Scroll: Ad-free subscription for news sites - <AUTHOR> https://scroll.com/sites <comment><USER2> It's strange. Part of me thinks this is a great idea, but some of the websites are also the worst offenders of what the site is trying to combat. Looking at Gizmodo and the verge, the crazy amount of 3rd party cookies, unable to really opt out at all. While writing pieces about how horrible google and Facebook are for all the privacy evasive stuff they are doing. I'd rather support content that aim for quality and differ it kind of business model then rewarding some of these sites for being so horrible that this service is even needed. Like [https://decorrespondent.nl/](https://decorrespondent.nl/) or specific patreons

<comment><USER3> CEO of Scroll here. Glad you're a fan of The Correspondent, we love them too. Also hear you on the privacy concerns. The publisher contracts with Scroll require that they remove third-party trackers 'that share information with parties other than Publisher or have a commercial purpose other than improving user experience.'

It's always going to be a negotiation when you're trying to work with sites rather than unilaterally act against them, but we're genuinely trying to get them to a place where they're living up to the privacy promise that a consumer would want.

<comment><USER4> Does Scroll work if I block third-party cookies?

 _Update 10 minutes later:_ It isn't working for me on theatlantic.com; I got the "free articles" drawers and then got blocked after they counted down to 0. So perhaps the answer to my question is "no".

I can whitelist third-party cookies on specific sites, but I don't think I can whitelist a single cookie across all sites. This seems unfortunate.

 _Update 30 minutes later:_ I tried disabling both cookie- and tracker- blocking in Firefox and still saw no sign of it working on theatlantic.com

<comment><USER3> If you whitelist [*.]scroll.com in Chrome for example, Scroll should work. Important to note it doesn't get you past paywalls. The economics would make the price insanely high for that.

<comment><USER5> Ahh, this is an important note. My first thought seeing this post was, "finally, a Spotify for the news!"

<comment><USER3> Would love to do it, but for a publisher the economics get super hard at this time. The number of new consumers has to be large enough to offset the drop in ARPU that a bundle would represent and publishers are super wary that there are enough people out there who want to get past paywalls to make that happen. This is the reason why even Apple News+ had such trouble convincing anyone to join.

I do think that over time more opportunities for, at first, skinny bundles will emerge but the world isn't there yet at the scale you'd want.

<comment><USER6> In theory we might be competitors, but I'd rather the world sucked less than feel smug.

So here's my argument: You don't charge enough money. It's the same mistake literally everyone ahead of you has already made before failing. Charge more money. Charge what seems like an absurd amount of money. Because you need a large pool to get people through the door. It's easier to cut prices than to raise them. Charge more damn money.

More selfishly: I can help you with the paywalls thing without cookies. firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to use a similar service called Blendle. It, too, promised ad-free news. But even though I have lots of credit in my account, I stopped using it for three reasons:

1\. It had a very limited number of publications available.

2\. You couldn't just read a whole publication. You could only read a selected few articles from each publication. And the curation of those showed clear political bias on the part of the curators.

3\. Blendle sends out a weekly newsletter with a list of the stories it thinks are the best. It also presented a clearly one-sided view of the world and the stories available from the Blendle publications, accompanied by a TON of editorializing on the part of the newsletter authors.

Instead, I subscribe to several newspapers both in electronic and dead tree editions. I don't mind paying for news. But I want to make up my own mind about the news, and not be force-fed one ideology by a gatekeeper.

Back on topic: I hope that Scroll does better than Blendle. Looking at its list of publications, I only see two that I would read, and only one regularly. If Scroll expands to more interesting content, I'll get on board.

<comment><USER8> I also was excited by the promise of Blendle and stopped using it, but for different reasons to you: the main way i consume news is by finding links to articles on twitter and reddit. with blendle, those links didn't take me to the "blendle version" of the article, but to the paywalled version, and there was no easy way to jump from the paywalled version to the blendle version. To see an article on blendle, i'd have to go out of my way to find it on blendle, and their browsing experience wasn't especially great.

Scroll looks really nice because you don't have to access the content _through_ scroll. You're still on the original source, and you get the benefits of your Scroll subscription no matter how you found the article.

The downside here is that because Scroll isn't re-hosting the content, you're stuck reading it on the generally awful websites of the original publishers, which are only made marginally better by the lack of ads and trackers.

<comment><USER9> I had the same issue. I emailed blendle, suggesting they write a browser extension which could manually/automatically redirect supported publications to the blendle equivalent. Obviously, they didn't think that was necessary.

Can't say I think much of their decision-making skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A fascinating area. I've seen several people getting into it in one way or another:

Blendle

The system in the Brave browser

Scroll

...

What I really want is:

1\. A friction free way to pay what I want AFTER I've read an article (I assume a base level fee to read it in the first place) so that I can reward an excellent article. I want to know that that money goes to those who made that article not all the other people at the "publication".

2\. Coverage of many good articles and publications, so that I can get most anything I want.

3\. Excellent search that suits me. (Would be great bonus to have a mechanism to automatically hook me up to a rewardable version.)

4\. No attempted surveillance at all. (I block much of it but hate that people try this nonsense, and I note that they do, if they're really objectionable I block them permanently at the DNS. Newspapers and magazines tend to be the worst offenders of all.)

<comment><USER11> Friction-less payments is unfortunately an issue that seems unsolvable on the 'banks' end. There's no easy way for you to just one-click take care of a payment, and for good reason. I do wish it wasn't as friction-full as it is right now, and there are initiatives by alternative banks to make that happen (direct API connectivity for small payments etc., although seems like the new EU standards will turn that into a pipe dream); no standards to my knowledge, however.

<comment> 0-_-0 > Friction-less payments is unfortunately an issue that seems unsolvable on > the 'banks' end.

This is actually already solved in Brave, you can tip a website or even a youtube channel with a click (technically it's 3 clicks: click BAT triangle, click "send tip", choose amount).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems that the OP linked to the /sites page, rather than the landing/home page. Can this be corrected? The linked page is pretty bare and has almost zero information.

<comment><USER13> The list of sites was actually most relevant to me because I rarely read those publications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think it's a compelling and feasible solution to the news site monetization problem. It just seems difficult to imagine users flocking to something like this away from ad blockers—which improve daily (and are mostly free).

<comment><USER15> There's been a bunch of similar initiatives, albeit more typically aggregating via a single app (Inkl, Pressreader etc). I've tried some in the past because I'd like to pay for news, but consider site subscriptions as deeply hostile to the www per se. But they all end up with the same problem - great early hope of accumulating more sources over time, which then doesn't happen.

Standardised micropayments are the obvious answer, but it seems to be a ship that's sailed.

<comment><USER7> If you're in the Apple ecosystem, Apple News Plus isn't too bad. If you read a lot, it's pennies or less per article.

Apple's added a good number of publications since it launched, and I get more value out of it than I used to. But it's still trying to find its sea legs.

<comment><USER15> I've had no Apple devices for a couple of years, but in Australia at least its newspaper coverage is pretty much limited to News Corp. That'd be a nonstarter for me. Though that's based on what I read during the Aus launch. It may have expanded since.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was really excited about Scroll when I first heard about it, but after I looked into it more I lost almost all interest. I was looking at it almost a month ago, so it may have changed a bit since then, but at the time, the main things were that:

1\. Even though almost all of the material about Scroll says "300+ sites supported", it's actually about 30 sites, mostly from the same few networks, and 304 "SBNation blogs". This was the list of domains initially supported: [https://gist.github.com/archon810/b4ec827d5fbe9e22a43ad39ca2...](https://gist.github.com/archon810/b4ec827d5fbe9e22a43ad39ca2f7c0c8) (and I broke down that list by owner here, if anyone's interested in that: [https://tild.es/lc6#comment-4ij7](https://tild.es/lc6#comment-4ij7))

2\. Scroll _does not_ get you past paywalls: [https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344875-does- scroll...](https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344875-does-scroll-get- me-behind-paywalls)

So if it's a site that's supported by Scroll that also has a paywall (like The Atlantic), you're expected to _both_ subscribe to the site and Scroll to get a "clean" experience. It's also notable that even though the New York Times is one of the main investors in Scroll, they apparently don't currently intend to support it themselves (mentioned here: [https://www.poynter.org/business- work/2020/revolutionary-a-h...](https://www.poynter.org/business- work/2020/revolutionary-a-hit-a-miss-in-any-case-tony-hailes-scroll-has- launched-at-last/)).

<comment><USER17> Why pay for the atlantic and pay for scroll when you can just pay for atlantic, or not, and read their RSS feed however you like w/o ads?

I don't know who the target audience of this product could be. There's probably 40 people on earth who fall in the venn diagram of not knowing about ad blockers, not knowing about RSS feeds, and willing to seek out a service like scroll for their 30-odd supported websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The problem with Scroll is we trade one evil for another: instead of ads and trackers, we get legally dubious "AS IS" clauses in Terms of Service, and censorship-laden arbitration clauses that cannot be subject to oversight.

<comment><USER19> Are there any concretely troubling parts to the terms that you saw?

<comment><USER20> Well, primarily:

> Scroll may, from time to time, change these Terms of Service, including the > Privacy Policy. Such revisions shall be effective immediately and we will > notify you if these changes are significant.

There is also the usual arbitration agreement.

<comment><USER21> That seems indeed non-compliant with many legislations. I think in the EU this would not be legal as you have to inform your customers about any changes in the terms and if you change them they have the right to end their contract with you.

