The Anglosphere miracle - <AUTHOR> http://www.newcriterion.com/articleprint.cfm/The-Anglosphere-miracle-7709 <comment><USER2> > _To British eyes, the whole process seemed bizarre. Rules had been drawn up > in the clearest language that lawyers could devise. Yet, the moment they > became inconvenient, they were ignored._

I find it very difficult to take this seriously coming from a Conservative MEP (I note the article makes no mention of his party affiliation), mainly because his party is proposing to do the exact same thing with the EU Convention on Human Rights.

To wit, the Conservative Party has upon numerous occasions frequently chosen to ignore their legal obligations, such as trying to deport people who have been charged with no crime on the basis of evidence gained under torture, denying some prisoners the right to vote, and retaining DNA of those arrested but not charged with a crime indefinitely. All of which are, according to the EU courts, illegal.

So when faced with these 'inconvenient' laws, the tories are proposing to ignore them, tear them up, and replace them with a 'British' bill of rights that largely duplicates what's already enshrined in EU law (a pointless exercise).

I also think it's rather disingenuous of the article to gloss over the fact that Daniel Hannan is not without his critics, and that his positions on issues such as immigration are not, in my view, particularly enlightened. I leave it to other commenters here to determine whether it's really 'racist garbage' (as someone else suggested), but whatever he's pining for something that simply doesn't and cannot exist anymore.

<comment><USER3> Can you give an example of a specific sentence or passage in the essay that you believe is false?

<comment><USER2> I quoted one. He suggests the British found it bizarre that Germany would ignore its treaty obligations to preserve Eurozone fiscal stability.

I don't think that's true, especially since _his own party_ is doing the exact same thing (ignoring EU treaty obligations), just with human rights instead of fiscal responsibility. If he found it so bizarre why would he do it himself?

He is attempting to project his own Euroscepticism onto the UK as a whole by making blanket statements about what it means to be 'British'. I think these assumptions are false. Whilst there are vocal Eurosceptics in Britain they are not representative of the whole (if they were, his own party would have a majority, but they don't - they're in coalition).

<comment><USER4> Something that is true of a group he is a part of isn't necessarily true of him. However, if he did want to change parties over this he'd have to drop out of mainstream politics entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Typical self-congratulatory anglo-conservative clap trap. No one outside of a very small group of wealthy Britons and Americans (and, alright, some wealthy educated descendants from the former colonies) could possibly share such an immensely bowdlerized narrative of anglo history.

The freedom he praises is the freedom of the very rich and well-connected to impose their success on the less fortunate, be they poor sheep farmers in Scotland who saw their commons taken away by enclosures, indentured servants who were shipped off to the colonies in America or the inhabitants of India who had their livelihood taken away from them when textile manufacturers from Manchester forced the destruction of their local economy. (Notice, by the way, how this essay makes no mention of Indians other than the 2.4 million Indians who were pressed into service in the trenches in World War I and who, for the most part, suffered terribly to defend a country that had pretty much ruined their own.)

For this rich mercantile elite, yes, the anglo system is superior, which is why its ideals have now spread across the entire world (even in China there is now an elite that dresses in suits and engages in trade unencumbered by rules and regulations that protect the millions that are pressed into working in their factories under appalling conditions).

For the vast majority of people, however, the system is a disaster. It has ruined communal forms of organisation that protected the unfortunate and the weak. It has destroyed perfectly viable local economies and it has reduced millions of people to little more than debt bondage.

It takes a special kind of myopia to gloss over all of that and proclaim, like this article does, that the anglo system is superior because it promotes free trade and rule of law for the rich.

<comment><USER6> Actually, the Latin political systems are quite obviously better for the powerful, as the weak tradition of rule of law and equality under the law allows them to more easily exploit the political process for their own gain.

<comment><USER7> Better to be a middle class American than a Latin despot.

(Back when America had a middle class. Now, we have our own despots.)

<comment><USER6> Pretty sure the despot gets laid more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The standard, disingenuous "we stand for civilization" line that apologists of colonialism like to make. Not a single mention of the fact that England with all its stated commitment to freedom ruled India and dozens of countries around the world against their will for two hundred years, systematically stripping them of their wealth for the benefit of the mother country.

Notice how casually the number of Indian soldiers in WW2 -- 2.4 million, more than the other countries combined -- is slipped in, well after NZ and Australia. And of course they all volunteered out of their love for the Queen -- unrelated to the fact that a coercive foreign power was ruling their country at the time.

Honestly, the world should be too evolved to be accepting thinly veiled racist garbage like this any more.

<comment><USER3> Is there a specific sentence or passage in the essay that you feel is false and would like to refute? That would be more convincing than mere accusations of isms you feel the author is guilty of.

<comment><USER9> > _Look at the size of the war memorials outside Europe. Consider the sheer > number of volunteers. During the Second World War, 215,000 men served from > New Zealand, 410,000 from South Africa, 995,000 from Australia, 1,060,000 > from Canada, 2,400,000 from India. The vast majority had made an individual > decision to enlist. What force pulled those young men, as it had pulled > their fathers, half way around the world to fight for a country on which, in > most cases, they had never set eyes? Was it simply an affinity of blood and > speech?_

Slipping India into that list is just bizarre and tantamount to distorting the truth (not the number, perhaps, but certainly the argument he bases on the number). These 2.4 million "volunteers" were not so much pulled by any affinity of blood and speech as grabbed by the scruff of their neck. Meanwhile countless millions more were struggling at home to overthrow the oppressive rule of the British.[1] The vast majority joined the relatively peaceful struggle for freedom led by Gandhi, but many took up arms against the colonizers and an Indian army even fought against the British and alongside the Japanese in WWII.[2]

So excuse me if I find that rosy picture about the loyal Indian bleeding for the "dear government" a little hard to digest. It would be a lot more believable if the dear government hadn't been massacring and looting the country for two centuries.

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

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

<comment><USER10> It's very easy to "fight" against an unpopular enemy that won't retaliate, like Gandhi did. The death toll of the Indian partition was breathtaking, and Gandhi ... fasted, while refusing to implement basic security measures while easily preventable massacres happened. He was also smart enough to choose his captors wisely, in other words, in the partition he avoided contact with muslims -himself- He had little qualms about sending millions to their death.

That's the theme of Gandhi's non-violence : it's only non-violence if you're looking from very far away focusing on the person. If you were someone affected by the political decisions Gandhi was involved in ... the political change he affected probably felt more like a holocaust. You could say, if you look at it from afar, that he didn't know this was going to happen, and he didn't order it. But he did order people into situations that he knew perfectly well were going to explode.

Here's one account of the immediate result of Gandhi's "non-violence":

      There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the maiming and
      mutilation of victims. The catalogue of horrors includes
      the disembowelling of pregnant women, the slamming of
      babies' heads against brick walls, the cutting off of
      victims limbs and genitalia and the display of heads and
      corpses. While previous communal riots had been deadly,
      the scale and level of brutality was unprecedented.
      Although some scholars question the use of the term
      'genocide' with respect to the Partition massacres, much
      of the violence manifested as having genocidal tendencies.
      It was designed to cleanse an existing generation as well
      as prevent its future reproduction."[1]

Mahatma Gandhi was a skilled orchestrator of public violence, who was very careful about constructing his public image. He has about as much claim to being a non-violent person as Hitler has, who has as far as I know never hurt a fly personally (actually Hitler did military service as a soldier, so I guess that's probably not true). Mahatma Gandi saw himself as being "above" base violence, saw himself as upper class, so he wouldn't touch arms himself. Not because he doesn't believe in violence, but because he doesn't believe in people of his social caste doing anything that could be understood to be work. He started out his political career recruiting for the army, and he's done the same job ever since.

Like most of this kind of "heroes" his non-violence is not the result of a belief that violence is wrong (or he wouldn't have recruited for the army), but the result of the worst aspect of Indian society : the caste system. His non-violence is about him personally refusing to do anything related to violence, except of course, command them from a distance. He would only involve himself in strategy, ordering people around and deciding what is "decent" "good" and "moral", on a grand scale. Personally committing violence is just one of those things he won't do himself, he'll hire/order others to do that for him.

