The Burden of Policing Walmart - <AUTHOR> http://tampabay.com/projects/2016/public-safety/walmart-police/ <comment><USER2> What, exactly, should Walmart's response to shoplifting be? The article seems to make a point of the low dollar-value of some of the items stolen vs. how much the police spend arresting the subjects. I fail to see why the value of the stolen goods matters from a illegality perspective; it's not like Walmart can punish the shoplifters themselves.

<comment><USER3> Serious answer: Offer the accused shoplifter some alternatives to police involvement. Pay for the merchandise, pay a fine, sign an agreement to never be on the store property. I'm not a retailer - I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas.

Flippant answer: Pay Target to train your managers in how to not abuse community resources like police. They obviously figured out something that Walmart can't figure out.

<comment><USER4> Response to flippant answer: I'm pretty sure the only thing Target figured out is to cater to a higher income demographic.

I'm curious if there were less disturbances before Walmart, or if they were just more distributed throughout the city.

<comment><USER5> _I 'm pretty sure the only thing Target figured out is to cater to a higher income demographic._

Whereas Walmart's genius lay in not only continuing to cater to the lower income demographic... but to keep its valued customers addicted to junk food, junk clothing, junk music, junk kitchenware, and just plain... junk in general (peppered with vindictive, quite possibly career- and/or life-ruining arrests for drinking a $0.98 iced tea before paying, now and then) so that they _stay_ in the lower income demographic.

<comment><USER6> >drinking a $0.98 iced tea before paying

Or shoving it behind something else on a shelf and not paying at all. When people no longer have any respect for authority, social contract or citizenship AND you can't crack them over the head to teach a lesson in hard knocks, how are loss prevention supposed to deal with it? You let it go, then it's suddenly a widespread thing (YES IT WILL BE) and it costs everyone. And frankly it never ends. Certain people will go so low at the expense of others, it makes for an unworkable culture.

<comment><USER5> _How are loss prevention supposed to deal with it?_

In the normal, pragmatic way: wait until you actually _see them_ put the opened drink behind something else on the shelf. Which, not all the time but often enough, you surely will. If they're drinking it out in the open -- in the line at the register, say? Most likely they're going to pay for it.

 _Certain people will go so low at the expense of others, it makes for an unworkable culture._

By the same token, _treating people_ as if they're already "low" (by not giving them the benefit of the doubt for an opening a $0.98 bottle of iced tea before paying) makes for an unworkable culture, also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If they pay sales tax, that should more than cover policing costs. I find it hard to fault them for calling the police on shoplifting, even of $2 items, since that's the kind of product they sell.

<comment><USER8> > I find it hard to fault them for calling the police on shoplifting, even of > $2 items, since that's the kind of product they sell.

I'd take it a step further and say good job on actually following through with it. Otherwise what's the alternative? A private police force for Wal-Mart?

<comment><USER9> In my opinion, it seems the police hadn't been able to effectively do their job in the past (for whatever reason), causing other retailers to look into private security options, yet now that Wal-Mart has essentially forced the police uphold the entirety of the laws (such as theft for small items), the police are complaining that nobody else is making them do those things.

It likely comes down to a lack of proper resources given to the police departments....

<comment><USER10> > Wal-Mart has essentially forced the police uphold the entirety of the laws

Good! That is their job after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Were Walmart instead employing more-extensive private security, then I can see people complaining about that instead. Heck, I remember angry articles about how private security guard persuade folks to sign documents admitting guilt &c.

Instead, Walmart is handing the problem over to the public authorities. This seems intuitively fair: why _shouldn 't_ a poor person accused of shoplifting have access to the same presumption of innocence and procedural safeguards as a rich person?

People are going to steal. Theft hurts Walmart, but it also hurts poor people, who will have to pay the increased prices (or decreased service) that Walmart would require in order to offset the cost of theft (or perhaps Walmart will go out of business, and poor people will be stuck paying even higher prices still).

The real problem is the amount of crime. Fix that, and none of this is a problem.

<comment><USER12> Actually you have it somewhat inversed. Fix the poverty and you fix the crime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The fact that Walmart generates much more burden than similar competitors, but the same amount of tax revenue, is kind of alarming.

This feels like a fairly successful attempt to push private costs onto the public. Of course Walmart doesn't deserve to be robbed, but when they create the kind of environment where theft is easy and common, it also doesn't feel right for the taxpayer to be on the hook. If they had more employees patrolling aisles or more security, there'd be less cause for police to get involved. But that would cost Walmart money instead of the city.

<comment><USER14> > when they create the kind of environment where theft is easy and common, it > also doesn't feel right for the taxpayer to be on the hook.

This smacks of victim-blaming.

Would anyone suggest the company were at fault if we were not discussing Walmart?

<comment><USER13> That's a fair point. It's certainly wrong to blame the victim, although I feel like that diminishes when we're talking about _any_ company, not just Walmart.

Still, you're right to bring up the idea that I simply dislike Walmart and so would take whichever position is against them. I don't think that's what I'm doing, but it's an easy mental trap to fall into.

<comment><USER14> > I feel like that diminishes when we're talking about _any_ company

Agree. I should've put scare quotes around "victim blaming."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 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.

I think it's a journalistic failure that this simple explanation has not been addressed in what is a very long, biased article (they didn't even ask Walmart for comment as far as I can see).

</comment><comment><USER16> Walmart purchases go to sales tax, Walmart no doubt pays property taxes, they generate a ton of income tax, and who knows what else.

I'm sure all these figures are true, whenever I stop off at Walmart where I live to grab whatever I would say about 40% of the time there's a squad car out front, but the article plays it out like if the drunk wasn't causing trouble at the Walmart, he wouldn't be causing trouble anywhere. In my experience, those who walk into public intoxicated and yell at others will do so irrespective of their location. Same goes for dumbass kids (of which there was actually a group last time we were there, go figure, watched the manager haul them out by their collars) or shoplifters, if they weren't causing trouble at Walmart, they'd be doing it somewhere else because if you're that kind of person, being disruptive and annoying is how you pass the time.

<comment><USER17> > if you're that kind of person, being disruptive and annoying is how you pass > the time

So instead, with a few extra layers of abstraction, these kids could be disruptive and have their startup. :)

On a tangential note, it's fun to observe how disruption is a good thing if you're the disrupter, but a bad thing if you're the one being disrupted. Personally, I'd rather celebrate innovation, regardless of whether it involves disruption or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems like a question of incentives (Walmart has insufficient incentive to deal with this without the police) that could be solved by looking at how insurance handles things: If I'm in an accident, regardless of whether or not it's my fault, my rates go up.

It's like... So corporations are people. But they're a drastically different kind of person than you or I. They're divisible, they come in hugely different sizes, they have no incarnation, etc etc.

Dealing with people as mere statistics is dehumanizing. But corporations? Aren't corporations basically just a complex bundle of statistics to begin with?

So, a human who calls the police a lot gets a talking to, maybe goes in front of a judge, maybe something else happens. They don't have to pay more taxes to repay society; for the sake of this argument, because they're a human. They're not divisible; they're not a statistic.

But, a corporation who calls the police a lot... Well, why not treat them statistically? It's not like they can get a talking to (it's an abstract entity with no emotions or capacity for reason), go in front of a judge (it's an abstract entity with no physical incarnation), it's not like the "something else" can be the usual for humans: jail (it's an abstract entity around which you cannot put a wall).

But a corporate IS a set of assets; so work with it on that level. Charge it based on the requirements it makes to society. Pick a cut-off range (like a tax bracket) where it transitions from "not responsible for local crime" to "clearly responsible for local crime".

The taco stand down the street is clearly not responsible for local crime. It's a truck.

The Walmart super center is clearly responsible for local crime. It, in an of itself, _is_ a locality.

Or... Well, I don't know, so I've got to ask: How do large buildings "pay" for other emergency services? Fire, hospital, etc? (I know for fire at least, there's also passing inspection)

<comment><USER19> The problem is that by definition, such bills would be endorsed by people without huge amounts of property and money, while being utterly condemned by the likes of Wal-Mart. That asymmetry only ever ends in one way.

<comment><USER20> And which "one way" is that?

<comment><USER19> Given time, it ends in favor of the people with influence and money. They can experience setbacks, but they can literally afford to be a bit patient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the reason why partially walmart has more problems is because they have a poorer client base, and poorer areas in general have more crime. Even if they changed policies, hired more private security and so on and it reduced everything by %50, they would still have about 3x the amount of police calls than more upscale target.

It's pretty unfortunate. Like how much police activity does foodmaxx and grocery outlet have compared to safeway and whole foods? Or mcdonalds vs subway?

</comment><comment><USER22> Am I the only one that's inconsolably disappointed this turned out to not be a text-based adventure about policing Walmart?