This clause would otherwise allow them to raise prices tenfold without the consent of their customers.

Maybe they should revise this...

<comment><USER6> They only accept US customers: [https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344891-what-if- i-l...](https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344891-what-if-i-live- outside-the-united-states)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I use scroll as a way to read USA Today ad-free. Their content is pretty good. I also read Vox, The Atlantic, and Verge sometimes. It's nice to not have ads on these sites.

<comment><USER17> All of these sites also offer RSS feeds, by the way.

<comment><USER22> Good point I should look into that. If RSS has pictures and categories, might be the way to go.

<comment><USER17> Depends on the webmaster on each site. Some of them have embedded images. Some papers offer specific feeds for certain sections, others will only offer the firehose feed of everything. Many RSS readers offer some way to categorize incoming articles from feeds, akin to rules for email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We tried this before and failed. It was a browser-extension called Sterling that would block ads on every site with a monthly subscription. Payment to sites would be based on the ratio of time spent across domains.

The problem isn't technical, it's that people just don't want to pay for general content. They might accept subs for netflix or spotify or specific newspapers but paying for "the internet" is still an unknown and unaccepted model. Until that changes, no amount of new apps are going to fix this.

<comment><USER6> And Readability and Blendle and Contenture and several Google things and I've lost count.

Disclosure: I had the same basic idea and I have a patent on a small problem related to it (reliably tracking visits, allowing paywall passage without revealing user identity, without box-stuffing by either readers or publishers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really wish they'd get rid of that persistent Scroll banner on every page where the service is active. I'm not going to pay for a service to get rid of ads just to see a different ad.

And no, the ability to share to social media isn't a "useful" service.

I realize they need a way to remind users that Scroll is active, but there needs to be a much less intrusive way to do it, or else they're defeating the purpose of the product.

<comment><USER3> CEO of Scroll here. yep, it's super annoying and we're changing it to be way less so. Should be rolling out early this coming week, so let me know what you think.

I'm sure there's going to be a lot of stuff to change as we learn, so please keep the feedback coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's an unfortunate lack of what I consider "real" news (I realize the definition is subjective), such as NYT, WP, Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, RT etc. I'd never pay for a subscription of "news" that doesn't cover my basic need of actual news.

And just to cover my bases here, by "real" news I don't mean that they are "unbiased". I just mean sources that will give me actual, interesting reports about things happening in the world. As long as there is a baseline, I'm happy to filter what I believe on my own as long as the sender is clear.

I'm also skeptical as to why a paid service selling news would include things like The Onion. I appreciate them as much as anyone but I don't want it in my "news" feed.

</comment><comment><USER17> Off the shelf solution is just pulling you favorite news website's RSS feed and running it through a full text filtering service, if the publication don't already give you the full text feed from the get go.

</comment><comment><USER26> 50% of the websites listed are click-bait garbage, content free, or rewritten wire stories. Hope they go bankrupt and learn that the internet is not a copy paste and charge money machine.

<comment><USER27> Perhaps the declining cost of ad revenue has resulted in these sites shrinking their content budget?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was thinking about doing something like this a year or two ago, but the cross-domain cookie landscape is making the idea less workable.

Also how much people hate paying for things. I recently went on a short rant about how I've never seen anyone with a paid version of Sublime Text. A lot of its users are professional software engineers should either be able to afford it or work for a company that can, and engineers that should have empathy for someone trying to make money off software

<comment><USER29> Well, I'm the one with paid version of Sublime Text. And a subscription to Bloomberg . I'm not going to disprove your point, but not all of us are overly greedy )

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wish there was a Google News replacement that only lists news sites that are focused on privacy and do not have those stupid turn off your AdBlocker messages.

There is a ton of news sites out there that need an audience. They can make their money through sponsorships and non-invasive ads. You don't have to make millions off of your news site .. maybe off a few you can.

</comment><comment><USER31> Every time people say that if they had how to pay for the site they would use it. Now is the time to show the truth

<comment><USER19> I've been wanting someone to do this idea (spotify for news) for years. But they really need to get one of the heavy hitters with paywalls (NY Times, The Economist, Financial Times, WaPo, or WSJ).

But maybe it's worth paying just to show publishers that it's viable. It's a rough chicken/egg problem.

<comment><USER3> CEO of Scroll here. It's hard with the big guys when you get started, they tend to move slow. However, the NYT and WSJ are both investors in the company so we're hopeful we can bring them in over the next year.

<comment><USER19> Great! I wish you all the luck in the world, I've been wishing for many years that someone with connections in the news world would make this happen.

I'm hopeful that fixing the business model of news on the web will cause them to step back a bit from polarizing clickbait and back towards factual reporting, which I think should help reduce the polarization in the political sphere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How would this work with third party cookie blocking that Chrome is planning to start ([https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private- web-...](https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-path- towards.html))?

<comment><USER33> I had to whitelist Scroll in my DNS-level ad and tracker blocking (nextdns), but that works fine. I assume you can whitelist in Chrome or whatever else as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can you make a browser plugin for HN (and preferably other popular news aggregator) to show icons which sites are Scroll partners?

</comment><comment><USER35> They say it's ad-free. Is it tracking-free too?

<comment><USER36> That's what they claim: "It would be private, no shadowy trackers selling your data."

On the other hand they bill you based on the percentage of the time you spend on each individual partner site. That seems somewhat contradictory.

<comment><USER37> You could have an open source addon or reader app which provided only that highly aggregated data.

<comment><USER38> When it comes to money between untrusting parties no one is going to open source it to make it easier for the other side to commit fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Advertising is bad and it's good to get rid of it but you also need to get rid of tracking.

</comment><comment><USER40> Struggling to see how this is different from running an ad-blocker or PiHole?

</comment><comment><USER41> How can I pay with BTC or anything else?

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't want to pay for sites to be ad & tracker free, I want to rewards sites that don't have ads & trackers in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER43> So this is like Spotify for websites?

<comment><USER44> spotify without the free tier.

<comment> r-w The free tier is what we already have.

<comment><USER45> Not at all. We hit paywalls, are bombarded with low quality or malicious ads (without adblock) even if we're paying ... it's a mess. Spotify and free streaming platforms keep advertising largely unobtrusive.

<comment> _-___________-_ The advertising Spotify slots into your playlists is hardly unobtrusive...

<comment><USER45> Where else would they slot ads? Advertising is obtrusive by default so we have to compare relative to the egregious examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "news" sites

</comment><comment><USER47> Apple News?

<comment><USER48> Nobody subscribes to Apple News+.

<comment><USER49> Apple News+ reportedly had 200,000 subscribers within 48 hours[1]. May we all have "nobody" customers.

[1] [https://www.macrumors.com/2019/11/14/apple-news-plus- subscri...](https://www.macrumors.com/2019/11/14/apple-news-plus-subscriber- issues/)

<comment><USER48> How many actually paid once their free trial expired?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The Onion LOL</comment>


MacOS VPN architecture from System Preferences down to nesessionmanager - <AUTHOR> https://blog.timac.org/2018/0717-macos-vpn-architecture/ <comment><USER2> What boggles me about the VPN implementation on Mac is the massive amount of functionality that is not accessible unless you are using Apple Configurator to create a profile. Then you have to install the profile, and for any configuration change, you have to repeat the process.

For example, even though you can create a basic IKEv2 config, most of the parameters that are needed to actually make it work with a given router are not accessible except in Configurator. You cannot configure the encryption or hash algos, DH Group, group identifiers, etc.

And there is no access at all to other VPN types, such as a number of vendor- specific options, custom SSL, etc., even though they are supported.

Why can't there be advanced options for this stuff? It makes no sense.

<comment><USER3> You're supposed to be managing the deployment/delivery of Apple Configurator profiles through Server.app's MDM features. If that is in play, then the workflow looks like:

1\. You navigate your device to the MDM web portal served from the Mac running Server.app;

2\. the MDM portal recognizes your MAC address as a new device, and allows you to register it;

3\. an MDM profile is auto-generated for you, which you download and install;

4\. the MDM profile transparently manages/updates a _real_ (Apple Configurator) profile, which has been customized by the MDM for any settings keyed specifically to your computer's MAC address.

Using Apple Configurator without MDM, just using Configurator .profile files, would be like using Windows Group Policy without Active Directory, just using GPO .cab files. It's _possible_ , but just kinda silly.

<comment><USER4> > It's possible, but just kinda silly.

Why silly? In one .mobileconfig file, I created complex VPN config for my provider, with my own preferences, and loaded it without any MDM, to all my macs and iPhones.

<comment><USER3> Because, what happens when you want to update that config? Even if you're just doing it for your personal stuff, MDM means centralized push-based management.

<comment><USER4> I'm not centralized, I will just update my config myself. Simply clicking on new myvpn.mobileconfig file :)

<comment><USER3> I guess I just don't like the idea of forgetting to update a device that I rarely touch (e.g. my iPad) and then being unable to VPN home with it later when I do go to use it, from a café on vacation or something.

Much easier to just leave Server.app running on my iMac. (It's basically what Server.app is built for; it's certainly not targeted at enterprises!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This might be useful for Algo! It's been a pain in the ass that IKEv2 has been a second class citizen on macOS.

[https://github.com/trailofbits/algo](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo)

<comment><USER6> Algo already provides .mobileconfig files. Works great.