And like any other monster that just happened to do successfully what is popular now, he has a cult following. At least this particular popular monster had the decency and self control to never rape and torture people himself, unlike the ubiquitous Che Guevara.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Freedom? When I go to North America I don't see native Indians, most of them were exterminated in order to steal their land. Is that freedom?

You will find even disrespect to what they call "Hispanic people" that in fact are more native American that they are, from California to New Mexico or Florida.Those were not exterminated because they were lately incorporated from other countries.

In all the south you find lots of blacks living in misery, the descendants of slaves. Is that freedom? In Spain slavery was forbidden by law in XVI century. In practice there were abuses but by law any native Indian was a citizen like any other.

When you go to any Latin American country you find a significant population of native Indians, all of them somewhat different from another. It is not the same the people from Colombia to the people in Ecuador, Brazil, or Argentina. This difference makes hard for them to unite and became a US competitor. Also US has done anything he could to divide and conquer, including destroying by force those governments that did not align with US interest.

In the past it was Europe who controlled South America, now it is the US. Brazil is slowly getting independent, as it is big enough.

Don't get me wrong, I like the US and have lots of north American friends, but there is propaganda in any country of this world and people inside them believe it blind folded without thinking for themselves.

<comment><USER12> Native Indians were killed almost totally by disease, not armed force.

<comment><USER13> Completely. Fucking. Irrelevant.

<comment><USER12> Europeans are not morally responsible for spreading diseases to the Americas that killed the natives. That was inadvertent and in many ways inevitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I found the arguments interesting, but difficult to evaluate. I simply don't know enough history to engage with many of the author's points. The same is probably true for most readers.

If I had any criticism, it would be this: It praises western government too much. While I'm certainly glad I live in the US, it seems clear to me that better forms of government exist. The problem is that nobody has invented them, or no country has tried them. This is understandable. Switching systems is not only incredibly hard, it's stupendously risky. Things have to get _really_ bad before people are willing to switch.

Also, anything better would probably sound ridiculous to us today. To quote Vernor Vinge:

 _If you go back to the year 1200 and you tried to explain to some noble lord why a democracy and intellectual freedom works better, he might be the rare sort of person who would listen to you. That 's possible, that he would listen to you. But he would be quite right to laugh in your face and say, "You know what would happen? If I tried to open myself up to that? Tomorrow, I would be dead. There would be another clown up here on the hill, and he would be doing the same thing that I'm doing. What you're talking about is anarchy and it is impossible."_

(from around [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzRuPGnJxCs#t=52m25s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzRuPGnJxCs#t=52m25s))

Finally, even if I believe the author, he offers no solutions. If the anglosphere's special sauce is being diluted, what can we do about it? I've sat around for five minutes thinking, but nothing particularly good comes to mind.

Overall though, I enjoyed reading this article. Then again, I'm from the anglosphere.

<comment><USER6> >If the anglosphere's special sauce is being diluted, what can we do about it?

It's quite obvious that the author is proposing you vote 'Whig' in order to stem the dilution. Unfortunately I, personally, don't think that any of the conservative parties in the Anglosphere are of much use (if they were, at least a potential solution would be much easier!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Which nations? All definitions include five core countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States."

It's very appropriate that this article was posted in HN. After all, these are the five guys of the Five Eyes- the intelligence network that's spying on the world they 'civilized.'

[http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/07/10/2276191/snowden...](http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/07/10/2276191/snowden- five-eyes/)

<comment><USER6> I'm more anti spying than anyone else, but how is this relevant?

<comment><USER15> Undoubtedly the democratic institutions and cultures of the Anglo-American culture achieved great things. But the triumphalist tone of this article not only whitewashes the cost in blood that created this civilization of law, and ignores injustices that still go on today.

It just comes out sounding really self-congratulatory. I'm no fan of Howard Zinn or Marxist historical revisionism. But this article makes it sound like the game is done and the West has won. Perhaps if it had been more prescriptive, urging the Anglosphere to strive to be better, to refine the rule of law, increase personal liberty, and reform representative government, then it would be more convincing.

<comment><USER6> One of the article's points is that civilization isn't secure, it's always under threat from enemies both foreign and domestic - that there are lots of things wrong with the Anglosphere with need to be fixed.

So then someone points out something wrong with the Anglosphere, something which needs to be fixed, and that comment gets voted to the top. I don't get it.

Further, it's not as if the author is trying to paint the Anglosphere as perfect. The best, healthiest culture in existence? Yes. Perfect? Obviously not.

<comment><USER16> By whose definition is it the best and healthiest? Most powerful != best or healthiest.

 _Anglosphere_. What a load of crap. If the center of gravity of this article's definition of "civilization" is currently in America and previously in Britain, it's an artifact of history, not of "Anglo". The center was once in Italy, and before that in Greece. If you've read Russian literature you'd see the democratic spirit was there too.

And then there's India, a piece of this so-called "Anglosphere". What did India do? It threw out the tyranny that was the British Empire. You'll probably argue that this somehow proves the beauty of the "Anglosphere".

<comment><USER17> The article is very particular to note the origin of the word "Anglosphere."

Which of Stephenson's novels is your favorite?

<comment><USER15> I suspect that the author may have just looked up the entry for the word on Wikipedia. I was surprised that Stephenson had been the one to coin the term; I'm still wondering if that's an accurate claim or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> To the majority of commenters: the article never says, "every anglosphere action and belief was always perfect and in mankind's best interest", it states that the commitments to certain basic tenets allowed the highest peak of human personal freedom, equality, and safety in history. Saying, "some points along the path to that peak were not that high" is obvious and useless. Likewise saying, "the peak could be higher" is also obvious and of no value. We should be instead trying to determine what else should be combined with these tenets to produce an even higher peak, a system of government that will allow for greater safety, freedom, and equality for all humankind.

</comment><comment><USER19> well, to me it was expressed in the phrase i read somewhere "the year Magna Carta was signed <something about state of my old country 800 years ago>"

And curiously enough, 800 years later, my old country still hasn't reached the mental state that "the power of the king may be limited by the people". When i read about Latin/South America a lot of things sound familiar. The article compares AngloSaxon world against Spanish when it is basically AngloSaxon world against any other - i mean pick any place in Africa or Eurasia ...

</comment><comment><USER20> _What raised the English-speaking peoples to greatness was not a magical property in their DNA, nor a special richness in their soil, nor yet an advantage in military technology, but their political and legal institutions._

This is no doubt aimed at Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, (Geography) & Steel"

</comment><comment><USER17> I see several commenters attacking Daniel Hannan, so let me share the best links I found as I researched him:

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

[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/4555/DANIEL_HANNAN_hom...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/4555/DANIEL_HANNAN_home.html)

[http://www.votewatch.eu/en/daniel- hannan.html](http://www.votewatch.eu/en/daniel-hannan.html)

P.S. Wouldn't comments be more interesting if they scrupulously avoided attacking the messenger?

</comment><comment><USER15> There certainly shouldn't be anything wrong with celebrating Anglophone cultural heritage, or the accomplishments of Anglo civilization. And there certainly isn't anything wrong with examining what caused the Anglosphere to become preeminent, the best virtues that helped shape its success.

Where I feel the article fails is in somehow presuming that the former led to the latter. Despite the author's protests of being triumphalist, the article comes off as praising the Anglosphere as an almost unqualified success, and it makes it sound like there is something inherently greater about Anglosphere culture. He mentions many good things that were formative to its rule of law and regard for liberty- and ignores those accomplished by contemporaneous civilizations- the Althing, the Golden Liberty of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. (Oh, sure, he pays lip service to the Swiss, the Dutch, and the Scandinavians- why not the rest of the Low Countries as well?- but should they be discounted simply because their nations and empires were smaller? What makes the Anglosphere greater, its culture better, than those other countries with a long tradition for respect for the rule of law and personal liberty?)

Maybe my disagreement comes from viewing history as a complex system, easily altered with a few tweaks here and there- call it the Sid Meier Model of History. What the Anglophones achieved was great. But they weren't the only ones to achieve it. And they needn't be the only ones to achieve it.