</comment><comment><USER23> I would _love_ a system where private businesses were responsible & empowered to enforce sovereignty over their own premises. Is that what they're advocating?

Oh wait, no. They're advocating a sort of anarcho-tyranny where depending on who you are, you gain all the costs of complying with the law but none of the corresponding benefits.

My heart bleeds for the police heartlessly forced to enforce laws against theft etc, instead of kicking down doors at 3AM for the thrill of it & robbing travelers of their cash on the highway.

</comment><comment><USER24> Most of the reason is liability transfer.

Walmart can be sued for detaining someone wrongfully. The police, not so much.

As for the solution: the police simply start showing up at Walmart much more slowly. Once a Walmart gets a bad reputation, its business will slip away.

The fact that the police actually _hang out_ at the Walmart tells me that they really don't have something better they should be doing.

<comment><USER25> "Walmart can be sued for detaining someone wrongfully. The police, not so much." No, you can sue Walmart and the police. No difference. The outcome may be different. But you can sue.

Detain someone for drinking a 99cent drink? Have YOUR security personal walk him out and tell him he is off limits on the premise for the next 5 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Voted this up not for the article, but for the discussion. Lots of stimulating thought here about what the role of police, individuals, and corporations in society should be - and almost all of it very civil (in comparison to the normal Hacker News MO).

Glad to see an article generating this level of discourse on HN. Good stuff, people.

</comment><comment><USER27> So get rid of all of the WalMarts... Do the shoplifters stop shoplifting? Do the panhandlers stop panhandling? Do the homeless stop sleeping wherever they can? I doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm really impressed that the police in Tampa show up for crimes of such small value.

The police in Oakland (where I live) explicitly refused to show up for child prostitution.

</comment><comment> awinter-py [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasite)</comment>


The Literature of Laughing Gas - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/09/17/extreme-extreme/ <comment><USER2> I logged in here with a throwaway account just to caution people that for a small percentage of users it is highly addictive. Some call it 'hippie crack' with good reason. After using it off and on for years and becoming more addicted, my last binge lasted two weeks and I ended up in a dissociative nightmare with nerve damage and a rash all over my body.

</comment><comment><USER3> The observations on thoughts match my experiments about two weeks ago with the stuff. I had the profound revelation that our perception is only about 1/10th of reality. It was vastly enlightening- I realized it wasn't necessary to sweat or worry over my perceptions, they're only a small chunk of what is _really_ going on.

Also, during that experiment, I did some research via Erowid and discovered this fascinating article about "Nitrous gangs." [0] It turns out, nitrous at music festivals is a highly profitable and banned venture. To thwart this, gangs have been organizing financially and physically to sell nitrous to concert-goers without getting caught by organizers. The article reads a bit like a Pricenomics entry:

[0] [http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-07-06/music/hippie-crack- ni...](http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-07-06/music/hippie-crack-nitrous- mafia-boston/full/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Recreational use of nitrous oxide is not necessarily harmless, although it is relatively mild and short-acting compared to other drugs. Excessive intake can lead to convulsions and repeated abuse can result in damage to Broca's area, a speech center of the brain, which can result in aphasia. This is also thought to be a problem for ketamine abusers IIRC.

</comment><comment><USER5> Tangentially related: While expecting our first child, I learned that hospitals are now offering nitrous oxide to mothers during childbirth. The mother inhales just for the duration of the contraction. Apparently, the gas nitrous doesn't stay in the body as long as opiates and less likely to affect the baby.</comment>


Combinatorial Mathematics - <AUTHOR> https://www.edx.org/course/tsinghuax/tsinghuax-60240013x-combinatorial-3771#.VA5MLPldXD9

<comment><USER2> _As an ancient field, the history of combinatorial mathematics could be traced back over 4000 years to the age of the Great Yu in ancient China._

Interesting perspective.I will sign up though I know zero chinese.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha ha, Yu the Great is a legend!

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

At the bottom it says there are English subtitles and the course materials are all in English.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Invoice Boilerplate – Simple automated LaTeX invoicing system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mrzool/invoice-boilerplate <comment><USER2> Seems like a great deal of work and indirection compared to simply editing a LaTeX template like:

[http://www.latextemplates.com/template/invoice](http://www.latextemplates.com/template/invoice)

I'm not convinced that YAML is substantially easier to work with than LaTeX source if you're just filling in a bit of text and some numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> YAML is _way_ easier to edit and maintain than LaTeX source.

Also, separation of layout from content makes life easier.

And also, this one has built-in spreadsheet-like capabilities.

<comment><USER2> The template I linked automatically calculates hourly totals, prices given a rate and time and subtotals. I think that covers the "spreadsheet-like" capabilities you mention.

The presentation details of the template are bundled into a class file and each line item is simply:

        \hourrow{Date}{hours}{hourly rate}

As for whether one semi-structured text file is easier to edit than another, I suppose it will have to come down to a matter of opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems similar to [https://github.com/scalableminds/invoice- compiler](https://github.com/scalableminds/invoice-compiler) ( which i forked for a ERP app to [https://github.com/nicojuicy/report- compiler](https://github.com/nicojuicy/report-compiler) ) but the documentation isn't upto date on my fork :(

</comment><comment><USER4> When I started one of the first ISP's in Europe in '93, I generated invoices in LaTeX too. Only wish this was available then, these look so much nicer.

</comment><comment><USER5> For me the large margins look weird. I understand that margins are usually larger in latex output than for example word document, because they try to keep a reasonable number of words in one line. But here, the page is not filled with text. It's almost painfully empty.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry for the pain! I wrestled with the margins a good while before settling for the current layout, but I can see your point. I use the template with a custom letterhead I made in InDesign, so having lots of whitespace to spare was imperative for me.

On the bright side, you can easily customize the margins through the geometry option and enlarge the font size to 11 or 12pt to make it look less empty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In a similar vein, I generate my invoices using this Jekyll plugin that I wrote: [https://gitHub.com/mhw/jekyll-invoice](https://gitHub.com/mhw/jekyll- invoice)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it intentional for the 11 (eleven) in the date to look like a Roman II (2)? I don't think this is compatible with the masses.

<comment><USER7> I now see that it's the font's 1 (one). It's okay'ish in other places but in this case it looks like a Roman II.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that's just how Hoefler Text works. I don't see that as a problem, but if you do, changing the font to a more modern-looking one is very easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> in a vacuum, obviously fine, but from a design perspective - too many different fonts being used

<comment><AUTHOR> There's one serif (headings and letterhead) and one sans-serif (all the rest). Both can be customized in the options, so if you want to roll with just one, be my guest :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> its missing a page number / total page and especially what happens on page overflow?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! My invoices are always just one page long so I didn't consider the cases you mention. I'll remember your comment going forward.

<comment><USER9> also it looks like a german invoice so you are missing some informations (§ 14a UStG) especially some additional information (especially the USt.-Id Nr. on some cases, etc).</comment></comment></comment>


Git-annex: Peer-to-peer network with Tor - <AUTHOR> https://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/peer_to_peer_network_with_tor/ <comment><USER2> I've tried git-annex a while ago, while I admit this is definitely a killer feature I wasn't aware of, it is just not what I'm looking for tbh.

Tho I hope that annex gets more attention, it's still a great tool, especially with this tor pairing.

<comment><USER3> What makes it such a killer feature? Maybe I'm missing something, but I simply don't see the point.

<comment><USER4> If you use Git LFS this is a good way to not depend on central hosting for replication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great stuff! Annex stores large files that are linked from a repository. You can already easily mirror the repository and the files in it [1]. This allows you to easily transfer the linked files as well. Now the next step is federated pull/merge requests [2].

1 [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.htm...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.html)

2 [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/4013](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4013)

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I'm lacking in imagination--what are the killer scenarios for this?

<comment><USER6> You have two random systems on opposite sides of various NATs or other awkward network topologies, and you want to move data between them.</comment></comment>


Three Clever Xobni Features (1/3): "Are you Happy?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/01/three-clever-xobni-features-13-are-you.html

<comment><USER2> Without any further information from that happiness survey, it looks like a fairly unclever feature to me.

If I task-switched in after frustration from using another application I might as well enter No. Or if I just had a great coffee maybe I'll enter Yes.

If it is really clever, please show some more stats. 90% said they were happy. Was this correlated with time of day? Or a particular day? More interesting would be something like, on average, how long did it take for users to respond to the survey after it was activated. I venture to guess that this information -- unless most users give detailed comments, as opposed to clicking Yes/No, which most lazy users would do -- is hard to make useful unless you collect further usage details which would put the app into the spyware category.

<comment><USER3> The question should probably say, "are you happy with Xobni?"