[https://github.com/trailofbits/algo#apple- devices](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo#apple-devices)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are there any reasonably straightforward open source VPN servers compatible with Apple's clients? For cloud and VPS setups, I always end up mucking around with OpenVPN/Tunnelblick.

<comment><USER8> I tried the OSX VPN stuff and gave up really quickly. It all just felt really clunky, without much control.

Tunnelblick and [http://www.pivpn.io/](http://www.pivpn.io/) work great. PiVPN targets Pi installations, but I found it works just fine on any modern ubuntu install. The cli tools to generate / revoke configs are very easy to use.

<comment><USER4> Apple does not provide native support for OpenVPN protocol, only IPsec. It'll take third party app to support OpenVPN, risky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting - do I remember that macOS 10.12 (or maybe 10.13) was supposed to allow for per-app VPN access? Does that use this API, or something else (assuming it actually exists)? Also, quite the cliffhanger on VPNStatus, which sounds promising (any chance it could also support Wireguard?)

<comment><USER10> The Network Extension framework mentioned in the post is that API. It's been an iOS thing for a while and came to macOS more recently (10.12, I think).

<comment><USER11> The docs say 10.11 for most of the APIs. A few are still (and forever?) iOS only.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I counted counted versions/WWDC videos wrong - the macOS version popped up in 2015 along with the El Capitan/10.11 announcement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's possible to build a macOS app that manages an IKEv2 connection using the public NEVPNManager, NEVPNProtocolIKEv2 and related APIs. This also gives you full control over DH group, algorithms, dead peer detection etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know if there are any plans to standardize (d)TLS VPNs?

<comment><USER14> I highly doubt it. Most vendors try to sell it as an USP and as an "it is easy because it is TLS and runs over 443 so inflexible environments will allow you to work"-type of solution which is trying to fix symptoms instead of causes.

For anyone who is reasonable at *nix configuration, setting up OpenVPN, IKEv2 or classic IPSec tunnels is not 'easier' than any SSL/TLS VPN, which makes it lose a lot of it's value vs. other VPN options.

<comment><USER15> IPSec provides unique problems when it comes to NAT traversal - something that is extremely common.

<comment><USER4> Not so sure. All current implementations have Nat-T on as default. Could you give an example, please? IKEv2 preferred.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alpine 3.10 Released - <AUTHOR> https://alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.10.0-released.html <comment><USER2> Interesting that they still had a truecrypt package. It looks like they've had the veracrypt package for a while (The currently maintained major fork).

I really like Alpine. Last time I tried using it on a bare metal system, it still had some missing EFI packages (I can't remember if it was the grub UEFI stuff or efibootmgr) and I ended up going Void, but I should take a look at it again. I use it as a base for a lot of my containers.

</comment><comment><USER3> For some reason Alpine in Docker can never resolve the names of other containers.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://bugs.alpinelinux.org/versions/133](https://bugs.alpinelinux.org/versions/133) 49 days late?

Does anyone know the meaning of "late", if any, in this context?

<comment><USER2> Probably just the difference between their planned release date/roadmap and when the ticket actually got closed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am a bit curious of the MongoDB removal.

Truecrypt and Qt4 I sort of understand, but MongoDB is still actively developed, so there seem to be a story there...

Update: I guess thats the reaction to the not OSI approved licence they switched to late 2018.

<comment><USER6> [https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/commit/testing?id=8a901de...](https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/commit/testing?id=8a901de31fa055ed591d487e12f8bb9ffcc0df21)

> community/mongodb: expunge nonfree software

<comment><USER7> Good riddance

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm using alpine with docker ([https://hub.docker.com/r/_/alpine](https://hub.docker.com/r/_/alpine)), and one of the thing that bothers me the most is NOT having the ability to just say "alpine:3". This is not an available tag (for reasons unknown to me).

If you look at many other similar official docker images like python or golang, you can just say python:3, or golang:1 so that I don't have to worry about tracking non-breaking version updates.

Not having the ability to specify "alpine:3" and not having the time to track such versions might be also why people do alpine:latest in their Dockerfiles, cross their fingers, and hope for the best.

<comment><USER5> AFAIK you can specify alpine:3.9.4 and alpine:3.9 for example. So I don't really understand your point.

<comment><USER9> You should also be able to pull 'latest' as well, correct?

I think the problem with specifying just 'apline:3' is that it is an ambiguous statement. Do you want alpine:3.0? Or do you want the latest in the alpine:3.x line?

I think either using 'latest' or specifying a particular point release is what you'd expect.

Edit:

> [... ]people do alpine:latest in their Dockerfiles, cross their fingers, and > hope for the best.

What are you crossing your fingers for? alpine:latest should be the latest stable, and should work as intended.

<comment><USER10> I think semvar would say `3` means the latest of the major version 3, no matter the minor version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is being upvoted so there is interest. Who uses Alpine and for what solutions?

<comment><USER12> As far as I understand, most people use alpine in docker containers due to it's being quite lightweight with a decently large number of packages. I personally use it directly on the hardware on my personal server and I love it. It's all the fun and flexibility of a minimal system like arch, with all the simplicity of upstart. Also it takes about 2 minutes to install, which is helpful for setting up testing environments.

<comment><USER7> Same here (home server on bare metal). The simplicity, hardening and lack of unnecessary cruft means a much smaller attack surface than, say, Ubuntu. It reminds me of OpenBSD that way.</comment></comment></comment>


Humanoid robot helps scientists to understand intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_31-3-2009-13-52-1 <comment><USER2> This article was very weak on any hard science and was not that interesting. Basically, the university just got a robot and they are going to hook a "brain" to it and see what happens.</comment>


The Cult of Done Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-manifesto.html <comment><USER2> AKA How to make crapy products that no one will buy - there are enough followers of this cult already.

</comment><comment><USER3> The icon for point #9 is particularly clever.</comment>


Show HN: Oozy.fm the Podcast Playlist - <AUTHOR> https://www.oozy.fm/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys I'm working on a podcast app to help people discover new great shows. Here is some background on why I started the project:

[https://www.dannav.com/why-im-making-another-podcast- app/](https://www.dannav.com/why-im-making-another-podcast-app/)

I would love to hear your thoughts!</comment>


CompassionPit.com, Share your feelings without fear of judgment - <AUTHOR> http://www.compassionpit.com/

<comment><USER2> Looks like a good place to go to pick/prey on vulnerable people.

Edit: I'm not saying that because that's my idea of fun. But someone's going to think that.

<comment><USER3> My first impression was "how are they going to filter out the jerks?" My next impression was "how are they going to also filter out the spammers?"

I'd love to hear the creator's answers to those questions. If they solve that, it could be an interesting experience to visit and interact or just watch.

<comment><USER2> Here's another one: what happens when you get someone who is suicidal or otherwise should get real help right away?

<comment><USER4> You know, they can always put in filters i.e. phrases like 'I want to kill myself' etc. get automatically tagged and a helpline number gets shown. A bit like what google has, but the troll problem will still remain.

<comment><USER5> This site seems to face a similar problem, (hopefully) solved by a static link to a guidance hotline.

[http://www.myuntoldsecrets.com/View.aspx?secret=102&topi...](http://www.myuntoldsecrets.com/View.aspx?secret=102&topic=secrets&item_id=8479)

(incidentally, I found that site originally via some spamming of the site in the picture, when I was reading the craigslist "best of" linked in it. I see the relevant drop.io page is pointing to another site. :\ )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks kind of similar to my site, <http://www.cheermeup.info/> (or <http://cheermeup.dlo.me/>), except with the addition of the chat component. Seems cool.

</comment><comment><USER7> A pit doesn't sound very compassionate...

<comment><USER8> Guessing it's a pun on well known band Passion Pit? <http://www.passionpitmusic.com/>

<comment><USER9> Or a reference to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_Despair>

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cool-RR Pretty cool.

Criticisms: (Just my opinions.)

* The chat font should be sans-serif.

* The chat input line should be below the chat view.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is another problem. I was having an awesome conversation with a computer linguist#, and I got disconnected in the middle. It failed to send the message, and I couldn't reconnect with him after that. Imagine if that happened when someone was in distress.

On the other hand, there might be a way out of your troll problem. You could make a community of the listeners. Although, it would be quite complicated. (how can you create accountability if the sessions are private? What about abuse of the said accountability?) It should be worth it.

By the way have you ever thought of contacting existing crisis intervention hotlines and pitching this? TREVOR would certainly be interested.

# If you ever do read this contact me on yesthisisananonymousid [at] gmail. Thank you.

<comment><USER4> By the way, attach a numerical session id to people so that someone can search them out after getting disconnected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really love your site design, very inviting and bright. Probably exactly what's needed when you're in the mood to use your site.

I noticed the favicon looks like the default one used for the Pylons framework. I'm curious, why did you choose Pylons over Django?

<comment><USER11> I'm a huge fan of Pylons for the flexibility it offers, and am generally more comfortable with it -- I've built up a huge framework on top of it, over the last 2 years or so of using it, so development goes really quickly. Not to mention that this project really didn't need anything that Django offers; it's database-free and, using Cogen, is totally async. Pretty simple and sweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yup, seems to be a lot of listeners eager and not a lot of complainers. I did my best to complain for a while, but eventually got sick of it. Actually, might go back and complain about that.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting - PostSecret meets Omegle.

</comment><comment><USER14> I tried being a listener and never got a complainer to chat with. So I tried being a complainer and I was just connected to endless AFK listeners.

