What Business is Wall Street In? - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2012/09/21/what-business-is-wall-street-in-3/ <comment><USER2> _It is getting increasingly difficult to just invest in companies you believe in._

Like how twenty years ago you could buy a stock you believed in for like $4 by using a computer system, paying a fraction-of-a-penny spread on average, to have a trade executed in milliseconds to seconds, but now you have to talk to a human on the phone and pay a $400 commission to pay a fraction-of-an-eighth spread and have the trade execute in minutes or hours? That fact pattern would make this critique make sense.

No, it is fantastically easier to trade the stocks of companies you believe in. If there is a problem with the market, the "problem", and one uses that term loosely, is that people are talking about macroeconomic trends more than individual companies because the observable evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of a conclusion we've pretty much known for decades: seeking alpha is a sucker's bet.

<comment><AUTHOR> "It is getting increasingly difficult to just invest in companies you believe in."

You're interpreting that sentence literally. His point is that investing in a company used to largely be based on how successful you though that company would be. The market has changed in a way that an overwhelming number of external factors can have a negative (or positive) impact on that company's share price, making the evaluation of risk far more difficult. At the same time, the barriers to getting into the market have been lowered making it far- easier for anyone to participate. That sentence has nothing to do with how your initial trade was executed.

<comment><USER3> If that is really his point, then he does not understand value investing.

From the point of view of a value investor, the numbers that you care about are the current price, and how successful you think that company will be. If the current price is below that benchmark, you buy and hold. If the current price is above that benchmark then _maybe_ you want to sell short. (The reason for the maybe is that, _the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent._ ) Either way you're aiming to make a profit off of the difference between long-term returns and the price you bought it at.

Therefore from the point of view of a value investor, everything that helps people lose track of a company's long-term prospects is good for you.

<comment><USER4> Better than that, an irrational dip in a stock's price due to an analyst recommendation or another factor may represent a good opportunity for a value investor!

<comment><USER5> Exactly. And we should just stop calling them "Value" investors. This is true for growth investors, any kind of investors, in fact all investors.

Investing is about knowing the difference between value and the price.

When you can do that-- and when I say "knowing" I mean it, and I have a spreadsheet to calculate it-- then you can buy low and sell high.

The problem is wall street is in the business of managing other people's money and most people are ignorant of money, so you have a lot of people who just turn their money over to others to "manage"... and many of those that use other people's money end up gambling with it rather than investing it... this problem is compounded by the moral hazard created by the government bailing these companies out when the gambles turn south (or underwriting the gambling by buying bad securities as helicopter ben is doing right now to the tune of $40B a month.)

The problem with wall street is government regulation which is idiotically designed, and intervention-- in the form of bailouts-- that perverts the entire system incentivizing gambling.

And the people voting for all this, generally don't even know what money is, let alone how to invest it. (If you think the dollars in your pocket are money, then you're one of those people, and I suggest you read <http://mises.org/money.asp> )

<comment><USER6> If you walking into the saloon ready to play poker the proper way (you know, 5 cards, held in your hand) and every game at every table is mucking around with Texas Hold 'em, it's no good saying you know the real value of poker - even if you are right, and value is written into your spreadsheet.

Never ignore Keynes' rule - the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

<comment><USER3> If you are able to afford to buy and hold, then it does not matter how long the markets stay irrational - you've bought it and it should work out.

Where Keynes' rule applies in spades is when you are doing things like shorting an overpriced stock. Now as the price goes up you keep on having to put more money in, and should you run out of money you lose your shirt.

And about poker, there are a lot of variants of poker out there. Texas Hold 'em is what everyone is playing because it has the combination of more strategy and thinner edges. So good players have a real challenge figuring it out, and weaker players have a better chance of walking away lucky on any given night.

<comment><USER7> Without dividends, there's no reward for buy-and-hold investing, and no reason to pick companies that will actually perform well. Instead anyone who buys is gambling that they'll be able to dump their position at a fortunate time, which leaves them dependent on predicting the irrational market's _perception_ of the company's prospects.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately dividends are double-taxed relative to cap gains/interest/etc. Until that's fixed, we won't go back to the era of companies returning money to investors.

<comment><USER3> Companies can and do return money to investors through stock buybacks. To first order, it is the same as a dividend, except that only the investors who want money get it.