That said, the feedback from this kind of thing can be surprisingly useful. You get a feel for the general mood of your users, and learn what the common pain points are (unhappy people generally say why).

Looking clever and being clever aren't always the same...

<comment><USER4> Yeah, and it only takes one feedback from one user to make you realize there's a real problem with something you've recently changed, which is actually what you want--if you can fix something before most users see it, there was no problem!

I will agree with the grandparent that the most obvious part of that feature isn't particularly clever: having a feedback field is a good idea that has been done before.

Also, the question may or may not be a bit vague. (I kind of like it because it gives a pulse on their software, especially on an individual user who could be sent an e-mail from a help desk technician when suddenly they choose no after selecting yes for many months.)

Either way, asking users if they're happy is a good idea because they will have statistics to prove it. For example, when I helped users with their support questions, I automatically asked them to fill out a survey. The question "would you recommend this to a friend" yielded a 9 out of 10 agreement rate (93% I think) over a period of a year. I am proud and have that as the first thing on the front page on my web site.

I think web apps + good stats are the way to go, so I'm gearing for that rather than desktop apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Survey questions like this one are not effective, monitor the usage & behavior of your users, which features are they using , which are they ignoring.

Compare the usage of users which are happy with your product (defined as continue using your software for a long time) with users that dump your product after a few hours of playing with it. What features are the happy users using? What are the unhappy ones missing?

Data mine everything, knowing your users behavior is power.

Customize user experience based on those stats.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I think I want to try that. Not getting feedback from users is a major frustrating point. I could imagine some would be prepared to at least press the Yes or No button. And once they made that step mentally, perhaps they'll even leave a comment.</comment>


My Experience as a Freelance Data Scientist - n-s-f http://www.gregreda.com/2017/01/07/freelance-data-science-experience/ <comment><AUTHOR> What advice do you have for striking out on your own? I.e., where did you find clients? I've toyed with the idea, mostly because I enjoy the mercenary lifestyle and I want to be able to choose when I work and where I live (geography unbounded).</comment>


ZFS on Linux still has annoying issues with ARC size - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ZFSOnLinuxARCShrinkage <comment><USER2> There's a good lesson in operability here: log reasons for decisions!

I have had to re-learn this lesson over and over again with my own software. "Tom, why did the system just do that?!" scream my users. "Er, let me check", i respond, already feeling that sinking feeling. "EDUNNOMATE" says the log. So, i add some logging around the decision (the data feeding into it, the choices made, the actions resulting), redeploy, and wait for my users to start screaming again, hoping that this time, i will be able to give them an answer.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author calls ARC autotuning "opaque" which surprised me given a well regarded paper has been published on it:

[https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast03/tech/full_papers...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast03/tech/full_papers/megiddo/megiddo.pdf)

[https://youtu.be/F8sZRBdmqc0](https://youtu.be/F8sZRBdmqc0)

...that said the author has been writing on the ARC for more than 10 years judging from his blog links so perhaps that paper did not answer his questions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Before I ditched ZoL for persistent storage for a few hundred NGINX caches, I saw this behavior too.

Setting zfs_arc_min to something like 50% of arc_max stopped it from dumping the ARC every 10 minutes.

YMMV.

<comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, what did you happen to move to (and why)? Back to ext4/xfs, or to Btrfs or something else more involved?

<comment><USER4> I just mount each SSD as its own XFS filesystem and use NGINX's split feature to fill them up.

Not resilient on a system level, but refilling the cache is cheap.

ZFS was generally pleasant from an operability viewpoint once we ironed out the quirks, but the perf hit from no sendfile was too much.

<comment><USER5> That's a good point; I never looked at what the perf impact of disabling sendfile would be on even a moderately-loaded webserver.

It'd be really nice to see that fixed like the recent DIRECT_IO additions.

<comment><USER6> Of course the people around these parts tend to have very particular needs and use cases, but for anything resembling the "common case" the performance impact of not using sendfile should be negligible.

(I'll just point of that using sendfile means that traffic is unencrypted... which is probably fine on an internal network, but I've started adopting the stance that even internal network traffic should be encrypted unless there's a very good reason not to do that. An absolute requirement for performance might be a good reason.)

<comment><USER7> If nginx decided to support ktls they could use sendfile for encrypted traffic as well. Unsure if it is worth it just to make sendfile work however.

<comment><USER5> I was going to mention kernel TLS hopefully enabling sendfile for mostly-HTTPS workloads, as that's the direction everything is heading anyway, and without it we don't get zero-copy for those connections.

Now I'm more curious about the actual threshold where not having sendfile begins causing noticeable performance problems… at what point before you become Netflix?

<comment><USER8> If your cache can face-tank a HTTP-DDoS, you don't need fragile fingerprinting techniques to distinguish bad from good, thus reducing the user impact (less accidentally-blocked users). The less cost you have for filling that 100 Gbit NIC with your TLS cache traffic, the more boxes you can afford. Internet exchanges are surprisingly cheap to connect to.

Of course sharing resources between a couple services would be good, as NICs and switch ports are sill a way from free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have very weird read performance issues on read using the stable ZoL in current Ubuntu LTS, on a box with over 200GB of ram and a few TB of L2ARC fast flash.

The default settings for L2ARC fill rate are also super low.

I haven't had time to track down exactly why it's so slow, yet.

<comment><USER10> What's the topology of your array? How many disks? L2ARC doesn't help with that much ram because your main memory will be faster than even mirrored nvme caches

<comment><USER9> 8x 10TB HDD, 4x 512TB flash, all 6gpbs SATA. 256GB ram, 40 cores. The HDDs are all in raidz2, with the SSDs all as L2ARC.

I have an ubuntu mirror on the machine that's around 150gb, and doing a `tar -c $MIRRORPATH | pv > /dev/null` shows lots of reads from the HDDs, even on second, third, fourth runs. It confuses me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have the same problem. Sometimes it just drops the whole cache suddenly and I don't have a clue why: [https://walkman.cloud/s/zXLp7DF9sDFwr7z](https://walkman.cloud/s/zXLp7DF9sDFwr7z)

<comment><USER12> You may find it informative to graph MRU/MFU - I suspect you will find that the MRU is being dumped. [1]

I personally can't decide whether I think it's a bug or not, since if the MRU is all old items there is an argument to be had that you don't want it in cache any more...but dumping 100% of it strikes me as a bug either way. :)

[1] - [https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/7820](https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/7820)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I still have this bug. [https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/8396](https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/8396)

Page faults from NFS client side aren't served by the server when they should (readonly map, reading a page). I could imagine this is related.</comment>


HTC sues Apple over everything - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/apple/htc-sues-apple-over-everything/ <comment><USER2> At this point, I find it unfathomable that Congress doesn't seem to have even noticed that the tech industry is imploding on itself with the ridiculousness of it all.

Yes, they have lots of fish to fry right now, but if they can spend time arguing about incandescent light bulbs [1], surely there must be some time on the legislature to sort this mess out? The whole thing has turned from skirmish into full-on war in less than a couple of years. I can't imagine how much worse it's going to get.

[1] <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/58964.html>

<comment><USER3> If you're going to raise irrelevant political issues like lightbulbs, at least place the blame where it belongs, which is not on "Congress" generally, but on a few Texas House Republicans (Jo Barton in particular), who are idiotically attacking the idea of having standards to increase energy efficiency.

Placing the blame on Congress generally spreads the incorrect belief that all legislators and both parties are responsible for criminally stupid stuff like this. They're not.

<comment><USER4> Why is having standards on lightbulbs a federal issue? Shouldn't it be best handled by the states? Perhaps the EPA or Department of Energy could write a report or make recommendations; but at the end of the day it should reside in the state.

<comment><USER5> So you think that each state should have a light bulb plant? If not, then we are talking interstate commerce, which means federal standards.

<comment><USER6> It is not actually the federal government's job to regulate every detail of every transaction that crosses state lines. The specifics of the lightbulbs are only tangentially related to the commercial transaction and even less connected to the fact that it crosses state lines, so I would hardly consider Congress negligent if it declined to make rules for cross-state light bulb shipping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem with patents is fourfold:

1\. Large companies, as a whole, like them. So Republicans like them;

2\. Trial lawyers _definitely_ like them (software patents are the Lawyer Full Employment Act in all but name). Many Congressmen are lawyers. The Democratic Party is basically the political wing of the American Bar Association (eg it's Democrats who oppose tort reform of any kind) so Democrats like patents too;

3\. They're currently being wielded by largely American companies. If American companies were seen as being victimized by foreign companies it would be a totally different political landscape; and

4\. America is such a large market that it affects both local and foreign companies anyway so there is limited benefit to setting up shop elsewhere.

Personally I think (3) and (4) are the key to getting Congress to do something but I suspect that by the time either or both happen, it'll be far too late to fix.

