent amount of the other business functions that make up just about every company.

You need to learn how marketing works, but not just the basics - learn what type of people are good at each role, what are the types of roles you need for different types of marketing strategies, some of the tactics for each strategy, etc...

Rinse and repeat for sales, operations, finance, product (different from, but aligned with engineering), and general strategic stuff like legal, recruiting, release strategy, fund raising, investor management, and so on.

Here's the good news: you don't need to be an expert in all of these areas when you get started. You just need to know enough to know which questions to ask and then surround yourself with advisors who can help answer them.

If you've ever built a new product (doesn't literally need to be a commercial product) from scratch and actually gotten people to use it, then you're probably already capable of thinking strategically - that's the first core ingredient for dealing with the market / product / economic challenges tasked to CEOs.

The second ingredient is the empathy and people-management part... This means being able to internalize concepts like e every employee is different, values different things, and therefore might need / expect different things from you - some employees might deeply care about working on interesting projects; others might care about being able to work in a specific time / location so they can maximize the time they spend with their family; some might care about money; but in my experience overwhelmingly most employees just care about feeling like their work is meaningful and appreciated.

Learning how to build an organization out of people who all have different personal priorities, levels of experience, backgrounds, and personalities is not trivial. You basically need to develop a high degree of self-awareness about your own needs and values as an employee first. And once you're able to do that, it gets a lot easier to recognize and understand what others need.

TL;DR; - there's a big menagerie of different things you have to learn to be a CEO, and engineering can help you structure the process of learning them but it's not enough unto itself. Develop a strong sense of self-awareness, a good advisory board, and the humility to ask for help when you need it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Except when they're not.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roth_(businessman)](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roth_\(businessman\))

Roth was an engineer who oversaw stock schemes and false accounting such that he was able to completely wipe out the company. (Nortel was one of Canada's largest companies and now its gone)

</comment><comment><USER16> From all the great Engineers who've ever lived, the author couldn't think of anyone else but Thomas Edison, Henry Ford...

With all due respect, when I read "engineering's long and glorious history", I have other names in mind.

</comment><comment><USER17> A high-profile counterpoint is RIM engineer and (former) CEO Mike Lazaridis. Even after seeing the Steve Jobs iPhone demo in 2007, his engineering and logical mindset was convinced that businesses would not adopt a device without a physical keyboard and that push email was more important than an apps ecosystem. He didn't see that the consumer engagement with iPhone was so compelling that the user would do an end run around the corporate IT departments (by buying the device on their own) and kick off the BYOD movement.

But setting aside some business missteps, it seems like engineers/CEOs are better for companies (especially tech growth companies) than MBAs. It was after all, Lazaridis' background that helped RIM achieve so much success that they could afford to pay $600 million to NTP in 2006 and also be in the competition with iPhone.

<comment><USER12> I personally would prefer the physical keyboard option, but we seem to have touch screens forced upon us. (I know there are a few models out there, but none were offered on the contract I asked for).

I am unable to answer the phone around 40% of the time (before the caller hangs up), due to the stupid swipe gesture I need to do. A physical green button was orders of magnitude more usable and reliable.

<comment><USER18> I can't upvote you enough. The only smartphones I've gotten have been in the Motorola Droid family because of their fullsize slideout keyboards, and like you I still miss the physical buttons for basic phone functions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A lot of engineers would make terrible CEOs because they don't understand the basic tenants of business. Most software engineers don't like charging appropriately or spending appropriately on things that make the company money. There is a huge aversion to sales, marketing, and advertising.

If the CEO doesn't make sure the company makes money, the company will fail. I see this a lot in smaller companies. Larger companies probably don't let engineers get to the higher ranks unless they can make the company serious amounts of money.

Ultimately a business is about making money, and the CEO has to make sure that happens. Otherwise, you aren't much of a CEO.

<comment><USER20> The flip side, of course, is the non-technical CEO walking down to engineering and shouting, "We need more money! Double the number of lines of code you are producing!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> china comes to mind: aren't many chinese leaders former engineers ?