I guess the ADD folks who switch tabs after a few seconds are clogging up the listener queue. I think you will have to tweak the social interface to make this work.

<comment><USER15> Omegle animates the title text, so you notice the tab "bouncing" when someone types something to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The listener should be required to click a button at a certain period of time to confirm that they are paying attention. This would remove the idlers.

</comment><comment><USER17> That looks really sweet! I've had a concept like this for years for the dutch market: Moeilijkedag.nl (tough day) but haven't had the time and or interest to built it. How did you implement it? Newfangled nodejs chat or something like it? :)

<comment><USER18> Off-topic: "master of none" type-a-guy from .nl here, also a webdev wannabe.

Sounds like an interesting idea - just in case you'll be open-sourcing, I'd love to see what the real-life dev process looks like.

<comment><USER17> who knows! You should add your contact info to your profile, btw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 1) Weird placement for input. 2) Not much different from omegle, which attracted lot's of spammers. 3) Bit slow.

</comment><comment><USER16> My chat partner got disconnected. Perhaps it should play a tone when you are the listener...

</comment><comment><USER20> how is this different from any generic random-user chat app, other than the "compassion" theme? is there anything technologically unique? not trying to be harsh, just honest.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is the name a reference to Passion Pit, the indie rock band?</comment>


Why Are Lawyers So Expensive Even With The Excess Supply Of Lawyers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/03/06/why-are-lawyers-so-expensive-even-with-the-excess-supply-of-lawyers/ <comment><USER3> A few quick thoughts (am about to go into a meeting):

1\. Lawyers are _not_ immune from market forces. This is easily seen at the micro level: a new practitioner with no established reputation can charge $800 per hour and see where that gets him (of course, precisely nowhere). On the macro level, law has been a boom business ever since at least the 1960s when expansive liability theories came to be widely adopted by the legislatures and the courts. So, what used to be regarded as a dispute over garbage at the local dump becomes a massive environmental enforcement action by which dozens of parties face multi-million dollar liabilities; what used to be a distribution chain in which only the end-point seller typically bore liability to the consumer becomes massive product liability suits going back to the manufacturers and imposing strict liability on them in ways that can ruin a multi-billion business; what used to be the $.25 that a cab driver overcharged you because of some shifty trade practice becomes a major class action in which all the vendors in the area are swept in to face a protracted legal fight and potentially substantial damage exposure; etc., etc., etc. The point being: the legal landscape has changed dramatically and, for example, the Big Law firm that I worked at in the early 1980s grew from 23 lawyers in 1965 to about 250 in 1980 and is today over 1,000 lawyers. Demand is up in a huge way over the decades and law remains a boom business in this respect (certainly Big Law remains so) notwithstanding the recent economic calamities that have beset us all. That is the main reason why the very high fees are charged: because businesses are willing to pay them (when they are not, overt or disguised discounting occurs with great regularity).

2\. That said, I am no fan of the Big Law model and have expressed my criticisms at some length elsewhere (see, e.g., <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648342>). I also have stated in some detail why I think the large firms have been left reeling from the recent economic shock and how this has caused a general revulsion against the billable fee structure used in these firms (see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1649507>).

3\. In reality, the legal field is pretty diverse and price does matter for those who consume legal services (why shouldn't it?). The providers of those services who remain stuck in old ways will need to adapt to the short-term problems but they obviously hope to keep the old structures in place in hopes that the good old days will return. For the broader legal market, however, there is already wide variety in the range of services and pricing offered. As a consumer, you need to do your due diligence and shop around. In the broader market, lawyers want your business and will adapt as needed to get it.

<comment><USER4> The laws of market implies rational actors and decisions aimed at maximizing revenues. Lawyers, especially new ones, may consider reputation more valuable than cash. A begginer charging $800 an hour will get nothing. To maximize profit should charge any price to get his first clients then go upward. However, if he has the patience of trying to find clients for several months and sticking to his initial price, he will end up getting one (there are many irrational actors out there). That is not a profit maximization strategy but a shortcut to high reputation and a gamble many lawyers may be tempted to do, especially those that have a high self-esteem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, Forbes is republishing Quora answers now? This must be part of that new strategy where they try to gain more traffic ([http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how- targe...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target- figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/)) with other people's content ([http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.html?pagewanted=all)).

<comment><USER6> These answers are republished by Quora to Forbes, with permission from the original authors. See this for more info: [http://www.quora.com/How-does- Forbes-decide-which-Quora-answ...](http://www.quora.com/How-does-Forbes- decide-which-Quora-answers-to-post-on-their-website)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, that's the situation. There is a partnership.

<comment><USER7> Slate appears to have a similar partnership, with the first such post appearing earlier today: <http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora.html>

<comment><USER6> Huffington Post too: <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This may not apply to the world of corporate lawyers the answer seems to be about, but at a smaller level, there are enormous switching costs involved in moving away from, and training a new lawyer.

And it's not a free market. In a free market, the consumer can walk away from a purchase. Most times individuals or small businesses need a lawyer, they are in no position from walking away. They need a lawyer. And they need to stop spending time searching, and get on with resolving.

So a lot of claims from lawyers that they operate in a free market are really not true. They mistake what are basically extortion/price gouging rates for free market pricing.

And the search is expensive too, with few (?) lawyers willing to offer 30 min to an hour of their time to discuss your needs for free. This is another factor in increasing switching costs for the consumers.

And of course, price is used as a signal for quality in a market in which quality is very hard to measure by most consumers. Sure I got a great deal on a lawyer, he only charges $150 per hour. Hmm, Your lawyer charges $400 per hour? Now, I'm not so confident.

<comment><USER9> "They need a lawyer. And they need to stop spending time searching, and get on with resolving. So a lot of claims from lawyers that they operate in a free market are really not true. They mistake what are basically extortion/price gouging rates for free market pricing."

It's interesting because the same fundamental problem is true of health care in the U.S.

It's essentially, "they need a doctor. And they need to stop spending time searching, and get on with not dying"

The market dynamics and model are entirely different with these sorts of emergency industries. It's almost always "first available" and not "best cost". Even with shopping around (when the luxury is available) the decision is perceived quality first, cost second (or lower).

<comment><USER10> There are both things that can be dealt with through a bit of planning. I.e. determine a pool of potential lawyers you will use and in the same regard determine a pool of potential hospitals/doctors you want to use. Then if you need one, you've done the leg work and know where to go.

<comment><USER9> Depends, this might work for some common cases, but there are lots of different kinds of lawyers just like different kinds of doctors.

The lawyer I use for business is entirely different than the one I might use to defend against a murder charge is entirely different from defending against a traffic ticket is entirely different to sue on a trademark case is entirely different from suing somebody for slashing my tires, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> To some extent, lawyers (or, more accurately, law firms) are Veblen goods -- meaning that their services are perceived as being better if they're more highly priced and exclusive. There's a general perception that a high-priced lawyer is a top-notch lawyer, and that skimping on such lawyers carries a huge deal of legal risk.

This dynamic plays out particularly in the BigCorp world, and especially if there's ever a perceived threat of litigation. (The idea that a competitor would hire "the best of the best," or "an army of lawyers," or "top guns," drives your own desire to pay for same).

<comment><USER12> It seems to me that lawyers have a captive market - I mean, you're not going to _not_ hire a lawyer when you need one, yes? And with the truckload of new laws that enter the books every year, there will likely be no shortage of need anytime soon.

It seems to me this 'salary matching' is basically price-fixing, even if unintentional. If my only option is a $650 / hour lawyer or a more prestigious $750 / hour lawyer, why not pay the higher price? I mean, legal matters can be scary to those not well versed in the intricacies of the law.

<comment><USER13> > It seems to me that lawyers have a captive market - I mean, you're not going > to not hire a lawyer when you need one, yes?

It's not any more captive than any other sort of market. If you live in LA and need a car, you're not going to not buy a car, right?

Corporations hire expensive lawyers for the same reason they get expensive architects to do their interior design. It's a signaling mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Part of the reason might also be that the law has become so complex (as well as, in my opinion, intentionally obfuscated) that it demands a certain amount of resources to engage it at all. If you can't meet that level, its best not to engage it at all.

You can't launch a satellite halfway into orbit to save a few bucks. You go all the way, or stay home.

</comment><comment><USER15> The unobvious but major thing missed is that hiring the wrong lawyer is far more expensive than an additional $300 per hour.

Since the only way to know if you are hiring the right lawyer is to base it on brand, top firms have a lot of pricing power and middle firms dissapear.

<comment><USER16> _The unobvious but major thing missed is that hiring the wrong lawyer is far more expensive than an additional $300 per hour_

You could say the same for any number of industries - hire the wrong structural engineer and that bridge or building will collapse, hire the wrong nuclear engineer and attack sub might run out of power while engaging the enemy, hire the wrong electrical engineer and the airliner's control system may fail, etc - and yet only very few people in those industries can ask for over $250/hr.

<comment><USER17> Well, if you think about it, when you deal with a lawyer, it invariably has to deal with the law whereas the other professions only deal legalities as a result and not primary purpose. So the relative consequence is not the same.

Similarly, with the police, because they are charged with law enforcement and being equipped with guns is very different than dealing the local surly person at the market.

That's why I'm of the opinion that certain professions need a lot more oversight and avenues of recourse than others. One would be foolish to think otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> the way I had lawyer, dr, etc. fees explained was that they can charge so much as you often don't get a second chance.