<comment><USER8> To first order, stock buybacks are equivalent to dividends. To second order, the IRS makes it complicated, as do regulators.

<comment><USER6> What - really double taxed ? Do you mean dividends are paid out of post tax cash, then taxed as income for the stockholder?

Just wondering

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you._

Can he explain exactly how this is supposed to happen? Let's think it through. You see a stock priced at B, and you decide you want to buy it. Cuban is saying that a high frequency trader will see that you want to buy the stock, and he'll buy it for B and then sell it back to you at B+X, making X in the process (any you pay more for the stock). To do that, he'd have to know that you were about to submit an order. But he only finds out about your order _after_ you've submitted the order to the exchange, and the exchange has relayed it to him. He doesn't get the opportunity to "jump in front of you", and I have no idea why Cuban thinks he does.

In actuality, what happens is this. The high frequency trader sees that the stock is priced at B if you want to buy it, and S if you want to tell it (with B > S). He then expresses his willingness to sell you the stock at B-X (by sending a limit order to the exchange). When you come along to buy it, you get it at B-X instead of B, which _saves you money_. The trader gets a rebate from the exchange for supplying liqudity (which he did, since you got the stock for less than you would have otherwise) and hopefully he is able to buy it back for some price around S (with another limit order), thereby making the difference between B-X and S.

There are dangers with high frequency trading [1] but they are not of the kind that Cuban is describing.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_capital#2012_stock_tradi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_capital#2012_stock_trading_disruption)

<comment><USER10> Except, that isn't all high frequency traders do.

They send in tens of thousands of requests a second, many of which they have no interest in ever being forfilled, in the hope of partly fooling other people, who are sending around similar numbers of requests.

Stock exchanges have turned into a high-frequency war-ground, which fortunately doesn't appear to spill out and effect the rest of us too often, at least as far as I understand.

<comment><USER9> Most exchanges that I have experience of have a minimum trade-to-quote ratio, i.e. at least a certain proportion of your quotes have to turn into trades, or you'll be warned and eventually kicked off the exchange.

In any case, to the 'end user' (a regular stock investor like you or me) the continual jockeying for position among HFTs doesn't matter - all we notice is that we pay smaller spreads and get our orders filled more quickly.

 _Sometimes_ the trading games spill out into the 'real world' with unpleasant consequences, but those instances appear (so far) to be rare. I think there needs to be tight regulation on HFTs to limit behaviour like quote stuffing, spoofing and other forms of gaming, but I don't agree with the argument that they are a net bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is really easy to convince nerds that Wall Street is fundamentally corrupt because of the exploitation of exotic sounding technology, like "high frequency trading".

The reality is that the vast majority of the damage Wall Street inflicted on the US economy had nothing to do with electronic trading. Until someone invents High Frequency Lawyering, the bulk of the work involved in trancheing collateralized debt instruments is going to be paperwork. Those instruments are traded OTC. While there are electronic markets for some of them, like swaps for blue chip companies, those markets have nothing resembling the volume of the NASDAQ. The '07-'08 crash was caused by evil phone calls more than evil computers.

The other thing you'd want to understand is that prior to electronic trading, Wall Street was crooked as a bucket of fish hooks. Before retail electronic trading, if you (you meaning _anyone_ who didn't work for a trading firm) wanted to buy or sell a stock, you had to find an agent to execute the trade for you. As you can imagine, most people have call to engage an agent very few times a year, but agents work with each other all the time. You got worse prices because your orders would quietly be routed through the channels that secured the most grift for your broker.

There are bad things about HFT; for instance, they create an incentive to route very strong CS talent to Wall Street instead of Google. But before you decide that HFT must clearly be evil because it allows the Goldman Sachs of the world to get better deals than mom and pop stock traders (which, note to mom and pop: don't _trade_ stocks), you should probably have a very good idea what a continuous double auction is, and what a market maker does, and have a good idea of who the "big fish" in HFT are actually preying on. It probably isn't your pension fund.

<comment><USER12> Tangent: DMCA takedowns are High Frequency Lawyering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is there such a witch hunt against high frequency traders? I understand the brain-drain argument, but I fail to see a direct negative impact on regular investors.

-High frequency traders provide liquidity enabling me to transact with slightly lower spreads. While narrow spreads may only provide a marginal benefit to the markets, how is it harming you or I?

-High frequency traders hardly impact my investing decisions. Has anyone here been burned by a high frequency trader? If so, please share your experience.