The way I see it, if we were living a couple of millennia ago, we'd be saying the same about Rome. And with good cause. The Roman Empire was _glorious_. It was a pinnacle of human civilization. But there is always a pinnacle at some point. They come and go, and are not intrinsic to any one culture, nor one people. Success is created as much by luck as it is by culture or people. Perhaps if some battles had happened differently, we'd be remembering Carthage as the great classical empire. Or, had things not fallen apart as terribly as it did in the Revolution, we'd be praising the achievements of the modern Francosphere. Roll the dice, and some other civilization succeeds, not because of their intrinsic greatness, but because there _has_ to be someone at the top. Someone with the most rule of law, the most democratic institutions. The Anglosphere (and the Swiss, and the Swedes, and the Dutch...) won because of their unique set of circumstances, their roll.

(As much as this author tries to bring up parts of the British Empire to show that he's not praising the West as a people or a culture but instead a concept, it's unconvincing. The five core nations of the Anglosphere are made up of Britain, America, and the White Dominions. India's democratic success is not quite at the same level. Singapore is very rich and has a strong rule of law, but is very undemocratic.)

My conclusion is not to bury the Anglosphere's legacy, but neither is it to praise it without reservations. We should certainly take what is good from its history. But we shouldn't pretend that it is exceptional; if we do that, we pretend only one culture is capable of its success. We discount the victories of other civilizations. (We also ignore that perhaps liberal democracy isn't the true end of history- perhaps some alternate government model may in fact arise and be even better for standard of living.) We forget that the Anglosphere is just as human as any other ball. Like Rome, thousands of years from now Anglo-American culture will show its influence from one end of the Solar System to another. But some other pinnacle will exist just the same.

And at the same time, as the Romans said, we should also never forget: Memento mori.

</comment><comment><USER21> The article cherry-picks its history and has a disagreeable tone; but this is an easy dismissal. I think this article begs a deeper analysis.

I see the main virtue of the article thus: it identifies a successful (by some measures) political system; attempts a deconstruction into its components; and then draws some conclusions from them.

The political system of England and its sister nations (the article argues) is successful in providing a robust government that maintains important personal freedoms. While the main support the article lends is pointing out the failure of most other countries' political schemes, we can also find strong evidence elsewhere. For example, the United States has ended slavery and granted suffrage to the poor, to former slaves, and to women, all while maintaining a nonviolent transfer of power between administrations and fundamentally similar Constitutions. Of course, the American Civil War was anything but nonviolent, American Presidents have been assassinated, and some Constitutional Amendments fundamentally change the structure of that nation (for example, the 14th). Nonetheless, it is hard to argue that other political systems can claim even such results.

The article then attempts to deconstruct what this "Anglo-Saxon civilization" entails. The author provides three broad components: the rule of law; personal liberty; and representational governance. For example, the author groups the protection of property under personal liberty (it might justifiably be grouped under the rule of the law, but I believe the author means, by "rule of the law", the simple belief that no entity is above the law).

Of course, one is a fool if one says the United States', or England's, political system is perfect. The shared history of the "anglosphere" (let's assume for a moment this is well-defined) is a history of a political system, but also of its use for racism, xenophobia, class schisms, for the destruction of civil liberties. But I think we can perhaps attempt to understand a few points: whether or not the political schemes used in England and her sister countries are in fact more successful than other schemes; if so, how we can characterize the successes, and perhaps distinguish them from its failures; and if so, how we can characterize the necessary components of this political system as leading to successes or failures.

Now, I do not claim the linked article was good; in fact it had so many flaws. But it is easy to criticize these flaws, much harder to write an article like the linked. Yes, we do not do a writer justice by blindly nodding along to his words. But it is so easy to find a flaw to complain about---maybe trying to understand what the article is saying, and trying to correct its flaws, is a more noble exercise than criticism?

</comment><comment><USER16> Did we just get trolled? (read the comment threads and see)

</comment><comment><USER22> > Third, representative government. Laws should not be passed, nor taxes > levied, except by elected legislators who are answerable to the rest of us.

This must be why the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association's slogan in 1967 was "one man, one vote". The native population of northern Ireland saw American blacks in Mississippi on the telly and wanted to get the kind of enfranchisement they were getting.

Workers in Manchester in 1819 who had a rally for the vote were massacred by a cavalry charge.

Of course all of this was paradise compared to what Rhodesians, Indians, South Africans etc. were going through.

What a load of bollocks

</comment><comment><USER6> The central premise is true, and bears repeating.

</comment><comment><USER15> Tell it to South Africa, or Rhodesia.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not ask some people from Angola, Mozambique, Ivory Coast or the Congo about it?

<comment><USER16> What is your point? Apocryphon lists a couple of counterexamples to the author's notions of the so-called "Anglosphere". You provide counterexamples to a notion of a Portuguese-sphere. Are you agreeing that all of this, starting with the author's article, is rubbish?

<comment><AUTHOR> Answer me this: It is the 18th or 19th century. You are in a less technologically advanced country. Your fate is to be colonised. I will allow you the choice of which European power will colonise you. Who would you choose, based on observations of how countries fared with different colonisers?

I think you can make the observation that countries that were colonised by the British (i.e. the Anglosphere) ended up stronger legal, administrative and educational infrasrtucture and traditions than countries that were colonised by other European powers (i.e. Portugese, Belgian, French, German, Spanish and Dutch).

I am not implying that they ended up better off than if they had never been colonised at all. I am not implying that colonisation did not take a terrible toll on the colonised. Nevertheless, the era of colonisation has left a legacy. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. We do not get to live in the counterfactual world where there was no colonisation. We do get to see the results of various approaches to colonisation.

Does this legacy tell us anything of the colonisers?

<comment><USER23> There was one country that managed to get through this period without being colonized: Japan. However, they tried to play the role of the colonizer in some places and pay the price for their actions today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Brown people are repressed abused and have resources stolen and withheld from them by white people while white people live in relative prosperity. Then white people use the relative instability and corruption in these repressed regions to support their own racism.

<comment><USER6> Pretty sure the article is about different cultures within the "white people world," not about comparisons of "white" and "brown" cultures.</comment></comment>


Linux Weekly News - something needs to change - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/350385/

<comment><USER2> I've seen some nice articles in LWN, but I'm not interested in Linux news per se. I'd suggest they drop the subscription model and narrow the focus, or move on to other things.

It's not just LWN that needs to change; the big question is _how do writers get paid when 'information' is free?_

<comment><USER3> Of course nothing is really free, there's always a cost somewhere. Maybe we the audience need to make a change and help support the writers and programmers who supply us with info and code that we like. You're not 25 (<http://tomatonation.com/?p=838>) anymore, right? Or maybe you are.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought to post this here for two reasons. Firstly, I'm sure many here frequently enjoy LWN's excellent writing. Also, perhaps people have some ideas about what sort of business model might allow LWN to keep going and to grow stronger in the future?</comment>


The death of due process (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cr.yp.to/20160607-dueprocess.html <comment><USER2> > If the accusation is true then the perpetrator should go to jail. If the > accusation is false then the source of this false accusation should pay for > this slander.

There's a large difference between "the accusation cannot be proven beyond reasonable doubt" and "false".

I can also accuse someone after the statute of limitations has expired, in which case the accusation may be true while the perpetrator should not go to jail.

Even when Nixon was alive, I could say that Nixon directed criminal activities, even though he shouldn't be jailed because he was pardoned.

> When I say "day in court", what I really mean is due process.

Due process is a legal term. Is it used for ethical principles beyond the law? The linked-to law review article only concerns the legal understanding.

> lynch mob

Ahh, now we get to the point. The author doesn't like it when people protest and incite for social change that the author disagrees with.

(Note: we are not talking about actual lynch mobs here. That's an illegal, extra-judicial murder.)

The problem with that is that "lynch mob" in this way is _also_ an accusation. Why should I be slandered as a member of a lynch mob, without a neutral judge to first verify that I am indeed a member of a lynch mob?

What is the definition of "lynch mob" which would be used for due process?</comment>


Why Facebook really bought Parse - <AUTHOR> http://swaggadocio.com/post/60416244109/why-facebook-really-bought-parse-yc-s11

<comment><USER2> This doesn't add up at all. If it's about usage data, they would be buying Flurry in a heartbeat.