If your life is on the line for an operation, you want the best doctor available.

Your life on the line in a trial, you get the best lawyer available.

This has a trickle down effect. Or put another way, if you don't get a second chance, things had better go right the first time. Fear is a powerful motivator.

Want that dream house?

Better make sure the paper work from the forclosure is done properly. Sure you can try to do it yourself or with a budget firm, but what if they make a mistake. Your dream house is gone.

Want to make sure your kids are protected in case of your death, better get the best lawyer you can to do your will. Sure, you can print a form off the internet, but we've all seen that go wrong. Don't your kids deserve peace of mind during the troubling times surrounding your death?

<comment><USER19> This is the #1 reason, and the common explanation, but lets examine it further.

You risk your life getting into your car every day. You don't pick the most expensive car? Choosing air travel is commonly an exercise in finding the lowest price, despite the inherent risks/fear of traveling 4 miles up at 500mph. Why are these commodities while preparing a will is not?

There are transactions/disputes that require highly skilled people to direct/settle, but I wonder how many legal systems have been specifically constructed to require guidance. How can we tell when something is costly because it is complex or merely complex to make it costly?

<comment><USER18> > You risk your life getting into your car every day. You don't pick the most > expensive car? Choosing air travel is commonly an exercise in finding the > lowest price, despite the inherent risks/fear of traveling 4 miles up at > 500mph. Why are these commodities while preparing a will is not?

That's easy. The expense of a car or plane doesn't indicate it's safety, infact it's usually the opposite, the more expensive the car or plane the faster it goes and less safe it can make your trip.

With a doctor or lawyer more often than not the more you pay the better the service/advice you get.

> There are transactions/disputes that require highly skilled people to > direct/settle, but I wonder how many legal systems have been specifically > constructed to require guidance. How can we tell when something is costly > because it is complex or merely complex to make it costly?

Completely agree with this.

<comment><USER20> > That's easy. The expense of a car or plane doesn't indicate it's safety, > infact it's usually the opposite, the more expensive the car or plane the > faster it goes and less safe it can make your trip.

> With a doctor or lawyer more often than not the more you pay the better the > service/advice you get.

Do you know this, or do you just believe / hope this? I'd argue that the actual quality of service delivered (not just how nice their suits or offices are) is very difficult for customers to assess. At least with cars, there are independent ratings agencies that will tell you that your more expensive car is actually safer. (Doctors actually have stats like mortality and length of hospital stay.)

<comment><USER18> > Do you know this, or do you just believe / hope this?

Good question, the answer is obviously I can't say its' true for 100% of the cases but do this thought experiment.

You are going to court against someone else, you get a public defender, your opponent brings in a team of 10 lawyers costing $100,000 a week.

If the evidence makes the case look like its 50:50. What is your chance of success? I think almost everyone would agree that its much lower than 50:50 after you factor in the lawyers.

<comment><USER20> It's easy to do that thought experiment at the extremes, but that's not what the article is about. It's talking primarily about corporate law, and a public company isn't going to hire a public defender.

More realistically, you're a company and you choose a $400/hr law firm instead of a $600/hr law firm. Are you necessarily going to get worse advice? I'd argue that would often just depend on how much experience each firm has in the particular subject you're hiring them for - and neither firm is adjusting their rates based on that.

Just yesterday I came across a situation where a major law firm was working as investor counsel on a type of deal they almost never advise on (because they're the clients usual firm for other types of deals) - I'm sure they didn't offer the client a discount because they have less experience than a lot of cheaper, less prominent law firms.

<comment><USER18> > It's easy to do that thought experiment at the extremes, but that's not what > the article is about. It's talking primarily about corporate law, and a > public company isn't going to hire a public defender.

Hmm, yes you are right.

Point conceded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A: Because they get other jobs that meet their income requirements.

People who make it through law school usually aren't idiots. So if they fail to achieve a satisfactory career in Law, they move into other areas. Attorneys work in government as political appointees, lobbyists and policy people; they work as corporate managers; they run businesses in areas other than law, etc.

Also consider that the barriers of entry for lawyers are high. Referrals are a huge source of business, so it's difficult to start a new firm without alot of capital.

</comment><comment><USER22> There is one restriction in particular which I believe has a huge effect on the legal industry's slow pace of change -- only lawyers may own companies which provide legal services to clients (vs. in-house counsel). So, want to start an online, virtual law firm? Either act as a referral service or make sure you never want a non-attorney to have equity in your company. Why does this rule exist? I haven't a clue.

<comment><USER23> This is true for most state-licensed professionals like doctors and accountants. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that a non-licensed person could easily bypass the license rules by affiliating with a licensed person in name only and doing all the work requiring a license.

The second is that licensed professionals have ethical and professional duties to their clients that they are taught as part of their licensing eductation. A non-licensed person may not know these duties, or be aware of their rationales, and may try to influence the licensed person to violate them.

<comment><USER24> I don't believe this is true for doctors, although, I could be wrong but I think HMO's get around the restriction. The bottom line is that lawyers are a protected guild with rules like the one mentioned above that artificially inflate the value of their services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Traditional supply-demand economics just doesn't explain the behavior of "middleman" industries, such as lawyering, real estate agenting, etc.

Traditional supply-demand economics assumes a 1:1 ratio where there is one buyer and one seller and there is some amount of economic surplus that the two parties play tug-of-war with. Traditional supply-demand economics works great when buyer and seller negotiate directly.

But in middleman industries, the middlemen can hop on either side, and play for either team. They are able to effectively scope out surplus from either or both sides, predatorize the weaker side with almost _no risk_ to themselves, and destroy a lot of the potential _realized_ value between the original parties in their process.

So basically it creates a "parallel" economy where prices aren't determined by supply or demand, but rather by fear and a kind of high-stakes prisoner's dilemma between buyers and sellers where buyers and sellers bear all the risk and lawyers and agents reap all of the rewards.

<comment><USER26> _Traditional supply-demand economics assumes a 1:1 ratio where there is one buyer and one seller_

That's not what 'ceteris paribus' means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Having worked some recently with lawyers, their chief value is similar to that of the historical value of having assassins on the king's payroll. The power is not in using the assassins, which is expensive and dangerous, but in that people are more scared to provoke and escalate with someone known to employ assassins.

</comment><comment><USER28> Before we talk too much about why lawyers are so expensive, it's worth checking out how much they actually get paid. It's the weirdest salary chart you'll ever see:

<http://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib>

Basically it's the sum of two separate curves -- a bell curve centered around $45,000 a year, and a sharp, sharp peak up at $160,000.

What's going on here? Well law is two separate markets -- the bell curve is the 90% of lawyers who compete on cost in a more or less normal market, and the sharp peak is the 10% of lawyers who work at BigLaw firms that march in lockstep at $160,000 for new associates.

So for the 90%, the answer is that law is a highly competitive market. You're paying $150,000 in tuition to get a job that averages $45k a year when you start, and won't go up too fast. You're doing largely hard, boring work, it sucks to do without support staff, and it's time-consuming to do right. If the product costs a lot, it's not because the lawyer is overpaid -- it's because that's how much it costs to produce. Lawyers who drop below that price go out of business.

For the 10%, they're in a weird parallel universe where the cost of their service is _almost totally irrelevant to their clients_. They're handling international mergers, billion-dollar divorces, and Federal indictments of entire financial firms. The question of whether the lawyers charge $300 or $600/hr is like the question of whether your parachute costs $50 or $100 before you jump out of a plane. If there's the slightest chance that the $100 parachute is safer, you go for it. That's why the starting salaries march in lockstep -- no BigLaw firm can afford to let people think that the cream of the crop from Harvard Law is being hired by their competitors. They'd lose all their business if anyone else had a clear edge. But this only relates to a small minority of lawyers.

...

To disclose my own bias, this article/conversation is strange to me because I took a big pay cut to go from programming (which I could do before I graduated from college) to law (where most of my lower salary goes to student loans). I knew I would. I didn't join the BigLaw 10% (which I would have hated), but I'm getting to work on things that matter to me, and I'm proud I made that call. But to see a bunch of programmers talk about why lawyers have it so good ... yeesh.

This isn't to say that law can't get easier or cheaper. There are huge wins to be had from automation here, and I always turn into the resident tools guy wherever I work. I've had to get pretty good at VBA of all things, and 1000 curses on that misbegotten tongue. (Jashkenas, are you listening? Need a project after CoffeeScript?) I also think law school needs to get a lot cheaper -- like college tuition in general, it's been growing at twice inflation for decades, and that can't be right.

One other thought -- the bar is indeed a protected guild, and I'm not sure where I stand on that, but there are reasons for it. First and foremost, _you will never know whether your lawyer has done a good job._ If you hire a programmer, there may be problems behind the scenes, but you can more or less tell whether they've done what you hired them to do. If you hire a lawyer, and you lose your case, you will often have not the slightest idea whether they were competent -- there's just not enough signal for most laypeople to analyze in most cases. Even my own supervisors often have no idea whether I've done my job right. They ask me a question, I answer it, and without repeating the work I did they have no way of telling whether I'm right or how long it should have taken to complete.

Requiring education, examination and licensing is one way to address that problem. It definitely raises the price. In theory it also lowers the chances that you're buying snake oil. Something to consider anyway.

