Small towns in much of the country are dependent on punitive fines and fees - <AUTHOR> https://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-addicted-to-fines.html <comment><USER2> Punitive fines and fees are bad. Abuse of civil forfeiture is worse. But worse still are a minority of towns that not only are dependent on punitive fines, but that levy them in a racially biased way.

See [https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson- court-f...](https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-fines- and-fees-fuel-anger) for an explanation of how this helped ignite the racial tension that Ferguson had a few years ago.

<comment><USER3> > and then arresting people when they don't pay [the fine].

So what should the government do if someone doesn't pay their fine?

<comment><USER4> > _So what should the government do if someone doesn 't pay their fine?_

Just go through the process of taking the money instead, no different then a civil party who was owed a legitimate debt? There is no reason a fine should be any different. Just go through the standard process, get a court order for lien, and then just seize the money from any bank accounts, liquid assets, salary, or property of any value the person in question has (or ever will have in the future up to the statute of limitations). In fact the only real difference is that I don't think a fine is dischargeable in bankruptcy.

But why do you think there is any need to use force against the person in question, or pay to imprison them? It's not some moral issue, it's just a matter of them legitimately owing money. So just take the money (possibly allowing the working out of a payment plan). For the vast majority of cases that's all that's needed, and the few who truly live as hermits can be written off and suffer their own effective punishment anyway.

<comment><USER3> ya, I guess that makes sense. Thanks for being the first person to explain it to me like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In Georgia you can see the path I-75 and I-16 take through the southern half of the state.

16 is notorious for speed traps and other shadier stuff. Including road blocks on exit ramps with drug dogs waiting to sniff cars. They bait people into getting off at the exits by leaving fake signs about upcoming road blocks. When College kids were moving or getting out of school they'd be out in full force.

Sadly my Dad grew up in one of these towns. The fines were the only way to keep parts of the town alive.

<comment><USER6> If you've driven between LA and SF you'll most likely be very aware of Kings County. A notorious speed trap that requires you to be on site to contest their questionable infractions.

<comment><USER7> If you're in the "Jefferson" counties of northern California it's not unusual to have cops waiting at the bottom of an off ramp for those drivers who practice "California rolls" at their stop signs. Locals seem to know better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hell, I'd say that any town that leverages against the economically poor to benefit the economically elite is bad, and just going by the way fines are handed out, that happens everywhere. Only a handful of countries fine you by according to how much you make. While doing this can add an extra incentive for the rich to be dishonest (which happens anyway), by not doing it you are essentially telling the rich that they are above the law - which is something that large swaths of ultrarich both already believe and know to be true.

<comment><USER9> I'm from a country with so-called day fines: a fine is a multiplier of your daily earnings. It boggles my mind that a similar system isn't in use everywhere. It's easy to understand and fair to everyone; a deterrent against infractions independent of your income.

<comment><USER10> If it was independent to your income, then your income should not matter. The fine should be proportional to the infraction/crime/damage.

<comment><USER11> If I were moderately wealthy, there would be no incentive not to just think of the fine as a fee to break any ordinance wherever and whenever I wanted. Fines aren't costs, they are a deterrent.

<comment><USER10> Part deterrent, part punishment. Consider if I punched you in the face, you laughed it off and I get charged with assault; versus: I punch you, you're now disabled for life, and I get charged with assault. Should it be based on my income?

<comment><USER9> That would not be based on day fines; fines and compensation are two different topics. "Disabled for life" sounds like prison time plus monetary compensation for the victim.

<comment><USER10> Right, which is my point. I think it should be proportional to the infraction/crime/damages. (Anyway, I am just having a conversation, will have to understand it better.)

<comment><USER9> It is still proportional to the crime, right? Just like with prison sentence: withholding of freedom is the deterrent part, and it hurts both rich and poor the same pretty much everywhere in the world (ignoring corruption). Day fines follow the same deterrent principle for smaller infractions: proportional to the crime _and_ treats citizens in a roughly equal manner.

Compensating someone for damages, be it for the victim's health or possessions, is then supposed to follow the real inflicted costs and does not include a deterring component, thus monetarily equal regardless of the perpetrator's income. I'd suppose this is the same almost everywhere?

Edit: so to clarify, compensation paid to the victim isn't based on your income, only the fines part that is paid to the state as a deterrent is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If they are going to use minor violations of the law as a pretext for revenue collection, they should call it what it is: kleptocracy.

If those places are dying out, it's probably best to let them turn into ghost towns because they have succumbed to corruption as a way of life.

<comment><USER13> I think Kleptocracy would only apply if the folks in charge are funneling funds to themselves.

If it is just what funds the government, that isn't a kleptocracy. Bad policy maybe, but not kleptocracy.

<comment><USER14> The folks in charge get paid by the government and the amount the government is able to pay is highly dependent on the amount of funding it gets.

<comment><USER15> Small town government is student council with armed sheriffs.

In the majority of these jurisdictions, the local government is not actually doing useful work towards a flourishing community, or perhaps to be fair, they aren't doing any useful work that couldn't be done more fairly and effectively at the state level.

<comment><USER16> >they aren't doing any useful work that couldn't be done more fairly and effectively at the state level.

Or equally fairly and effectively without having it officially orchestrated by the government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are a few small towns in Minnesota where you will see an officer posted up right where the highway turns from 65mph to 45mph through town. They will be there almost all day, without fail.

I don't think it's a coincidence that their cruisers are all brand new. It's obviously a source of income more than anything.

<comment><USER18> There aren't any Minnesota towns on the map in the article so it must not be more than 10%, presumably.

It is interesting to see some towns that are famous in my local area for it:

Morrison, CO (45.3%). 150,000 drivers pass through it daily, with a population of 431. It's hard to argue with as they stop people if they're going 15 MPH over the limit. [1] I think people here just get used to the lack of enforcement of the other cities.

Mountain View, CO is only 0.09 sq mi (0.24 km2), population ~528. Sandwiched between Denver and the next suburb over, writes more tickets combined than Denver, Boulder, and Aurora. A lot of the tickets are for things like seatbelts and cracked windshields [2].

[1] [https://www.speedtrap.org/colorado/morrison/](https://www.speedtrap.org/colorado/morrison/) Quote: "They got me going 41 in a 25. $135 ticket. They are making a killing by gouging people for no reason so beware!" LOL

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_View,_Colorado#Police...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_View,_Colorado#Police_department_controversies)

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure if 285 technically runs through Morrison, but there are lots of tickets issued right there because it is essentially a highway but has a low speed limit. They could raise the speed limit by 10-20mph and it would probably still be safe. There are also several elevation changes that make it easier for a traffic officer to hide.

Weird that Mountain View is in the mix. Maybe it's just a statistical anomaly because the "town" is tiny and is actually in a metro area and may include a portion I-70.

<comment><USER18> If you search for either town in Google Maps, it draws their boundaries, which will be useful for this thread.

Morrison looks like a gerrymander: it runs along roads, and has some other parts that are unused pieces of land, and doesn't include private property that is being used even though it is next to it. It really does look like it was designed to cover roads that have nothing to do with the actual downtown part of Morrison.

Mountain View is between W 41st Ave and W 44th Ave (which looks like a fairly busy road). I just noticed they are only at 5.3% in the report though. [1] That's not even 10% (and a lot more than Morrison's 45%.)

Since you mentioned I-70, on the other hand there is Lakeside: Mountain View actually borders another tiny "town" (population 8), Lakeside, which consists of a lake, shopping center, and amusement park, and I-70 and related on/off- ramps. According to the map in the report [1], Lakeside is on the map but at 13.5% revenue from tickets.

[1] [https://www.governing.com/topics/finance/fine-fee- revenues-s...](https://www.governing.com/topics/finance/fine-fee-revenues- special-report.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Read [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio) if you'd like to see how extreme this kind of corruption can get. It could be described as a military occupation of part of the United States by a rogue nation.

<comment><USER21> Along those lines:

Lyons CO, a town along the highway from Denver to Rocky Mountain National Park has a section where the speed limit drops from 55 to 25 within about 1/4th mile. Cops sit there all day long just fining tourists.