I'd bet the acquisition is more about a huge challenge Facebook faces, which hasn't had a good engineering solution for years, and for which the solution is still not clear: the chasm between the web as a platform and the native mobile platorms. A lot of FB's value has not survived trying to jump that enormous gap, and the major casualty has been the concept of "FB-as-a- platform". There is nothing equivalent to Flash in mobile through which they could control social games like they did back in the early Zynga days. Apple and Android are the ones who really control the platform, including payments, for social games and other apps on mobile. FB would _love_ to have a platform they could control as tightly as Apple controls the app store, but they are simply closed down behind a technical barrier. Parse is probably the only successful initiative of a mobile platform that smartly sidesteps the control of the walled-garden-guards. It takes control of the back-end and its access code, and trying to leave the native client part to become just a UI skin, which is under the control of Apple/Google, but which in FB's dream scenario would become a minor part. I think FB's wet dream about Parse would be to find a set of calls that can be abstracted, which define the actual app logic, which can be implemented equally on Android/iOS/HTML5+JS and through which iOS and Android can become just skins to the real app... and offer that platform for developers to develop FB apps, which would run in iOS/Android/the web and for which the gatekeeper could be FB itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> > This doesn't add up at all. If it's about usage data, they would be buying > Flurry in a heartbeat.

\- Flurry has $50MM in VC funding. Parse had $7.7MM. Something tells me Parse would have been a lot less expensive to acquire.

\- Acquiring Parse also allows FB to pass off the acquisition as some sort of pro bono play as Mike Vernal did. Buying an app analytics company would be obvious and deprive FB of this +ve good will they got for free here.

\- Parse has 100,000+ "apps", Flurry has 115,000+ "customers". Assuming these are pretty much equivalent as I do, Flurry is 8 years old, Parse is 2. Tell me which looks like the better deal?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this is the important bit from this article.

 _However, I have been working on a way to avoid being locked in to Parse, i.e. still use the Parse SDK (ViewControllers, PFObject, etc) but build in a kill switch to have the Parse SDK suddenly communicate with one's own servers instead of Parse's. Then to migrate out of Parse all one would need to do would be to build an API server endpoint that quacks like Parse. This would be a much less daunting task than getting every user to upgrade to a new app binary that didn't use Parse. I thought of the name Parseport, i.e. leave when you want. A proof of concept is here[1]._

[1] [https://gist.github.com/stevegraham/6067333](https://gist.github.com/stevegraham/6067333)

</comment><comment><USER4> Genius.

Parse is the most amazing app building service I've used thus far.

<comment><USER5> I just wish they'd implement real-time data sync as Firebase does, then I'm totally sold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI, this quote was swiped from my article/interview on VentureBeat. You can read the whole thing (with a lot more context) here: [http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/05/why-parse-was-the- missing-...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/05/why-parse-was-the-missing- piece-in-facebooks-puzzle-interview/)

</comment><comment><USER7> It is very unlikely that the next Instagram would be using Parse

<comment><USER8> Why? The next Instagram with an Instagram number of users would definitely not be using Parse, but the whole point of the text you are disagreeing with was that Facebook could use the data before the next Instagram fully exploded with users.</comment></comment>


Classic games re-imagined in 3D - <AUTHOR> http://www.redbull.com/uk/en/games/stories/1331626719110/classic-games-3d-gaming

<comment><USER2> I played all of these games growing up and these renditions are amazing. I will note that there was a US emulator translation of Mother 3: [http://mother3.fobby.net](http://mother3.fobby.net)</comment>


The 10 Richest People of All Time - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/money/3977798/the-10-richest-people-of-all-time/

<comment><USER2> I think of myself as among the richest people of all time, because about ten years ago something happened that would've killed me about 25 – 30 years prior.

Pretty much everyone in Western countries who gets Penicillin is richer than the richest person alive in 1900.</comment>


Show HN: The Deadlock Empire – Slay dragons, master concurrency - <AUTHOR> https://deadlockempire.github.io <comment><USER2> This is awesome! I love this kind of games - they are very fun and educational at the same time.

If you're like me, you might enjoy these as well:

1\. Microcorruption - [https://microcorruption.com/](https://microcorruption.com/) (a game that teaches about embedded systems and security basics)

2\. Over the Wire - [http://overthewire.org](http://overthewire.org) (several games based on Web security)

3\. WeChall - [http://www.wechall.net/](http://www.wechall.net/) (a big list of games with progress tracking)

<comment><USER3> Ruby Warrior is another great one. I had a lot of fun with it when I needed to learn Ruby for work. [https://www.bloc.io/ruby- warrior](https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior)

<comment><USER4> Is there any way past the first level besides logging in with facebook?

A friend of mine just started (yesterday) looking at Ruby stuff and this looks awesome, but I wouldnt recommend any service that has an impassable FB login after level 1.

<comment><USER3> You can use the original without logging in to anything. It doesn't have the graphical elements, but in my recollection, the game is the same otherwise.

[https://github.com/ryanb/ruby-warrior](https://github.com/ryanb/ruby-warrior)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool! However, I was somewhat disappointed that it only models a linearizable memory (each low-level operation atomically acts on the same global state). It would be great to teach people that they _can 't_ actually think about memory this way, since various reorderings are possible. The UI design gets a lot trickier, but this could become a great way to teach people how to deal with things like atomic instructions, memory fences, and the differences between the x86 and ARM memory models.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We agree, memory models/instruction reordering is where it gets really fun and educational. The complexity scared us and we wanted to make the game usable as soon as we could, so we rather left it on the TODO list for now. Maybe one day in V2 :)

<comment><USER6> You could add a CPU write buffer or cache lines as an intermediate step between the code and memory, and allow the player to choose when those get flushed to memory, constrained by memory barrier operations.

This kind of problem comes up very often in the context of the Linux kernel. And the ability to deal with it is as even rarer among programmers experienced with concurrency than experience with concurrency is among programmers in general. A tutorial of this form for memory ordering issues would be _invaluable_.

I'd be happy to help with problems and game-element design for a memory- ordering version of this tutorial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This game would actually make for a great assessment test[1] for hiring. I might be interesting to retrofit it to keep score or maybe perma death ala roguelike.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_(assessment)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_\(assessment\))

<comment><USER8> Whoa[0] there[1], slow[2] down[3] son! You don't have footnotes for the rest of the common words in that sentence! What is a 'game'? Or 'score'? Or 'rogue' 'like'?

[0] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whoa](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whoa) [1] [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/there](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/there) [2] [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/slow](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/slow) [3] You get the idea

<comment><USER7> Assessment testing is not a common phrase. In the recruiting industry it means something very specific and I wanted to make sure it was explicit that I am talking about that type of testing and not just testing for whatever other reasons you might test someone.

Years of programming I guess have made me an explicit cross referencing kind of guy. I find it far worse when your not explicit at times. Misunderstood communication can lead to bad things...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's the Welsh Dragon!

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. My creative process: "Need quick & nice fantasy-styled logo" => "Hey, I remember Wales has a dragon on its flag" => "Ooh, and Wiki Commons even has a CC0 SVG! Done."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty nice, well done!

One suggestion: it would be nice if you somehow integrated the fix for each bug into the game somehow. At the very least, in the congratulations screen, you could show a version of the code updated to fix the concurrency bug.

In other words, this helps you learn what _not_ to do, but not so much on what you _should_ do.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hey! This was built at HackCambridge (and it won first prize)! Great to see it here - it's such a cool project.

<comment><USER12> Pretty funny that one of the judges said that this would definitely be on the front page of HN soon

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, how cool is that! Congrats to the authors :)

Btw, I bet Edward Lee¹ would like this game.

¹ [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1....](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> What language is this in? Never really tried anything like this before, but just went through the entire game and beat it. Seems like you have to trick the threads in the correct sequence in order to introduce deadlocks, but what is the overall context of the game? (It was fun, but I didn't know what I was doing half the time; I just tried to get the threads to hit the critical code functions)

<comment><USER15> >Seems like you have to trick the threads in the correct sequence in order to introduce deadlocks

This manually "trickery" you are introducing is you intentionally replicating potential control flows that can (and will) happen in real life. You should come out of this game with a new/renewed paranoia about multithreaded programming and how seemingly safe code may not necessarily be so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Took me about an hour to beat it, I'm still fairly new to concurrent programming so this was pretty great for showing me the pitfalls you can come across.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think I may learn some C# just so I can play this game.