America, as a whole, seems beholden to "old world thinking" when it comes to intellectual property. Just look at the mess of lawsuits by the RIAA/MPAA (being tantamount to legalized extortion), copyright treaties negotiated in secret that want to put copyright infringement on the same level as terrorism, the Obama administration infested with ex-RIAA lawyers and so on.

The collective ignorance with respect to IP by the courts, the executive branch, the legislature and most people as a whole is staggering and until that changes don't expect much to change.

<comment><USER8> Given that patents in non-US countries tend to be weaker and harder to get, (3) is unlikely to change.

On the other hand, if America's growth stays anemic while Asia (and to a lesser extent South America) keep growing (which seems likely), (4) will take care of itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well good. The nuclear war has finally started. Once everyone is obliterated, maybe some real change can finally be made.

Nobody is going to 'win' this war. Everyone who participates will be a loser, and at this point, nobody can afford not to participate.

If there aren't some serious cease-fires real soon, this is going to be a bloody battle.

In case anyone isn't following along: Imagine a scenario where every major piece of electronics equipment has been banned from sale in the United States.

<comment><USER10> "Nobody is going to 'win' this war."

This is an existential crisis for the smaller companies, but it's simply raising the stakes a little bit for Apple, who are making enough profit to afford endless litigation.

The whole contest has numerous immediate benefits for Apple. Since they're making the lion's share of the money in smartphones, they win simply by raising the table stakes (i.e. litigation costs and court awards), which eat up a disproportionate share of their competitors' profits. It's not outrageous to think that their lawsuits pressured unprofitable Motorola to first threaten to sue other licencees and then sell to Google under extortionist conditions. I wouldn't be surprised if other struggling Android handset makers (LG?) moved to the fixed cost of Windows Phone 7 over the headache of Android-related litigation. Of course, the Motorola purchase incentivises _profitable_ Android makers to hedge their bets on WP7, too.

In the end, I think that Apple will be pleased if the product of their litigation is not to drive Android out of the market, but to create a phone market much like the tablet market - the iPhone and then a mish-mash of odd looking (to the average consumer) competitors.

<comment><USER11> _it's simply raising the stakes a little bit for Apple, who are making enough profit to afford endless litigation_

No, Apple cannot overlook the possibility that the import and sale of some of their own products is banned in the US. If that happened as a result of their litigious adventuring, they'd have some real explaining to do to big investors.

Look at what happened with Blackberry and NTP. The actual service (used heavily by the US Government and no doubt patent judges) came very close to being shut down. Probably someone gave the parties a good talking-to and forced the settlement. But in this case, a suspension on the sale of _these particular_ shiny devices is not an existential issue for anyone except Apple's executives.

<comment><USER10> That's such a remote possibility that, yes, Apple can overlook it or at least consider it a remote risk in their cost/benefit analysis. If anyone had the patent position to keep Apple out of the market, rest assured that they would have regardless of Apple's lawsuits. Compared to the potential benefits of muddying the competitive field just as they make their first multi-carrier U.S. launch with the iPhone 5, it's an extremely negligible potential cost.

<comment><USER11> It's not a "remote possibility". It's foolish to predict the results of international quasi-legal panels and US judges and juries when it only takes one claim on one infringing patent. Even newcomer HTC has stockpiled hundreds of patents by now, some of which Apple has already been declared to be infringing.

 _If anyone had the patent position to keep Apple out of the market, rest assured that they would have regardless of Apple's lawsuits._

No, I don't agree with that at all. The vast majority of all patents are never litigated and it's very rare that any large-budget manufacturer is actually kept out of a market as general as mobile touch-screen phones.

Normally patents are ignored, occasionally they're pooled or cross-licensed. Usually only trolls end up going as far as actually obtaining a suspension of sales and imports, but even then their goal is payment.

This is what makes Apple's decision to start a "real" patent war with HTC (and all Android makers by extension) so exceptional. Apple has as much to lose as anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The thing about these patent suits is that they (almost) end up being settled out-of-court in a cross licencing deal. The terms of the deal are (almost) never public, which makes the patents seem more valid (the company can claim they have been licensed for huge amounts of money the next time they sue another company over them) .

The court cases are usually just a way of changing the bargaining position.

<comment><USER13> _The court cases are usually just a way of changing the bargaining position._

What do you mean by this exactly?

<comment><USER9> The court cases are just a threat to get someone to go along with you. Just like the cold war, where nukes were used as a threat... They're only effective if you parade them around once in a while. If you don't remind people you have them, they forget.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In the year 2015 will it be possible for newcomers to start new businesses? Patents seem to be reaching a point where companies are grabbing everything that can be thought of and everyone arriving late to the scene is accused of thoughtcrime. Someone more charismatic, persistent and eloquent than me needs to start civil disobedience against patents.

<comment><USER15> The Internet is global.

Of course you can start a business. You just need to find a way to charge US customers from whereever you are (assuming that the credit card companies will block you if you ignore US lawsuits).

Or you just ignore the US market and target the rest of the world. Actually that's what already has partially happened in the banking/broker sector: Try to open a broker account at one of the European brokers and they'll very likely tell you that they don't want to have you as a customer because you are US citizen or resident (just happened to me some weeks ago). Of course the reason for the brokers aren't patents, but US regulations that would be too much of a hassle.

<comment><USER14> a) I found the comment about not being able to open accounts abroad very interesting, proving that runaway legislation does have an incurred cost. In the same vein one of the reasons George Soros gave for shutting down his fund was that the cost of complying with legal requirements was too high. b) Charging people remotely works for software but does not work for hardware because imports of your products can be stopped for patent infringement. c) I wonder if there is a precedent for company A going after your payment provider for enabling patent infringement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately, big companies with shipping products have every incentive to settle by cross-licensing & royalties.

What we need is someone with deep pockets to form a patent troll and actually block shipping products rather settle. This will force big companies to lobby congress to fix software patents.

<comment><USER16> Haha - fooled you!

If you tried this, you would probably fail!

The government (lobbied by big companies) will convince the courts to block your injunction and force you to settle. You know, "risking national security by ruining the economy" or something.

<comment><USER17> HTC is a Chinese company, and Apple makes all their gadgets in China. This has very little to do with the US, except that we are the ones paying for the gadgets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm honestly afraid this is going to turn into another ridiculous partisan battle in congress that ends up with a terrible solution because of infighting.

<comment><USER11> Don't worry, a patent reform debate doesn't have the necessary television- appeal to turn into a real partisan battle. Unfortunately, the powerful interests it attracts may be even worse (for those seeking a non-terrible solution).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Earlier phone patents [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_telephone#Pate...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_telephone#Patents)

and previous disputes <http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/edison/section4.rhtml>

</comment><comment><USER20> The original complaint & the actual patents if anyone is interested: <http://thisismynext.com/2011/08/16/htc-sues-apple-patents/>

</comment><comment><USER21> Wasn't there that article about people not being able to focus? The result of this patent war is that you will now be able to focus on whatever you're doing. See, problem solved! Lawyers to the rescue !

</comment><comment><USER22> Majority of Congress are lawyers. Lawsuits like this help theirs colleagues to make more money. They are not going to cut the branch their profession is sitting on.

</comment><comment><USER23> And not a single word about the patents themselves.

<comment><USER20> Here you go: <http://thisismynext.com/2011/08/16/htc-sues-apple-patents/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Once you start a nuclear war, the only possible outcome is death to everyone and everything.

I for one welcome our new gadget-less future.

</comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone have links to the actual papers?

</comment><comment><USER25> So at this point every company has dirtied its hands with Software patent suing. So I'm guessing pretty much nobody is about to try and stop the madness since it would make them seem as if they are hypocrites or whiners (these cases take forever to be resolved). Not sure any company out there is going to do much of anything to stop it.

</comment><comment><USER26> playing devils advocate here.

But when companies fight over patents, does't that mean that they are putting money on R&D that will eventually drive all the field forward in the middle term? even if at some cost on the short term... Apple and HTC are not /just/ patent trolls.

...I find my own argument hard to swallow, but i just thought i had to offer ONE counter point to one patent posts on HN :)</comment>


I will never be able to log in to Flickr again - <AUTHOR> http://ngzhian.github.io/blog/posts/2014-05-24-yahoo-flickr.html <comment><USER2> "I was surprised to find out that Flickr now requires a Yahoo account to log in. I'm not sure when this was implemented..."

Yahoo usernames were required in 2007: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6316761.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6316761.stm)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty sure from 2007 till 2014 they made some changes to allow users to log on using Facebook/Google accounts, and they reverted in recent months

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This feels sensationalist to me. Password requirements, a captcha, and (optional I think) phone verification are common on many sites. I was able to create an account in about 30 seconds. I think if the author wants to, he will be able to log in to Flickr in the future

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes many sites do require that, but Yahoo? I expected a little more from them, does it even make any sense to have such password requirements anymore? Also, I can't tell for sure if the phone verification is optional, it could be required for new sign ups randomly. Yea I most definitely can, but I will definitely don't feel like logging in anymore.