Kingman AZ is essentially a speed trap with more steps.

Just about any village on I-50 in Nevada does the speed step down too, typically from 75 to 35, as the highway goes through the village. The cops are typically not very well hidden either. As is similar to the Rome OH situation, if you are within sight, you are getting a fine. _Top Gear_ ran into this issue in Season 12, episode 2 [0] and Clarkson was quite irrate on screen. Fortunately, I-80 is a much better and faster way across Nevada.

[0] [https://www.topgear.com/show/series-12/episode-2](https://www.topgear.com/show/series-12/episode-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's lots of towns very well-known for being speed traps in my part of the Midwest. My hometown in particular has a police force of approximately 8 full- time officers for a population of 5,000. There's absolutely no good reason to have so many cops for a population of that size, especially when the crime statistics are very low for non-traffic infractions. The only traffic ticket I've gotten in 30+ years was at 12:30 AM coming home from a concert in a larger city, going 5 MPH over the speed limit there. I'm sure he was pissed off that he couldn't also write me up for a DUI.

<comment><USER23> The U.S. has 284 police officers per 100,000 people.([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers)) That would translate to ~14 police officers for a town of your size.

<comment><USER22> Ok, sure, but that's not really a useful metric for a low population density area. Crime in my area is very low, violent crime especially, there's simply no need for that many police - they'd be doing nothing most of the time, if not for running speed traps and harassing bored teenagers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Actions taken by the legislature in Louisiana and in other states have likely compounded the issue. According to Census survey data, in states with the most fine-reliant jurisdictions, localities incurred notably steeper state funding cuts than elsewhere nationally over the decade. Many of those same states have also enacted numerous revenue restrictions for cities over the years. In fact, according to research from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in states that implemented caps or limits on local property taxes starting in the late 1970s, fees and charges substantially increased as a share of all revenues that local governments raised."

I think this speaks to the larger issue, a structural problem about how revenues are gathered.

State legislators restrict or eliminate funding and cut off any other sources of funding, so they gather funds the only way they can providing a perverse incentive.

There's way too much focus on "cut taxes wherever" without much thought as to good governance and the results of such cuts.

<comment><USER16> It's not as though cities and towns are using fine dollars to educate children and feed the homeless. They're not. They're using it to pay more police salaries so they can write more tickets. They're simply using the money to further their own existence. God forbid the towns be forced to find an alternate way to pay for, reduce or cut a service in the face of shrinking revenues.

<comment><USER13> I think the article adequately describes how difficult it is to "find an alternative" particularly when the state legislature is cutting off those paths.

<comment><USER16> Alternative for what purpose? These towns and counties already have basically nil for services.

<comment><USER13> Presumably for whatever services the town might want to offer. Police, fire, water, sewer, etc. I think we can all imagine what those things might be from city to city.

Believe it or not small towns do offer some services, it might not be much compared to others, but little is still something that needs to be funded.

I can understand a bit of the rural vs urban issues in the US when I see a lot of arguments here that because they offer very little (perhaps just compared to an outsider's point of view) ... that means they shouldn't have any?

Meanwhile as the article notes state legislatures cut off funding from the state / limit their ability to gather funds by other means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _Missouri lawmakers responded by lowering, to 20 percent, a cap on the proportion of general operating revenues that could come from minor traffic violations._

Previously the limit was 30% and before that it was 35%. That higher limit was imposed to deal with Macks Creek, MO, a village on a US highway in a valley between two steep hills. That village was coated in brake dust, until the legislature decided it doesn't really need police. I'm pleased at the progress we're making in this state.

<comment><USER25> That was the town with one cop per 50 residents, wasn't it?

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure if they ever had four cops? They did have two patrol cars, though, so it could have made sense. They didn't want anyone to sneak through at 46 MPH.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've always thought society would be better off if fines and money confiscated by police was redistributed as tax relief rather than going to the government or police department doing the confiscation.

As it stands it only encourages abuse.

<comment><USER27> No one involved in levying the fine (or deciding what is fined or how large a fine is) can benefit if you want to remove the conflict of interest. Perhaps the best thing to do is stick it all in a fund for helping victims of crimes when the criminal doesn't have enough funds to cover damages to the person (but even that isn't great).

<comment><USER28> Shred the money that gets collected. This helps everyone by increasing the value of the dollar by an extremely tiny amount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> non-entity I grew up on the outer edge of the metro Atlanta area, and I remember a lot of people joking about this small mill town and how they made all their money off traffic tickets. Eventually, I'd here a ton of notes about these type of towns everywhere I lived.

</comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 The financialization of modern life puts extra pressure on areas without much economic activity. Self-government enables local needs to be discussed and addressed while serving as a job program for more than just the few elected positions; it raises its own revenues but also generates new costs. Locally- generated revenue has to supplement scant subsidies from the state.

Within this template, a fortunate jurisdiction can collect fines and fees from out-of-towners without significantly making locals' lives miserable. An unfortunate jurisdiction harasses locals too. This is not unlike how corporations take advantage of laws, but with the added abuse potential of being able to make up laws too.

The state stepping in and forcing a disincorporation of the local jurisdiction isn't necessarily a good answer. It stops the immediate symptom of near-abuse or actual abuse of power but doesn't provide a framework to substitute economic activity. Far better is limiting the level to which local governments have control over decisions of policing, but such measures are unpopular. The status quo largely continues, with investigations opened into a few high- profile cases of abuse of power, and the rest can keep doing what they do for now.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is especially annoying because for every dollar they collect, you can end up paying your insurance company 4+ times as much because they now think you're a terrible driver for getting these minor BS citations.

<comment><USER30> If you get caught for speeding in Michigan, the Golden rule is to always appeal the ticket. Unless you've been excessively reckless they'll typically knock it down to "impeding traffic" which carries a slightly higher fine (depending on your speed) but is not a moving violation and doesn't get reported to insurance. [1]

> Impeding traffic is a civil infraction punishable by a fine. It is also > considered a non-moving violation that does not add any points to the > offender's Michigan driving record. Non-moving violations are not reported > to the Michigan Secretary of State and are less likely to be detected by > automobile insurance companies as a basis to raise rates. Municipal > attorneys will frequently offer to reduce speeding tickets to an impeding > traffic charge which avoids points on the driver's record but usually > results in a bigger fine.

It's a pure money making scheme.

[1] [https://www.monroecountylawyers.com/blog/2018/12/what-is- imp...](https://www.monroecountylawyers.com/blog/2018/12/what-is-impeding- traffic-in-michigan.shtml)

<comment><USER14> "Money making scheme" is putting it mildly. If they're offering to not tell your insurance company in exchange for paying a larger fine, I would describe that as "extortion."

<comment><USER31> And especially favors the rich as they have the time and money to pay the government upfront, while the poor get to deal with higher insurance premiums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >Others prop up their budgets using traffic cameras, parking citations or code enforcement violations.

I saw my town make over $1,200 within a split second the other night.

I was stopped waiting at a red light, as cars were passing in front of me.

The light turned yellow, then red, then not even what seemed like a nanosecond after it might have turned red... 3 cars entered the intersection and the light flashed 3 times.

$400, $800, $1,200... all within less than a second, for an infraction so minor that even a police cruiser sitting in my exact same position would have probably sloughed off as being "close enough".

Not to mention, these cameras probably cost orders of magnitude less than a human police officer and a dedicated cruiser.

All I am getting at is, from a business standpoint, it's obvious why these are so popular with poor municipalities.

Once again, the rich get richer, and the poor get kicked on their way home from their 3rd job with a $400 fine for being a nanosecond later than an ambiguously timed light decided they should have been.

This is not going to change unless federal legislation forces it to.

</comment><comment><USER33> Government is "sticky". War taxes stick around long after the end of the war, and city bureaucracies stick around long after a city declines.

Nobody wants to accept that maybe a town of 5-20k people don't need 20-100 man police forces, and a far lower level of public services in general.