<comment><USER17> I've only done the first few levels but it might as well be pseudo-code. I haven't hit anything language specific yet.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I'll give it a try after work then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> quite the fun game EDIT: can't figure the last one out, but was fun :D

<comment><USER19> 1\. Move Thread 0 to end.

2\. do a few iterations through thread 1 (e.g. n=5)

3\. step darkness++ concurrently (via expand), so that darkness=1

4\. step thread 0 to Monitor.Wait(sanctum)

5\. the rest is straightforward.

<comment><USER20> Whoa! Spoiler alert!

;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is really gonna help me study for my OS midterm tomorrow- thanks!</comment>


Cannot Measure Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html <comment><USER2> I am going to get my drum out and bang on it again.

Software is a form of literacy - and we measure literacy completely differently. In fact we measure it like we measure science - you are not a scientist unless other scientists agree you are, and you are not a coder unless other coders say you are.

What Fowler wants to measure is not the top echelons of productivity but the lower bounds - presumably to winnow out the unproductive ones.

But that is not how we conduct ourselves in literacy or science. We _educate and train_ people for a very long time, so that the lower bound of productivity is still going to add value to human society - and the upper bounds are limitless.

What Fowler is asking for is a _profession_.

<comment><USER3> > you are not a scientist unless other scientists agree you are

Science requires one thing: making and testing falsifiable hypotheses. A priest is able to determine whether or not you are doing that. If anything, it's philosophers who decide what science is, e.g. Karl Popper.

<comment><USER4> Doing science does not make you a scientist.

<comment><USER5> Can you elaborate on why you believe this to be the case? Saying that a scientist is one who does science seems like a truism bordering on being tautological. I'm curious why you disagree.

<comment><USER4> Does knowing a bit of physics make you a physicist? Does praying make you a monk? Does mixing a few chemicals make you a chemist? Does having some theories about people's motivations make you a behavioural psychologist? Does balancing a budget make you an accountant?

"Scientist" implies a certain amount of knowledge, training, discipline, etc. I'm not implying that every scientist needs to have undergone academic training - there are other ways - but merely doing a scientific experiment is not enough to call yourself a scientist.

A scientist is one who "does science" with some knowledge, consistency and perseverance.

<comment><USER3> I guess you'd better edit Wikipedia:

> In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the > scientific method. [...] This article focuses on the more restricted use of > the word.

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

<comment><USER4> Wikipedia is not the ultimate repository of human knowledge, particularly when it comes to more tricky questions like "what is a scientist?"...

If we're going to throw definitions around, how about dictionary.com: [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scientist?s=t](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scientist?s=t)

> an expert in science, especially one of the physical or natural sciences.

<comment><USER3> Actually I think Wikipedia is pretty good for tricky questions, in that they attract a lot of attention and receive a lot of edits.

If being a scientist is determined by the consensus of one's peers, it seems like it makes sense to accept an article defining what scientists are that is written as a consensus opinion.

But anyway, if you think it's wrong, why don't you edit it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It has been more than 10 years, it has been at least 50 since there were moans about productivity in the early 60's.

Feynman had some interesting thoughts on minimal computation that sort of paralleled Shannon's information complexity. As you know Shannon was interested in absolute limits to the amount of information in a channel and Feynman was more about the amount of computation per joule of energy. But the essence is the same, programs are a process that use energy to either transform information or to comprehend & act on information so 'efficiency' at one level is the amount of transformation/action you get per kW and "productivity" is the first derivative of figuring out how long it takes to go from need to production.

It has been clear for years that you can produce inefficient code quickly, and conversely efficient code more slowly, so from a business value perspective it there is another factor which is the _cost_ of running your process versus the _value_ of running your process. Sort of the 'business efficiency' of the result.

Consider a goods economy comparison of the assembly line versus the craftsman. An assembly line uses more people but produced goods faster, that was orthogonal to the quality of the good produced. So the variables are quantity of goods over time (this gives a cost of goods), the quality of the good (which has some influence on the retail price), and the ability to change what sort of goods you make (which deals with the 'fashion' aspect of goods).

So what is productivity? Is it goods produced per capita? Or goods produced per $-GDP? Or $-GDP per goods produced? Its a bit of all three. Programmer productivity is just as intermixed.

<comment><USER7> > It has been clear for years that you can produce inefficient code quickly, > and conversely efficient code more slowly (...)

That's not only false, but is often the opposite.

The symptom number one of an inexperienced programmer is to waste development hours reinventing the (square) wheel, while a good programmer is lazy (already knows which solution works best, and will probably just import it from a tested library).

So an experienced programmer not only doesn't waste computation power, also doesn't waste hours on the development cycle.

I agree with everything else you pointed.

<comment><USER6> Since I'm trying out my CODE keyboard [1] I thought I'd go into a bit more detail.

My statement about inefficient code quickly is in terms of joules per computation. So while it is absolutely true that a junior perl programmer might slowly generate inefficient code and an experienced (lazy) perl programmer might quickly generate optimal perl code, neither of them would produce the same product written in assembly code (or better yet pure machine code).

To put that in a different perspective, I once wrote a BASIC interpreter in Java (one of my columns for JavaWorld) and it was pretty quick to do, and yet looking at the "source" to Microsoft BASIC written in 8080 assembler it was not very efficient. But it took Bill a lot longer to write Microsoft BASIC in assembler, and you couldn't even _begin_ to port a full up Java VM to the 8080 (let's not argue about J2ME).

But step back then from that precipice, you have two versions of BASIC, one runs in a Browser and one runs on a 16 line by 64 character TVText S-100 card. (or 24 x 80 CRT terminal). Now you can run the same program in both contexts, unchanged, but the amount of energy you expend to do so varies a lot. So which is more "efficient?" I'd argue the one written in 8080 assembly is more efficient from a joules per kilo-core-second standpoint. Which was written more quickly? Mine, it only took about a week.

That is why talking about efficiency and productivity without getting anally crisp in your definitions can lead to two opposite interpretations of exactly the same statement.

[1] I find the lack of a wrist pad to rest on a challenge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The sad part is that even after decades of technologists debating this, the reality is that most non-technologists working in the industry don't know, don't care, and really just want their pet features. The real measure of productivity in organizations with non-technical stakeholders therefore becomes whether or not a stakeholder feels like they are getting what they want. Attempts to measure productivity, whether via lines of code or "velocity," are often little more than a way for everyone to pretend their opinion is backed by something quantitative. In especially bad cases with non- technical management, they'll just keep swapping out processes until they either get what they want or have something with numbers and graphs that makes it look like they should.

While I could be accused of excessive cynicism, I do believe this is common enough that it should be addressed. There's a pervasive delusion that decisions are made by rational, informed actors, when that is rarely the case.

<comment><USER2> > becomes whether or not a stakeholder feels like they are getting what they > want.

If the stakeholder you choose is a customer, then that is a valid measure of business productivity.

Which I guess is kind of the point - we are trying to measure on a granularity beyond what we can validly do.

Which indicates to me that a world of smaller organisations, made up of software literate people will be one where rewards will follow talent. That may not be a world we want to live in - and my cynicism sees your cynicism and raises :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are two types of productivity:

1) Are you doing the right things?

2) Are you doing things right?

They can be imprecisely measured, but every metric has problems and can be gamed. Combining the measurements is extremely difficult.

Let's start with 1 - doing the right things. Someone who chooses to have their team work on 3 high value tasks, and stops their early on 6 low value tasks is by one definition more productive than someone who forces their team to do all 9 things. Or at the very least they are more effective. This is what Fowler is getting at.

On point 2... Let's assume that the appropriateness of what you are doing is immaterial. How fast are you doing it? This can be somewhat approximated. You can say "Speed versus function points" or "Speed versus budget" or "Speed versus other teams achieving the same output" and then bake in rework into the speed. All of these metrics are doable. Lines of code isn't a good base though.

The real question is, "What are you going to do with all of this productivity data?" If the answer is systemic improvement, you're on the right track. If you try to turn it into personal performance (or salary) then people wind up gaming the metrics.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is measuring productivity isomorphic to the hiring problem?