-I am unaware of any academic research concluding high frequency trading has caused harm to individual investors.

-The flash crashes that have occured, appear to have been temporary in nature, and therefore have had zero impact on real investors.

-Don't use market orders if you are afraid of getting a trade executed at an irrational price.

-if PG, KO, or similar crashes for a few milliseconds as a result of high frequency trading (which may be a dubious claim) how does that hurt you? You may have the opportunity to temporarily exploit a mispriced security and buy shares of a company at a lower price.

<comment><USER14> >Why is there such a witch hunt against high frequency traders?

There's a decent chunk of jealousy involved; I think it's mostly the way they seem to be making a large amount of money while not doing any "real work". Compare the general attitude towards lawyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cuban is just griping about something he doesn't even understand here. There was a great article about it here a couple months back. There is value to HFT. It creates liquidity in the market. It doesn't make long-term investing any different at all. It's just an automated version of the same market making that's been done manually for decades.

Wall Street has a lot of problems. Computers making markets instead of humans isn't one of them.

</comment><comment><USER16> Love Cuban, but his target is program trading, not Wall Street. And trading serves its purpose as it makes the market more efficient. Arbitrage opportunities will always narrow or close over time.

His argument is like saying that someone that buys and sells used cars has a big advantage over me the consumer, therefore buying a car is rigged. I know that implicitly, it's the friction of low transacting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone buying and selling used cars doesn't have the ability to crash the entire car market negatively affecting everyone that currently owns a car in the same way that high-frequency trading can with the stock market. I don't think your analogy works.

<comment><USER16> Those crashes primarily impact professionals... I'm not familiar with any enduring crash with sustaind impact to retail investors. I'm sure the value created by tightening spreads and creating volume dwarfs the cost of a momentary crash that impacts other professional traders (and a small fraction of retail traders).

I'm not saying that high frequency trading isn't shady, but it also serves a purpose. And I don't think the objective is to crash a market, it's to make money. These traders don't want scrutiny, so they are personally motivated to maintain order.

<comment><USER17> Individuals are also affected by decisions made by professional traders (e.g. mutual or retirement funds). Maybe crashing the market is not the objective, but it could be an unintended consequence, and the only real motivation is short-term profit, not "maintaining order" in fear of some hypothetical future regulation.

<comment><USER16> When did the length of the period of speculation become the moral compass for whether someone should be allowed to put their capital at risk.

I still think that everyone is missing a key point. There is huge value in programatic trading. The frequency of a crash with impact to retail investors (not traders willingly risking money speculatively) relative to the volume of spread tightening trading approaches zero.

<comment><USER17> It was not my intention to claim whether high-frequency trading is "good" or "bad". To be honest I don't think I have enough information to judge that. I just replied to your specific arguments which I considered wrong.

That said, I agree that rejecting algorithmic trading just because it's new, different, and scary doesn't seem like the best approach. Computers have disrupted most industries, and the financial industry is just one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "It is getting increasingly difficult to just invest in companies you believe in."

So, let's say that Mark's right and the combination of HFT and emphasis on macro trends has caused some securities to be mis-priced compared to his analysis of their long-term prognoses. As a long-term investor, shouldn't he be delighted for the opportunity to bargain shop? If anyone can stay solvent longer than markets stay irrational, it's him.

</comment><comment><USER19> There's a difference between retail trader and retail investor. If Joe Schmo is a trader, looking to earn profits in the short term (days, weeks, < 6 months), the odds are heavily stacked again him, with HFT (i am kinda in agreement with Cuban there). If Joe was an investor, seeking out good companies and buying stocks with the intent to hold on to them for the long term (1 yr+) then HFT should have lesser impact. Ofcourse an investor could have made the wrong call, but then the outcome of a stock moving up or down over the long run should be related to the actual performance of the company in the real world, not some alternate universe dominated by hft algos seeking arbitrage opportunities.

<comment><USER20> Individual investors outperform the market over a 20 day holding period and that "these patterns are consistent with the idea that risk-averse individuals provide liquidity to meet institutional demand for immediacy." The expected return for an individual investor deteriorates as time horizons get shorter _and longer_ than 20 days, with professional traders dominating individuals at the shorter end and professional investors at the longer.