Nobody wants to admit they have to lower their standards of living in the face of adversity; instead we double-down on reproducing (or improving on) the standard of living of our forebears and thereby immiserate ourselves with the debts (or oppression in this case) needed to square that circle.

Even the most economically irrelevant areas of rural america have paved roads these days when they could simply have stuck with gravel, etc. In many ways we are trying to exceed the prior standard of living (progress!) all the while forgetting that the economic base of most of these places has either not improved or significantly worsened.

We all increase our standards of living at our own peril; one must save and capitalize first (which is actively punished by low interest rate policy). Taking this as a given, should we have expected any other outcome?

</comment><comment><USER34> I always felt like punitive fines and fees, tickets, etc, should be de facto given out to a third party, unaffiliated charity. Got a ticket for not picking up after your dog? Money goes to an animal protection group.

Of course, even WITH the economic incentive a lot of these things get little to no attention/enforcement, so without it will be even less. Sigh. At least ridiculously random road rules would go away?

<comment><USER35> 3rd party contributions may then incentivize the formation of special interest charity lobbies pushing for more fines unfortunately.

<comment><USER34> Heh, dealing with the intersection of money and people is hard.

Lets just use the death penalty for everything. Less money involved then.

Oh damn, the people making injection drugs will lobby too... I just can't win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Fines should not exist. Anything that gets punished by a fine is basically codeword for 'you can break that law if you're rich'. The most spectacular example being Facebook's stock _rising_ after being fined for a few billions because it was pocket money for them.

Alternatively, if you _really_ want to punish minor things, fines could be dependent on your income.

</comment><comment><USER37> If and when autonomous cars become a reality, I wonder what will small towns do to find new punitive fines and fees...

</comment><comment><USER38> This is unfortunately and notoriously true. It is how relatively impoverished towns without a real tax base generate enough revenue to provide basic services. These fines are usually selectively applied to people from outside the area, so there is little adverse consequence for the townspeople. It works this way throughout the rural US, though easily avoided if you diligently pay attention to and comply with the signage when in those kinds of areas.

Insufficient local tax base for small towns is a problem throughout the world, with many diverse solutions. This is the evolved and ad hoc US flavored version in the absence of a top-down official solution.

</comment><comment><USER39> Perhaps changing location in title from "the country" to "the U.S." would help international readers; some of whom have told me they feel annoyed because they need some acknowledgement that other countries exist.

</comment><comment><USER40> Same here South Africa, it has been said that for many small towns their main income is from speeding fines. Quite irritating if you go on a road trip and come back to a couple of speeding fines in the post

</comment><comment><USER41> A degree of this could be solved just by saying proceeds from fines, fees, and forfeiture go to the state or federal government.

Obviously that might encourage those governments too do such fines, but a. they already do that, and b. people have historically been better at limiting large scale abuse like this that is possible in each separate small town scattered around the state/country.

Also it might provide a more cost effective way to sue in response to disparate enforcement (one suit vs many).

</comment><comment><USER42> The town in East Tennessee is Bluff City and it's notorious for its speed traps, cameras, and lazy law enforcement. It was so bad someone who got a ticket bought their domain when it expired [https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/man-buys-police-dept- websi...](https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/man-buys-police-dept-website- speeding-ticket/story?id=10858731)

</comment><comment><USER43> Hah. The last traffic fine I paid was for a highway speed-limit sign (65 to 30mph) more than a mile from, and around a curve from, a Midwest whistle-stop that a few hundred called home. A lot of these flat-plain potholes probably survived only because their leaders had the connections to get the highway routed through them.

( Akroid's 1991 film 'Nothing But Trouble' sums up my feelings.)

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm genuinely surprised not to see any Rhode Island cities/towns on this. Speed cameras have shown up like a plague in Providence in the past year and are expected to spread throughout the state.

[https://www.wpri.com/news/providence-speed-cameras-were-a- mo...](https://www.wpri.com/news/providence-speed-cameras-were-a-money-maker- in-2018/)

<comment><USER16> This article is talking about fines as a proportion of overall revenue. In the Northeast they can fine the crap out of anything that moves and taxes revenues are still high enough (because there's so much expensive property, high incomes and other taxable stuff combined with decently high tax rates) that the fines are still not a significant percent of revenue.

<comment><USER44> Valid, and I don't know what the total fines are, but if the speed cameras alone netted 3.2 million last year it seems quite plausible that fines are accounting for 10% or more if I'm reading this report correctly [http://www.providenceri.gov/wp- content/uploads/2019/01/Accou...](http://www.providenceri.gov/wp- content/uploads/2019/01/Accountants-Report-and-Financial-Statements-City-of- Providence-FINAL.pdf)

But you know, I'm not an accountant

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Two places to _always_ drive the speedlimit:

* On US Military Bases

* Near small towns

</comment><comment><USER46> was a good article in NYT Magazine about this, almost the same kind of piece "How Cities Make Money by Fining the Poor" [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/magazine/cities-fine- poor...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/magazine/cities-fine-poor- jail.html)

</comment><comment><USER47> _immediately looks for Linndale, OH as a former Cleveland resident_

Yup, there it is. 96.2% of general funds from fines. $24,126 _per adult resident_. That's what happens when you have a tiny town with a small segment of an Interstate.

</comment><comment><USER48> When towns can't raise taxes to cover basic services or the revenue they do have dries up as the population shrink, there aren't a lot of options left. Transient taxes on hotel rooms or traffic fines are pretty much it.

</comment><comment><USER49> Another worrying aspect is that many small towns contract with third-party companies to handle ticket processing, often tacking on extra surcharges (above and beyond a cc processing fee) to pay via credit card online.

</comment><comment><USER50> All government relies on your money in some form or other.

Traffic fines just de-select those who don't travel by motor vehicle. And, to some degree, the fees are self-selected. (You choose to speed or not.)

</comment><comment><USER51> NY shouldn't be overlooked here. Driving from CT to Ohio, I'll see 5x as many cops in the short part of the trip in NY than I will on the entire rest of the trip.

</comment><comment><USER52> This was a major plot point in Disney's Cars.

</comment><comment><USER53> Every time on the 395 between Bishop and Mammoth.

<comment><USER48> That's CHP, not town cops or country sheriff except when driving through Bishop or getting off 395 to drive into Mammoth.

</comment></comment><comment> denton-scratch Aren't all fines 'punitive'? Isn't that the point?

</comment><comment><USER54> Waldo, Fl until the "Waldo Bill".

</comment><comment><USER55> It deters Investors

</comment><comment><USER56> And this funding is disproportionately paid for by the poor:

[https://gawker.com/ferguson-and-the-criminalization-of- ameri...](https://gawker.com/ferguson-and-the-criminalization-of-american- life-1692392051)

The use of bureaucracy to funnel wealth from poor to rich also operates in the same way for private institutions such as banks. Graeber goes into this modern tendency towards bureaucratic rule in detail in his book "Utopia of Rules"

<comment><USER56> I really don't understand what was so unpalatable to other users about this comment... The link I shared goes into the same details about Ferguson as the top comment and the notion that it is poorer people that bear the largest burden is also stated in the featured article. Is it the idea that these same issues also arise in the private sector that rubs people the wrong way?</comment></comment>


Amazon Prime Moves Towards One-Day Delivery - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-25/amazon-will-spend-800-million-to-move-to-one-day-delivery <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool, but it always kind of irked me that they could still claim it's '2-day shipping' even if they don't actually ship the package out for multiple days after you order it.</comment>


Ask HN: What features would make up the ultimate person finance tool for you? - <AUTHOR> - <comment><AUTHOR> We've been building Everwealth ([https://www.everwealth.io/](https://www.everwealth.io/)) and, since a lot of developers seem to be using our product, we want to learn what features dev's a technical audience want most. We'd love your ideas.

<comment><USER2> Txt msg query tool</comment></comment>


Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.themarysue.com/aardman-shares-employees/ <comment><USER2> I've already loved these guys, now my admiration just increased. Reading HN we start to think that life is to get bigger and richer. These guys spend their time spreading intelligence, art, and fun.