Everybody says there's a "shortage of developers," but I know good developers who keep getting shitcanned after a few interviews where nothing seemingly went wrong.

We can't tell who's going to be productive. Since we can't tell, we come up with ten foot high marble walls to scale. Our sterile interview problems make us feel "well, at least the candidate can do our Arbitrary Task, and since we decided what Arbitrary Task would be, they must be good, because they did what we wanted them to do."

Productivity is pretty much the same. There's "just get it done" versus "solving the entire class of problems." Is it being productive if you do 50 copies of "just get it done" when it's really one case of a general problem? I'm sure doing 50 copies of nearly the same thing make you look very busy and generates great results, but solving the general problem could take 1/20th the time, but leave you sitting less fully utilized after (see: automating yourself out of a job).

<comment><USER11> They are absolutely the same problem. Because we can't measure productivity, we can't determine relative quality in an objective way. If we could, it would make the hiring process much more simple.

The question I have is, how is this much different than any other profession? How do we measure doctor productivity? What keeps me up at night is that it is very likely that the 90/10 crap to good ratio in software developers is probably the same ratio as surgeons.

<comment><USER12> Must be the same in every profession. How many of e.g. your school teachers were good? About 10%.

I am wondering if the ratio holds for crap to good parents. The scarier aspect of this is that people are actually being trained for their professions, as opposed to parenting, so the ratio may be even worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A very wise man said "there is no silver bullet". Yet we keep trying all these schemes to automagically solve what are hard optimization problems only amenable to heuristics and deliberate, intelligent introspection. Very simply, you cannot run some tool to measure the information density of a large project. Graphical programming isn't going to turn a bunch of marketers into programmers. Doing user stories and forcing people to stand up as they talk isn't going to remove all the need for planning and tracking. And so on.

You know how I figure out if something can be improved? I dig in, understand it, and then look for ways to improve it. If I don't find anything, of course it doesn't mean there is no room, but I'm a pretty bright guy and my results are about as good as any other bright guy/woman.

I was subjected to endless amounts of this because I did military work for 17 years. You'd have some really tiny project (6 months, 2-3 developers), and they'd impose just a _huge_ infrastructure of 'oversight'. By which I mean bean counters, rule followers, and the like - unthinking automatons trying to use rules, automatic tools, and the like. Anything to produce a simple, single number. It was all so senseless. I know that can sound like sour grapes, but every time I was in control of schedule and budget I came in on time and on to under budget. But that is because I took it day by day, looked at and understood where we were and where we needed to go, and adjusted accordingly. Others would push buttons on CASE tools and spend most of their time explaining why they were behind and over budget.

I like Fowler's conclusion - we have to admit our ignorance. It is okay to say "I don't know". Yet some people insist that you have to give an answer, even if it is trivially provable that the answer must be wrong.

<comment><USER14> Please excuse this small rant.

If you're referring to Fred Brooks, he wrote "[T]here is no _single_ development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement _within a decade_ in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." (emphasis mine)

The surrounding context makes his comment a very specific prediction which means something different from what most people claim he meant. Much of the rest of his essay suggests techniques which address the issue of essential complexity and which, when applied together, he hoped would produce that order of magnitude productivity.

Perhaps there was no _single_ such improvement in the years 1986 to 1996, but when people use the phrase "no silver bullet" to dismiss potential improvements in productivity, I believe they're doing Brooks and the rest of us a great disservice.

<comment><USER15> You missed a key point of the essay, which is that no matter _how_ much progress we make in accidental complexity, essential complexity does not go away.

<comment><USER14> Of course that's the key point of the essay, but I've never observed that anyone who says "There's no silver bullet in productivity" has made it past the desire to misuse the title of a Fred Brooks essay to support a middlebrow dismissal to the nuance of distinguishing between accidental and essential complexity.

After all, much of programming culture is stuck on the idea that the clarity of syntax of a programming languages to novices is more important to maintainability of programs written in that language than domain knowledge, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You can quite well measure productivity if you set a task, write tests for it, and tell two independent groups to implement it. You give them the same amount of time.

Now the _more productive_ / better group is which can do the task with _smaller complexity_.

Complexity measures measure size of code and number of dependencies between blocks in different ways. But even the most simple comlexity measure is quite good: just measure number of tokens in source code. (It is a bitmore sophisticated than LOC). You can then make competitons between groups, and measure their productivity. (I am writing a book now titled 'Structure of Software' which discusses what is good software structure on a very generic/abstract level. It relates to 'Design Patterns' as abstract algebra relates to algebra.)

<comment> alok-g Genuinely asking: Why not just stop at "tell two independent groups to implement it"? That is, why constrain to the same amount of time?

<comment><USER16> Because we measure the quality of their output. A weaker group can solve the problem with the same quality as a stronger group given much more time. (For example by doing refactoring in the plus time.)

<comment> alok-g I see. The time constraint you set is on the tighter side. I was considering it to be on the relaxed side which would allow the weaker group to improve as you said.

On the other hand, setting the time constraint (as opposed to measuring both time taken and solution complexity for the two groups) is important because deadlines help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> artumi-richard The book "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It" ([http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Software-Really-Works- Believe...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Software-Really-Works- Believe/dp/0596808321/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377809167&sr=8-1&keywords=making+software)) has a section on this.

Chapter 8 "Beyond lines of Code: Do we need more complexity metrics?" by Israel Herraiz and Ahmed E Hassan.

Their short answer is that, in the case they looked at, all the suggested metrics correlated with LOC, so you may as well use LOC as it's so easy to measure.

IIRC they believe it's only good to compare LOC between different employees if they are doing pretty much the exact same task however, but since LOC is correlated with code complexity, there is some measure there.

I recommend the book, as really focusing on the science of computer science.

</comment><comment><USER17> Heisenberg principle variant for software:

Measure it. Or optimize it. Can't do both without impacting the other.

Software is a work of art and creativity, not the work of a rules-based factory.

</comment><comment><USER18> So two teams build identical databases in identical time frames. One becomes popular and has sells in millions of dollars. The other flops, with sells in the hundreds of dollars. Sure there is a difference in business results but I fail to see how the two teams were not equally productive at creating software. Sure I don't have a good definition of software development productivity but this is open to so many non software development productivity elements as to be nonsensical.

Basically I see this as marketing. We may not be the fastest but who cares about that we have the special insight to build the hits that keep you in business.

</comment><comment><USER19> Most performance indicators are imprecise. P/E ratio is one of the stupidest measure of value, but it is widely use in finance. No one(at least no value investor) would invest based on P/E ratio alone though, there is a lot more due diligence that's done before investors put their money into a stock. (At least that's what you hope happens.)

The problem with productivity measures, is not how they are measured but what they are used for. Most managers want to use productivity measures to evaluate individual or team performance, however, performance is tied to incentives, so you always end up with a lot of push back from the team or someone gaming the system. (IMO, this is because of lazy managers wanting to "manage by numbers", without really understanding how to manage by numbers.)

Rather than using it as a performance management tool, productivity measures, however imprecise, can be used alongside other yardsticks as signals of potential issues. For example, if productivity measure is dropping with a particular module/subsystem, and defect rate is increasing, then one might want to find out if the code needs to be rearchitected or refactored. In these cases, it is okay to be imprecise, because the data are pointers not the end goal. When used correctly, even imprecise data can be very useful.

</comment><comment><USER20> The quest for a single measure of hard-to-define concept like productivity is doomed. Even Fowler's article highlights the fact that we don't have a shared understanding what the word productivity means: writong quality code, shipping useful products or making money? all of them? It's no surprise that there is no numerical measurement that captures a badly-defined concept.

In my opinion, we should approach measurement from a different angle: can we learn something useful about our profession by combining different types of measurements. Can we, for example, easily spot a person who is doing what Fowler is calling important supportive work. Can we detect problem categories that easily lead to buggy code and allocate more time for code quality work for tasks and less for those that are known to be more straight-forward.

</comment><comment><USER21> It drives me nuts when programmers brag about their productivity, measured by how many lines of code they've written.

You end up with something like feature 1: +12,544 / -237 lines. Done in 2 weeks.