</comment><comment><USER29> There are all sorts of reasons, but first and foremost is the lack of transparency in all things legal. This is why I'm working on PlainSite (<http://www.plainsite.org>). The opacity creates the illusion of difficulty, the need for (arbitary) specialized knowledge, and uncertainty as to the real price because so many factors are hidden from view.

For example: you're expected to follow the law even without knowing what the law says. When you want to find out what the law says, it's not easy--it's certainly not available in a standardized format. When you want to interpret what you find, assuming you find it, that's not easy either. Courts interpret things in new ways all the time.

The federal court system charges you to access public information contained in court proceedings, with limited exceptions--that is, if you even know where to look for it. See <http://www.thinkcomputer.org/20120209.pacer.pdf>. The interface is terrible and hard to use. The way in which you write lawsuits is obscure, counterintuitive, and creates additional needless work.

In addition to all of these factors, and perhaps because of them, lawyers (especially at big firms) have institutionalized fraud. It's taken for granted that legal billing is often fraudulent. If you charge $500 per hour and your system only resolves to the tenth of an hour, that means if you spent four minutes writing an e-mail, you can charge for 0.1 hours, or $50. But really you only did $33.33 of work. That's a nice cushion. But what actually happens is that an attorney might do 45 minutes of work and round it up to an hour-- even though that work is formatting in Microsoft Word that the client could have done; or printing out a Word document in order to scan it in as a PDF. Still seem worth $500 per hour?

For those lawyers not at large firms, they're covering expenses (such as law school) that are enormous. High rates are a necessity, and who would charge far lower than market rates anyway? It might be interpreted as a signal that something is wrong.

Of course, don't for a minute think that paying $800 per hour will get you a better lawyer than paying $300 per hour. It might. Either way, you'll be paying someone in a staggering number of cases to unscientifically guesstimate What The Government Might Do, when the answer is, "who knows?". That doesn't mean all lawyers are the same; some are definitely better than others. But it has nothing to do with price.

More lawyers could afford to charge reasonable market rates, and not work for large firms, if it weren't for the ABA mandating that you have to attend a law school (that results in huge piles of debt) or clerk for years (four in California) in order to join the bar. See [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/opinion/are-law-schools- an...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/opinion/are-law-schools-and-bar- exams-necessary.html).

Lawyers know, too, that you can't get rid of them (also thanks to the ABA), and so you're locked in. There's a monopoly on business representation, for example. See <http://www.plainsite.org/issues/index.html?id=137>. It's absurd.

<comment><USER30> >More lawyers could afford to charge reasonable market rates, and not work for large firms, if it weren't for the ABA mandating that you have to attend a law school (that results in huge piles of debt) or clerk for years (four in California) in order to join the bar.

That's exactly the problem, regulatory capture of government protected guilds. It's exactly the same with Doctors and the AMA, or electricians, hell in some places even interior decorators.

If you've ever had to hire a commercial electrician, it's absolutely terrible. Once they pull a permit and start working, it's extremely difficult to replace them, and they know it.

Recently the general contractors in Georgia convinced the state to raise the net worth requirement for contractors. They are already required to have massive insurance coverage, so the only reason was to protect the incumbent contractors from new competition.

Anywhere you end up with government sanctioned guilds ran by industry or ex- industry people, you're just asking for regulatory capture and the resulting protectionism.

<comment><USER31> Without a regulatory body it would be too easy for an unqualified person to pose as an electrician, doctor, dentist or lawyer. Do you really want someone with no experience or training wiring your house, pulling your teeth, operating on your knee, or defending you at trial?

<comment><USER29> If I want to represent myself or my company at trial, I should have that right.

<comment><USER32> You have the right to represent yourself, but not another person or entity, which is what you would be doing if you attempted to represent your limited liability entity in court. It doesn't matter if you're the sole shareholder or not, you and the company are not one and the same.

<comment><USER29> Except that such logic seems to vanish in small claims court (where I can represent my corporation), and before the USPTO Trademark Trial and Appeals Board (where I can represent my corporation)...which means that it's really not very logical at all.

<comment><USER32> The details of small claims courts vary wildly from state to state, but more importantly, they're not courts of general jurisdiction. They have severe restrictions on what they can and can't do, and the losing party is often entitled to a de novo trial in a court of general jurisdiction.

The USPTO appeals board you mentioned is not a court at all. It is an administrative body whose holdings are again subject to review in US District Court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The same reason professional athletes make so much money even though high schools and colleges are full of kids who want to play for a living. Just having a good lawyer isn't enough - he needs to be _better_ than the lawyer on the other side.

</comment><comment><USER34> There are a few things to add in here (IANAL, but I'm close to quite a few).

A major element is billable hours.

When you want to reduce a bill for a client, during bad times or whatever, you can always under-bill the number of hours spent. Or change the mix of high- low-rate hours expended. Reducing the number of hours billed doesn't (necessarily) reduce the number of billable hours you can credit the attorneys.

While you can have equal salaries across departments, you have bonuses, which depend on how many hours you billed. Also, #billable hours is a great sort criteria for who's first on the shit-list and first on the promote-list.

</comment><comment><USER20> I used to "hire" law firms regularly for my clients. What's not being mentioned here is that since in most cases the individuals _choosing_ the law firms for large financial and M&A transactions (which represent the real meat of the "big law" business) generally aren't directly paying the legal fees, there's relatively little incentive for them to push for lower prices. (And if I remember correctly, if those legal fees are part of a financing transaction, they don't count against the businesses "normalized/adjusted" income, either.)

If I'm the CFO of a company that's doing a $500M financing round, am I really going to choose a lesser law firm to save maybe $100K in bills? I'm already probably paying the bankers $5M or more to do the deal in fees (arguably, that's the real gouging, given that the work doesn't really scale with the deal size but the fees do.) If I choose a cheaper firm, and they mess up (and frankly, all the firms make mistakes, especially when you have junior associates drafting filing docs) it could cost me my job.

(The most cost-conscious clients I've seen were entrepreneurs or at least majority owners of businesses - they saw those fees as coming right of out their own pockets, so they tried to do whatever they could to keep them down)

In-house counsels are definitely trying to push down costs by doing more things internally or offshoring more mundane stuff like day-to-day contracts. But at the same time, most of your in-house counsels come from a big law firm, so they're unlikely to break away completely, either.

</comment><comment><USER35> Surely that's an opportunity for a new firm? The demand is obviously there (plenty of people don't see a lawyer for financial reasons), as is the supply (apparently).

<comment><USER9> There's a service that used to be called "Prepaid legal" with essentially a small retainer, and a minimum guarantee of services, with favorable rates when the service was used beyond that. It operated basically as a kind of legal insurance.

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

<comment><USER36> Yes, some company offer that. Cheap, but you lose the case with cheap lawyers. Penny wise, pound foolish.

<comment><USER37> Why do you think you automatically lose a case with cheap lawyers? If you are bringing a weak case against someone, then perhaps using high priced lawyers will be able to bully them into submission, but if the facts are with you, then a competent lawyer should be fine. If some are so bad that you will trivially lose, then perhaps the ABA/Bar has misrepresented their qualifications?

<comment><USER36> You get what you paid for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This whole argument that this is "not a free market" is silly. None of the factors pointed to here would actually limit choice or restrain price movement. It is a free market, but that does not mean that the market lacks information asymmetries that would artificially morph prices.

As Antone points out, there is a strong quality perception issue. Ironically, it is the Bottom Line Law Group that is fighting this perception of quality on a daily basis (vs a Wilson or Fenwick). Thus it does not matter if the supply increases if the consumer perceives the bottom-end as an inferior good.

This skewed perception is rooted in a total lack of transparency in the legal industry. This lack of transparency limits the consumer's ability to find lawyers like Antone, and keeps the cost of standard information and a simple opinion high.

I agree with Antone that the industry is on the brink of change, but it is a BIG messed up industry. Change will come in many forms within the industry's mirco verticals. It will come from networks of smaller more specialized law firms such as the Bottom Line Law Group, and from innovations which create more transparency in the industry to find qualified attorneys and access quality information.

</comment><comment><USER39> Any way this market can be disrupted? Maybe through some more efficient/decentralized/AI-based services that would do much of the lawyer's jobs, forcing them to reduce their billing rates?

<comment><USER40> Docracy was posted to HN recently:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3666478>

It's really limited or just starting out, no EULA's or anything that I can personally actually use.

<comment><USER41> Yep, we're getting started, but we might get an EULA soon, stay tuned

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The article doesn't address what could be the most important factors.

First, your relationship with a lawyer is a personal relationship. And it's hard to break a personal relationship over a yearly price increase of single digit %.

And lawyers regularly wine and dine and become "friends" with their clients. The client really thinks that the lawyer likes them. If you've ever worked in sales you know what I mean by this. Lawyers are nice and friendly and that insures the loyalty of the client. When I was in high school I delivered gifts to the clients of a small law firm. I remember the partner deciding who got what gift (based on amount of work). This wasn't a bribe. Just a thank you to insure ongoing loyalty. (Maybe some were bribes of course).

Remember rates aren't doubled they go up a little each time they are raised. If you are already paying $400 per hour you aren't bolting for $425/hr. It's not like rates are doubling in a year.

The other reason is FUD. People convince themselves and rationalize that a certain lawyer at a certain rate will get the job done. They are afraid of switching lawyers and having a bad outcome.

So the above is certainly one of the things that keeps legal rates high.