<comment><USER3> That is the point of a worker coop just that the rewards are distributed equitably :-) an d yes that does mean the cleaner / office admin get as much as the CTO

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate on "gets as much as". Do you mean they get as many shares? Earn the same salary? I'm a bit unclear on that.

<comment><USER5> I don't believe salary will be equal-- the company will still pay out salaries; owning equity and receiving dividends from that equity is a different matter. Here's a source with much more info on the structuring: [https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/10/wallace- gromit-...](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/10/wallace-gromit- producers-hand-stake-in-business-to-staff)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry for the naive question, but how does this work? So let's say the employees now are part of this trust which owns 75% of the shares. What is the benefit? The trust owns the shares legally correct? Is it some sort of profit sharing scheme? I assume you don't hold on to the shares when you leave the company (as they are with the trust)? Does every new hire dilute the ownership?

How does this actually impact the day to day employee if at all? My wife is part of an "employee" owned company and all it really means is more responsibility without any real benefit other than a paltry profit sharing payout of a few hundred bucks each year. So I am a little skeptical.

<comment><USER7> In this case I think the primary reason is to protect the company.

Aardman is probably a fairly hot company right now. Probably prime for a purchase by one of the big studios. But then it would most likely just get broken up and turned into a mill for churning out look-a-like content. Or possibly even just a logo stamped on contracted out content. I believe the founders have been fairly clear in the past about not being interested in selling.

While the founders still own it they can just turn down these offers and stay independent, but soon they are going to retire and will have to give up ownership to someone. And that someone might just decide to take the big payout and sell. So this is their way of ensuring that the company continues to run as it is for the good of the employees. It can now only be sold if the majority of employees vote to accept the sale, and if they do at least they'll also be the ones to get any associated payout not just some profit driven owner.

<comment><USER8> Either it's hard to create the content, or it is not.

If it's not hard, the studios don't need to buy Aardman. The IP they have is negligible, and no one watches a movie because it's made by Aardman (99% of the people would not know who they are anyway).

If it is hard, the studios would need to keep the employees who manage to do this hard thing, and it would be in the purchaser's best interest to manage it as if it were a butterfly.

<comment><USER9> > and no one watches a movie because it's made by Aardman

From a UK perspective I think you're pretty wrong here. Aardman cant be separated from the style they've built over the last 30 years, and it's incredibly popular. Even if someone didn't recognise the name, you could show most people a even a single frame from one film and they'd recognise what it was immediately.

<comment><USER10> I think you might be mis interpreting the parent. They are presenting 2 options (either its hard or not), without a preferred option.

But yes I think you're right Aardman are instantly recognisable and not easily copyable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope to see more of this in the future, although from a different angle. As more and more business owners are retiring, it is a great time to give their business to their employees -- especially in the form of a worker cooperative.

<comment><USER12> I hope Jack Dangermond considers doing something like this with Esri[0] at some point.

[0] [https://www.esri.com/](https://www.esri.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If only all companies did this, maybe we could influence our government the same way malicious special interests do right now. There would finally be representation.

</comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of Bob's Red Mill and their Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP):

[https://www.bobsredmill.com/bobs-way- meet#ESOP](https://www.bobsredmill.com/bobs-way-meet#ESOP)

<comment><USER15> I just recently learned about ESOPs: a few weeks ago I visited Graybar's [0] website, and learned that this large electric/etc distributor has been employee-owned since the 1920's.

Louis Kelso was "the inventor and pioneer of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP)" [1]. Kelso wrote *The Capitalist Manifesto" [2] about employee- ownership in 1958.

I think most businesses would run better if their employees were more invested in their success.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graybar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graybar)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_O._Kelso](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_O._Kelso)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capitalist_Manifesto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capitalist_Manifesto)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Employee- owned_compan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Employee- owned_companies_of_the_United_States)

(now I can close those tabs: HN comments are much better for me to keep track of things I've read than bookmarks.)

<comment><USER16> Since about 12% of world-wide population is part of a coop[1] there are a lot of statistics. Of interest around stability[2]:

\- The economic activity of the 30,000 cooperatives in the U.S. contributes an estimated $154 billion to the nation's total income. The co-ops have helped to create over 2.1 million jobs, with an impact on wages and salaries of almost $75 billion (Deller et al 2009).

\- Cooperative businesses have lower failure rates than traditional corporations/small businesses: after the first year (10% failure versus 60-80%) and after 5 years in business (90% still operating versus 3-5% of traditional businesses) (World Council of Credit Unions study in Williams 2007). Evidence also shows that cooperatives both successfully address the effects of crises and survive crises better (Borzaga and Calera 2012).

\- Since most cooperatives are owned and controlled by local residents, it is more likely to promote community growth than an investor-oriented firm. Since cooperative business objectives are needs oriented, cooperatives are more likely to stay in the community (Zeuli, Freshwater et al 2003).

\- Cooperative businesses stabilize communities because they are community- based business anchors; and distribute, recycle, and multiply local expertise and capital within a community. They enable their owners to generate income, and jobs; accumulate assets; provide affordable, quality goods and services; develop human & social capital (Gordon Nembhard 2002, 2004b, 2008a; Fairbairn et al 1991; Logue and Yates 2005).

\- Cooperative start-up costs can be low because: are eligible to apply for loans and grants from a number of federal and state agencies designed to support co-op development; are often provided relatively low cost loans from non-governmental financial institutions like cooperative banks because they are chartered or established to do so (Zeuli, Freshwater et al 2003).

\- WAGES in Oakland CA finds that after owning the house cleaning co-op the worker-owners' median income increased to over $40,000 (before the co-op the Latina owners had a median income of $24,000). Ownership in the co-op has put their income higher than the national average of $38,000 for Latinos/as ([http://www.wagescooperatives.org/economic- empowerment](http://www.wagescooperatives.org/economic-empowerment))

\- Food co-ops spend more revenues locally, buy more products locally, buy more organic produce, recycle more plastic, and create more jobs than conventional grocers. For every $1,000 spent at a food co-op, $1,606 goes to the local economy; for every $1 million in sales, 9.3 jobs are created (Yes! Magazine 2013).

[1]: [https://www.ica.coop/en/global-co-operative- statistics](https://www.ica.coop/en/global-co-operative-statistics)

[2]: [http://www.geo.coop/story/fact-sheet](http://www.geo.coop/story/fact- sheet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not to be a cynic, but the owner can get a lot of benefits (including tax benefits) from selling to their employees versus an outright acquisition by an outside party.

Basically, the owner sells their shares to a trust, which then pays the owner and the employees gain ownership over a period of time as the financing is paid back.

<comment><USER18> I rather suspect that someone like Pixar or Dreamworks would have offered more money than Nick Park is able to get from his employees.

<comment><USER19> You mean Disney & NBCUniversal. Both have been acquired and lost most of what made them famous (creativity) in the process. I think that's what Nick Park is trying to avoid. I'm assuming he'd get more satisfaction out of seeing Aardman thrive independently while he rides out his retirement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Previous discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18422105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18422105).

</comment><comment><USER21> Off topic, but the cookie consent popin wants me to allow a total of more than 2500 different cookies? Only a few are actually created, but come on, do they really partner with thousands of 3rd parties for my precious data?

</comment><comment><USER22> Ohhh... thats just lovely, isn't Gromet?

\---

I love this company. It was sad when they lost props in a fire.

</comment><comment><USER23> For a studio that often injects messages on capitalism and class struggle into their work none of this comes as much of a surprise.

</comment><comment><USER24> Share the means of production! We need less centralized planning in companies. And the only truly way to achieve that is to share the ownership. Partners not the Master-Slave trickery that we call Employment.

</comment><comment><USER25> Aardman Animation, the stop-motion studio behind the Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit shorts and Chicken Run, has brokered a new deal that puts ownership of the studio in the hands of its devoted team of employees. Founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who started the company in 1972, has ordered 75% of shares [1] placed into a trust, where they will be held for Aardman's workers.

Lord and Sproxton have no plans for retiring anytime soon, but they wanted to shift their priorities at the company. Lord said, "We've spent so much time building this company up and being so profoundly attached to it. It's not a business to us, it's everything, it's our statement to the world. Having done that for so many years, the last thing we wanted to do was to just flog it off to someone."

