Walmart's Crime Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-walmart-crime/ <comment><USER2> I cannot believe I am going to defend Walmart right now, but that's how poor this article is.

They say "There's nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart." and justify that statement by saying that if Walmart: added more greeters, scrap self-checkout, made stores smaller, it would reduce crime. That's a nonsensical and isn't explained in the article, we're just meant to accept that.

The reality is that Walmart is a victim of their own success in some ways. They have a core demographic (the employed and unemployed poor) which they've been extremely successful in attracting, so much so that the demographics even at a store like Target are markedly different (middle class-ish).

Walmart seems to have actually extended their reach into the poorest of society, it used to be that stores like Kmart were cheaper than Walmart and the really poor shopped there, now Walmart has been nabbing a lot of their business, it comes with a lot of the problems associated.

What's a solution? Walmart's shoplifting is a symptom of social issues elsewhere: Drug usage, poverty, lacking social safety nets, criminal justice reform, and so on. If you want to decrease shoplifting you have to give people something to lose and that's a bigger challenge than hitting Walmart over the head for having to call the cops too much.

It is very easy to make Walmart a scapegoat, but ultimately you'd just shift the problem to a different location if Walmart stopped serving the customer base they serve.

<comment><USER3> It's almost absurd not to shop at Walmart or other stores that are "extremely successful in attracting" the poor.

If I buy groceries at Walmart or another discount grocer, my bill is nearly half of what it would be if I shopped at a "nicer" supermarket and well over half of what it would be if I shopped at a place like Whole Foods. And I actually find the experience of shopping at Walmart to be better than the experience of shopping somewhere like Trader Joe's because Walmart's large size makes things far less congested than Trader Joe's, where it seems like everyone is constantly in the way of each other.

And this is all for essentially the same produce and meats. In many cases, the discount grocer's produce is actually better quality than the supermarket's.

<comment><USER4> I get what you're saying, but will also note that this is probably subjective based on where you live. In my city, most of the walmarts are crowded, loud, and dirty. A lot of merchandise somehow ends up on the floor. The lines are long. The produce quality varies greatly but is not very good.

I once saw a Walmart in another state with a live lobster aquarium. My local friends almost didn't believe me. (I live in California)

<comment><USER3> I've certainly seen stores that are in just terrible shape. They all tend to be understaffed. They have 30 checkouts available and most times it seems like 5 are open. I never understood the idea behind that, though I went in one time around Christmas and they had a ton of lines available.

I think the best mix between prices and not being over-congested and dirty are the warehouse stores like Sam's Club and Costco. Those places require larger volumes, so they aren't really great options if you aren't buying for an entire household.

<comment><USER5> Sams (and I assume also Costco) also require a membership, the cost of which keeps the really poor folks out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that we should crack down on walmart and other large companies who service poor people, blacks, and other population groups that disproportionately commit crime. We should force walmart to behave more like target, catering towards higher income people, with higher prices and better service. And if poor people need to pay higher prices at a non-centralized location, that's the breaks.

Similarly, walmart should be prevented from doing things like allowing the homeless to camp in the parking lots. Target is the pioneer here - they force the homeless to illegally park on the streets where the cops can harass them until they leave town.

In short, rather than having all the crime in one spot, we can spread it around the community! This won't help things, but at least we won't have a single unsympathetic scapegoat to blame.

(Also blame walmart when it does try and stop crime and the inevitable results occur, namely criminals being hurt/killed as part of the law enforcement process.)

I can't think of a better illustration of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics than this article. Poor people steal and hurt people but we can't blame them. Walmart is nearby so blame Walmart!

[https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of- eth...](https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/)

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's obviously a binary issue and there is no possibility whatsoever that Walmart could do things to prevent crime that have a lower net cost for society than calling the police.

<comment><USER6> What exactly should walmart do?

Run a private police force that inevitably harms criminals during the law enforcement process? (The article criticizes them for doing this.)

Maybe walmart can run it's own on-site jail that way the cops only need to come once/day? I'm sure a private walmart run jail won't attract the same criticism, particularly when the inevitable bad things happen in it.

Or maybe they can hire more security guards to follow around suspicious people in the store. I'm sure that will help stop the criticism, even if the demographics of suspicious people don't correspond to population demographics.

From what I can tell, the problem isn't walmart but the people who shop there. But this is obviously a politically unacceptable conclusion, so walmart makes a convenient scapegoat. And they'll remain one no matter what they do.

<comment><USER7> Yes, the criminality is the problem.

But say having someone present at an entrance for much of the day clearly cuts the number of shoplifting incidents. It's pretty reasonable for the police and town to push for that staffing if it is less costly than handling the displaced incidents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems as though this is following a familiar pattern (as in the UK) of:

"Privatise the profit, push the risk/cost to the local community"

<comment><USER9> Isn't the point of the police to have a monopoly on violence?! I mean, I'm sure Walmart could create its own _army_ if they had to, but ... do we, as a society, really want that?

<comment><USER8> Not sure about an army, but I think the point is that they are actively consuming a public service more often because they have cut their own costs, instead of paying for a deterrent themselves.

<comment><USER10> Surely the stores pay property taxes that go to local PD?

<comment><USER11> Walmart at times at least gets tax discounts for "all the jobs they create"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While blaming Walmart for the crime problems may be emotionally satisfying, the crime is a manifestation of a systems problem which ultimately cannot be solved by Walmart, but must be solved by the government. Adding more staff will simply result in an increase in prices for customers who can not afford increased prices and it doesn't solve the crime problems, simply move it somewhere else.

The state needs to spend money understanding the structural issues of crime in their state and implement interventions with tax money.

Here is a plan: In NY City where I live there is a state cigarette tax of $4.35 and a city tax of an additional $1.50 for a total of $5.85 per pack of cigarettes.

Oklahoma, the state first mentioned in the article, just rejected a cigarette tax increase to $1.50 [http://kfor.com/2016/05/19/democrats-republicans-clash- over-...](http://kfor.com/2016/05/19/democrats-republicans-clash-over- cigarette-tax-in-oklahoma/)

Raise the cigarette taxes to $3 or $4 per pack, the smoking rate declines and healthcare costs from tobacco declines.

The cigarette tax revenues can be put into plans that help to solve the structural problems of crime (unemployment, law enforcement, whatever). The State of Oklahoma should study the crime problem and use the additional revenues from an increased cigarette tax to help solve the problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> The article didn't touch on this, but Walmart is held in such low regard that there is, for many people, zero stigma attached to shoplifting from an "evil empire", even compared to "friendlier" competitors like Target.

</comment><comment><USER10> Article only uses the word "tax" once, in a quote from a police officer: "[Walmart] offloads the job to the police at taxpayers' expense".

But isn't the taxpayer in this case the store itself? If the store isn't paying enough taxes to support the PD, how is that the store's fault?

</comment><comment><USER14> I live close to a UK Premier League football stadium. Every match day requires a police riot squad being deployed for crowd control. Given that these teams are privately owned I do wonder about who should ultimately pay the bill for what are public events held for profit.

London Met police costs - [http://www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2014/august_201...](http://www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2014/august_2014/2013030002515.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Best it would be paid by public who would not even be watching or interested in that event. I think it is just a variant of 'You may not be interested in politics but it does not mean politics is not interested in you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One should never blame the victim for sexual assault; victims should be able to dress/act how they please without fear.

vs.

One should blame the victim for theft; victims bear responsibility for securing their possessions.

<comment><USER17> They are two different categories of crime, yes. That's why we don't throw people in prison for a decade for petty theft, or put petty thieves on the Petty Theft Offender national registry and require them to notify their neighbors when they move into town.

<comment><USER18> I get that more severe crimes get more punishment, but why would the severity of the crime change where the blame is placed?

<comment><USER17> Hard to say, but it is. When a person leaves their door unlocked and people walk in and rob the place, the thieves are responsible and guilty but the neighbors will cluck their tongues and wonder why someone with perfectly- functioning locks doesn't use them.

That's why a person leaving their house unlocked and getting robbed is used as an (unacceptable) analogy to a person getting sexually assaulted when they walk down the street at night in skimpy clothing. The "Victim could easily have done something more and chose not to" aspect is already taken as a given in the unlocked-door scenario.