[http://archive.nyu.edu/bitstream/2451/26930/3/CFE-04-04.pdf....](http://archive.nyu.edu/bitstream/2451/26930/3/CFE-04-04.pdf.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sigh, I like Mark Cuban, its fun to watch him on Shark Tank but I don't think he makes a good case here. The financial markets have several ways in which people use and/or exploit them. One of the ways people use the stock market is for investing, one of the ways they use the market is for 'trading' which for all intents is extracting value out of the first (or second) derivative of market trades.

An analogy (weak but serviceable) is that a home town bank is for "saving money", you save your money, you deposit, you write drafts against your deposits that other people can use to make value limited withdrawals. Oh and the people in the bank? They also have a business where they take your deposits and they loan that to people who need money now and can repay it in the future. But to do that they have to do 'magic math' and figure out how likely it is that this borrower will pay it back and they do that with an interest rate. Now the bank, like it has from the beginning of time, is "making money using your money and dealing with people who will pay to borrow it."

Interestingly this exact same works on Wall street and with 'investment banks'. You "invest" (equivlaent to making a deposit) and instead of a chit that says you have $1000 on deposit you get one that says you have ownership of 50 shares of stock in AT&T. Guess what, the bank doesn't just sit on a bunch of stock certificates, they have _another_ business where they let other people use those shares on the agreement they can always get back 50 shares to give to you if you decide you want the certificates to put in a safe deposit box or something. One customer is 'investing' and one (possibly different) customer is 'trading'.

Guess what you can do this with anything of value, and if its something someone consumes you call it "commodities", if its currency you call it "banking", if its stocks and bonds you call it "investing", and if its gossip you call it "journalism."

Mark is smart enough to know this, so why the blog post?

My guess is that a lot of people don't like high-frequency-trading because _they can't afford to play._ What has happened is that a large holding company, fund, or bank with programmers and computers and data center space near the exchange can easily _out trade_ someone trying to do this through the e-trade Web API. I get how that could be annoying to someone who used to make money that way, tell it to all the folks who used to be able to make a class A game title with a couple of programmers and an artistically inclined person or two.

<comment><USER5> My opinion is that Mark Cuban works hard, but he's opinionated most in the areas where he knows the least. He is not an authority on anything, except maybe sports team management. He got lucky selling a shell of company to Yahoo (a fool of a buyer) in the dotcom boom.... but his performance on shark tank and on his blog tell me that, he's confused his luck with talent.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. He's entertaining and probably smarter and more focused than 99% of people but his poor arguments make me think he's not a precise thinker and isn't mentally flexible. I wonder if he'd be able to answer this question: What would he have to be persuaded of to change his mind on this topic? (I wonder what everyone including myself would answer to this question.)

I wonder what his motivation is. Is he upset by poor performance in his personal account and wants to blame someone? Does he buy the shockingly confused media hype? Is he threatened by something he incompletely understands? Is he doing it to get even more attention? Is he trying to seem intelligent or gain even more status by jumping on a bandwagon to criticize a popular scapegoat?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > or changing the capital gains tax structure so that there is no capital > gains tax on any shares of stock (private or public company) held for 1 year > or more, and no tax on dividends paid to shareholders who have held stock in > the company for more than 5 years.

A complex tax structure ignores the bottom (who pay very little tax on income) and only harms the middle. The top earners in any system with a complex tax structure have the capital and the assets to make it worthwhile to design vehicles that shield them by exploiting these complex tax rules.

</comment><comment><USER17> The analogy between hackers and traders is interesting, but the argument would have been even better if the author hadn't assumed that hackers have to be criminals:

"A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it."

On the other hand, looks like we've already lost this fight.

<comment><USER24> Yep, I came here to post this exact sentiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> HFT, brokerage houses, and wall street in general is about providing the service of being a middle man and profiting from standing in the middle of a transaction. Traders via automated machines or human beings facilitate a transaction between a buyer and a seller. That's the business. It's not about providing capital or whatever else people think it is, it's about being basically a sales agent.

Before computers, Wall St. was still largely about trading and standing between people who have money and people are willing to trade ownership for money. That's it.

The problem is that HFT is about profiting on even the smallest trades, but cranking up the volume to 11. It's kind of like what Wal-Mart did to retail, they make less money per item, but they literally make it up in volume.

Algorithmic trading can be slow or fast, but it plays off the fact that machines can compute the data and make a decision faster than humans can, especially on a digital marketplace.