Sproxton added, "And we wanted to make sure they are all engaged in this employee ownership as well," assuring their team that they won't be in danger of a big studio buyout. Both men are committed to keeping Aardman's uniquely close-knit culture. "There's no real concern about the culture of the people, it's just an asset that can be sold on in years to come," he said of a corporate acquisition.

The studio is located in Bristol, U.K., where a team of 130 staffers run the beloved stop-motion animation company. During production, that number can swell to nearly three times that size for a feature-length film. Aardman is currently in production on <em>Farmageddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie, which will be followed by the long-awaited Chicken Run 2.

Sproxton and Lord will join director Nick Park on Aardman's new executive board of directors. Park, who has been with the company since its early days, directed the Oscar winning Wallace & Gromit shorts, which include The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and the film The Curse of The Were-Rabbit, which won Best Animated Feature in 2005. Park and Lord co-directed 2000's Chicken Run, which remains the highest-grossing stop motion animated film of all time.

Lord said of his and Sproxton's future with the company, "We're not quitting yet, we are doing this because we love the company and because we love it we think this will be the best things for it. This is not about David and I leaving. It is a continuity deal. We always believed that independence was our strong suit. We didn't have to dance to anybody else's tune and could make our own decisions."

This move towards continued independence and self reliance follows Aardman's carefully hand-made approach their projects. Their films are beloved for their handcrafted aesthetic and their commitment to British humor and culture. Their latest move to share ownership ensures that Aardman will remain as charming and unique as they always have been.

[1] href="[https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/10/wallace- gromit-...](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/10/wallace-gromit- producers-hand-stake-in-business-to-staff)

</comment><comment><USER26> I watched Wallace and Gromit like a 100 times

</comment><comment><USER27> Employee ownership is a very old concept. All studies have shown that they are risk averse and have poor growth. I'd love for this to work, but you can't fantasize your way to results.

<comment><USER28> Both of those things sound very good. Corporate growth for the sake of growth is what got us to an atmospheric carbon dioxide level of 400PPM.

If your idea of a company's success is how much profit it accrues, maybe it's time to question why it is you think that's a good thing.

<comment><USER29> Market failure got us to 400PPM. The externalities of carbon and methane pollution have not been properly priced in. That can be resolved with a market mechanism - a carbon tax.

The free market has also brought us widespread electric cars, solar panels, gas power plants. The very things with which we will combat climate change.

Socialism has brought us expanding populations globally, by offering free food to people who are not productive enough to buy it. The biggest threat to the planet now are the expanding populations of countries who still have their fertility rate above replacement rate.

<comment><USER28> If we're just going to attribute anything that happened during capitalism as a result of the "free market" then I get to say that communism invented satellites, discovered stem cells, and cured maternally transmitted HIV.

Electric cars and solar panels won't save us. You're not fooling anyone with that. Solar panels are not nearly efficient enough to replace anything major any time soon, and electric passenger cars will certainly help, but they are not hitting the pavement fast enough to have any kind of impact in the timelines we need to see to avoid apocalyptic catastrophe.

Also how will gas power plants help climate change? Unless this is a different use of the word 'gas' than i'm used to, I think you're referring to natural gas, aka: one of the largest contributor to carbon emissions.

And damn, I've heard a lot of dumb anti-socialist arguments before, but "people who are not able to provide labor to a market economy should starve to death" is a new one.

<comment><USER30> Do you have a source that natural gas is the largest carbon emissionss contributer? Genuinely curious, because over here in Germany gas companies (Gazprom.. ;)) market themselves as the opposite and the same argument is used for cars running on natural gas. I know that's just PR, but I thought it produces less emissions because it burns more efficiently than other fossil fuels.

<comment><USER31> CO2 emissions are essentially the same, but other pollutants are much lower. There are less contaminants in natural gas, so burning it in a cheap and inefficient engine like a bus in a city is better than using petrol.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shenandoah GC: What We Know in 2018 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBQtbkmURiQ <comment><USER2> Buried in a slide @ [https://youtu.be/qBQtbkmURiQ?t=766](https://youtu.be/qBQtbkmURiQ?t=766):

You can try an in-development version of the GC with the 'shipilev/openjdk- shenandoah' Docker image ([https://hub.docker.com/r/shipilev/openjdk- shenandoah/](https://hub.docker.com/r/shipilev/openjdk-shenandoah/)).

Run the contained Java executable with -XX:+UseShenandoahGC

</comment><comment><USER3> How does Shenandoah compare to ZGC? Aren't they in direct competition with one another?

<comment><USER4> From what I understand the goals are similar but the approaches are different.

\- Shenandoah uses Brooks-style forward pointers whereas ZGC uses colored pointers and off-heap forwarding tables. Meaning Shenandoah has a bigger impact on heap footprint but less offheap data meaning the heap size is closer to the RSS.

\- Shenandoah runs on Windows and macOS if you build from source, AFAIK this is a non-goal for ZGC.

\- Shenandoah tries to return unused heap to the OS wheres currently the recommendation for ZGC seems to be -Xms == -Xmx. In addition ZGC tripple maps the heap which can lead to interesting challenges in resource usage accounting.

\- None of them are generational although Shenandoah allows for custom policies and has short cuts if you application is young-only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if anyone has started work on applying machine learning to gc yet?

<comment><USER6> Not ML, but the jmh framework has a toy example where a genetic algorithm is used to tweak runtime parameters.

Edit, here it is: [http://hg.openjdk.java.net/code- tools/jmh/file/3769055ad883/...](http://hg.openjdk.java.net/code- tools/jmh/file/3769055ad883/jmh- samples/src/main/java/org/openjdk/jmh/samples/JMHSample_25_API_GA.java)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Profbit – Track your Coinbase profits - <AUTHOR> https://www.profbit.info/ <comment><USER2> I love the idea of this. Good analytics and data presentation are tough to come by in many situations, even when the necessary info is in principle accessible. This clever open source tool meets this need.

</comment><comment><USER3> > LOGIN WITH COINBASE

Hmm. How about you give me a little more information about what exactly your service does before propositioning me to do something as instinctually terrifying as that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cyberdog, totally get your concern, I will update the UI to add some further info.

tldr: I get read-only permissions from Coinbase OAuth and don't store any user data. You can also setup your own server -- one click to deploy to heroku, further instructions in the github! [https://github.com/joshblum/profbit](https://github.com/joshblum/profbit)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Automatically adjust monitor color temp with hardware. - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yWbRG5oXVYE

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a neat project I made to automatically adjust your monitor color temperature based on ambient light. Think of it like a hardware-based version of f.lux; instead of guessing the color temp in your room based on location, time of day, etc. this actually measures it with a small I2C light sensor. Check out the guide I wrote on it for Adafruit's learning system to see the details: [http://learn.adafruit.com/automatic-monitor-color- temperatur...](http://learn.adafruit.com/automatic-monitor-color-temperature- adjustment/overview) You can also find the code here: [https://github.com/tdicola/AutoColorTemp](https://github.com/tdicola/AutoColorTemp)</comment>


Sex and Gor and open source - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/26/sex-and-gor-and-open-source/ <comment><USER2> I spent a good portion of my early career working with Drupal on large-scale media sites and got to know some folks central to the movement. I liked almost everyone I met, including Dries, but after starting my own agency, left the platform and the community. Not because of individual conflicts, but because I concluded that I did not want my agency to orbit Acquia. This is what happens in commercially mature open source communities, and a huge source of mundane conflict. The founder and BDFL of the movement becomes the founder and BDFL of a venture funded, IPO-bound startup, and incentives start to become crossed. Or in the case this case, incentives become entirely perverted.

So I have a darker take on this: Dries banned Crell as a face-value reason to strip a competitor of a seat at the core contributor table. Crell works for Platform.sh, a challenger to Acquia's main hosting platform product. Drupal has lots of very senior architectural voices already, so losing Crell isn't going to jeopardize the platform, and it's more convenient for Acquia for them to work in the same place.