What about new startup lawyers? Well the way any professional service works you start out with whatever work you can get at whatever price you can get (let's say). Then as you gain clients you slowly wean yourself from the low priced clients (by taking longer, not returning calls etc.) and they get the message. This leaves you with the best clients who you can raise rates on (because they like you and are fearful of changing).

So even if there was a group that charged low rates (to corporate buyers) over time their rates would rise as well. Because of the person factor I mentioned in the first paragraph.

Finally, even though lawyers can now market (I remember when they couldn't) they won't "sell" in the traditional sense. If I sell a service (like web hosting web design or unix sysadmin) I can pickup the phone and call people. I can go door to door. I can place ads. Lawyers can place ads of course but that's not the most effective way to sell personal services. Then you are waiting for someone to contact you. Selling is selling. If lawyers were ethically allowed and it was acceptable practice to "cold call" I believe you would see rates dropping in certain types of work.

</comment><comment><USER24> My naive understanding is that only lawyers can own and operate a law firm. In other words one can't form the equivalent of an HMO and hire a bunch of lawyers and pay them a salary and offer legal counsel to individuals.

I believe this is mandated by bar associations on ethical grounds, though I find it absurd. This artificially inflates the cost of legal services.

</comment><comment><USER36> Because there are no H-1B lawyers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think lawyers from other countries know US law? I don't think so. You will pretty much have to start over in US.

<comment><USER43> You realize there are huge outsourcing industries (in the legal and accounting sector among others) where workers in India, China, etc. are trained to learn American standards, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of those are doing the grunt work. But when it comes to go in the court who is going to go?

<comment><USER43> Most legal work is grunt work, the time spent in court is only a fraction of what a lawyer does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To respond to one point in the article:

> Associate salaries are not an efficient, free market.

That is probably true, but the evidence supplied in the article supports an inference the opposite of the one made by the author. If everybody in New York pays $160k as an informal arrangement, that suggests artificially low salaries, not artificially high ones. Why would a bunch of firms act informally in concert to artificially drive up their costs?

And associate salaries, of course, have only an indirect effect on legal fees. The price of a good is directly influenced only by supply and the demand curve. The costs of making the good are irrelevant except to the extent they influence supply. Clients, of course, don't care what associates make. The amount they will pay for services is entirely a function of their demand and the supply of law firms willing to do the work.

</comment><comment><USER13> The legal field isn't really amenable to simplistic economic analysis. With all due respect to thinkcomp, the idea that licensing requirements are what is driving the cost of legal services is totally wrong.

First, legal services generally aren't that expensive. If you need someone to help you draft a deed to some property, you can probably get that work done for cheaper than you would pay an engineer to design you a retaining wall on that property. When people say legal services are expensive, what they mean is that high-end corporate legal services are expensive.

Second, corporate legal services is not expensive because of limited supply. There are about 45,000 JD's graduated each year, and maybe 3,000-4,000 are hired at big firms that do corporate work. The rest work for far less money, in the $45-$60k range. If you wanted to start a firm doing corporate legal services at low cost, paying attorneys $80k a year (half the going rate of a first year at a large firm), you would literally drown in job applications. While in a platonic sense there is a supply constraint in the legal field, it has a practical effect more akin to crash safety regulations in cars than something that actually constrains supply to drive up prices.

If the state bars got rid of the requirement that lawyers attend an accredited law school, there would be almost no change in the cost of legal services at the top. Big firms hire the large majority of their associates from only 20 or so schools, out of the 200 that exist. Why would adding a category of potential hires below the huge group of people already not getting hired drive down salaries?

The price of high-end legal services is insensitive to the supply of lawyers for the same reason the price of Apple products is largely insensitive to the number of Korean competitors in the market: 1) brand is tremendously important; and 2) there are actual differences in the quality of the product.

Re: 1) Because it is difficult to tell whether your lawyer did a bad job or whether you just had a bad case, branding and signaling becomes tremendously important. It is that branding and signaling that makes companies keep going to firms that hire primarily from the top schools, even when there is nothing, legally, that prevents them from taking it to firms that have more diverse hiring standards.

Re: 2) The adversarial nature of law means that there is an arms race for the smartest people. While a lot of even high-end legal work can be very routine and boring, some of it can be very complex. That 10% of legal work that requires out-thinking the opposing counsel can have major repercussions for companies, and as such companies are willing to spend the money to ensure that their lawyers are smarter (at least on paper) than the opposing party's lawyers.

<comment><USER44> _Re: 1) Because it is difficult to tell whether your lawyer did a bad job or whether you just had a bad case, branding and signaling becomes tremendously important. It is that branding and signaling that makes companies keep going to firms that hire primarily from the top schools, even when there is nothing, legally, that prevents them from taking it to firms that have more diverse hiring standards.

Re: 2) The adversarial nature of law means that there is an arms race for the smartest people. While a lot of even high-end legal work can be very routine and boring, some of it can be very complex. That 10% of legal work that requires out-thinking the opposing counsel can have major repercussions for companies, and as such companies are willing to spend the money to ensure that their lawyers are smarter (at least on paper) than the opposing party's lawyers._

This. Agree that these are the primary factors in the insane legal costs for high-value clients (corporations and high-net worth individuals). Also agree that for most folks, it is possible to find a good lawyer to do a will for under $500, an amicable divorce for under $800, or do all the filing to launch a business for under $400.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Think about this. If you have too many doctors, they run out of sick people and their prices go down. They don't go out and start injuring people to make business for themselves.

Lawyers do just that. If they don't have work, they can attack innocent citizens to create work for themselves. Frivolous law suits create new market pressure for more attorneys. Whenever you see slip-n-fall attorney commercials, that's just an window into the parasitically-based ecosystem that lawyers operate in.

Failing that, lawyers are the most likely profession to go into politics and create more laws that need what to sort them out? Oh yeah, more lawyers.

It's a troubling profession that needs to be considered carefully when you're making decisions about the economic impact of laws upon society.

</comment><comment><USER46> Same reason so many of us here can bill out at several hundred dollars an hour even though there is an unlimited supply of people calling themselves computer programmers who will happily try to do the same job for $7/hr.

Valuable stuff is worth paying more for.

</comment><comment><USER47> For anyone interested there is a good book called 'The End of Lawyers?' by Richard Susskind, a visiting Professor at Oxford, that discusses the ways in which technology will gradually commoditize many elements of traditional legal practice.

[http://www.amazon.com/End-Lawyers-Rethinking-Nature- Services...](http://www.amazon.com/End-Lawyers-Rethinking-Nature- Services/dp/0199541728)

Chapters

1\. Introduction - the Beginning of the End? 2\. The Path to Commoditization 3\. Trends in Technology 4\. Disruptive Legal Technologies 5\. The Future for In-house Lawyers 6\. Resolving and Avoiding Disputes 7\. Access to Law and to Justice 8\. Conclusion - the Future of Lawyers.

</comment><comment><USER48> The fee overage acts as insurance. Since the downside of legal services (no matter the competence) is significant, consumers believe the extra money they are paying will help mitigate any unfortunate circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER23> Simple, because government keeps passing more and more laws that create more ways to become liable. While there may be growing supply of lawyers, there is a growing demand due to this explosive growth of new laws. Stop the government from controlling every inch of our lives, and you will see lawyers getting cheaper.

I also agree with the previous reply that this article only deals with the 10% of lawyers who work in big firms. The other 90% of lawyers that don't work in big firms are out there competing everyday for your business and are charging reasonable rates.

</comment><comment><USER49> HN, help me make up my mind: is an abundance of lawyers to be seen as a necessary component of a complex society? Or is it a symptom of decay? Are lawyers necessary agents of the greater good or are they vampiric rent-seekers on a byzantine legal morass?

I'm not trying to be clever; I genuinely want to figure this out.

<comment><USER50> (Obviously, IANAL and I have no legal training).

In England people are encouraged not to go to law until they really need to.

People with family law problems (divorce, access to children, etc) are encouraged, strongly, to use mediation before they go to court. This mediation can be lawyer led, but it can also be led by other professionals.

People with employment problems usually need to filter through any internal company policies before they go to law.

Rejecting pre-trial discussions is usually a bad idea.

Solicitors will tell you that going to law is a bad idea, and expensive, and will often not get the result you want. I think, BICBW, that they need to do this as part of their professional codes of conduct. They're tightly regulated, and encouraging people to go to law if they're unlikely to win is frowned upon.

Note that none of this is a barrier to effective law; once you need to go to law you've usually had several discussions with solicitors and you know what's involved and what to expect from your barrister.

There are separate tracks for quick and easy civil "small claims" cases, but even these can sometimes be avoided by using existing legal protections. (The very consumer-friendly "Distance Buying Regulations" or the credit card protections, for example.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The supply of lawyers is high, but the supply of good, experienced lawyers with good reputations is lower.

</comment><comment><USER52> What I found interesting in dealing with layers: they charge high rates even for standard contracts, EULAs etc. and when asked if one is safe with their advice, only tell you that courts can decide in whatever way they want - <USER2> no.

</comment><comment><USER53> I would add:

1) Pay can be high with win/lose stakes

2) Different pay models (contingency)

</comment><comment><USER54> Supply Induced Demand. They're out there, so you need one too. The other guy has 2, you better get 2, too. No such thing as an "excess supply."

</comment><comment><USER55> This article misses one point, law school is expensive!

Students generally will want to pay their 6-figure debts with a matching salary.