It is unfair to human traders, sure. But, you have a digital trading platform, so at some point it's impossible to stop algorithmic trading.

If you want a market where the purpose is to create capital for businesses without dealing with machine trading, you need to start a new market that is not run by machines and is only operated by human, person to person trades.

<comment><USER26> I am not usually a fan of regulation but his 10c tax for trades in less than an hour may help this out big time. It really is just like API throttling so people or consumers don't abuse the systems for all. Then again day trading and hedging is a big part of investment portfolios now and this would change things big time.

 _Whether its through a use of taxes on trades(hit every trade on a stock held less than 1 hour with a 10c tax and all these problems go away), or changing the capital gains tax structure so that there is no capital gains tax on any shares of stock (private or public company) held for 1 year or more, and no tax on dividends paid to shareholders who have held stock in the company for more than 5 years._

There are probably some edge cases where a time based tax would be a problem but for the most part I think it would drastically reduce the HFT skimming. Then again, if you are making money on the market you are probably doing the skimming.

A big problem for markets is weak or too many short term investors, they can create a snowball effect. HFT trading algorithms are very short and can create flash crash windfalls. Luckily they can also buy up when those things happen and the whole thing is over in a blink but that seems too risky. What happens when all the trades are by HFT algorithms? Eventually if those make all the money then everyone will use them all the time. Where are the long suckers then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I gather that Mark is upset that HFTs use stocks as pawns and resale merchandise here. Essentially, HFTs buy stocks just because the supply and demand numbers look right. These algorithms most likely don't do research into the background of a company, they don't do character checks on executives, and they don't look at what kind of expertise the staff or board has. They just look at the buy/sell rates historically and take advantage of good opportunities. They're essentially middlemen in between the buy and the sell rates, and feel a lot like retail stores. You could almost compare them to Wal-Mart. Get whatever the hell goods they can, give a better rate than anyone else, sell to people who actually want the goods. However, they are not buying stocks as a sign of faith in the company, which is what I think Mark Cuban believes is the real point of the stock market.

</comment><comment><USER28> In the past few years, I've been a fervently anti-bank corruption, often aligning myself with the occupy wall street crowd. However, unlike most people with my views, I see algorithmic trading as not a symptom of, but one of the solutions to the problems in investment banking.

Maybe it's because of my background in machine learning, but I view computers as a way to reduce the amounts of arbitrage opportunities and insider knowledge that can be exploited by traders to enrich themselves on the back of others.

Well programmed computers are able to use NLP techniques to read thousands of news articles, reports, financial statements, government data, demographic data , analyse millions of data points, sort which ones are important, build predictive models, and do it all in a few seconds of time.

A few computers can do the job of thousands of traders, do it with less bias and with better mathematically proven decisions.

Nowadays every time a human trader tries to beat the market by predicting short terms swings in prices, there is a computer on the other side of his internet connection that is relying on much more information and even models of the human's own personality and biases to trade against him. This means that unless the human has inside information that is not accessible to the computer, (and I'm sure those who operate these computers try to feed them or make them infer the greatest amount of direct or indirect insider knowledge as possible ) it will tend to be impossible to beat the market.

With the greater amount of information, the computers will keep the prices closer to real world fundamentals, bust bubbles before they inflate and reduce all the price swings that traders used to be able to exploit to make a profit on the back of less sophisticated investors.

By making obsolete the jobs of all these traders, they are making the market much more efficient. They are automating a kind of job that didn't produced any real goods. Hopefully, pushing these people into jobs that make something real instead of skimming the top of everybody's retirement savings (I can see why those who want to be traders would be upset about this).

Ah but you say, all we have done is replace humans from skimming our retirement savings by machines that do the same. This would be true if there was only one computer system competing against the human traders but there is a whole industry and they also compete against each other. Two sophisticated machines that trade against each other, will not only beat the human trader and put him out of business but reduce the arbitrage opportunity and margin each of these computer systems can exploit.

Contrary to what the article states, computers that compete against each other will tend to eliminate all short term unjustified price swings and leave only accessible prices based on real company fundamentals. Only long term traders that bet on fundamentals will be able to make money and they will make more money than when they were subject to be exploited through market distortions and bubbles.