Then comes feature 2, 2 and a half months later, the stats: +5,428 / -9,845.

Look at that, you had to tear down everything they wrote because they cared about amount of code over code quality. The more they brag, the more you think "oh s$%t, every line they add is a line I'm going to have to completely untangle and refactor."

I think software engineering productivity can be measured, though not well by today's standards. There will probably be a decent algorithm to do it in the future that takes in to account the power of the code, how easy it is to build on top of, how robust it is, etc.

<comment><USER22> Nothing makes me happier than removing code. If I can find ways to deliver the same functionality in less code I get excited.

Now, I do like to look at my personal lines of code because it gives me a gauge to compare features I implement on a relative basis. It also gives me a relative, rough measure how much effort a particular feature took to produce.

<comment><USER13> You will like this story from Apple, when they for a time required engineers to report LOC produced that week.

[http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Neg...](http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The purpose of measuring productivity is to manage it. There are two categories of factors that decide the overall productivity: the factors within the developers (capability, motivation, etc) and the factors outside the developers (tools, process, support, etc).

True, it's hard to objectively measure the overall productivity using a universal standard, but it is relatively easier to measure the productivity fluctuation caused by the external factors. Velocity measurement in Agile practice is mostly for that end.

For the internal factors, the best way, and arguably the only effective way, to manage it is probably to hire good motivated developers. I think most top level software companies have learned that.

<comment><USER2> This is true - to an extent. Scrum screams out to measure relative story points, and never provide the data for "management" purposes. But even the same team estimating in succession will face external pressures - and if those pressures will be alleviated by gaming story points, they will. This catch-22 had me - I truly think the only way is to report only an estimated finish date. Any public posting of velocity eventually filters into a management by velocity - because that's the only metric management has. And we are back on the same old loop - we can have a measure of productivity as long as we do not use it in any manner as a measure of productivity.

Add to this I don't think scrum has become setup to take this to its logical conclusions - agile/scrum has been sold as a fairly fixed methodology, not as a means to get some relative metric out of teams and use that in a series of experiments to achieve productivity improvements. And even if it were, the major wins we _know_ and can prove work (quiet conditions, minimal interruptions, trust, respect, time for reflection and education, are a long way from being accepted by today's enterprises.

In short there is no silver bullet, and while agile looked a magic bullet it just turned out to be plain old lead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The article makes the point that the LOC metric is confounded by duplication:

> Copy and paste programming leads to high LOC counts and poor design because > it breeds duplication.

This problem is not insurmountable. Compression tools work by finding duplication and representing copies as (more concise) references to the original.* The size of the compressed version is an estimate of the real information content of the original, with copies counted at a significantly discounted rate. The compressed size of code could be a more robust measure of the work that went into it.

* Sometimes this is done explicitly, other times it's implicit

</comment><comment><USER25> And what about Iteration? The learning value that can come from doing things poorly?! Imagine if Microsoft had LEARNED something from what they did wrong in Windows 95? Or Windows ME! Imagine how amazing their software would be now. They couldn't have done it without having totally screwed up first. Of course they didn't do that in the end...so...

</comment><comment><USER26> Productivity by any volume measure seems meaningless in the software context. That's like measuring writing productivity by word count. Nobody really likes high-volume communication, unless the goal is to write a lot of trash.

Even if you deliver a system with a lot of features and no known bugs, if they aren't the right features, it's not valuable software.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you don't work >43 hours/week, you aren't productive. At least according to one boss I've had. :|

</comment><comment><USER28> I think that the the one thing that enables science is that even though you cannot measure all you want, you can still measure some things and that measurements are useful, just not directly.

</comment><comment><USER29> Because this

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

productivity of working on a software is like measuring fractals.

</comment><comment><USER30> Perhaps trying to measure true productivity reduces to the halting problem

</comment><comment><USER31> Software productivity management (as an end in itself) fails to account for another fundamental axiom: that software itself isn't the end-product, but itself is a tool or defines a process by which some task is accomplished.

Count lines of code, function points, bugfixes, commits, or any other metric, and you're capturing a _part_ of the process, but you're also creating a strong incentive to game the metric (a well-known characteristic of assessment systems), and you're still missing the key point.

Jacob Nielsen slashed through the Gordon's knot of usability testing a couple of decades back by focusing on a single, simple metric: does a change in design help users accomplish a task faster, and/or more accurately? You now have a metric which can be used _independently_ of the usability domain (it can apply to mall signage or kitchen appliances as readily as desktop software, Web pages, or a tablet app).

Ultimately, software does _something_. It might sell stuff (measure sales), it might provide entertainment, though in most cases that boils down to selling stuff. It might help design something, or model a problem, or create art. In many cases you can still reduce this to "sell something", in which case, if you're a business, or part of one, you've probably got a metric you can use.

For systems which don't result in a sales transaction directly or indirectly, "usability" probably approaches the metric you want: does a change accomplish a task faster and/or with more accuracy? Does it achieve an objectively better or preferable (double-blind tested) result?

The problem is that there are relatively few changes which can be tested conclusively or independently. And there are what Dennis Meadows calls "easy" and "hard" problems.

Easy problems offer choices in which a change is monotonic across time. Given alternatives A and B, if choice A is better than B at time t, it will be better at time t+n, for any n. You can rapidly determine which of the two alternatives you should choose.

Hard problems provide options which _aren 't_ monotonic. A may give us the best long-term results, but if it compares unfavorably initially, this isn't apparent. In a hard problem, A compares unfavorably at some time t, but is _better_ than B at some time t+n, and continues to be better for all larger values of t.

Most new business ventures are hard problems: you're going to be worse off for some period of time before the venture takes off ... assuming it does. Similarly, the choice over whether or not to go to college (and incur both debt and foregone income), to to learn a skill, to exercise and eat healthy.

It's a bit of a marshmallow experiment.

And of course, there's a risk element which should also be factored in: in hard problems, A _might_ be the better choice only _some_ of the time.

All of which does a real number in trying to assess productivity and employee ranking.

Time to re-read _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_.

</comment><comment><USER4> [2003]

</comment><comment><USER32> Also if you procrastinate a lot, you might end up learning something useful and get new insights that will make you more productive in the long run.

<comment><USER33> I'm going to keep telling myself this as I sit on HN...</comment></comment>


The magic of the fast inverse square root (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://h14s.p5r.org/2012/09/0x5f3759df.html

<comment><USER2> There are many previous submissions and discussions on the fast inverse square root hack going back many years, but it's still fun to see it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203676)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213056)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419166)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=573912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=573912)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896092)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599635)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332793)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115168)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3259199](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3259199)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4526609](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4526609)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519365)

<comment><USER3> Do you actually have a script to output a list of links to similar stories on HN? Just curious.

<comment><USER2> No. I've never bothered to automate it. Though I did run a query on Algolia HN Search, most of the above list comes from an old comment by ColinWright:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4526959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4526959)

As far as I know, Colin does/did have some form of scripting to generate dupe/related lists.

BTW, the Algolia "experimental" interface is easier since it allows you to shut off the annoying thumbnail image loading. You can enable the "experimental" interface through the "settings" link at the bottom of the page:

[https://hn.algolia.com/settings](https://hn.algolia.com/settings)</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Weekend: San Francisco #2 - <AUTHOR> http://sf2.startupweekend.com/

<comment><USER2> Hey all, good point, sorry we didn't make the relevant information easy enough to find. Hopefully I can help.

Dates: April 3rd-5th Location: in SF on Market near Powell Bart (Microsoft HQ) Tickets: $40 at <http://sf2startupweekend.eventbrite.com/>

I'm happy to answer any questions: firstname.lastname@example.com

-Tyler Willis

<comment><USER2> Also, we just created a code for Hackers and Founders 'startupmeetup' will give you 50% off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> PR/Marketing ticket group is already sold out?

<comment><AUTHOR> As in limited PR/Marketing tickets. They want developers there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Agreed...the about page isn't much better.

</comment><comment><USER5> I read the first couple of entries and still have no idea what/when/where this is. Instead of talking at length about SXSW, this page should contain all the relevant information right at the top

<comment><USER6> The when is prominently displayed in the header.