<comment><USER18> I think I see what is going on. Could you be seeing both wearing skimpy clothing and leaving your door unlocked as very minor crimes?

From that point of view, getting robbed would be a minor punishment fit for such a minor crime, while getting raped would be a major punishment, disproportionate for such a minor crime.

<comment><USER17> Neither is a crime. But responsibility and crime are divorced concepts---you can be partially responsible for being in a situation (getting in a car and driving on the road during rush-hour with a friend in the car) without being culpable for the consequences (drunk driver hits you and your passenger is severely injured). Drivers still feel responsible in situations like that, even if they're not guilty of committing a crime.

And if you're talking about my personal opinions: I think the two states (leaving your door unlocked and wearing skimply clothing) are completely separate, and the arguments that unify them are flawed because they move the responsibility to not get raped from the rapist to the victim.

But the sharing of responsibility for petty theft between the thief and the person who fails to take basic measures to secure property (like locking doors) is already culturally-accepted for reasons I don't know, which is why the argument that "wearing skimpy clothing is the same thing" is even made. I think it's possible to argue that people who leave doors unlocked shouldn't be considered to have done something wrong, but I hear almost nobody making that argument.

<comment><USER18> >I think it's possible to argue that people who leave doors unlocked shouldn't be considered to have done something wrong, but I hear almost nobody making that argument.

I hear this every once in a while. My country used to be a police state and people often say "back then we could leave our windows open without fear" to argue that we should go back to authoritarianism to reduce crime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I said this the last time this came up, and I feel the same journalistic failure is present in this article:

Could the troublemakers simply be attracted to Walmart and would go elsewhere if things were different? Walmart might even be doing the police a favor by concentrating them all in one place.

<comment><USER20> Walmart has created a retail model that does not work -- unless a disproportionate number of police implement their security for them. Their stores are unmanageably big. They're understaffed and undermonitored, and they even do stupid things like not routing people with merchandise returns to approach the return counter strictly from outside the store, so the trivial hack mentioned in the article can't occur.

Walmart has a 30 year history of offloading the healthcare and social costs of its employees onto local hospitals and county agencies. Of course they offload their security. In perhaps 50% of their market (geographically) they're a retail monopoly. They rig the game because they can.

<comment><USER12> The high healthcare costs are systems issues and the reasons they are so high are because of politics which can be fixed at the state and sometimes city level.

The high health care costs are externalities created by state and city policy (and sometimes federal policy) that create an additional burden for employers such as Walmart which creates an additional burden for customers and employees. The higher health care costs result in lower wages for employees while resulting in higher prices for customers than in Wal-Marts case, many can ill-afford.

For example, most of health care costs are from those with serious chronic disease (the highest category is the 9 million "dual eligibles" \-- people with disability that are on both Medicaid and Medicare).

These chronic diseases are from smoking, obesity, lack of exercise, air pollution for starters.

The fixes are raising the cost of tobacco through taxes, banning smoking in public places, hard hitting anti-smoking TV ads, ....), taxing sugar added beverages as Philadelphia has just done, lowering air pollution by getting the highest polluting coal-powered electric plants shut down, and in the Northeast and Midwest, converting buildings burning #6 and #4 fuel oils to less polluting #2 or natural gas.

The more of the healthcare cost externalities that are borne by private firms that are a result of government policy that government must pay for, the better for all of us. Only when the costs to government are high enough, will they implement policies that will reduce the high costs of health care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Heh, one of the few times I shoplifted as a teenager was from a Walmart. It was from one of the more run-down ones, and it _did_ seem easy.

Not many stores I would've dreamed of doing that in ('twas only teenage hijinks anyway), but it's true when you have a big crappy commercial space where crap is just laying around (Walmart, kmart, Ross, etc.), it really gives the impression that the purveyor doesn't give a crap about their crap.

</comment><comment><USER22> Isn't it more efficient for more crime to be in one place? They can send a van to take arrestees to jail instead of individual trips; the Walmart employees are likely more effective at implementing proper procedure than a store that has one or two incidents a year, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> I worked in retail when I was a teenager and something I was taught was that keeping your store in good condition (i.e. fronting and facing the shelves) inhibits shoplifting and other crimes. If you see that the people who work there take pride in their store you might think they are watching and will catch you if you try to shoplift.

On a good day, the Wal*Mart in my area looks OK but on a bad day it looks like the aftermath of a frat party. On a day like that it looks like a ghetto store and just doesn't feel like a safe place. The local Target on the other hand could use more people at the checkout lines, but has a lot of staff on the floor to keep the store looking good and help out if you need to find something.

</comment><comment><USER24> Semi recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11676928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11676928)

</comment><comment><USER25> _In July, three Walmart employees in Florida were charged with manslaughter after a shoplifter they chased and pinned down died of asphyxia._

No wonder they call the police when they want shoplifters choked out: police don't get prosecuted for that.

This is much ado about nothing. All big companies run periodic "let's take a shit on society to save some money" programs. They find something that costs a little money (e.g. a modicum of private security), the absence of which won't cause them to go out of business immediately, and they stop doing it. Even if they eventually have to restart in most locations, they still save money over the interim. If society really wanted to end this practice, society would stop bending over backwards to coddle large corporations, or even to allow them to exist in the first place.

TFA describes problems in lower-income urban and suburban settings. Maybe these are the Wal-Mart stereotype, but Wal-Mart has stores in many other communities that don't fit that mold, and which may not have seen the crime wave described here. The mayor in TFA had the right idea: declare problem stores a public nuisance to force Wal-Mart to do something. What Wal-Mart will do, was also identified in TFA: hire a bunch of off-duty cops. It kills three birds: security will actually improve with cops on the premises, police chiefs won't publicly criticize a business that's paying their subordinates lots of money, and the cops they hire will use the resources of the whole department anyway. Again, however, this expenditure will only be required in those special communities that have lots of potential criminals.

</comment><comment><USER26> The walmart in kemah had the police called 364 days out of the year last year. Sometimes twice a day. They are costing the PD a fortune for it. They even had a bomb threat made there.

 _edit_ my comment was poorly worded. The seabrook PD is constantly at this walmart instead of doing other things and the revenue isn't offset to hire more officers.

<comment><USER27> Are you suggesting we start charging people for police protection?

<comment><USER28> Corporations are people, my friend.

<comment><USER27> Corporations are taxpayers, my friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm curious: does a new Walmart increase crime, or merely concentrate and redistribute it?

Kind of a tough question, because to define concentration you need some notion of area, and you might just redistribute it across the boundaries you draw. Still, this is probably possible at least for smaller towns.

</comment><comment><USER30> " _[Walmart] said it would skip calling the cops for first-time offenders shoplifting merchandise valued below $50 if the shoplifter completes the company's theft-prevention program._ "

The response to having too many petty crimes is to not call the police? This whole situation is bizarre.

<comment><USER7> Presumably the data shows that petty shop lifting is a fact of business for big box stores and that the level of petty shop lifting goes up and down with staffing levels on the store floor.

The shoplifters are still the ones to blame for the shoplifting, but it's not entirely unreasonable for the town to demand some level of performance from the store rather than happily providing expensive police to deal with a problem the store could handle with cheap employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots"

They're refusing to look at the demographics. The criminals have nothing to do with my Dad in his fancy RV. The article is close to understanding the problem is socioeconomic class but for political reasons can't say the real problem, so, um, it must be the campers, yeah they must be the problem.

Another peculiar logical and demographic problem is the article implies corporate spending on employees will magically reduce crime, much as hospitals hiring more ER nurses will reduce shootings.

<comment><USER32> Not only that, but WalMart allows overnight camping specifically because their studies have shown that the ongoing presence of trucks and RVs lowers crime in their parking lots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Even up in Northern Michigan, this has been a MAJOR issue. Our local law refuses to admit it, however if you pay attention to the news and radio one can see a trend.

<comment><USER17> I would _definitely_ refrain from drawing conclusions on trends gained from news and radio. The positive feedback loops in that ecosystem are _large_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here's a similar article in the Tampa Bay Times published earlier this year. The graphics department had a fun time with it. [http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2016/public- safety/walmart-...](http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2016/public- safety/walmart-police/)

</comment><comment><USER35> If the economy wasn't in a massive slump, this article wouldn't have been written. It acts as an apology for predatory business practices, and the exploitation of a working class.