This can all be proven by something called the efficient market hypothesis:

There is a great explanation by Glen Whitman of Agoraphilia, that uses grocery line wait time predictions as a metaphor: <http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2005/03/doing-lines.html>

See also:

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis>

<comment><USER29> I find this idea that all the investment managers in the world exist simply by skimming off peoples retirement savings mind boggling.

There are two main kinds of retirement savings, those where the retiree is in control of where their money goes - in which case they can choose to invest it as they wish. In an index, a company or anything else, and those where a company is investing on their behalf but with a legal obligation to pay out.

Now, if the company goes bust then that is not the fault of HFTs or managers skimming. Either they failed to make adequate contributions or they simply went bust because the business failed.

If you invest your money in ACTIVE MANAGERS then you'd best know who they are, what they do, and why they think they can win in a negative sum game. By definition very few actually can.

HFT is not the cause of pensioners going without - that is a combination of lack of contributions (based on unrealistic expectations) and poor investment decisions. They don't prevent you from spending all your money on Apple shares and making a killing, and nor are they to blame if you invested in Northern Rock and lost everything.

It is a fact that more money is spent on portfolio transaction costs for large pension schemes than any other cost. It is also true that much of it is unnecessary. But these are functions of investment choices based on active management, along with poor implementation and usually high management turnover.

<comment><USER30> What a lot of people are missing is "the market" can't grow faster than "the economy" over the long term. There has been a huge influx of money into the stock market as an increasing percentage of people hoping for historical returns. Causing people to chase after ever lower returns. It's gotten so distorted that the 'smart money' practically ignores growth in favor of other games.

HFT is the perfect example of this as they don't chase growth. There goal is to tax cash flows and market inefficiency. So, they leave low churn stocks like Berkshire Hathaway alone in favor of cheap stocks with a lot of turnover. If you keep your stock for an average of 10 years then HFT is meaningless to you. But, with hedge-funds often doing quite a bit of trading they can extract money without you realizing your trading.

In the end it's yet another reason 401k's are growing a lot slower than many people predict. Sort of like how people expect the economy to 'recover' when it was what there remembering is an unsustainable bubble.

PS: And of course Dividends are something of a special case in the above analysis.

<comment><USER31> I disagree that the market can't grow faster than the economy. Derivative markets for example.

<comment><USER30> Note: over the long term

Compound interest is an exponential equation. Even 1% growth means doubling every 70 years and 1,000x growth every 700 years and 1 million x growth in 1400 years etc. Let's say US GDP is X$ and stocks are 'worth' a 100,000 X. At some point the market get's so far from the 'fundamentals' you get a crash, but it's more like a return to rational behavior.

PS: That's not to say tax breaks like 401k's cant shift things for decades. But, there is only so far you can inflate any bubble before it pops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This sounds like liquidity is a bug rather than a feature, because those secondary trades don't send capital to the companies. But that liquidity is part of why the primary capital went into the company, and that liquidity supports a flock of risk management and information signalling functions. So I'm not sure why the focus on liquidity per se.

Given that the rejection of HFT has to be overbroad. If they liquidity they provide is the sort of that supports the functions we like, who cares what their holding periods are?

It certainly seems true that Cuban is right about "hacking" the market insofar as yeah, a good deal of HFT sounds like exploitation of rules and procedures to avoid creating the fair market intended. But that means there is "bad" liquidity, which doesn't serve our purposes. Okay, so let's write rules that better serve our purposes for liquidity. (And if we're worried about market distortions from bad trading liquidity, what about the market distortions from Fed provision of currency liquidity? The wash of cash has lifted all asset prices, it's hard to see economic signals when price correlations are moving to one.)

Cuban seems to think we can do just that by manipulating investor incentives -- give them tax breaks for holding periods, tax transactions, etc. But all of these just make the market more complex, and increase the differential between investment categories -- all of which creates more incentive for financial hacking and further detaches pursuit of financial return from realization of economic return. It makes the rules less comprehensible. And it gives the politicians and regulators more to do in the markets, which makes them more attractive targets for lobbyists. He's increasing the incentives for soft corruption while making it harder to spot, the consequences are easily predicted.

Cuban is a smart and pragmatic guy with billions of reasons to think himself smarter than the average bear. Part of his smarts are an ability to keep it simple, and an instinct when things are out of whack. But here that instinct have lead him through simple on to simplistic.

</comment><comment><USER33> Mark Cuban is only human, and I was wondering why he seemed to take that huge Facebook loss so lightly.