According to Crell's post about this [[https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi- outing](https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing)], the Drupal Association apparently attempted to apply their code of conduct and found repeatedly that Crell had done nothing wrong. But then Dries decided to ban Crell with little fanfare. Hard to believe that Dries cares that much about Crell's sex life. Easy to believe that he's become a cutthroat opportunist who would use the Code of Conduct to optimize Acquia's outcomes. What would have happened if Crell had worked for Acquia?

That's the thing about a BDFL. Give him enough VC money and ultimately all that's left is a giant D.

<comment><USER3> There's an appearance of conflict of interest, and you are not the only one to make this accusation. But this is a red herring.

It was also brought up on the related Reddit thread. Someone surmised this might be "motivated by the direct competition."

To which rszrama (Ryan Szarma) said "As a co-founder of Platform.sh, I know with absolute certainty this is not the case."

Assuming Ryan knows more than both of us, and he would be in a position to gain from making such a claim -- it's important to note he emphatically said NO.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/60y9mq/larry_garfie...](https://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/60y9mq/larry_garfield_on_harassment_in_the_drupal_project/dfcg0n8/)

<comment><USER2> I'm with you 100% here, yeah, and I agree entirely with the points made here [[https://subfictional.com/thoughts-on-recent-drupal- governanc...](https://subfictional.com/thoughts-on-recent-drupal-governance- decisions/)]. But I don't think Dries has the credibility to act in the community's best interest and also in the best interest of Acquia. As an officer of Acquia he has a fiduciary responsibility; his responsibility to Drupal is purely ethical.

I'd argue that Ryan can't really gain from making a claim that Dries is trying to damage his business, because then he's admitting that his business has been damaged without any real recourse. But I do agree that he knows plenty that we don't!

My thesis is not that Crell's behavior was acceptable. I know I don't have the standing to opine on that. My thesis is that Dries isn't accountable for this conflict of interest and the demands of running a venture-backed startup are largely at odds with the demands of running a community worthy of its code of conduct.

Of course, Dries is not the only BDFL with this kind of a conflict of interest. Many of us who have a career on the Internet live in the shade of one tree or another...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not at all surprised by this. I'm not a BDSM enthusiast, but in my personal life I wear clothes and have body mods that while legal and socially acceptable in my country, many Westerners find outrageous and deeply offensive. I have always complied with the standards and dress code of any business event I attend. It's simply what I wear in my personal time.

It's been a huge obstacle to getting recognition when dealing with Western tech media. Even when I don't appear at all with the project, simply the off- camera creator's appearance being offensive has been sufficient excuse for exclusion. I have no doubt that BDSM enthusiasts, or Furries, or many others face similar issues even when they check all aspects of their lifestyle at the door and it has no bearing on their projects.

As part of a knee-jerk reaction to community problems with sexism, parts of tech are now deeply, deeply conservative and judgmental about anything even vaguely sexual.

You can very easily have permanent damage done to your career prospects by appearing or acting in some way different from what they feel is the norm. Once that's done, there's no appeasement or washing away the stain- you might as well embrace your eccentricity and resign yourself to whatever fringe niche will have you.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article is written from one side of a complicated conflict.

It's the perspective of the ousted Drupal member that his beliefs are entirely packaged up in the BDSM subculture that he takes part in, and that to have a problem with his beliefs is to persecute his BDSM subculture.

It's the perspective of the other Drupal members who ousted him that his beliefs are not in fact cabined in that subculture, but in fact bleed out of it into his interactions with the broader world. They cite evidence.

Since the beliefs that we're talking about could be broadly and probably inaccurately but by how much I don't know described as "females are subhuman", it's the perspective of the Drupal members who did the ousting that those beliefs matter very much to the project.

I don't know what the right answer is, but I do know that this TechCrunch article basically defined away the controversy. That doesn't help anyone make sense of it. I'm happy letting the Drupal community work this stuff out for themselves though, and also flagged this story, which is, after all, really just drama.

<comment><USER6> Community governance in a world where open source is increasing and privacy decreasing will necessarily require drama as long as emotions are involved.

The article raises questions in the controversy worth exploring in countless open source projects.

I didn't encounter evidence cited by the ousting members in the article. Can you link to your sources?

<comment><USER5> You didn't encounter pretty much any of the other side in that article, which is not an accurate summary of the controversy. I'm not sure this article makes a good starting point for discussing this issue, and I'm not sure the issue itself is really worth mining to find a good starting point.

<comment><USER7> In a way it looks very much like just the same issue that has come up before with people getting banned from tech conferences for example: Should the beliefs a person holds that are unrelated to the community in question be grounds for ostracizing him from said community. I don't really understand why you think that isn't an issue worth discussing.

<comment><USER5> I didn't say it wasn't an issue worth discussing. I said that the article we're commenting on is highly misleading. It would lead one to believe that the community is penalizing consensual sexual behavior, when in fact the concern has virtually nothing to do with his BDSM subculture.

<comment><USER7> I don't think the article is that one-sided. It also raises another issue which is that the total lack of transparency even to the person being prosecuted is problematic.

The comments from the DA side about this have been few and self-contradictory so that partially the reason the article is the way it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sad. I definitely agree with the article's "yes (no), hell no, hell no" answers. But I wonder how many people would answer the same here as with Brendan Eich being forced to resign or Curtis Yarvin being dis-invited from LambdaConf.

Edit to be more clear: I can understand either position as long as it applies consistently. I also think I may have pattern matched this incorrectly as "person unfairly ostracized for his personal sexual preferences", when perhaps the part that will get play in the tech community is "woman hating white male", in which case this will fit right in with Eich and Yarvin.

<comment><USER5> Yarvin was not disinvited from LambdaConf. LambdaConf was boycotted because Yarvin presented there.

(To your edit: so far as I know, the issue with Yarvin has more to do with outspoken racism than with gender equity).

<comment><USER9> Disinvited from strangeloop I think? It's hard to keep track of it all.

<comment><USER10> Right, disinvited from strangeloop. When he was invited to speak at LambdaConf, pressure was brought to bear to get him disinvited. When that didn't work, people instead brought pressure against LambdaConf's sponsors, speakers, and attendees, in an effort to get LambdaConf cancelled.

<comment><USER5> That's a lurid way to describe people boycotting (pretty successfully) a conference.

<comment><USER10> Which claim are you objecting to? That people attempted to get him disinvited? That people pushed LambdaConf's sponsors to pull out? That people pushed LambdaConf's speakers to pull out? That people encouraged LambdaConf's attendees to switch to MoonConf? Calling that "attempting to get LambdaConf cancelled" doesn't seem particularly lurid, especially not compared to things like "You chose to die on this hill."

<comment><USER5> Again, all you're doing is rattling off a description of a boycott.

<comment><USER10> Right, which is why I'm confused that you objected to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At first I thought this article would be linkbaity-gossip about a tech individual's private matters. However I think it raises a good point:

Generally our attitude toward different sexual preferences (previously labeled 'deviant') is that it is _illegal_ and _wrong_ to use them to hold back somebody's career. However fetishism thus far hasn't been approached the same way as homosexuality, nor has the debate even begun in any public fashion.

I think this debate will have to happen and it's very nuanced.

<comment><USER12> Disclaimer : i am a dom/top/whatever you want to call it in my private life.

Even more interestingly, the majority of the fetish/BDSM community is heavily feminist and open minded. (There are always grey nuance and complex case but still) It is a community that is deeply rooted into consent and people that submit making a conscious and informed decision.

You tend to meet people that accept someone else opinion or lifestyle, that are team player and adapt to others, more than proselyts or zealots.

Interestingly, the legal implications are complex, and most of the time, in the US, would not support the lifestyle that much. Consensual non-consent or violence is a strange place legally.

But from the public information so far, it seems hard to believe that this was about proselytising or promoting anything.

Just a witch hunt. Which, to be honest, do not surprise me.

I am semi public about my personal involvement since 50 Shades, because i accept the problem i could get in exchange of informing people that need it (50 shades is hated in a lot of the community for good reasons) It is not easy and you get a lot of anxious/uneasy look.