<comment><USER36> Employing people at market rates isn't "exploitation".

<comment><USER35> It isn't hard to google examples of Walmart encouraging their employees onto social assistance programs in order to ensure they get a living wage. This has been happening for over a decade now.

Also, I could direct you towards the average market rate in Nepal or Shenzhen Province in China, and we could have a fun conversation about Walmart's exploitation of the third world, but we'll stick to the goalposts we have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Many keep pointing out the Walmart theft numbers and his they correlate to the local crime stats. I wonder if there is a correlation to theft numbers and distance to nearest bus stop.

</comment><comment><USER38> To me this is a great example of why Lean focuses on cutting waste, not cutting costs.

I don't expect execs to learn a lesson, though. Cost-cutting fits in much better with our managerialist culture. Decreasing waste mostly has to happen when employees doing or very close to the work spot opportunities for improvement. But any fool can look at a corporate budget, pick out the biggest expense, and say, "Well, let's cut that by a lot."

</comment><comment><USER39> What are some other ways we can reduce human workforce that obligate extraneous events into the municipal sector? Daycares could stop watching the children - EMTs could definitely pick up the slack if there is a random health event. Restaurants could stop employing wait staff - eventually the UN would be deployed to feed the starving people.

</comment><comment><USER40> It is not recent anymore, but I don't think that this flood of "mainstream media" links in hackernews suits well with past demographics. Maybe this forum is changing, but I think it is toward a bad direction.

EDIT: And the downvotes proves that the demographics changed a lot. Why come here if I can browse CNN, Bloomberg and WSJ by myself? There is a lot of comments there too.</comment>


Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, Citizens [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf <comment><USER2> The linked document is missing its figures and tables, which makes it a little hard to get at the nuts and bolts of the analysis. I don't know if a more complete version is publicly available yet.

They appear to conclude that "economic elites" get their policy preferences enacted more often than the median voter (though there's a good deal of inertia that makes change difficult no matter which groups want it). That's not surprising to me in a republican system: Elites are the ones getting elected! This is not necessarily a bug if you think voters are better as judges of character, values and capability than as issue-by-issue decision makers. The authors disagree, though I think they describe the other side of the argument uncharitably:

 _A possible objection to populistic democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly informed preferences do not influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support._

 _But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that – collectively – ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect._

<comment><USER3> No it isn't. They start on page 25, although the I would certainly appreciate a link to the source data.

<comment><USER2> Ahh... thanks!

Yeah, I'd be most interested in seeing the extremes: Which are the policy changes with 80%+ support from non-"elite" income Americans that top-10%-ers did not approve and were not enacted? And vice-versa: Which very unpopular ideas have become law with only support from the elite? They list some of these in parentheticals, but links to some individual surveys would be more useful.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It's not definitive but it's a great jumping-off point. I plan to track down the book mentioned in the paper as having a lot of the source data, I too would have liked more in-depth analysis.

<comment><USER2> I am unfamiliar with how this stuff is supposed to work in the social sciences, but it's a little disturbing that Gilens seems to be mining this curated "database" of polls for several years of high profile publications instead of releasing it publicly. Maybe it's in an appendix to the book...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Alright, this paper got 3000 upvotes on reddit and I thus failed to make a dent to the hivemind. I will try here once more.

I have two criticisms of this paper: 1) I did not find any details regarding how they construct the population's preference on policy. (I'm glad if someone can educate me.) I highly doubted that they can poll a significant amount and a representative sample of people on nearly 2000 issues spanning the 80s-now. Even if they can, think about the survey fatigue that these people suffer.

2) They do not control for anything besides wealth. What if wealthy people are just smart / motivated -- and motivated people get involved more and have more influence on policy. I'm not advocating any hypothesis of my own here and simply criticizing the scientific validity of the authors.

Finally, as a insider of Political Science, I would recommend that everyone takes any study with a huge grain of salt. (I recognize that that claim is unsupported by this comment, but just an observation).

<comment><USER2> From page 10:

 _What makes possible an empirical effort of this sort is the existence of a unique data set, compiled over many years by one of us (Gilens) for a different but related purpose: for estimating the influence upon public policy of "affluent" citizens, poor citizens, and those in the middle of the income distribution.

Gilens and a small army of research assistants gathered data on a large, diverse set of policy cases: 1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change. A total of 1,923 cases met four criteria: dichotomous pro/con responses, specificity about policy, relevance to federal government decisions, and categorical rather than conditional phrasing. Of those 1,923 original cases, 1,779 cases also met the criteria of providing income breakdowns for respondents, not involving a Constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court ruling (which might entail a quite different policy making process), and involving a clear, as opposed to partial or ambiguous, actual presence or absence of policy change. These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe of all possible policy alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to assessing the public's influence on policy. The included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington "policy agenda." At the same time – since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about – they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence._

<comment><USER4> This passage talks about what policies are included, not how the respondents are recruited / how their answers are recorded.

<comment><USER2> These were all presumably publicly available national polls, conducted by a variety of organizations using a variety of methods. Unfortunately, the origins of this data set are with _Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America_ by Martin Gilens (one of the authors of this paper), and thus it's difficult to learn more about them without having the book on hand.

I'd be interested to know if they only used non-partisan polls from national polling organizations (e.g. Gallup), as opposed to polls conducted under the auspices of an interest group.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the info. On the one hand I feel (emphasis on feel) like the conclusion is correct. But on the other hand, as a Political Scientist I have to treat this as a scientific endeavour and criticize its method regardless of its conclusion. And as a scientific work, this piece ranks lowly I think. There is very little theory, i.e. okay, even if the rich gets more influence, exactly why is that true? If it's because of campaign contribution law, we can test that thanks to change in campaign law. Plus, the people can always vote their representatives out of Congress -- why don't they? Is it because of a lack of transparency on their representatives' stand? Is it because campaign ads are so effective? Or even because that people don't really care enough?

Anyhow, this paper may (or may not) report an intriguing empirical regularity. But what to make of it is not at all very clear.

<comment><USER5> consider the time period studied as well. that 20 year period was incredibly business-friendly, so it should be no surprise that policy outcomes matched business values at large. i wrote a longer response here ([http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/2379ny/study_revea...](http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/2379ny/study_reveals_how_often_americas_politicians_do/cguw8qs)) but i know it won't get any views... would you mind giving me your feedback on that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As I browsed through the paper, it occurred to me that readers here on Hacker News may want to know more about public choice theory, a theoretical perspective that suggests some reasons why representative democracy will not work as ideally as hoped in any country. (The founders of the United States, writing about two centuries before public choice theory was studied under that name, were actually quite hard-headed about such issues, as you can see by reading _The Federalist,_ the book including essays mostly by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton about why the federal Constitution should be ratified, although imperfect, in the 1780s.) Some links that I like for introductions to public choice theory (something I studied in a law school class on legislation in the 1980s) include these that I've Google up a few times before.

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html)

[http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21569692...](http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21569692-james-buchanan-who-died-january-9th-illuminated-political- decision-making)

[http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm](http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm)

[http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet....](http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet.pdf)

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html)

[https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public...](https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public_choice_theory.html)

As usual, the Winston Churchill quotation gets it right: "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill)

<comment><USER7> Has public choice theory ever been put to the test empirically?

<comment><USER4> Ah ha! You just identified the great debate in Political Science. It's very hard to empirically test game theoretical models since a lot of the model components are about the utility of the actors which is very hard to get at empirically. Plus, things like repeated game have multiple equilibria and we don't really know why the equilibrium that is our world gets to happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since the study may be interesting, I changed the url from [1] to the paper itself.

All: This is one of those subjects that is fine for HN if the discussion remains substantive and civil, and otherwise deserves to be flagged. If you comment in this thread, please make sure your comment is substantive and on- topic.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10769041/The- US-is-an-oligarchy-study-concludes.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Except this: The lawyer's lobby (gives the most) largely advocates for laws that let them monetize human suffering to the benefit of humans suffering at the hands of corporations; The retired lobby (gives 2nd most) largely advocates positions that reduce medical expenses and margins for healthcare firms. On the opposite side is insurance and business lobbies opposing the lawyers, and healthcare lobbies opposing retirees positions. The notion that an oligarchy controls American disconnected from citizens interests, and free from competing interests is hyperbole that makes for cool titles. Intensely competing interests = democracy.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it's deliberately misleading to say the study is "from Princeton and Northwestern Universities," when it's a coauthored article by one professor from each place. I think that was done to make the study sound more important, probably because the author of the news article agrees with the premise of the study.