</comment><comment><USER34> I read an interesting claim in a book about economics recently: that Wall Street wasn't an industry, but a monopoly.

The argument was that in a normal industry, companies in competition with each other benefit when a competitor goes out of business. Other firms step in and snap up the opportunities. But with Wall Street, the whole network of companies needs a government bail out to stop their wholesale collapse when one company gets into trouble (eg. Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers). Thus they are not really an industry of competing companies, but should be seen as a single monopolistic entity.

(of course they are filled with competitive people, but think of how departments and employees within the same company compete with each other)

</comment><comment><USER35> HFT is gambling, pure and simple. I bet the price is going up, someone else bets that it isn't. Personally, I don't have a problem with gambling and I don't care if other people do it. It certainly sounds sketchy, given that they are using millions of dollars of other people's money. But they know the risks and they do a decent job of managing them. This is no harm, no foul.

I think part of the point (maybe Cuban's point) is that gambling isn't helping anyone, either. Financial markets were designed in theory to get capital to the right companies. HFT is a lot like a Native American casino...there was something much more profitable to do with the real estate than it's intended use.

</comment><comment><USER36> What is this guy's deal? He posted almost the exact same blog post over a year ago. [http://blogmaverick.com/2011/08/08/what-business-is-wall- str...](http://blogmaverick.com/2011/08/08/what-business-is-wall-street-in-2/)

</comment><comment><USER37> `It is getting increasingly difficult to just invest in companies you believe in.`

I disagree with this. How many people believe in Apple as a company and invested in it's growth over the last 8 years. Or Target over the last 3 and there are many others.

The challenge as I see it is that it is very difficult for the companies to actually leverage the growth in their stock prices. The companies need to buy and sell their own stocks in order to use the money as investment. Unless I am missing something huge here. Most of the time it seems it is only an incentive to management that the stock price increases. But really, the capital isn't invested in the company, it is gambled on the company.

</comment><comment><USER6>
       However we need to do it, we need to get the smart money
       on Wall Street back to thinking about ways to use their
       capital to help start and grow companies.

This is the meat and potatoes quote. Founder Visas, Ycombinator, Disrupt, the death of VCs, the new VCs, all of these do shout that someone has dropped the ball, and a new breed of investors have picked it up.

I still look at Prof. Sadoway and think how will he get the investment he wants from US markets. Its either VCs, Green Funds or soverign funds making all the running - the business of creating new businesses seems to have fallen out of favour.

Proof - none that you can speak of, except for my bones.

</comment><comment><USER38> There is little productivity created in the wall st business. As the author states little of what Wall St does is raise capital for companies. Mostly it facilitates trading stock which is basically people trying to make money off of other people who have enough money to buy stocks. You buy your 'chips' and trade them and hope to make a profit. As far as the rest of the economy is concerned, little productivity is created from this action. It's as productive as gambling is, which would be analogous to Wall St's true business.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wall Street's business is _facilitating the capital markets_ , not "creating capital". Equity underwriting, a white shoe Wall Street activity, involves simultaneously facilitating a series of transactions we call an IPO. Creating capital is not really anybody's job - you can create capital/money by agreeing to take an IOU in lieu of cash for services rendered.

Also, Wall Street != algo/program/high frequency trading. That area of the capital markets, which requires sophisticated market infrastructure to exist in the first place, is exceedingly small by headcount and profit share.

>" _The best analogy for traders? They are hackers._ "

Traders _are_ hackers, and so are entrepreneurs. The kind that likes to tinker with data, play with mathematical models, and find nuances previously un- noticed or empirical anomalies irrational. The dream is to, in the process, find a way of modelling phenomena presently deemed unpredictable, i.e. to discover something new.

>" _Discussion in the market place is not about the performance of specific companies and their returns. Discussion is about macro issues that impact all stocks._ "

Adam Smith didn't write about economics, he wrote about the political economy. The post-War trend of having a secular divide between politics and markets is historically unprecedented. Discussion has shifted because the salient points have shifted; beta is dominating alpha. A visual could be a slick of oil on top of an ocean - the oil is company-specific factors and the ocean the general market. In calm seas just watching the oil is fine. If you're in a Hellenic thunderstorm, however, the dominating factor is the rolling waves. Don't blame someone else because your model is obsolete.