<comment><USER22> IMHO, it was because the engineering departments of the universities were less ruined (than humanity/history/law departments, roughly, though they were not categorized like they are today), during the Great Cultural Revolution between 196x-1976, which were not fully restored until early 1980s.

Although the engineers are broadly parts of the intelligentsia community, they are kinda 'useful', and it was theorized that the worker-peasant-soldier students[1] were politically trustworthy, many of those students were sent to universities to fill in the blanks, and many of them became engineers(, and career as a worker in an industrial factory, together with residential records, or Hukou in a city was quite desirable then).

Now that China has been led by people who were born in 1950s or earlier for years, they were quite likely to be in universities during or after the Cultural Revolution years. It wouldn't at all be surprised that some of them were trained as engineer(, but diverted to administrative paths during career).

[1] [http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=J5QbQpQTegwC&pg=PA124&lp...](http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=J5QbQpQTegwC&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=worker- peasant- soldier+student&source=bl&ots=qoGPl4_zud&sig=fai9CYcr9MZFzUOWsAG2DQSOtjo&hl=zh- CN&sa=X&ei=tgxqU8KSMIG1lQXgnoHIDg&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=worker-peasant- soldier%20student&f=false)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Marc Andreessen at SS '11: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9phm2ae0Ss&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9phm2ae0Ss&feature=youtu.be&t=22m25s)

"The engineer who can become an entrepreneur, who can then become a CEO... there's something magic about that formula"

</comment><comment><USER24> Personally, I feel people make "great" CEO not specifically one group .

</comment><comment><USER25> Friendly reminder that Herbert Hoover was an engineer.

<comment><USER26> I can't tell...is this supposed to trigger some sort of a contradictory-to- the-article emotional response? Look, I don't doubt that there are many terrible engineer-CEOs, but I wouldn't use Hoover as an example.

First of all, CEO != POTUS.

Secondly, in the words of Harry Truman, "don't you ever cast any aspersions on Mr. Hoover because he's done some very important things for this country and the world."

e.g.:

Early in 1946, when large parts of both Europe and Asia were threatened with famine, Truman made Hoover honorary chairman of a Famine Emergency Committee, and in that capacity Hoover traveled 35,000 miles to twenty-two countries threatened with famine. As a result of his recommendations, the United States in five months shipped more than 6,000,000 tons of bread grains to the people of hungry nations.

\- _Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman_

Not to mention a lot of successful food relief efforts he drove during and after the First World War. How do you think the guy got elected President in the first place?

Hoover did have leadership skills, it seems in particular the problem-solving kinds that a successful engineer-CEO might bring to the table. His political policies and the times he lived in just didn't intersect well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This bodes well for NewMicrosoft and Nadella.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm of mixed minds about this. On one hand, if your CEO isn't smart enough to appreciate engineering, R&D, and the cultural needs of high talent, you'll never get anywhere. The long-term result of having a business-driven technical organization isn't having a lower talent level. It's losing all the talent.

On the other hand, it's really simplistic to assume that engineers are "the good guys" and that having an engineer-turned-CEO will guarantee an engineer- driven organization. There are plenty of self-hating, Benedict Arnold engineers who'll gladly sell technology out to management. For some reason, a substantial portion of the engineers who become executives are that kind, and I don't know why, but it gives the good engineers who move into leadership a bad name.</comment>


USC Degree in Disruption with Dr. Dre - <AUTHOR> http://iovine-young.usc.edu/

<comment><AUTHOR> "No other program like this exists anywhere in the world — yet."</comment>


Show HN: Historical stock price viewer formed as a question - <AUTHOR> http://newinvestordaily.com/what-would-it-be-worth/ <comment><AUTHOR> An interesting way to look at historical stock prices. Not really useful but interesting none the less.

A result of many weekends of development. NodeJS API, standard frontend with jQuery. Nginx reverse proxy.</comment>