<comment><USER10> And based on the downvotes, it appears that many people here also agree with the premise of the study!

Seriously, publications are by professors, not universities. It's at best lazy and inaccurate reporting to say otherwise.</comment></comment>


Google Spaces Doesn't Last a Year, Shutting Down on April 17 - <AUTHOR> https://www.droid-life.com/2017/02/24/google-spaces-shutdown/ <comment><USER2> It seems to me, that every time they do this, they make people less likely to jump onboard their next product, making it's early death more likely, perpetuating and accelerating the cycle.

They could really do with getting their shit together and then following through - and if they were going to pick one area to start with, please, please pick messaging.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the first I even heard of the service.</comment>


Hooks-Based WebGL Library for React - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sghall/react-vertex <comment><USER2> A couple years ago I was looking into doing things at the reconciler level - either to wrap around PIXI or WebGL straight. Did a bunch of tests: [https://dakom.github.io/react-renderer-test/](https://dakom.github.io/react- renderer-test/)

Conclusion I came to is that React itself is the bottleneck - even when you take ReactDOM out of the picture and even if you do nothing in the rendering phase. Ultimately, once you need several thousand entities, you end up with anti-patterns in order to squeeze out better performance, like keeping all your entities in arrays and objects instead of each being its own component.

YMMV and it's a cool idea - don't want to rag on hard work, but thought it might help to give a heads up of the trouble I ran into :)

</comment><comment><USER3> A gentle request: if you author something like this and you put time into making it so that somebody finding it can learn about it, please also consider explaining what the intent and expected outcome of that project is.

What's unclear is why I should consider it over an alternative, and if indeed the authors think I should. Also, is it an experiment in the sense that it's a learning opportunity for the author, or does somebody think a serious advancement is being made?

Without answering these questions, it's hard or impossible to know in what context I would want to use this.

Now, this doesn't matter for every project, but I say this here since it's clear that effort has been put into making this approachable for somebody with no context.

The more general lesson here is that people don't just want to know what your project is. They also want to know if they should be using it. If you want your project to be used, one of the easiest things you can do is explain what problem your project solves and why somebody with that problem should use your project.

<comment><USER4> This is one of those things where _if you have to ask_ , it's probably not useful for you. If you have used both WebGL and React, it's obvious why this is an interesting experiment.

This is also what bothers me about reading academic papers. Generally, the set of people who both need the introduction _and_ who can make use of the contents of the paper is an empty set.

<comment><USER3> That's a bit presumptuous. As is my case, you can have real use cases for WebGL and React and have worked with them, yet still want answers to those questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's also react-three-fiber[1], which works through three.js, rather than directly on WebGL. Discussed 2 months ago[2]. Development has been active; 15 contributors. Issue #80 mentions it being used to build Storyboarder's Shot Generator[3] (accessible creation and editing of storyboards, including in VR).

[1] [https://github.com/drcmda/react-three- fiber](https://github.com/drcmda/react-three-fiber) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363595) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70RNZHEc39Q&t=35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70RNZHEc39Q&t=35)

</comment><comment><USER6> The ease-of-use of OpenGL meets the performance of React.

<comment><USER7> Performance looks good: [https://react-vertex.com/demo-attenuated- light/](https://react-vertex.com/demo-attenuated-light/)

Ease-of-use looks good: [https://github.com/sghall/react- vertex/blob/master/demos/Att...](https://github.com/sghall/react- vertex/blob/master/demos/AttenuatedLight/Scene.js)

Looks excellent actually.

<comment><USER6> Rendering a single static 3D object lit by one point light isn't much of an achievement these days -- I'd be curious to see how this performs with hundreds/thousands of elements moving around on the screen at once.

My experience with React suggests the answer is "not well." (But I'd be happy to be proven wrong on that point!)

<comment><USER7> For sure it would be nice to see some stress tests of performance.

From my experience with React, if it's used properly so that the entire component tree isn't rendered every frame, I would expect the overhead of using to be almost nil. You can see in the examples the author using React.memo for this.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but you can't really avoid rerendering every frame with OpenGL.

(Not without a lot of tricky caching, at least, which has it's own costs).

Not saying this is impractical (Personally, I wouldn't bet on it, but I'm sure it's fine for some things), so much as that the cost model here is fundamentally different.

<comment><USER7> The WebGL view might rerender every frame, the react component tree doesn't have to.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coding tip: Leave your code in a broken state - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MichaelMahemoff/posts/LQUV9bBd8dL <comment><USER3> I understand the rationale, but I see a problem with this, and a better system.

The problem is that you might be juggling 30 things in your head while writing that code. When you come back tomorrow, you have to start remembering them all, and you're more likely to forget one of them, and spend time debugging later to fix the resulting lesser-quality code.

The better system (in my opinion) is to finish your code for the day, it will leave you feeling good and accomplished. But before you leave, _write a to-do list for tomorrow 's code, with detailed notes_, while the code is still all fresh in your head. Then you can go home and not think about work, and truly relax, and know you'll get to the office tomorrow knowing exactly what you need to start with, and won't be forgetting anything important.

And I'm not sure the analogy with fiction writing is useful -- writer's can suffer from writer's block, so leaving a paragraph can help jump-start the creative part. I've never heard of programmers suffering from coder's block.

<comment><USER4> There are two separate problems.

One is getting something easy to gnaw on, to get into flow, to remove the inclination to procrastinate.

The other is picking up where you left off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is all well and good, but if you check in intentionally broken code, or if you _fail_ to check in your code _because_ it is intentionally broken, it will drive me bananas, and I will look for you, and I will _find_ you.

<comment><USER6> Have you heard of distributed revision control? Local check-ins are awesome.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, that doesn't keep some idiots from pushing broken code to `origin master`.

<comment><USER8> Why can they do so on a mature project? Why can they not only push to their branch, have the repo have commit/push hooks for fast linting, have CI builds for each commit, and only merge into master when comfortable (e.g. after QA)? And if it's a fairly new project and they're working in master directly, what's the harm of broken code?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I practice a variant of this where I have some small, well-defined task to do at the beginning of the next day to ease into the flow of things, but the thought of leaving the code in a known uncompilable state (even if just my local copy of it) would just make me feel uneasy until I've gone and fixed it.

<comment><USER10> What I like about leaving it uncompilable is that way, I know I won't forget to finish that unit of work. Sometimes I'll leave it uncompilable, sometimes I'll just leave my self a little note with what I've done, and what I have left to do.

<comment><USER11> I'm more in this latter camp. I'll perhaps leave it completely compilable, but with logic incomplete, e.g. a stub function that always returns true. My task the next day is easy, then; it starts as finishing the stub, and as I do that, the rest starts flowing.

I've had days where I start by just running the code end to end and seeing what's egregiously broken, but I find this puts me in whack-a-mole mode the entire day and it's extremely tiring. Though, I do feel like Sherlock doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I have TDD set up...I'll add a breaking test...it's a little more verbose, but the fact that everything else passes gives me a nice sanity test when I revisit the code. And of course, unless I totally bunked the test, I can actually keep the test as part of the suite (yes yes, I'm aware that tests themselves become legacy code that demands maintenance and that nothing comes for free)

<comment><USER13> I call bs on this tests have a cost mantra. They may have value, i.e. be useful, and then it is ok to spent a few minutes fixing them if needed. But if fixing them is costlier than their expected value, then just skip them.

I see many reasoning for not writing tests everywhere and very few reasons are acceptable. In some cases in some non mockable languages it is really too hard, this reason is ok. The only other good reason to not write tests is "I don't want to."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My brother works in publishing and came very close to ruining a 6 figure order of calendars because he put his personal birthday on them to test his proof readers.

Don't break your code to remind yourself where to start.

Instead, leave a failing unit test. Not only does it tell you were to start but you also told yourself what you were doing ShouldDoThisNext().

</comment><comment><USER15> I like to use a syntax error if I'm implemented in the middle of a number of related changes. As long as I follow basic hygiene of running/compiling the code before committing, I'll be reminded of where I was.