<comment><USER3> The requirements are reasonable in my opinion: the length range prevents too short of passwords, and the variety of characters range prevents some of the weakest passwords: 'password' for example. Not allowing whitespace in passwords can prevent a lot of headaches - say I wrote a password on a piece of paper. How do I represent two spaces vs. one space? Nicer for Yahoo to not have to have to deal with that type of problem from angry users.

All CAPTCHAS are a pain, but the reasons for having one are fair.

The phone verification is a more interesting issue. When I created an account yesterday, it never asked anything about phone verification. And some people don't perhaps have phone access who could be trying to register? If it is randomly mandatory, that's a decent pain and privacy issue. I'm guessing it's probably opt-in or opt-out though

Do I agree with all their decisions? Not really, but I can see why they were made

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yep Yahoo! does have pretty much the worst sign-in/sign-up system on the internet. Its even worse than LinkedIn.

Maybe instead of spending billions buying and "sunsetting" random mobile apps or mediocre blog platforms Marissa should dedicate a single high school dropouts salary to fixing the damned thing.

I've all but given up on logging into any Yahoo! property at this point.

</comment><comment><USER5> At least when you log in to flickr, you don't get the message "Hello- new account signups are temporarily unavailable from this network address space used by your Internet Service Provider", as I've been getting for so long.

Maybe some day, Yahoo will get their heads out of their asses and restore access to my old photos. I'm not holding my breath.

</comment><comment><USER6> The worse, I guess, is the password constraint. I really fail to understand why should any application (except banking, may be) force its users to go for difficult passwords. I agree, it weakens the security - but warn them, don't force them. It should be a guideline; not a rule. Whether I want to follow it not is my decision; my risk.

<comment><USER7> I can't think of a set of rules to make passwords secure. It all feels like smokes and mirrors at this point. Are we going to have a blacklist of passwords that you can't use as passwords anymore (and require users to change password on next log in as we add new items to the blacklist)?

Otherwise, the more I read about these experts who can get 90% of a 16k password hash list figured out in a few hours, I can't think how MyAuntSally1 is any safer than donkey

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm still able to log in to Yahoo! with my Google account, although it seems they're phasing out that option: [http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/05/technology/yahoo-google- face...](http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/05/technology/yahoo-google-facebook- login/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I found the tool used to generate the blog interesting. Hakyll, a static site generator for Haskell inspired by Jekyll, which uses pandoc to generate HTML from Markdown. [http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/](http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/)

</comment><comment><USER10> For the author, typo on 'asking', " indicates an error, askign me to"

</comment><comment><USER11> Yahoo don't care about the user experience. I hate the fact that flickr was bought by them and not Google. The requirement to have a Yahoo account to sign in to it is a bit of a joke, considering how their mail service might as well not exist any more.

</comment><comment><USER12> No spaces in passwords? Obviously not hashing them.

<comment><USER13> Spaces are just characters. Their presence has nothing to do with hashing algorithms working or not.

<comment><USER14> That's the point; since spaces in the password cleartext should not matter for storing the password hash, what would be a good reason to disallow them?

<comment><USER15> There isn't one.

<comment><USER12> Which begs the question why I was downvoted heavily and posted to @shit_HN_says for making the comment.

<comment><USER15> How the hell should I know? But if I had to guess, I'd say it was because your prior comment implicitly equates "spaces prohibited in passwords" and "passwords not hashed" and assumes the latter as a necessary consequence of the former, when the two are entirely unrelated.

Now, to be fair, that's an uncharitable interpretation of the comment you're complaining about. But you helpfully make clear in a later comment that that was what you meant:

> I'm saying that because they're disallowing the submission of spaces, they > aren't hashing their passwords when they get to the server.

And that just doesn't follow, and that's probably why your comment is getting downvoted, but not why I downvoted it just now. I don't downvote for content, but only for rudeness, unfunny jokes, and complaining about downvotes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside AT&T's 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2013/05/19/inside-atts-83gbhour-mobile-cell-tower-or-why-your-iphone-no-longer-drops-out-at-huge-events/

<comment><USER2> To convert to more normal units, that is about 189 Mbits/second. Which sounds a little less impressive considering the peak 4G speed is supposed to be 100 Mbit/second.

<comment><USER3> I thought 83 GB/hr seemed like not much capacity, and indeed that really isn't much. I've seen these units (and from other carriers as well, IIRC) before and figured they were bringing massive amounts of extra backhaul to spots with big events.

I'm curious how these figures relate with what 'normal' towers have allocated. I've seen the rough 1 gbps figure before but don't know how accurate that is.

<comment><USER4> 1Gbps assumes the tower has fiber. Since this was a temporary event we can assume they don't have fiber available, that and the article illustration shows a microwave backhaul.

Standard microwave backhaul in a licensed band typically tops out around 263Mbps as that's what you get with 256QAM in 40Mhz of spectrum.

<comment><USER5> A lot of operators are switching to higher frequency bands for their backhauls, I see a lot of Ubiquity airfibers popping up here in India. Airfibers are 800mbps full duplex

<comment><USER4> What kind of distances are they pushing them to?

AirFiber radios (I'm quite fond of mine) and other 24Ghz, 60Ghz, and 80Ghz radios have severe rain fade so you need to keep the distance down to one or two miles unless you feel lucky. Now find a cell tower in that distance with fiber and available mounting space. I suppose that isn't a big problem in a more densely populated area like southern California, but still more challenging than parking a 11Ghz dish on a rooftop somewhere within 14 mile or so.

From what I've heard most carrier interest in high frequency bands is for links going a few city blocks to connect micropops back to a area hub site. That kind of caution with fade margin is more in line of what I'd expect out of at&t or a similar provider.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure that the distances are under 10 Km or 6 miles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So light on details.. could have mistaken it for a press release. And more amazing, they managed to get some of that wrong. In their graphic, they mislabeled the mobile command post as H, and G in the key... and "AT&T's network is about 80% iPhones" then link to an article about _smartphone_ sales in _Q4 of 2012_

<comment><USER7> > could have mistaken it for a press release

I tend to avoid articles on any 3rd party sites with the word "Mac" or "Apple" in their domain names for this exact reason. The effects of the RDF are just too transparent.

<comment><USER8> The only thing they're good for is reporting (the existence of) rumors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I ran a mobile gaming conference for about 250 people in a major city back when AT&T was the only game in town for the iPhone (~2009). Without calling us or us reaching out to them, AT&T contacted the venue and installed a micro- cell--free of charge--to ensure good coverage throughout the day.

Say what you want about the network or the company, but I was impressed. (It probably didn't hurt that we had some folks from Apple on the attendee list.)

<comment><USER10> I help run a conference in Portland, OR and would love to look into this further.

Do you have any contacts still or any idea who I could get in touch with to get more information? Thanks!

<comment><USER9> I'm afraid I don't. We never actually found out from AT&T how this happened or who was responsible--someone got in touch with the venue manager and the next thing we knew, a micro-cell showed up.

I'm told one can rent them (it was a small rack of equipment), but I'm guessing it's rather expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is pretty surprising that AT&T engineers were the ones to design the antennas. It is usually vendors such as Nokia-Siemens, Alcaltel-Lucent or Ericsson that provide the equipment and that have the antenna/radio know-how while on the operator side the engineers there focus more on optimization and RF planning, rather then the design.

<comment><USER12> If you watch the video of the two AT&T engineers, they basically say that they just had the idea; their (unnamed) vendor actually did the work to see if it was feasible and designed the antenna.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have an unlimited ipad data plan on AT&T, and for 1 month straight, I streamed video constantly just to test if they throttled or capped Unlimited Ipad plans. 128GB in 1 month and I was still getting 50+down/15up.

Evidence: My twitter images twitter.com/MichaelLargent

<comment><USER14> Leeching 128GB would only take 6 hours at the speeds you describe. I would certainly hope that they don't cap you after a period that could be as short as 6 hours!

<comment><USER13> Well, I'm actually outside of the LTE area, so I ran my test on 4G HSPA+.

The image for the speed test was to see if they throttled at the end of the month.

Just to be clear...don't try this on a supposedly Unlimited iphone data plan, or straight talk unlimited...doesn't work lol.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure what any of this has to do with the math. You claim 128GB over a 50Mb connection. That's less than six hours of constant streaming. Unless you want to qualify it with "during the times AT&T actually provided reliable service," your numbers seem off. A lot.