<comment><USER5> To be clear: the claim here --- not that you'd know it from the article --- is that proselytizing was in fact an issue.

<comment><USER12> Well proselytising what ? Because once again, the fact he plays as a Gorean master does not mean he believes women to be subhuman.

This tends to be the problem with most of these things. But in any case we really lack information here.

<comment><USER13> Regardless what he believes, whether it is in line with the mainstream western values or not, it hurts the inclusion and tolerance to expel members based on that. One's taste, political views (regardless how extreme it is) should not be a subject of investigation in a professional community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > More generally, is it OK for an open-source community to ban/ostracize a > member purely because their "belief system" — perhaps better described as a > complicated fantasy milieu in which they happen to spend their personal time > — was doxxed? [hell no]

It's interesting to compare this with the TechCrunch article written after Brendan Eich was ousted for his "belief system": [https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/brendan-eich-resigns-as- mo...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/03/brendan-eich-resigns-as-mozilla-ceo- following-criticism-of-his-support-for-prop-8/)

</comment><comment><USER15> [http://www2.rdrop.com/users/wyvern//data/](http://www2.rdrop.com/users/wyvern//data/)

</comment><comment><USER16> The Techcrunch article has a broken link to Dries' blog post: [http://buytaert.net/living-our-values](http://buytaert.net/living-our-values)

The Techcrunch article focuses too much on BDSM in general. If I understand correctly, the problem here is on the specific aspect of viewing women as inferior and the fact that this contributor wields significant influence in a community where (like many free software communities) gender is a problem.

This isn't very different than being anti-gay and being the lead of a big free software project. Some people can pretend that their personal opinions have no impact on their work, but that's very rarely the case. If there was more diversity, this would probably be less of an issue.

<comment><USER17> It is both notable and unsurprising that the Drupal code of conduct [1] makes zero mention of any of the topics in this debate. Nothing about sexuality, nothing about feminism, or equality, ... Yet every discussion about this immediately turns to gender politics. I think this shows the duplicitous nature of COCs: no matter what the letter says, the intent, as understood by nearly everyone, is to apply it to filter by reigning morality, under the threat of public punishment.

When it comes to Drupal, the only gender problem it has is the people who keep manufacturing major incidents out of minor slights, even when the people involved don't mind. Case in point, the Drupal Association member who resigned because he called his friend a pussy, who in turn didn't mind it.

It is disingenuous to uphold a code of respect, diversity and inclusion while simultaneously expecting everyone to conform to the wishes of the most easily offended. More so to act like the only way to be respectful to women is to treat them like fragile flowers. Some people prefer traditional gender roles, in or outside the bedroom, and some are women.

The last thing these inclusion activists want is diversity, it would expose them as the sheltered and privileged upper class they are.

[1] [https://www.drupal.org/dcoc](https://www.drupal.org/dcoc)

<comment><USER16> > Nothing about sexuality, nothing about feminism, or equality, [...]

From the DCOC: "The Drupal community and its members treat one another with respect."

> When it comes to Drupal, the only gender problem it has is the people who > keep manufacturing major incidents out of minor slights [...]

I don't know for Drupal, but gender is an issue in most computer-science related fields, I doubt that Drupal is immune to this. Free Software has a lower % of women involved than computer science in general. In any case, until there is near parity, there is a gender problem.

I agree that 'we' are pretty bad at handling incidents. Damned if we do, damned if we don't. There's been an evolution in the last 10 years, but clearly more work to be done.

<comment><USER13> > "The Drupal community and its members treat one another with respect."

Frankly, the DCOC is vague. If we want to kick out people with a reference to the DCOC, we have to define with mathematical precision what is "respect", "poor manners", "people outside the Drupal project".

> I don't know for Drupal, but gender is an issue in most computer-science > related fields, I doubt that Drupal is immune to this. Free Software has a > lower % of women involved than computer science in general. In any case, > until there is near parity, there is a gender problem.

You can always find an aspect which is underrepresented. Gender, ethnicity, solved tickets, religion, eye colour… Can we just focus on getting things done and being a welcoming toward everyone who would like to donate free time until that person does not restrict others to do so?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Determining hot items with exponentially decaying likes - <AUTHOR> http://julesjacobs.github.io/2015/05/06/exponentially-decaying-likes.html

<comment><USER2> This can also be achieved by giving newer likes more value than older ones. Equivalent with opportunity for efficiencies in precomputing older sums. Is it HN or reddit ranking algo that does this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's exactly what this is doing :) But it's doing that in a specific way to keep the sort order equal to exponential decay, and make sure that the numbers don't cause floating point overflow and rounding errors.

Reddit does boost the score of newer posts. It doesn't do that for the value of votes though. Reddit simply adds the (scaled) timestamp when the post was created to the score of a post. This way newer posts get a higher score than old ones. Reference: [http://www.outofscope.com/reddits-empire-no-longer- founded-o...](http://www.outofscope.com/reddits-empire-no-longer-founded-on-a- flawed-algorithm/)</comment></comment>


Doomed: Why Wikipedia [may] fail - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/02/doomed-why-wikipedia-will-fail.ars

<comment><USER3> The thesis of this article is built around an anecdote and two assertions.

The anecdote is that someone inserted a "Wilhelm" into finance minister Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg's name. I think K. T. M. N. J. J. "Phil" F. J. S. F. von und zu Guttenberg has a sense of humor about it by now. Similar (though less amusing) anecdotes have been breathlessly reported for years now.

The assertions: first, that the greater part of all edits made by newcomers to the site are reverted by a new breed of xenophobic editors. This is an extraordinary claim. It's easy to disprove; go pull up Special:NewPages and watch dozens of new users create superfluous new pages every hour, most of which won't get reverted.

The second assertion, that attrition is taking a toll on WP administrators, is even more laughable. Go pull up Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship. Status- obsessed WP dorks spend weeks and months doing menial work (like patrolling new pages) to build a case for adminship. If anything, WP's problem is that it has too many of them.

<comment><USER4> You are technically right, but if it takes to be a "tatus-obsessed WP dork" to become a WP administrator - then it is a problem in itself, isn't it?

<comment><USER3> On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand WP adminship means so little that it's effectively flypaper for the drama club. Admins are essentially powerless against solid contributions, and the cliques and internal strife function as a fine system of checks and balances against overt abuse.

The worst you can say about it is that the admin culture repulses newcomers. But the WP model doesn't really demand long-term commitment from contributors in order to work. WP will improve steadily based on casual contributions. And so adminship is really more of an inefficiency than a serious problem.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if it is so harmless drama - for example see this: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/01/wikipedia_and_naked_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/01/wikipedia_and_naked_shorting/print.html) it is certainly overdramatized on itself by the journalist - but even if there is just a trace of truth - then it seems quite serious.

<comment><USER3> Exactly how is any of this quite serious?

The only serious threat to the encyclopedia would be a force that would prevent strong writing on relevant subjects from being incorporated into it, or a force that persistantly corrupted that strong writing once it was incorporated. This link is just drama.

What lazy or corrupt journalists choose to do with the content in the encyclopedia is a problem outside the purview of the encyclopedia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wikipedia is the content stored in wikipedia and an editorial process. The first is here to stay, with caveats to its quality, the second can - <USER2> probably will - be fixed.

This article is grandly exaggerating the problems wikipedia is facing, I think we should be surprised how well it worked and fix the few problems that are there rather than to start predicting its demise. That content will certainly outlast everybody who claims it will die soon.

<comment><USER6> All they need is to have experts occasionally read articles, and mark them as "verified". Then, every page will display the latest edit, just as now, but have a "last verified" button that will go to the historical page, previously mentioned.

<comment><USER7> That's a great idea, though I think "All they need..." trivializes the scope of the implementation a bit :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _'"I think Wikipedia is great," he said when wrapping up his talk, and he wants to see it succeed, but he has trouble seeing how that can happen as the project continues to grow.'_

If someone had explained Wikipedia to you ten years ago, would you have thought it had a chance? I'll be honest, I doubt I would have.