I typically use '...' for this, since it is/was invalid syntax in pretty much all languages.

Then perl went and added it as a placeholder...

[http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.0/pod/perlop.pod#Yad...](http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.0/pod/perlop.pod#Yada_Yada_Operator)

so it now compiles (but will at least throw a not-implemented error).

</comment><comment><USER16> I believe this tip originated from writers. By leaving your thoughts incomplete, but with an end in mind, you can begin writing the next day and get into the flow immediately.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think this is backwards from what works for me. For me, the difficulty is always in starting something new. It doesn't matter what time of day it happens, if I finish something, and I'm proud of it, I have almost zero motivation to get to work on the next thing.

I get that you're trying to prevent morning lethargy from coinciding with decision avoidance, but I think I have a better system. Don't end the day just before you finish. End the day just after you start, just at the part where it starts getting good. The next morning, you'll be excited to come in, because you know what to try next.

You can ride that high into your morning standup, confidently say "this is what I will do today," and ideally a half hour before quitting time, you'll finish what you're working on, and while you might be tempted to say "done enough, time to go home," you won't do that. Instead, start on the next thing. Spend 30 minutes figuring through it. Figure out an approach, write it in your journal, and then go home. Start implementing again tomorrow, and repeat the process.

<comment><USER18> I like the idea, but I find it really difficult to actually stop when I'm "in the zone". I tend to recognise when I am and treasure those moments of hyper- productivity to get lots done.

I use the technique in the article and have for a while. I find that the relatively easy task of fixing a compile error will gently lead me back into coding.

I expect it's a personal thing, though.

As an aside, I like to leave a bunch of TODOs lying around in code for things like documentation, so I can come back and do that boring stuff when I'm feeling brain dead. I never use TODO for something important that needs to be done because chances are it won't! (I don't know why, I think it's just something about the nature of TODO).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I won't leave code intentionally _broken_ , but I always save some small trivial task for the next morning to immediately get into the swing of things. I really like being able to come in first thing and get something done, even if it's small. If the first thing I have to do requires a lot of deep thinking, I'm likely to procrastinate.

<comment><USER20> >If the first thing I have to do requires a lot of deep thinking...

That's why I try to think about what I have to think about, the night before. E.G. Try to enumerate all possible solutions/causes to a problem (most likely to least likely) to give yourself something to just dive into the next morning.

<comment><USER21> Does this affect your sleep? I occasionally think about tomorrow before I go to sleep, and I find that my sleep that night was not as restful as it could have been.

<comment><USER22> I noticed this recently. I started my job 3 years ago, building a database system from scratch for my organization. Learning Django, and building something new sparked my interest in coding again.

3 years on, it is now mainly maintenance programming, actually fixing stupid excel upload errors (I have argued for hours that we should not be using such an inappropriate method for uploading data, but important people insist).

Anyway, the point is, I don't usually bring problems to my sleep with me (I have outside interests). But recently I was asked to add a new feature. It turned out to be a complex problem - along the lines of the P versus NP problem. Now this got me thinking. In my sleep. I did have strange code like dreams (not had that since studying at university). I wouldn't say I sleep badly, more with a sense of excitement (excitement may not be the exact word, but something similar).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In my C# code I like to leave a " _throw new NotImplementedException();_ " behind if I can't finish something. I'm with some of the other posters though in that I like to leave stuff working at the end of the day.

<comment><USER24> Do you then add a test that fails from this exception?

Otherwise, you are simply leaving a bug that is only discovered at run-time rather than one that is discovered at compile time. Doesn't seem like an improvement to me

<comment><USER23> Seems like an improvement to me! And I'm the one doing it, so I'd know.

And for your information...I do have a test, but it doesn't fail, it returns positive. I search for " _NotImplementedException()_ ".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Better yet:

Vim can save a session via :mksession file_name.vim which can then be restored by vim -S file_name.vim

It's nice when I have to quit programming while in the middle of task where I'm drowned in context spread across multiple tabs and splits. I'm not trying to spread the Vim gospel; this feature is nothing really extraodinary so I guess it's available in other editors/IDEs as well.

Overall this is roughly equivalent to putting your machine to sleep mode while your edition session is still on.

My personal opinion is that both methods make OP's look pretty primitive and hacky.

<comment><USER22> I am an IDE (Aptana / Eclipse) user.

VIM / Emacs sound like they have so many cool features. Can someone not build a decent interface that doesn't rely on remembering cryptic commands for all of the features?

To people who know both. Would it be worth me learning either Vim / Emacs in this day and age? Eclipse has a lot of features and plugins. And way more intuitive interface (I use git through it, without having really learned all the syntax and options, it does most of what I want).

Vim / Emacs seems like a lot of learning (that I could spend on possibly more useful things). Opinions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Similar but more general advice I got early in my career, was to not try to leave work with everything in a tidy state. If you are hunting a bug, for example, you'll be tempted to stay until you've fixed it, or at least understand it. Don't do that. Go home. Your mind will continue to work on the problem subconsciously and you may very well wake up the next morning with new insights.

</comment><comment><USER27> I believe Ernest Hemingway invented this technique (or the writing equivalent, on which this is based).

</comment><comment><USER28> My code is always in a broken state...

<comment><USER29> I know you're joking, but I've heard this 'tip' before and am puzzled because there is always a backlog in my head of "shit that is fucked up" on any given project. There doesn't seem to be any need to throw some made-up bug on top of that list for me to have something to start fixing if nothing else comes to mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is also unspoken benefit of this - training yourself that _IT IS OK_ to leave code in broken state. An feel good about it. Too many developers kill themselves by trying to end the day in a perfect code state. And it has nothing to do with happiness :)

</comment><comment><USER31> As long as this stays local, or on a secluded branch, why not... but if you push a broken commit to master then you fix it immediately. And there's no place in a team for someone who intentionally pushes broken commits to master.

</comment><comment><USER32> TDD.

When you get to work, run your tests. All green? Great! Write some more tests that fail then make 'em green again. Failing? Even better, now you have something to fix.

TDD made programming 5x more fun for me.

</comment><comment><USER33> I actually do this sometimes when it's near the end of the day and I know the problem at hand might cost a few hours. I'll write a comment but not in a code comment, exactly like the article suggests.

Funny enough, it never had to serve this exact purpose and had I written the comment so that it wouldn't prevent a build, I would've still continued where I left off. I think (but am not sure) the fact that I wrote it down at the end of the day makes sure I don't forget.

</comment><comment><USER34> my gut reaction here is to cringe and generally be revolted.

with some thought it seems like an okay idea... it gives you a place to start in the morning that is easy and helps you overcome the 'start working' hurdle at the beginning of the day.

with more thought it reveals bigger problems in methodology which enable this to be practical imo. ranging from not having a plan through to not having discipline.

imo you should be able to leave things in 'a convenient state' which may be broken or not, and then pick it back up... as long as you are working to a plan, and the code is sufficiently clean and friendly then you should be able to approach /someone elses unfinished work regardless as to what state it is in and start working immediately/.

On the other hand I know that most people struggle with reading code... maybe this is part of the problem more than anything else?

The context switch involves some dallying around reading code and making sense of it in the morning - I don't see how leaving things broken removes this. Rather this seems like a prescribed way to force yourself to leave at least the bare minimum documentation you should to do your job as a programmer with a little more efficiency.

Write things down, don't trust your memory, its easy to think when you are in your late teens or twenties that its an immutable record and highly reliable - especially if you have been inflicted with an especially good memory - <USER2> truth is that its a bug riddled system where data constantly degrades. Work around it like you would any other faulty system and keep backups too...

</comment><comment><USER35> I totally agree with this. Leaving things working... partially, is the best way to forget tomorrow and ship half finished code with tomorrow's distractions.

I also find this is a good strategy to step away from something and renew your perspective on the solution after a good break. Especially at the end of the day. That's worst the 'I just want to get this working by poking around, not writing unit tests' leave here in a rush, trap time.