... so prominently that though I did find it, it was only after skimming the main content on the page looking for it.</comment></comment>


Neat Algorithms - Flocking - <AUTHOR> http://harry.me/2011/02/17/neat-algorithms---flocking/

<comment><USER2> Re-submitted later, and that got more traction:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2263367></comment>


Four Attacks on OAuth - How to Secure Your OAuth Implementation - <AUTHOR> http://software-security.sans.org/blog/2011/03/07/oauth-authorization-attacks-secure-implementation

<comment><USER2> Isn't this why many providers are moving to OAuth2? Complexity of implementing and lack of security?</comment>


How Can I Make a Habit of Waking Up Early in the Morning? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-make-a-habit-of-waking-up-early-in-the-morning/answer/Dan-Luca?share=1

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the link to the original question: [http://www.quora.com/How-can-I- make-a-habit-of-waking-up-ear...](http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-make-a-habit- of-waking-up-early-in-the-morning)</comment>


Why we decided to shut down BackupMyTweets - <AUTHOR> http://www.austinpreneur.com/shutting-down-backupmytweets/ Case study and explanation of why we launched, and then eventually decided to shut down the service even though we have 35,000+ users. <comment><USER2> $1000 per month for your servers seems really high. Where are you hosting this?</comment>


CodenameOne - Making WORA Real Again For Mobile Devices - <AUTHOR> http://www.dzone.com/links/r/codename_one_making_wora_real_again_for_mobile_de.html

<comment><USER2> I can't see how this can result in great apps. The apps either have to run against a lowest common denominator API, or they must reject most of the platforms for each build, making this useless. And let's not even start about a native UI (and I'm not talking about merely using the host platform's widgets).

<comment><AUTHOR> This new java platform implemented a lightweight UI which is pretty powerful and rich allowing embedding native widgets and with native access to all platforms. This can result in great apps with rapid time to market.</comment></comment>


Why did CDC send NYC man home without testing for coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> https://abc7ny.com/5974999/#click=https://t.co/T3wcGV6lIF <comment><AUTHOR> Context: [https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/fayko1/my_covid19_stor...](https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/fayko1/my_covid19_story_brooklyn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)</comment>


Ask HN: Software to merge two videos recordings of the same view - <AUTHOR>

hello, I need a tool that could merge recordings of the same view by two separate cameras located at different angles and eliminate the object that appears to both cameras. Imagine I want to record the classroom, whats on the blackboard to be more precise, but there is always a teacher walking between the cameras and the blackboard.
If I locate two cameras in two different corners of the room under different angles from the blackboard so that each of them sees a the blackboard and the teacher but each of them will have different blind spots on the blackboard.
when I combine the two views merging them on common region (part which both cameras can see) I will be able to get the view of entire blackboard. please refer to this pic to understand what I mean *ttp://i56.tinypic.com/2reo08i.png Is there any tool that can automatically do that? thanks a lot I really need this for my term project at the university <comment><AUTHOR> anobody? no?</comment>


Can you trust your business to Google's cloud? - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9989019-93.html?hhTest=1&tag=nefd.top <comment><USER2> Probably more than you can trust it to your own IT dept.

<comment><USER3> In a startup, isn't "IT dept" just another name for "technical co-founder"?

<comment><USER4> Well, then the technical co-founder will spend tons of time doing things such as setting up emails, scanning viruses, looking for intruders to servers, setting up quickbooks. Then you lose man-hours that should be dedicated to your main product/services.

I know this because I have been working for 6 startups for 10 years. This is a very common pattern that leads to failure.

<comment><USER3> That's true, but I interpreted the word "trust" in terms of capability, not availability.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


10 Best American novels of the past half century - <AUTHOR> https://notesonliberty.com/2019/10/17/10-best-american-novels-of-the-past-half-century/ <comment> dawg- The list is written "out of a respect for the less-heralded cultural underpinnings" of America, but it includes books by Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow...great authors and great books but hardly "less heralded"</comment>


Is it possible to make money off of advertisements if your primary audience are techies? - <AUTHOR>

I am planning on starting a website primarily aimed at techies. The problem is that techies are very unlikely to click on ads and use AdBlock, further lowering the probability. Is it possible to make money off of advertisements if your primary audience are techies? <comment><USER2> Honestly, I find the subject matter of the ad more relevant than the presence of an ad. Partner up with good sites like New Egg or Tiger Direct for ads and you're bound to get some good numbers. Stick with Google AdSense (and that's not to say anything negative about AdSense) and you wont see near the same numbers mostly because

1\. Everyone recognizes AdSense and it doesn't really stand apart from content (this reflects on how effectively and tactfully place your ad)

2\. More common is it becoming to see Ads on AdSense that point to TLD's that display no relevant information, or useful data, so people automously ignore them.

Advertisements are all about the audience, much less the product. Get the right ads, and you'll see results even with the techie crowd who are more familiar with blatantly bad advertisements.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very interesting, thank you. But how does one go about partnering up with specific sites like New Egg or Tiger Direct?

<comment><USER3> Become a publisher at <http://www.cj.com/> for New Egg. Become a LinkShare affiliate for TigerDirect <http://www.linkshare.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you get to a decent size you can get sponsorship from companies and sell your own ads. They'll just be images/text on your site with a link to their site, so you can avoid hitting adblock default list. If the the ads are for good products people might even appreciate them.

<comment><USER5> I did/do that and while I can sell small ad spots for a good amount (enough to pay rent at times) it is _very_ hard to find companies willing to advertise a single-author blog like mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very much so: job ads.

<comment><USER5> _cough_ snaptalent..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Possible? Sure. I've put up web pages directed toward programmers, and have gotten ad clicks.

But you'll probably find a greater click-through rate writing on other topics.

</comment><comment><USER8> You are right in regards to adsense. Adsense can work as a business model, but only at a MUCH larger scale than most realize. When you factor in natural ad- aversion, it raises the the bar for success to a number you will be unlikely to achieve without a mainstream site.

That said, job ads are a very cool approach. They pay more and in-the-know managers are willing to pay a premium for elite developers.</comment>


Ask HN: How to make myself marketable? - <AUTHOR>

I'm out of college this past year and six months into my first job. It's a steady career path with good benefits at a multi-billion dollar company, and I'd probably do well for myself if I stuck around.
It's fantastically unsuited for me.
I don't have any good horror stories yet about the company culture, but I have seen enough to know that this is not the environment and the challenges that I want.
In the last year, I've also discovered Stack Overflow, Hacker News, and a whole slew of new languages, paradigms, ideas, and possibilities. I've liked programming for a long time, but this is the first time I've been passionate about it, and my passion is growing. Now I want to find the kind of job that I'm thrilled about, not just satisfied with. Maybe the answer is to start my own business. Maybe it's simply to join a software-focused one that feels the same way I do. Maybe it's none of the above (indie/OSS development?). I only know that I need to keep moving.
I'm not in that great a hurry to leave my current job, and I'm told that such a quick exit isn't good future-planning, anyway. At the same time, I feel anxious to do more than read and tinker. I'm getting ready to start a blog. I'm busily polishing up my first app for release. I bounce my thoughts off anyone who will listen. I know I'm going to work on something on my own time, and I want to make sure it's something that will prepare me to get the best possible job for myself. So:
- How make myself most marketable to software-focused companies with the best cultures?
- How do I know which companies those are, and what makes them good?
- Should I start networking? What is the best way to do that? <comment><USER2> Of course you need to start networking, your network is the number one thing that will help you pursue your career and open doors to places you want to be. The question is not if, it is how. I suggest you go to local meetups (perhaps hackathons or usergroups, for example here in Sweden we have SHRUG, Stockholm Ruby User Group) and meet other hackers, people that are passionate about programming. Talk to them, get to know them and hit them up on LinkedIn and Twitter afterwards. Remember to keep in touch, a good way is over lunch if your work locations are nearby. Networking and keeping ones network alive is hard and requires effort, but it will pay in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stop everything you're doing and buy "How To Win Friends and Influence People." It's available for Kindle, if that's your preference.

Seriously. JRAJAV, are you writing this down? How. To. Win. Friends. And. Influence. People. By Dale Carnegie.

</comment><comment><USER4> \- Github

\- Find products you naturally love, explore cultures of those companies specifically.

\- Meetup.com</comment>