I think of the success of Wikipedia as similar to evolution. We're just not good at grasping the scale at which either work, so our intuition betrays us.

<comment><USER9> > would you have thought it had a chance?

Sure... we had open source projects in 1999, too. Ten years is not that long ago.

<comment><USER8> Wikipedia follows a different model than all open source software projects. Even if there are a large number of contributors in an open source software project, there are still a disproportionately small number of arbiters. Any random person can submit a patch, but there's no guarantee it will get in. The larger the project, the less likely it will.

Wikipedia is everyone can be a contributor, and everyone can be an arbiter.

<comment><USER9> > Wikipedia is everyone can be a contributor, and everyone can be an arbiter.

Open source is no different. Click the "fork" button on Github, and the project is now yours.

> Even if there are a large number of contributors in an open source software > project, there are still a disproportionately small number of arbiters. Any > random person can submit a patch, but there's no guarantee it will get in.

> The larger the project, the less likely it will.

This is not really true. Send a patch to any open source project, and it will probably get in if it needs to be in. (Sure patches get rejected -- not everything needs to be "core", the code might not work, it might not be useful, etc., etc. But if you send a useful patch, it will get in regardless of how big or how small the project is.)

Anyway, Wikipedia really has the same model, it just looks different. You can edit anything, and the edit sticks immediately. But eventually an arbiter will review your edit, and if it's bad, it will be reverted. (There are "WikiProjects" dedicated to making sure every edit in their project gets looked at.)

Bad edits rarely slip by completely undetected, and if they do, that's life. Bad patches are committed to open source projects. Paper books have errata.

I am not sure why Wikipedia needs to be held to some higher standard than any other form of media ever.

<comment><USER8> Open source _is_ different because forking a project doesn't fork the users of the original. There's a central repository for Wikipedia.

The model is fundamentally different. It's the ecosystem around that model that makes it work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm soooooooo fucking tired or hearing this bullshit argument. Wikipedia will fail cause it's open. And the false dichotomy between quality and openness.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wikipedia never claimed to be 100 per cent accurate and is rarely quoted as a source by an authority wanting to prove a 'fact' - but that doesn't mean it isn't brilliant or successful.

It is a useful website for many reasons, all of which come together to prove its worthiness, and it's success.

</comment><comment><USER12> Many people (me!) don't trust Wikipedia, never have, and don't care who gets screwed by erroneous Wikipedia information.

For all others, Wikipedia is convenient and it will have to go horribly wrong before it's bad enough for most people to stop using it.

The real thread to Wikipedia is a _better_ free online encyclopedia.

<comment><USER13> The real threat to Wikipedia is over reaction from the powers that be. It's very successful, quite useful, and hopefully isn't going anywhere. Is it perfect, no, but I haven't seen anything at this scale and ambition being 100% perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the real underlying presumption by the article's author is that he wants _someone_ to be responsible. Similar wikis where some editor is ultimately responsible for approving/disapproving content have many orders of magnitude less pages, less content, and less edits.</comment>


The Osborne Myth - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Effect#The_Osborne_myth <comment><AUTHOR> I noticed a few people talking about skipping over Vista upgrades to wait for Windows 7. While MSFT is not going to go bankrupt over this, it seems like an interesting time to look back at an infamous case of pre-announcing a product.

<comment><USER2> Microsoft is probably more concerned about repeating the fiasco around the Vista launch. Nothing hurts adoption of your new OS like having third party drivers broken on launch day. It's not like you avoid getting the new Ubuntu just because you know another one is coming out in April of next year. Apple's OSs are special in that regard, as Apple also control the hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> And poor Lee Felsenstein, who created community computing projects in the early 80s. He was briefly a millionaire from Osborne, the stock plummeted and he was not a millionaire anymore (I won't speculate on how much he cashed out).</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite Wikipedia article? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone have a Wikipedia article that they wish more people would have a chance to read? <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists)

</comment><comment><USER3> One of my favourite pages is the page on the Emu War: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War)</comment>


Python command line oneliners - <AUTHOR> http://www.vurt.ru/2013/02/python-command-line-oneliners/ <comment><USER2> This article isn't as much about one-liners as it is about the usefulness of the _if __name__ == '__main__'_ idiom. It's great when a module can be consumed as a library and as a command-line script at the same time.

Unfortunately, Python isn't really that good for writing one-liners, especially those that process input. At one point I was sufficiently unhappy about this, that I tried doing something about it:

        https://github.com/gvalkov/python-oneliner

<comment><USER3> It also looks like this was just for self-reference; it's not an article as it is a collection of useful tips.

I write a lot of these to remind myself of tool usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most of these should be tools of last resort, the technological equivalent knowing how to start a fire without matches. The performance of SimpleHTTPServer is abysmal, particularly if you want to serve a few files over 100MB or thousands of little files.

Even toy webservers blow the Python versions away. If I need a quick one-off server to share files over the LAN, webfs [1] is first on the draw. 90% of my uses don't even need fiddling with the command options. Though webfs is fairly limited, SSL is the most complicated thing it can do.

For slightly more advanced one-off webservers, thttpd [2] is wonderful. It's got many of the features of heavy duty webservers (plus great throttling controls) but every option is tune-able from the command line.

And as an aside, my own jshon [3] is usually nicer and faster than mjson.tool, at least until you hit a fairly high level of complexity.

[1] <http://linux.bytesex.org/misc/webfs.html>

[2] <http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/>

[3] <http://kmkeen.com/jshon/>

edit: Thanks dschep.

<comment><USER5> It's useful for quickly getting an HTTP server. No one in their right mind would use it for anything more. There are plenty of other very good python web servers.

<comment><USER4> I am arguing it is not even useful for that. If you simply want to share files across a LAN (the use case for these oneliners), SimpleHTTPServer falls flat on its face. It'll transfer large files at DSL-like rates and time out completely on directories with large numbers of files in them.

What are you supposed to do with an http server after getting one quickly? Stare at the open port? The only thing quick about SimpleHTTPServer is the startup time. Don't actually try using the server.

The specific instance that put me off of the python servers was when a friend downloaded a CableGate tarball and someone else wanted to look at it. No one had a flash drive on them, but the fellow did have python installed. One SimpleHTTPServer later and the tarball was being transferred at 100KB/sec, slower than the original download. The cables were all html anyway so let's try uncompressing the tarball and serving those. Now the server would time out instead.

What do people actually use SimpleHTTPServer for?

<comment><USER6> It's a good HTTPD Dummy. I've mostly used it in debugging purposes - a little as a swiss army knife.

It's not _that_ useless that you're portraying it as. But I do however agree that it's below toy level. It's not for production or long-time use.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it does seem a little useful for lightweight development and testing. Though I find it bizarre that anyone doing professional web development can't spare the 1MB for an Nginx or Lighttpd install.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a few scripts that facilitate the use of python on the command line:

<https://gist.github.com/dgulino/4750088> (mine)

[http://code.activestate.com/recipes/437932-pyline-a-grep- lik...](http://code.activestate.com/recipes/437932-pyline-a-grep-like-sed- like-command-line-tool/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Kind of related:

cat messy.json | python -mjson.tool

<comment><USER9> This is one of the examples in the article.

<comment><USER8> So, if I had spent the time used to create a HN account on reading the article another time, I wouldn't have to feel this stupid...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Related: <http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/evanescent_python.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> In article I focused on usefulness of python one liners regardless of what technology they use. This one more for python devs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recently wrote PAWK (<https://github.com/alecthomas/pawk>) in order to give me Python at the command line. It's exactly what you think it is: Python AWK.

It's served me well so far.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also, the last line to check for 'one-liners' won't get them all:

      $ grep -r  "if __name__ == '__main__'" /path/to/lib

Should be:

      $ grep -r  "if __name__ == ['\"]__main__['\"]" /path/to/lib

<comment><USER12> If you're not storing that somewhere, but rather typing it, I find you're often better off by being a little more forgiving, eg:

      $ grep -r "if __name__ == .__main__." /path/to/lib

or even: $ grep -Er 'if\W__name__\W==\W.__main__.'</comment></comment>