</comment><comment><USER36> Don't do this. Try and leave you code working at the end of the day. What I do instead is leave a bunch of @todo comments in my code when I'm done programming. This does two things: It gives me some obvious starting points tomorrow and leaves those tasks fresh in my mind as I go through out the rest of my day. I often come up with really great solutions just from writing a very simple @todo sentence.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've been doing this for years. If it's a compiled language, I prefer a compile error. It's easy and I might as well get SOME value for the compiler, as specious as it may be. If it isn't, I stick to a failing unit test that was asserting the last unit of work I was working on. Helps me get into the "zone" faster and I feel less anxious about getting started in the morning.

</comment><comment><USER38> I usually do this end of the day, just throw in some pseudo code for what I want to accomplish the next day. In the case of Rails I still have to learn about everything, so it is really easy to adhere to this practice :)

However it is a bit conflicting, I don't necessarily want to commit this stuff, but I always want to push my work in case of disaster.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is great advice, and something I do all the time with #warning and #error (works with both Clang or GCC, not sure about other compilers) for partially completed methods or to-dos. When I'm mid-project I'll have "#warning TODO: Fix this" and the like all over the place.

</comment><comment><USER40> I keep a notes.txt and errant random files in a folder hidden in .gitignore and keep that open in sublime text, or else just leave myself a note in a comment at the top of the main source file. It's easy enough to break my stuff as it is.

</comment><comment><USER41> Along the same lines,

Write a function that captures your TODO's, and set an urgency level. If the urgency is high, make it a fatal error (or whatever in your given language).

This is a great way to make TODOs much more functional and actionable.

</comment><comment><USER42> What a great idea! I'm going to try it.

All too often I dither around for an extended time when starting. Then, when finally started, everything just flows.

Maybe this will help reduce dither time.

</comment><comment><USER22> Pen and notebook (paper type, not a knee burning laptop), with a checklist of things to do tomorrow works for me. q

</comment><comment><USER43> I have to try this out to</comment>


The End of the Race for H1-B Visas - <AUTHOR> http://www.brookings.edu/up-front/posts/2012/06/13-immigration-ruiz-wilson

<comment><AUTHOR> The article is more of numbers take on: if the quota is finishing up quicker every year, then shouldn't congress realize it and do something about it. I think what the author means by end of the race is:

"It took only 10 weeks this year to reach the FY2013 visa cap of 85,000. Last year, it took more than three times longer, 33 weeks. "

SO employers are 'racing' to get the H1-B applicants in, and due to the ridiculous quota, the race is over in a little over two months. So anybody hoping to get a H1-B visa, who is not employed at a really lawyered company will have trouble staying in the country.

</comment><comment><USER2> I've met and worked with lots of H1-Bs, but in no case did they have skills that were not available by hiring citizens.

<comment><USER3> True, many Americans have equivalent skillsets, but there aren't nearly enough to rely solely on Americans. A lack of talent is currently constraining economic growth in the SF Bay Area.

Silicon Valley basically would not be what it is today if it were dependent solely (or even largely) on labor performed by American citizens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> the article's title makes no sense to me. nothing was said about the race ending, or looking anywhere near coming to an end.</comment>


Ask HN: I want to remap my Capslock, any good idea? - <AUTHOR>

Caps lock is a key I hardly ever used, and it's taking humongous space on my keyboard. This is not efficient, this is not good. I hate it. I'm considering remap it to another function or key, any good ideas? All I can think of right now is Escape. <comment><USER2> I think Control is the best choice. It makes it much easier to use Control- modified commands, especially in Vim/Emacs. For Vim, you can use Control-[ to exit insert mode, a command that becomes much easier with Caps Lock remapped to Control. I use Vim, and I prefer more convenient Control-modified commands over having an Escape on home row. Besides, having Control on home row and using Control-[ is basically like having Escape on home row :)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you use VIM, that might be the best thing to do. Mine's mapped to Control.

</comment><comment><USER4> Use it to launch the software you use the most.

</comment><comment><USER5> Control</comment>


RC Plane Buzzes New York City Landmarks - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9cSxEqKQ78

<comment><USER2> Is that a cop they're talking to at the end? And why do they omit their names and blur out faces at the end, but still keep the guy's face in at the beginning?

Great video. :)</comment>


SSH Mastery: OpenSSH, PuTTY, Tunnels, and Keys - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelwlucas.com/nonfiction/ssh-mastery

<comment><USER2> I use tunneling instead of a VPN when I'm using an open wireless connection.</comment>


Versions: a gui Mac subversion client - <AUTHOR> http://www.versionsapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Versions is very cool... but doesn't it seem like they've missed the boat a little?

Git has effectively taken the world by storm recently, with a slew of web- based interfaces to people's push points and a huge amount of developer mindshare.

This might have been big money a few years ago.

<comment><USER3> I think you underestimate the number of users SVN has now and will continue to have. As SVN goes more and more mainstream companies will stick with it once they have it up and running. Switching to the latest and greatest VCS all the time is not a good use of time and resources.

<comment><USER4> Yep. I work at a rather large avionics company, which still mostly uses ClearCase. It's often an uphill battle to get projects moved into Subversion. Git?... not for a long time here, methinks.

<comment><USER5> If you're at a "large avionics company" using ClearCase, you're probably not using Macs with "10.4.9 and higher". (Because IBM says "At this time there is no plan to support ClearCase on Macintosh OS X, and it has not been tested for use on X11".)

It may be a good rule to support the median VCS if you're going after the median consumer, but a program for developers on recent versions of Mac OS X is not aiming at median consumers.

<comment><USER4> Touché, few Macs here, though I was just meaning to offer a datapoint for not- everyone-moving-to-Git-yet... Slightly useless in this context, I guess. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're using Git on a Mac, try GitNub: <http://github.com/Caged/gitnub/tree>

<comment><USER7> Is there a place to grab a binary for this?

<comment><USER6> Try this: <http://s3.amazonaws.com/caged/releases/GitNub_0.8.5.zip>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been keeping my eye on this product for awhile, I'm actually concerned to use it given how long it's taken to come to market.

I'll give it a try this evening.

</comment><comment><USER9> Meta-comment: These comments exemplify the classic Usenet culture:

"What's the best way to X?"

//blow to the head

"Do not X! You must Y!! Only the clueless and terminally insane even consider X!!!"

</comment><comment><USER10> Ugh, it doesn't support sites with self-signed SSL certificates. Does Versions expect me to send my SVN password in the clear? That's crazy!

<comment><USER10> Someone pointed out to me that Versions will work with sites using self-signed certificates if svn has been previously allowed to connect to the site (from the command line).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> pardon my ignorance - but how can i setup versions with my SVN repo and my local checkout? I was able to give it the login to my svn repo and that worked fine, but no clue how to get it to recognize my local svn checkout

<comment><USER12> Without knowing anything about Versions, why not just `svn ci` whatever you have modified locally, then re-checkout the repo again using the client? Totally understood if it's a big download, just throwing it out there as an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> damn that site is pretty. i want the app just cuz of the site.</comment>


Google unveils the Pixel 3 XL, with a 6.3-inch screen and an $899 price tag - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/pixel-3-camera-features/ <comment><USER2> I'd pay $1000 for a 4.5-inch screen, hardware keyboard and replaceable battery.

<comment><USER2> $2000 if it could reliably run an open source operating system.</comment></comment>


Time Travel Simulation Shows Quantum 'Butterfly Effect' Doesn't Exist - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/time-travel-through-a-quantum-world-has-nothing-to-fear-from-the-butterfly-effect <comment><AUTHOR> >Recovery of Damaged Information and the Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators

[https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.040605)</comment>


The Workplace Benefits of Being Out of Touch - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/your-money/companies-see-benefit-of-time-away-from-mobile-devices.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a little embarrassed to admit this as the founder of an Internet startup, but I didn't even have a smartphone until a few months ago. I had what my wife referred to as a "dinophone." :-)

Eventually, I succumbed to the pressure and curiosity of having a smartphone. Now, as I check my email, tweet, or check HN walking my dog, as I'm eating lunch, etc., I find myself wondering: is this connectedness actually making my life BETTER?

I think for me, the answer is somewhat ambiguous. Yes, I appreciate the flexibility of being able to reply to emails in places and at times I was previously unable. However, I think there is a cost. I'm a lot less "present" during the monotonous moments of life. And, I think it's this monotony --- the "down time" --- that often makes space for unexpected creativity in our lives. Perhaps that's why our best ideas often come during mundane tasks like taking a shower ([http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2011/why-you-get-ideas-in- th...](http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2011/why-you-get-ideas-in-the- shower/)).