<comment><USER16> You're assuming that streaming video can provide data at the same rate as speedtest. In reality those numbers are nowhere close, and don't reflect the reliability of AT&T's service.

<comment><USER15> I'm not assuming anything. I'm asking for clarity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been researching something similar for a startup idea for a while now.

There still a couple of problems that still haven't been addressed (or just aren't included in this article)

1\. 1 Cell site isn't enough to cover a densely populated area. Although this is running on 850mhz which is much lower than wifi at 2.4ghz, multiple cell sites are usually better than 1 big one. If their peak is only 189mbps, then it should be fine using cat6 cable, however your limited when for range as you will run in trouble if you run cable over 100m without a repeater or booster. The other option is to use fibre, which is rather expensive but it wouldn't be that bad for AT&T considering their size.

2\. Limited to the network beyond the cell towers.

This is coming from experience being at large festivals like Coachella, but although you can get signal on your phone most of the time, sms is virtually useless since your txt's are delayed by 4-5 hours. You can make a call after about trying 10 times, but because of the noise, you can never hear what the other person is saying and vice versa. So unless they are running a local relay for text's and transferring calls, their network servers are the ones that need beefing up rather than the towers themselves.

Now I'm guessing people are going to be using data more than anything, but in the past I've found 2g to be much more reliable (3g flatout did not work at the last festival, Big Day Out I was at). We found that Whatsapp became the most reliable way to communicate between our friends as your messages wouldn't get delayed for hours.

</comment><comment><USER18> what do the AT&T vans connect to? I assume that there is no landline available for them to hook into, so how are they providing service?

my guess is satellites or communicating with other cell towers but the latter seems counterproductive as it would push a high load to a different cell tower. but if they used satellites, wouldn't there by high latency and bandwidth limits?

<comment><USER19> The image at the very top of the article mentions they have a microwave backhaul (see "E"), which I'm assuming goes to another ground location (i.e. a central office.)

<comment><USER13> Actually this makes better sense than what I was guessing about cell towers below. So, what I'm imagining is these temp towers will make sure that you can get connected.

I think ATT is a tier 1 network, so your connection to whatever data center will probably get bonded directly to whatever ATT datacenter which has the fastest response (ping) to the content your connecting to...love to see a traceroute for comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know if they do any local web caching? There's nothing mentioned, but you'd think that a small-ish transparent web cache would save them a lot of bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER21> Can you feel the heat when you sit next to this antenna?

<comment><USER22> In the ground probably not, but put your hand right in front of one of those dishes and you get some serious RF burn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was at this concert actually, and I have to see it was the most spectacular reception I've ever had an event.</comment>


Ask HN: Any recommendations on building a team and delegating? - martin-adams

So I'm currently contracting under my own business and find myself working with and managing remote teams more and more.   At the same time I'd like to start building my own team to delegate work to.
Does anyone have any recommendations, such as books that are good reading on this topic?  I'm looking to improve my delegation and technical management skills, but also grow my business.
Thanks in advance. <comment><AUTHOR> I worked with my organization's leadership development team for the past few years, here are two recommendations to get you started:

 _the leadership challenge_ by kouzes and posner ([http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008DM2MK8](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008DM2MK8)) - the canonical book on business leadership, well worth the investment. it's research-driven and full of case studies and examples; many MBA programs will teach an entire semester on this bad boy. not much to say here that isn't in the reviews.

 _it 's okay to be the boss_ by bruce tulgan ([http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061121363](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061121363)) - if the leadership challenge feels a little too high-brow or abstract ('transformational vs. transactional,' in leadership jargon), this little book can scratch the itch for tactical management tips. tulgan can seem a bit directive and simplistic at times, and his advice may not fit with every organizational culture, but he's a savvy student of organizational leadership, and a quick read.

leadership, especially in a remote environment, isn't trivial - congratulations on being willing to invest in this skill. best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER2> While I haven't any book recommendations, I think one of the key things for delegation is to understand that you don't have to do everything. If you believe that you have to do everything because otherwise the work won't get done, then you either don't trust your team to be able to execute, or you want to be the "hero", neither of which are good things.

For more inexperienced delegates, you'll have to spend more time forming the task into something concrete for them to work with. However, over time you're building them up to be a productive member of the team that will need less and less instruction. I'm not sure a book can teach that, because I believe it's knowing your team, what they're capable of, and making the most out of their talents.

I'm assuming for this response that you have someone to delegate to. You also have "building my own team" as a discussion point, and I can't help there.

<comment> martin-adams Thanks! Very helpful. I can certainly see both the lack of trust and "hero" traits in me. I've known this for many years and realising this is going to be a very crucial factor in being able to scale up my business.

I've got a couple junior people on a part-time/freelance basis who I can delegate to.

I think one of my biggest challenges is learning how to progressively disclose the level of complexity about the task and not bombard them. But also providing them with clear measurable goals for them to work on.

Right now I feel like I'm too much in the teaching role because the people I have available are learning, but I can't yet afford anyone with more experience (yet).

<comment><USER2> > I think one of my biggest challenges is learning how to progressively > disclose the level of complexity about the task and not bombard them. But > also providing them with clear measurable goals for them to work on.

I agree with this. It's not an easy problem to tackle. You could manage other people for years and still not have a good handle on it, but hopefully it gets easier to feel over time, as to what's too much for them. How well you know the other person is also a factor in this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This isn't a book, like you asked, but my startup has found project management software, when used correctly, to be helpful in doing this. We have settled in with PivotalTracker.com for its compromise between price, customizability, and feature set/enforced ideology.</comment>


Cash/Consent: The war on sex work - <AUTHOR> https://nplusonemag.com/issue-35/essays/cashconsent/ <comment><USER2> This war very much effects us as technologists, both directly as restrictions on what we may build and operate, as well as indirectly through our ethical obligations to act with the public interest in mind.

For example, it would be illegal for me to run a website which let sex workers anonymously check a particular client's phone number to see if someone had previously reported them as violent. FOSTA/SESTA would expose me to both criminal and civil liability, even if it wasn't intentionally made with sex workers in mind, if I didn't act to stomp out any sex workers from using the service.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, I sort of worry about anonymously crowd-sourcing reputation like this. Putting aside the notion of sex workers for a minute, suppose you ran a site where people could report bad drivers by their license plate numbers. (I believe such sites exist.) If someone doesn't like you, they go on and file fake reports about you, and now you can't get a delivery job (etc). There have already been issues with more public entities on sites like Yelp which have caused people to lose their entire livelihood, and now you want to bring that sort of thing to individuals?

<comment><USER4> Are you saying that should be illegal? Doesn't that seem like a violation of freedom of speech?

As it is, libel laws give you protection if you can prove the claims are false, and you can get civil damages if you show harm. What would you say should be legislated beyond that?

<comment><USER5> When reports are anonymous, you'll have trouble suing for libel. When the output of the site isn't a stated fact ("person x did y"), but a "calculated probability" without actually producing any of the reports ... good luck proving that the probability of you recklessly driving is below 50%.

It's not an easy decision, but I lean towards "should be illegal if done anonymously and without proof".

<comment><USER4> So you're saying if I wrote a post on NextDoor saying you were a bad driver (no proof) and putting your license plate that should be illegal?

Would it be a civil thing where you could sue me for some amount, or would you make it a criminal infraction?

<comment><USER5> It's a thin line, but mostly I'd regulate the platform to not allow anonymous slander. Between individuals, it's most likely a civil issue, I'm not a huge fan of having criminal law creep into everything.

I'm pretty sure that "no anonymous slander" reduces the amount rapidly, so you end up with a bunch of legitimate accusations that people are willing to stand for because they can provide evidence. The whole "I don't like his hair, so I'm going to make up stories about him" stuff goes away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll bring up the point I always bring up regarding sex work: why are so many people focused on whether or not this actually produces better results for people? Legislation, by and large and particularly in the United States, is driven first and foremost by principle, rather than utilitarian objectives.

Even if legal prostitution led to higher crime, more violence, death and disease (none of which is true, of course), the issue is still fundamentally one of principle. Why does the state have a role to play in a transaction between two consenting adults? The only sensible argument would be that the state has a role only insofar as consent is in question, and therefore maybe assists in some capacity in terms of ensuring consent. Beyond that, we simply should not be legislating in search of outcomes.

In much the same way that alcohol prohibition might lead to lower rates of violence, rape, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unemployment, unwanted pregnancy, etc...we oppose prohibition from a principled position. Just as you might argue that putting a security camera in every room in every house would vastly remove unresolved criminality, false imprisonment, domestic violence, etc...we oppose such an invasion of privacy from a principled position.

It really doesn't matter how sex work is actually affected by the legality of it, the state simply has no right to interfere in a consensual transaction which does not produce negative third party externalities, period.