When you don't have to worry about a huge debt, it allows you to be riskier and try other avenues, such as public interest, or work in small lesser known industries

<comment><USER56> The article did mention student loans. Also, I can't help thinking that the reason law school can be so expensive is that the students can then get overpaid jobs and pay it back.

<comment><AUTHOR> The law school is as expensive as the medical school, or almost. While at medical school you can understand the infrastructure you need to teach people, what infrastructure you need when learning law?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Who said there is an excess supply of lawyers?

</comment><comment><USER58> It's why Legalzoom is doing so well.

</comment><comment><USER59> Perhaps it is because lawyers are, by definition, the experts at defending dubious practices.

</comment><comment><USER60> "Back to Econ 101. What happens when you double the price of something? Demand for it decreases."

Pretty sure what he's describing is sliding the supply curve straight up, which has exactly the opposite effect.

<comment><USER61> I think you have _marginal utility_ confused with _marginal cost_. For a given supply, as demand increases, that causes an increase in price. But obviously, increasing the price does not (usually) cause an increase in demand.

<comment><USER62> If we're rationalizing this with economic principles, I think we can chalk it up to "imperfect information".

Also demand is static regardless of price changes. Quantity demanded is what changes. Apologies for the pedantry but don't want anyone reading too much here and making that mistake on a econ test :)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Masked.link – A Stateless Link Shortener - <AUTHOR> https://masked.link <comment><USER2> Neat idea but impossible to type unless I am missing something. I built a url shortener using hashids [https://t.ly/](https://t.ly/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice! This looks like a similar idea to [1] Zero Width Shortner, except you can actually see the characters!

[1] [https://zws.im/](https://zws.im/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for linking that! It looks like zws is using Firebase as a backend store to save the links while this just encodes it into the unicode.

I wonder if there's enough valid whitespace characters to store a meaningful amount of bits in...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Managed to have -12% compression rate =D

Couldn't copy and paste the link, it takes forever

[https://pastebin.com/e8ivtyev](https://pastebin.com/e8ivtyev)

</comment><comment><USER5> Neat trick!</comment>


A religious couple didn't believe in medical care. They're headed to prison - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/07/10/a-religious-oregon-couple-didnt-get-medical-care-for-their-newborn-the-child-died-and-now-theyre-going-to-prison/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e0ed5178e363 <comment><USER2> "that this was a familiar occurrence with members of the Followers of Christ Church, a faith-healing sect numbering around 1,000 members"

I'm calling "BS".

How can it be "a familiar occurrence" with just a 1,000 members?

How many have babies? How many have infants that die?

This is such low quality reporting. Sad to see it on HN's.

<comment><USER3> I think you underestimate just how high the infant mortality rate was before modern medical care.

<comment><USER4> What year did "modern medical care" start?

Dependence on Jesus Christ is primary. Secondarily after prayer, God gave humans skills to carry out compassionate healing. There's no spiritual conflict with using an emergency room and modern medical care. They are all an extension of God's grace on Earth.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Storage Pricing: GB vs. GiB - <AUTHOR> According to the SI system, Colin Percival and hard-drive vendors, for anything other than memory, i.e. for storage, 1 GB = 10^9 bytes (http://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html).
Yet, most cloud providers continue to insist for billing purposes, that 1 GB = 2^30 bytes, even for recently launched projects:
"Project storage usage and bandwidth usage are calculated in gigabytes (GB), where 1GB is 2^30 bytes. This unit of measurement is also known as a gibibyte (GiB). Similarly, 1TB is 2^40 bytes, i.e. 1024 GBs." - https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=54521
Surely it's time that pricing pages show 1 GB = 10^9 or else use GiB if they mean 2^30?
If you were designing a pricing page for a new storage solution, would you use 1 GB = 10^9? Why or why not? <comment><USER2> AFAIK, storage hardware was always rated in 10^9 while storage software (file sizes, etc.) always used 2^30 [1]. So the cloud is just continuing this problem.

[1] recent versions of OS X being the exception</comment>


Jonathan Schwartz's Farewell Memo - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2010/02/jonathan-schwartzs-farewell-memo.html

<comment><USER2> You're perhaps seen this before, but per the commentary at the end of this posting of it: " _Note carefully the first letter of the first 7 paragraphs._ "

It can't be an accident.</comment>


Google web security expert posits the "Millenium Prizes" in web scanning - <AUTHOR> http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/08/commercial-scanners-and-word-suck.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Backstory: there are something like 10 different commercial web app scanning tools. Aim them at a web app, get a list of XSS and SQLI "findings".

There are wildly different opinions about how useful/effective these tools are, despite the fact that they generate tens of millions of dollars of revenue and arm a significant percentage of all web app testers (we've banned them at Matasano, for whatever that's worth).

HN usually doesn't care about inside-baseball appsec stories, but I think there's an opportunity for HN to geek out on the big unsolved problems Zalewski --- one of Google's leading security people --- suggests afflicts the space:

* How do you compare HTTP/HTML responses to detect templated versions of the same basic page structure (pages that differ only in the database row used to generate them, but with the same inputs and the same mapping of inputs to outputs)?

* How do you even detect whether a page is valid or not? Most large web apps intercept and articulate the page-not-found exception, so that it looks like any other part of the app.

* How do you figure out how to reliably and automatically feed inputs to 100 different applications that will encode inputs totally differently?

* How can you distinguish a "500 Internal Server Error" caused by an uncaught exception handler in defensive code from a "500 Internal Server Error" caused by an undefended component crashing "exploitably"?

There's pretty good money in a simple, clever, effective answer to any subset of these questions, for what it's worth.

<comment><USER2> Your first problem is closely related to screen scraping.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not "my" problem (we don't use automated scanners), but it is apparently a problem for things like WebInspect, in that they want to identify distinct functional areas of the application to subject to their battery of probes.

How would you solve it as a screen-scraper?

<comment><USER2> Using a chunk of a bioinformatics pipeline that scans for mutations using longest-common-substring and lines things up between a series of pages from the same source. It's called 'sequence alignment'.

I've used that trick restoring a database when a sysadmin on some site went rogue.

Very effective.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Before my company got bought we spent years lamenting that we didn't have the budget to purchase licenses for WI. As soon as were acquired, we were stoked to suddenly have the budget to get tools. In pure "cursed-monkey's-paw" fashion, we quickly realized how awful the tool was; and have subsequently stopped including it as part of our methodology.

I'll occasionally use it for what I think is a straight-forward purpose, and more often than not, it's more trouble than it's worth. We've demoed a couple of other web scanners, and it definitely doesn't seem like WI is alone in it's awfulness.

</comment><comment><USER4> What RFCs are relevant for query parameter and URL encoding? I'm assuming that the article is talking about semantics and not syntax.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, not totally sure where he's coming from here; presumably, he means something like 'x-www-form-urlencoded' and the reserved & and = characters.

His broader point is that you can't count on ?a=b&c=d formatting if you're writing a tool that needs to exercise any web application it finds. There are definitely some goofy alternatives to that format lurking out there.

<comment><USER5> My personal favorite : example.com/outsourcingIsAnEducationalExperience?a=bamp;c=d

This, naturally, broke the existing query string parsers, but never fear, they built a custom string tokenizer (which did not actually descend from StringTokenizer) which segmented the string around "amp;"

It was brought to my attention after a lecturer in web design at $CLIENT couldn't post a homework assignment for his students because it included "&" in the message body text field.</comment></comment></comment>


Processing XSLT Transformations in Windows - <AUTHOR> anyone knows of a good windows XSLT processor to run transformations in Windows in batch mode (many XML to CSV file transformations at once) like Xalan does it from the commend line with Java? <comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I found the right solution for windows - hopefully this is helpful to someone else: <http://www.zlatkovic.com/libxml.en.html> and for more details: <http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/InstallingAProcessor.html> and <http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/HtmlOutput.html> Worked very well for me!

</comment><comment><USER2> [http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2fb55371-c94e-4373-b0e9-db4816552e41&displaylang=en)

next?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I am not much of a windows person but I guess if can also use a browser with a XSLT processing instruction. Just didn't think of this when I posted. But thx for the input. Any other good client would be appreciated.</comment></comment>


America's spies anonymously took down Michael Flynn. That is deeply worrying - <AUTHOR> http://theweek.com/articles/680068/americas-spies-anonymously-took-down-michael-flynn-that-deeply-worrying?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=afternoon&utm_medium=02_15_17-article_1-680068 <comment><USER2> "Unelected intelligence analysts work for the president, not the other way around."

No they don't. They work for the American public.

They swear to uphold the US Constitution above all else, including the Presidency.

Presidents have been undermined for the right reasons by the intelligence service before, in the greater national interest (Deepthroat during Watergate for example, Iran-Contra, Gitmo - there were always people on the inside prepared to go against their own agencies). These cases certainly meet those tests.

<comment><USER3> I think you may be thinking of the military or elected officials, Non-elected non-military personnel do not have to make an oath by anything for most cases much less the constitution.

<comment><USER4> Do we know precisely where the leaks came from? Don't CIA officers, for example, take an oath?

In any event, oath or not, I think it's understood that we expect people to breach protocol under the right circumstances. The United States, at least, rejected the Nuremberg Defense. This isn't quite the same thing, but at the very least it's well established that even the lowest-level officials have an obligation to their nation's organic[1] law, as well as to universal moral law, that supersedes their duty to obey supervisory authority.

[1] organic meaning constitutional--little 'c', not big 'C'\--that can include both written and unwritten law.</comment></comment></comment>