Anyway, I think the bottom line for me is this: I need to learn a new skill: how to disconnect and, perhaps more importantly, come to value these "boring", unproductive moments so I can withstand the temptation of pulling out my phone. I think that's an even bigger challenge for me.

<comment><USER2> I don't think you need to be embarrassed about it, and I get the sense that avoiding smartphones (or at least, being able to not become welded to them) is at a _higher_ rate among techies than in their peers in the population at large these days. (Note: "peers" in this case means people of similar age, say 20-50, and similar socioeconomic position.) I think it's a combination of dealing with tech tools all day at work (and needing time off) and understanding the risks to security and privacy.

I still don't have a smartphone. I'm thinking I might get one the next time my contract's up, but I'm very much thinking I won't hook my email up to it....

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks for saying this. Geez, I thought I was the only luddite that didn't have a smartphone. That's a very interesting observation about "techies" being more adverse to smartphones.

I wonder where all this technology is going to lead. Connectedness should increase our humanity, not harm it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am constantly forgetting my phone at home, leaving it in the car, etc. I attribute it to an unconscious hatred of the thing. Of course I am from the generation that grew up without these annoyances, and look back with nostalgia at the days when you could leave the house/work and you were just "out" until you got back. And you were more likely to a) complete the errand or purpose of your trip without distraction and b) get back sooner because you didn't get diverted to handle three other requests on the way.

</comment><comment><USER4> My macbook bricked while I was on vacation, allowing me to actually read a bunch of the books I always bring along but never get around to...

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't believe how often I forget my phone at home now that I've got a wristwatch again.

</comment><comment><USER6> Taking the night off? Inform the IRS that companies are profiting from uncompensated labor!

</comment><comment><USER7> so true, if we're always available..

thats happened to me, and I think about work alot lately.</comment>


CoderPad - <AUTHOR> https://coderpad.io/ <comment><USER2> Cool, it's nice to see one of my projects make the rounds again. CoderPad has gone from frustrating "I can't believe no one's built this yet, interviews are so annoying" to a thing actual people are paying me for, and I have HN to thank for a lot of that early traffic.

If anyone here has any questions about CoderPad, please feel to ask here, or if it looks like this topic's dropping off the frontpage, I'm always available at firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER3> Your front page is scant on details, and I really don't like providing both email and a password just to figure out if I should send money to somebody. You don't have a published privacy policy, which reinforces that feeling.

Okay, so you say you do C++. What does that mean? Can you compile and see error messages? The editor in the demo has no line numbers - is there any hope in actually deciphering the errors and fixing the problem? Can I, the interviewer, provide or run unit tests against the code? Does the editor have things like auto-complete, code formatting, etc?

Okay, I gave up, I signed up. It's pretty cool, no, strike that, very cool. I had no idea from your front page. It wasn't clear at first that I could experiment endlessly without using my 2 pad quota, which was another thing to add friction for me to try it out. I can see that I can easily paste in some unit tests for the user to use. But, do you have boost, gtest, etc? What version of Python (and all other languages) do you support? What C++ compiler and version are you using? I tried some C++11 code, and it compiled, which is nice, but should I really need to type in test code to figure out what is supported?

Site seems very hacked together. Now that I am signed in, I have no way to get back to the start page, the FAQ, and whatever links you had on that front page. The code of my pads seems to somewhat overlay the ad links (select your plans) below. One I start editing code, there is no back button. If I use the browser's back button, sure I end up where I was - at the profile, with the new pad I just created not listed as one of my pads until I hit refresh on the browser. If I create a bunch of pads, it just creates them in a never ending expanding list - will I have ways to sort through for different candidates, times, etc? I kind of wonder what happens when you get to 50-60, as you don't seem to be storing them in a container - am I going to end up with a huge unmanageable page? Can I delete pads?

I also am not crazy about your tiers, though I recognize it is a common strategy. Small shops hire in bursts - a few months go by with few to no interviews, you get funding or a new contract, and suddenly you have 100 people to interview. Do I need to pay for a high tier so I can deal with the bursts? What if I buy the 20/month, and need 21 pads? Can I change my subscription level on a monthly basis? Is it really safe for me to just type my credit card number into your site? Why doesn't this just scale to my needs - why do I have to subscribe to tiers? Amazon doesn't make me pay for computer services I am not using, why do you?

I'm not looking for the answers to any of the above in this thread - I'm not going to recommend that my company pays for a service that cannot describe itself on it's webpage but eagerly provides me with fields with my credit card info, and whose only contact information is "me". There's not even an address - what recourse do I have if you take my data, or I have billing issues? Are you in the US, the UK, Argentina? Finally, I don't believe you can actually provide 24/7 support. I'm emailing "firstname.lastname@example.com" \- I doubt one person can service enterprise scale use 24/7\. I don't even know what your infrastructure is - are you using AWS such that you can easily add nodes as needed, or is this run on a box in your basement that dies when the power goes out?

Awesome app, bad site.

<comment><USER2> You're right, frankly, a lot of the web-facing stuff isn't quite there yet. I would say that this is because I have been working on improving the technical offering for my current customers, and that this HN posting has caught me in the middle of a frontpage redesign. I'm sorry about that.

As for the language versions, privacy policy, etc - those will be coming soon, but you can be assured I'm not NSA'ing you guys.

The tiering is because most shops favor cost predictability over scale-to- your-needs billing, which smooths out acccounting. I understand your concern here, though, and the pricing is still definitely very new (like the rest of this site).

My site is in fact on top of AWS (heroku), and I have 0 doubt about my ability to scale to enterprise usage. I've invested a fair amount in the architecture thinking up front, and I eagerly await a reason to pull the switch on my dyno counts. Unfortunately, I need an excuse to do it, but I might just spin up 20 nodes and do a load test for fun one of these days.

Anyhow, I'm glad that you at least like the product. Hopefully improvements to the landing page will be present soon. Sorry that your experience with it was so unfavorable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Going out on a limb here, but I'll assume this is for Ruby only? Nothing in the landing page suggests this works for other languages.

I like the implementation, but if folks didn't like the NSA spying on them, they might not like this. This is wiretapping on steroids. I'm assuming the interviewer watches every keystroke. Creepy. I'm sure authors, well spoken and in full command of the English language, would get annoyed at someone staring at them to see if they can write a novel.

Tech interviewing is broken, but all solutions historically point to trying to watch a person code. I don't think that's the solution. When folks realistically work on multiple tech stacks with multiple frameworks and multiple languages, what is to be gained by zeroing in (deeply) on only one aspect of it.

This explains the need for a tech interview "study guide" posted earlier in the day. You're working on stuff contextually needed for your current job, but you'll be tested on stuff you don't use daily/monthly/yearly? That's insane.

<comment><USER2> Sorry if it isn't super highlighted, but if you scroll down a bit, you'll see that I support most languages you'd want to use this for (current notable exceptions are Go and Obj-C, the former of which is coming soon). Here's the list:

c, c#, c++, clojure, coffeescript, haskell, java, javascript, lua, php, python, ruby, scala, scheme

As for your philosophical objection, I think the true value prop of CoderPad is a bit more nuanced than you make it seem, respectfully. The primary benefits as I see them are twofold:

1\. The right kind of candidate is wowed. It is a real fish landing back in the ocean moment. "Finally, this works like I've always dreamed it should." You look really sexy administering that interview.

2\. It can help you see candidates who have a firm grasp of programming but not quite a great hold on syntax do better. I would argue the former is more important, and CoderPad let's you see them experiment with syntax without having to rack their brains over whether the parameter goes before "do" in ruby.

<comment><USER5> I do think it could be highlighted better that other languages are supported. I almost didn't sign up because I thought it was Ruby only after the tutorial.

It would obviously be ideal to have a demo for each language you support, but even if you simply highlight a bit clearer which languages you support right in the top part of the page rather than as a bullet point further down, that should really help your conversion rate.

<comment><USER2> I'm in the middle of a reworking of the landing page. I almost wish this got posted a few days later :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Neat website! One quick thing - the Ruby 1.8.7 REPL on the homepage was a bit of a turn-off because that Ruby version was recently discontinued. I'm not sure if any newer versions of Ruby have been compiled down to Javascript yet though.