<comment><USER7> Consider the example of a highway robber that holds you up at gunpoint and asks for your wallet on the threat of death. In this situation there is typically consent by the victim in handing over her wallet to the perpetrator - after all he has the _free will_ not to hand over his wallet.

In the same way, you have the _free will_ not to work, but the consequences of not working are ending up on the streets. As a special case of this, a prostitute has the free will not to work, on the threat of ending up on the streets. The only difference between a generic worker and a prostitute is that it is the human reproductive act itself that is being commodified.

I guess that the question of whether prostitution is exploitative or not, and whether generic work is exploitative or not, depends on what _alternative_ choices are available: Does society guarantee that you will not end up on the streets i.e. (1) is there a scarcity in the basic human needs of society, viz. housing, jobs, the recognition in law of that someone is a citizen etc. (2) does society provide these basic needs to all its members.

From this framework it's possibly to argue that _in principle_ prostitution is exploitative. It is no more exploitative than any other form of work, but perhaps has a tendency to attract the most vulnerable in society who do not have a safety net to fall back on. So I don't see anything especially exploitative about a middle class woman becoming a stripper to get through college. But not everyone is middle class.

What's undeniable _in practice_, is that legal prostitution leads to less criminal behaviour and exploitation. Hopefully we can work to change the conditions that make prostitution exploitative as opposed to an expression of an individuals creativity.

<comment><USER8> This is an absolute butchering of free will.

A person being robbed at gun point is being coerced. He is having a choice forced upon him by another person. Society, being composed of individuals all of whom do not want to be coerced has an interest in preventing coercion.

This is not true of having to work. The biological necessity of your body requiring food is not forced onto you by anybody. So nobody can be held responsible for it.

A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually makes her life better, because depriving her of having to choose does not improve her life, while depriving a man of having to choose between being shot and giving up his wallet improves his life greatly.

<comment><USER9> > A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually > makes her life better

It brings her money, no doubt. Does it also bring emotional/mental trauma? What if it was your job to exchange your body for money at a high rate daily/weekly/monthly? Would you be ok with your daughter being a sex worker? What about your wife or your mother?

<comment><USER10> > _Does it also bring emotional /mental trauma?_

Many jobs come with emotional trauma. Try working 14 hour shifts gluing heads on dolls in some provincial Chinese city. Or swimming through sewers to undo blockages in a Haiti slum.

The truth is that many sex workers look at the alternatives and see sex work as the easier option. And by far the most lucrative.

In fact, having spent time in a part of the world free from the residue of Christian morality, I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.

They were baffled that sex could come without an exchange of something of value.

It's an entirely different perspective.

<comment><USER9> > Many jobs come with emotional trauma. Try working 14 hour shifts gluing > heads on dolls in some provincial Chinese city. Or swimming through sewers > to undo blockages in a Haiti slum.

While a factory worker gluing heads on dolls might compare themselves to a successful CEO and feel a very low sense of self worth, I'm not entirely convinced that having sex with strangers in exchange for money wouldn't bring on an any different set of self worth problems.

> I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.

I do agree that most women see performing sexual acts on a man as an exchange, especially in power. In their eyes, as a man, you are fortunate if this woman "decides" to let you have sex with her.

As a sex worker in my eyes, you are getting rid of your power/right to choose who you want to have sex with/when because it is linked to "I need to pay my rent".

I believe a sex worker's self-worth and mental trauma take on new levels as soon as a sex worker has sex with somebody they wouldn't have had sex with in a typical romantic/casual hookup situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought this was incredibly interesting. The author directly confronts the grey and ambiguous areas around consent when money is involved. It really drives home the point that if you want to legislate ways to protect sex workers, you should _actually_ talk to sex workers and not make up feel good bs that can harm people.

<comment> barry-cotter Or if you hate sex workers you could criminalize the purchase of sex and use eviction, making people homeless, as part of your repertoire of tactics to try and destroy whores' lives.

[https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/norway_report_- _sex_workers...](https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/norway_report_- _sex_workers_rights_-_embargoed_-_final.pdf)

> Oslo police have over the last decade adopted a "preventative policing" > approach to sex work which involves the enforcement of lower level offences > as "stress methods" to disrupt, destabilize and increase the pressure on > those operating in the sex sector. One academic researcher describes how > police sources "in Oslo often use terms like they are going to 'crush' or > 'choke' the [prostitution] market, and unsettle, pressure and stress the > people in the market". One example of this approach is "Operation Homeless": > an initiative that saw increased enforcement of the law on "promotion" of > sex work – which makes it an offence to "let premises ... for prostitution". > "Operation Homeless" ran for four years between 2007 and 2011 and initiated > the systematic and rapid eviction of many sex workers from their places of > work and/or homes.

<comment><USER12> So the police created homeless sex workers? How does this not worsen the blight in the city?

<comment><USER13> It's a power play. Police are law enforcement through use of power. They don't have 'make life better for people' in their workday.

<comment><USER14>
       > They don't have

_Those police_ don't have

The ones where I live aren't like that.

<comment><USER15> Wow, that's so informative.

<comment><USER16> It is. It's informative because people like to talk about "the police" as a homogeneous group of people who all think and act the same way; as if a rural sheriff in Alaska is the same person as a beat cop in NYC or a camera operator in London.

This sort of stereotyping is problematic, because you can't fix problems if you can't differentiate between dysfunctional and functional. You can't make changes if you alienate the good with the bad. And you can't make things better if you're making global changes without understanding local context.

<comment><USER15> Right, but the comment I was responding to offered no such details and came across as defensive. I appreciate you bolstering their assertion.

<comment><USER17> cgriswold didn't offer any real-world details, only 2 abstract principles. In contrast, saying "the police where I live do act like they have 'make people's lives better' as part of their mandate" is an observation on a local reality

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are people who will say "I want to do this for this person in exchange for what they're offering me". There are people who will say "You can't do that. You're hurting yourself". Usually the people in the second group then leave happy having done their job of saving the people in the first group. Then the first group starves.

As a minor, I did all sorts of work over the Internet, and got paid fraudulently over Paypal. Boy am I glad child labour experts didn't get in on that shit. Moralists never really care to help.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure what to make of this article, but I couldn't stop reading it. It's was well worth the time.

<comment><USER20> I tend to have the opposite reaction. All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. It's like it has to conform to some very narrow "edgy" journalism standard that immature college kids writing screenplays in Starbucks would find compelling.

I once described my ideal way to hear about news or human interest stories like this: take that old robotic voice from ~1997 era Mac computers and just have it read off a list of declarative sentences.

To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that's what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, _especially_ idiosyncratic empathy for individual sex workers that invites me to indulge all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives.

You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet- blanketiest possible way.

<comment><USER21> > To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that's what I need. Facts > totally divorced from human empathy,

Honestly, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you. Maybe, if you look into it, there's something going on there that would be worth knowing about yourself?

<comment><USER20> You sound very sanctimonious and unwilling to consider the idea that in order to be compassionate on a large scale, such as population ethics, you have to minimize the effect of idiosyncratic stories and consider aggregate measures of well-being or harm.

> "Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you."

This is just egregious trolling. Seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to equivocate my point of view with finding human empathy "abhorrent." In all seriousness, that is borderline psychotic of you to say.

Far from finding human empathy abhorrent, I care a great deal about human empathy. In fact, it is _because_ I care about human empathy that I don't attach nearly as much importance to idiosyncratic stories as I do to large scale measurable outcomes and statistical understanding of how policies are actually likely to relate to outcomes that help people.

You are never going to get to constructive policy decisions that have high chances of success across large cohorts of people if you make up your opinions from idiosyncratic emotional journalism.

You're just going to lobby for bad policies driven by emotional thinking and end up hurting people with policy contrary to your intentions.

<comment><USER21> (First, a small aside. This is petty, but... the words "equivocate" and "psychotic" don't mean what you think they mean and you should probably look them up.)

Atrocities have been committed by those who believed they were being "compassionate on a large scale" but somehow didn't want to get into the messy details of what people affected by their policies thought and felt on an individual level.

> All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about > rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and > indiosyncratic to me.

You chose to reject her lived personal experience accumulated over decades as having any weight or relevance to policy because it bored you and you apparently prefer dry statistics. Or, as you put it, declarative sentences read by a robot voice.

You sound like you've had a sheltered life and you lack the life experience to have an informed opinion on policy around sex work. (That's perfectly fine, by the way. It can be quite liberating to accept the fact that you don't have to have an opinion about everything.)

What's unfortunate is that you think you're the enlightened one with your insistence on solid statistical aggregate data only, when in reality you're exactly what she's describing -- blindly locked in your own narrative, sure that you know what's best for other people while refusing to listen to those same people when they tell you you're wrong.