<comment><USER7> "Note that we are not using Ruby 1.9.x due to its reliance on threads, which cannot be ported directly using Emscripten." \- [https://github.com/replit/emscripted- ruby](https://github.com/replit/emscripted-ruby)

<comment><USER2> Hey, I made CoderPad. I'm looking at replacements for emscripted-ruby currently. Interesting candidates currently include doing it all server side, and using mruby compiled via emscripten. Unfortunately mruby's greatest current shortfall is lack of `require` support, which may or may not be a dealbreaker. What do you think?

<comment><USER8> mruby is a completely different beast from Ruby. Consider it a different language, not a different version.

What about using JRuby on the server-side?

<comment><USER2> I've thought about it. The daunting bits are the trickiness around how long the session should live. You'd like the repl's variables to persist between commands, etc, but at the same time letting an arbitrary code session live for a long time on your server is probably not the safest thing. If you have any resources on the topic, I would love to look at them.

<comment><USER9> Check out [https://github.com/opal/opal](https://github.com/opal/opal)

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks wonderful, and far better than just copying the code from a hackpad into ideone. Unfortunately, the real thief of time here is the phone screen itself - although what would have gone on an online collaborative editor now goes in a REPL, the interviewer still has to shepherd the 8 of 10 candidates who can't write Fibonacci. And out of generosity or fear of giving offense, they'll likely sit through it all.

(Which is the beginning of a fascinating discussion about choosing between the Scylla of wasted eng time and the Charybdis of a rigid, non-adaptive auto- screening, but that's for another comment.)

As far as the env itself goes, though, props++.

<comment><USER2> I do appreciate Greek myth. Allow me to respond in kind.

Athena is said to have emerged fully formed and fully armored from her interviewer's head, but what her peer reviewers did not see at the time was the struggle she faced in Zeus' ego. Though newly born, she yearned to wrest the tools of code to her will, yet no matter how she strained at the yoke of her keyboard, she could never quite overcome the compiler.

One day, she happened upon a memento that belonged to Metis. It was CoderPad, and it allowed her to more fully bring her will into reality. Using it, she forged herself a suit of armor - not her best work, but much better than the patchwork stuff she was making before. She banged and clamored with her shield, and eventually, the hiring manager Hephaestus was finally brought around to overrule's the stubborn Zeus' "no hire."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was wondering how all this could work in a browser, and to my surprise it appears there's a pretty well-developed project that has a bunch of language interpreters working in the browser via Emscripten (discovered via viewing coderpad.io's source): [http://replit.github.io/jsrepl/](http://replit.github.io/jsrepl/)

It appears to have been developed by/for [http://repl.it/](http://repl.it/), which is education- rather than interview-oriented.

<comment><USER2> Repl.it is really quite great. Unfortunately it is beginning to feel its age (2 years, now). I'm looking to get off of it for some of the core languages I support, and I already rely on other services for the other, trickier languages (C++, java et al).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently used [http://thereq.com/](http://thereq.com/) for a similar purpose. Features I liked:

      * I can set interview questions in various languages
      * Candidate can write code right away, I can see everything he/she writes
      * Code can be executed to see the result right away
      * This even works for SQL, they have a sample schema the candidate can manipulate
      * They have a fairly large library of questions you can just add to your interviews
      * It's completely free as far as I can tell

No affiliation with the site, but it was very useful for me.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice site, but please capitalize the first word of each bullet point. It looks unprofessional.

[http://oi44.tinypic.com/amqgqw.jpg](http://oi44.tinypic.com/amqgqw.jpg)

<comment><USER2> Good point. I'll do it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really great. A friend and I were going to start building something like this, mostly because we were like "why the hell does something like this not exist already"?

<comment><USER2> Those words are almost literally the gripe to my coworkers that spawned this whole thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For further discussion, check this previous posting: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5707525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5707525)

Glad to see you took some of my copy write advice from last time :)

If you don't mind me asking, how many users do you have?

<comment><USER2> Not very many by internet startup standards, but the ones I do have are very engaged. Thank you for your advice from last time, it was very helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome what you can pull off in SaaS. $200 Bucks a month and still no unlimited use.

<comment><USER17> It's likely a bargain if you end up using a lot of support hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very cool and immediately useful.

Might want to go over the "flow" of how the application will be used?

I'm guessing the interviewer will set up the "pad" and just send a URL to the interviewee?

<comment><USER2> Yup! Updated copy for the landing page is coming down the pipe. I should really make that bit explicit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems great and something like I would use but the only problem is that it doesn't work on my ipad and I use my ipad, allot.

<comment><USER2> I'm going to take some time this week or the next to flesh out tablet functionality. If you drop me a line via email, I can let you know when it's ready.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Would be nice if I could try out all the languages in the local session, just to drop any remaining objections.

<comment><USER2> This is coming - I've been swamped. Hear you loud and clear though.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why can't I pay for Firefox? - <AUTHOR> Google's "jump the shark" post yesterday [0] puts into sharp relief the perilous state of the net and privacy generally.  If nothing else, it reaffirmed my decision to delete Chrome and fully embrace Firefox - not just as a browser, but the only browser I use across desktop, laptop and phone.
Apple's pro-privacy stance is laudable, but questionable in its permanence - it's more strategy credit [1] than structurally embedded principle.
Mozilla might not be perfect but they're the closest to a organisation where privacy stands a chance of being a meaningful commitment rather than disingenuous propaganda or convenient byproduct of monetisation strategy.
And yet: Firefox is free, and Google remains a major funding source.
Whilst I can donate to the Mozilla foundation [2] (and have) I can't imagine it's a path many will easily find.
Which makes me wonder: why doesn't Mozilla offered a paid Firefox subscription option? Not suggesting it's mandatory, or that it has to offer premium features.  Equally realistic about the percentage of users who would actually pay.
Google's funding is around $300M pa [3].  That's 10M users paying $30pa.  That's a lot of people, but the internet's a big place.  The wikimedia foundation has so far managed to function on donations.
So: why wouldn't Mozilla offer the option?  Would you pay?
[0] https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/building-a-more-private-web/
[1] https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/
[2] https://donate.mozilla.org/
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-deal-with-yahoo-and-makes-google-the-default-in-firefox-again/ <comment><USER2> "...wikimedia foundation has so far managed to function on donations."

"Whilst I can donate to the Mozilla foundation [2] (and have) I can't imagine it's a path many will easily find."

Uh. So... Are donations viable or not? I'm sure if Firefox pop'd up a note on install and once a year saying "Help support Internet Freedom & Firefox" with a link to Moz's donation page... they'd get plenty.</comment>


Installing Linux on a $95 Onda Windows10 Tablet - <AUTHOR> http://hackernoon.com/installing-ubuntu-mint-linux-on-onda-820w-tablet-727747a376b <comment><USER2> It's quite sad that with the power of today's mobile devices (multicore 1GHz+ CPUs, GPUs, 2Gb+ RAM) we still don't have linux support without the need to resort on "hacks".</comment>


Beijing loves IKEA, but not for shopping - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china-ikea25-2009aug25,0,3900096,full.story <comment><USER2> If they're sensible, IKEA will embrace this, even if they're losing a bit of money now. It's establishing their brand and turning it into an aspirational product which will pay dividends as China gets more developed and more of these customers can afford their furniture rather than simply aspiring to it.</comment>


Ask HN: Fun things to do in the Bay Area as someone new to the area? - <AUTHOR> I'm here for work for a week and I'm staying in a nice Airbnb in Menlo Park about 5 minutes away from my company's office! After the redeye yesterday I worked all day and then I slept for like 10 hours and then today just relaxed during the day and went to Oak + Violet and had some great food.
Pretty broad topic but if anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears!
I am thinking of going to SF tomorrow and exploring a bit. <comment><USER2> Rent a bike from embarcadero. Ride it through golden gate stop by at fisherman's wharf for some clam chowder and Ghirardelis for some dessert. Its a great way to spend a day there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Go to tamales point and see the tule elk before they are gone

</comment><comment><USER4> Muir Woods has redwoods if you are into nature and hiking.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you have a car, or are you constrained to sites accessible by public transportation?

<comment><USER6> Just use ZipCar or SilverCar, they're great for day trips and very affordable if you don't own a car.</comment></comment>