Now honestly you probably don't _need_ to have an opinion on this topic, and you'd probably be a lot better off if you just admitted that you don't know and don't need to know what's up. But if for some reason you do, and you're worried that just one "idiosyncratic emotional story" is going to bias you, then you always have the option of doing some research or even going out and talking to the people affected by these policies and buying them a coffee in exchange for a piece of their mind on these topics. I'm guessing you wouldn't, and the very idea probably terrifies you, but feel free to prove me wrong.

Now I don't suppose you're going to take advice from a "sanctimonious" asshole like me, but in case some of this is getting through to you, consider that rather than being unwilling to consider your ideas, I might just know a few things you don't. People who look at measurable metrics but refuse to listen to individual people never get the outcomes they really want, and have done incalculable damage along the way in human history, much of it in the name of "science".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Women only go into sex trade because they have no better option"

"We should ban sex work, because that's best for women"

This always felt like an oxymoron to me.

<comment><USER9> I think a lot of people are pro-sex work when it comes to commenting on the theory of it, but a lot of people would also be remiss if their daughter/wife/mother was a sex worker. On top of that, if you didn't want your daughter being a sex worker, I would go as far as to say you also wouldn't want her hanging out with any known sex workers.

<comment><USER23> Never mind their wife / daughter.

A bunch of people in this thread are saying there's nothing wrong with sex work, but if I offered £30 for them to give me a blowjob not one of them would take the money.

There's a weird disconnect here: people think women selling sex enjoy it, and they don't recognise that the vast majority of women are only selling sex because they have no other option.

<comment><USER24> If you'd offer me to pay me the minimum wage for an hour of scrubbing toilets, I'd ferociously decline, but that doesn't imply that there's something wrong with janitor work.

I'd also not want my wife and daughter to work in _many_ professions that are known to be harsh, exploitative physical work in abusive conditions that's likely to bring in long term health conditions for measly pay. There are so many jobs that objectively suck, and being able to refuse money because the job is really bad is a privilege that most people don't have. So that criteria also isn't really sufficient to distinguish sex work from many other options that are and will continue to be legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I had read a discussion on whether Nevada could ever offer the decadent day spa style that you see in Germany, and basically a bunch of sex workers in this forum revealed how lazy they were and benefitting from the continent wide prohibition.

Compare this to $75 day pass to massive grounds that would put anything on Game of Thrones to shame. $150-$200 per hour to do anything private and sexual. A budget Norwegian Air flight, accomodations and 10 hours of your wildest sexual fantasies and you'll still have spent less than any of the bullshit you'll encounter in North America.

I personally see that model over there and it seems pretty awesome, but people are always looking for something wrong to rationalize their opinion on all sex work, but most of whats wrong applies to any job in these regulated environments. People talk to sex workers, and assume they are all being coerced to say something positive.

</comment><comment><USER26> While the US is passing more and more stupid laws banning consensual sex between adults, many countries in Europe and South America have legalized prostitution and bettered the lives of sex workers. I'm sure that won't happen in the puritanical, impractical US but it's something to think about for when the idiots in charge here get replaced by slightly less idiotic idiots who actually want to help people rather than pretend like they're on the moral high ground while doing the same things they outlaw for others.

<comment><USER27> If you don't know whether the person you're paying needs the money to survive, it's immoral to buy "sex." You don't know to what degree it's "sex" or they are forced into it, which is called "rape." Banning the purchase (the "Nordic model") is the same as banning other immoral acts.

It's the same with porn by the way. You don't know if the women you're watching are on drugs, being threatened by men, or just needs the money to survive. So what what are you watching? "Sex" or rape?

<comment><USER28> That's not the point. Consider reading the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wish we could have something akin to the laws that protect people from drug prosecution for bringing someone to an er for an overdose for sex workers who are raped to come forward and prosecute without fear of prosecution while we figure out how to inact realistic laws that actually protect victims of trafficking and don't turn willing sex workers into trafficking victims or criminals

<comment><USER30> Is there talk about changing the legislation? When Sweden flipped the legislation some years back (selling is now decriminalized while buying is illegal) I thought that was part of a global trend? To me it always seemed like a rational change.

<comment><USER29> I honestly don't follow it enough to know, but politics in my country (United States) tend to lean towards the extreme instead of incremental, because of what I see as, political posturing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The economic exploitation underlying the need for women (and to a lesser extent, young men) to prostitute themselves is central to the subject, and highlighted well by this essay. Chris Hedges did a very moving interview with Rachel Moran about her experiences as a prostitute that describes these issues. Trigger warning:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2pE- Uoh6I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2pE-Uoh6I)

</comment><comment> BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 However people end up in sex work, their worst enemies are authorities and dogooders. While suchlike pretend concern with sex worker welfare, they offer SFA in the way of true help. The best way to help sex workers trapped in their occupation, mostly by financial pressure and discrimination, begins with decriminalization.

<comment><USER27> Why leave out the Nordic model as an option? It doesn't direct the authorities to harm sex workers. If business suffers as a result, they aren't chained to selling "sex" as a way to make money (and we should providing a UBI system anyway)

<comment><USER32> The Nordic model stops the law abiding customers. It doesn't stop demand, it just leaves the only customers being the abusers and actual criminals, those with no qualms about illegality.

And there is never, ever, ever a UBI or "retraining"/"back to the workforce" program paired with this to get them out of SW.

The Nordic model is at best ineffective virtue signalling and at worst actively increasing the danger SWers are exposed to.

<comment><USER27> I don't understand the point of the first line: Murder is also only done by violent people breaking the law but we still have laws against that.

The second line is also confusing... I wrote there should be UBI/exit programs because there aren't.

<comment><USER33> Who are these people who are taking money to be violently killed by other people?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The freedom to not be prosecuted for a victimless crime should be a constitutional right.

</comment><comment><USER35> The odd thing about this topic is that I think nobody has articulated the fear of legalizing sex work well.

The reason most men don't want to make sex-work legal, deep down, maybe so deep they don't realize it, is because sex holds such symbolic importance in our society.

The fear is that legalizing sex work would have the side effect of morally legitimizing sex work (i.e. making it less shameful), which in turn would push us a bit more toward a world where we might see the people hiring numerous sex workers as a status symbol rather than a shameful secret.

Imbalance in wealth is a loaded topic. But imbalance in sexual satisfaction is a much heavier one, particularly for those at extremes.

That said, I don't have an overall opinion on the issue, this is just to try to elevate the debate.

</comment><comment><USER36> Maybe I just had my head in the sand, but I only just discovered this whole social media "findom" subculture last week. Apparently there are "master/dom" type people who have social media profiles where they "dominate" followers by asking them to send them money through Square Cash/PayPal/Venmo to pay for things. They do nothing any more sexual than post pictures/videos/text.

Honestly, quite fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER37> Somewhat relevant, about the "specialness" of sex work: [https://thoughtcatalog.com/alfred-macdonald/2014/12/if- you-w...](https://thoughtcatalog.com/alfred-macdonald/2014/12/if-you-wouldnt- fck-a-grapefruit-for-money-i-dont-know-whats-wrong-with-you/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the focus on the early 2000s doesn't provide enough history to holistically address sex work in the USA. Yes, many more additional laws were passed since then but a lot of them are based on the public health concerns, not solely this one dimensional human trafficking idea. The public health concerns can be addressed now.

Syphilis, for example, was a real debilitating problem 70+ years ago. Today, its something everyone actively avoids, and also quickly treats.

So this particular public health issue isn't perpetuated by rampant diseased sex workers.

Regulated sex workers are cleaner than the general population due to frequent testing.

There is room for many state-level prohibitions to be challenged now, due to the rationale that passed their old laws. Sure there are people that will cite the law as preventing and criminalizing human trafficking, but go back to the public policy discussions regarding the drafted laws and you will often see public health issues that are no longer relevant today. The judicial branch can easily then strike them down. Forcing the legislatures hand.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder if some people's attitudes towards sex work may change if we get realistic sex robots.

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow, what a beautiful essay. This is the one piece anyone contemplating the politics of sex work should read.</comment>


Are negative-karma users unable to upvote posts? - <AUTHOR>

I had posted a comment somewhere which seemed like blatant advertising, which I had not intended it to be. I gained some negative karma points. :)
I'm trying to up vote my own post someone had submitted, but it doesn't look like I can. Is this intentional?
Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5600123 <comment><USER2> It seems plausible, although I don't know for sure.

You have options. One is simply to take your lumps and join in with the community. Submit items, comment in threads, _etc.,_ remembering that the HN crowd punishes content-free comments like "Me Too" or "Great Post", but can reward new insight and new information

Another is to register with a new, fresh account and start over with 1 point of karma. If necessary you can always return to this account when you have something really good to contribute, and this resurrect it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, I think so.</comment>