>" _I would be curious if anyone out there knows what percentage of transactions actually return money to a company for any reason_ "

I'm not sure what this means, so I'll take it as what percent of revenues came directly from capital raises (IPOs and debt offerings). This supposes that all other functions at the bank, e.g. asset management, making markets in stocks, providing brokerage and execution services, etc. are useless. From their latest GS 10-Q [1] we see that they earned $1.4 billion in underwriting for the first half of 2012. Not including net interest income their revenues for the same period were $14.5 billion; thus, underwriting represented 10% of Goldman Sachs's revenues for the first half of 2012. As a percentage of transactions I'm not sure how you'd work this out (is an IPO one transaction? Multiple?) nor what use it would be. For reference, underwriting represents nothing of Blackrock's or Bridgewater Capital's revenues.

>" _Wall Street as a whole needs to be in the business of creating capital for companies and selling shares to investors who believe they are shareholders._ "

A healthy primary market cannot exist without a healthy secondary market, i.e. the success of an IPO, and whether it happens in the first place, is strongly related to how investors feel about being able to sell at some point down the road without incurring losses.

Let's examine the connection between holding term and governance mentality. The FT recently had a piece documenting that institutional investors, who own roughly 70 percent of U.S. stocks, despite having long-term positions and near total voting control, tend to by default vote with management and not participate in corporate governance [2]. Resolving our public capital markets is more complicated than fuck the facilitators; ape-handedly throwing taxes around before thinking through the consequences, intended and otherwise, isn't smart (though it will evidently get your article views).

\--

High frequency traders, in a race to the bottom, are in the short-term being run into the red by firms that trade time-consuming safety checks for speed. In the end the bad drives out the good and the market de-stabilises. The solution to this is having a series of pre, inter, and post trade checks that have to be run, e.g. monitoring the total dollar volume of trading over a time interval or the total dollar amount lost mark-to-market (yes, there are firms that took these functions out of pre-trade verification to save a few milliseconds). This puts a natural and non-arbitrary speed limit on the markets which accomplishing something meaningful in that time beyond feeling good about having conducted a witch-hunt.

[1] [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/886982/00011931251234...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/886982/000119312512344636/d365261d10q.htm)

[2] [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e19b6a54-fbf8-11e1-aef9-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e19b6a54-fbf8-11e1-aef9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz26tJrjGeO)

</comment><comment><USER39> Wall Street sells trust. Trust that, for the one time you want to take a company public in your life, that it won't get screwed up. Trust that they'll repay the billions (trillions?) of commercial paper loaned nightly over the phone, day-to-day, to the commercial banks, which they use to pay interest.

Technology is the last thing Wall Street sells.

</comment><comment><USER40> An interesting company in this space trying to return control to the investor: <https://www.secondmarket.com/>

A talk by the founder at Stanford: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH- wyaS2Rn0>

</comment><comment><USER41> Mark Cuban, go create your own exchange where you set the rules, or STFU.

That's why we live in a free society.

There is no valid reason or excuse for putting a gun to someone's head and telling them, "stop trading or else," which is what you keep insisting on.

<comment><USER42> You're saying that the stock market has no effects on society?

<comment><USER43> Everything has an effect on others. The question is whether those effects are the result of voluntary actions. As far as I can tell, nobody is being forced to invest on Wall Street. Everyone is free to keep their money in gold or under their mattress.

Now, if everyone chose to do those things, that would have a _huge_ negative effect on society, massively greater than anything Wall Street has ever inflicted. But that doesn't imply we should regulate how much people are allowed to buy gold or stuff their mattresses.

<comment><USER44> "Forced" is something that has degrees. When we replaced private pensions with 401k's, and when we got rid of the firewall between commercial and investment banks, we made it very difficult for anyone to not invest in Wall Street.

<comment><USER43> Private pensions didn't invest on Wall St? That's news to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Some excellent points here, but his conclusions seem to be severely limited by self-interest and/or nostalgia.

"Individual investors and the funds that just invest in stocks and bonds are not going to crash the market."

So what happened in 1929 then?

</comment><comment><USER46> Animated GIF showing, visually, how HFT has impacted the overall flavor of the market:

<http://imgur.com/DxWer>

</comment><comment><USER47> Great article explaining high frequency trading:

<http://www.economist.com/node/21547988>

</comment><comment><USER48> I've read this piece before, but it's dated Sept 21st, 2012. What's up with that?

</comment><comment><USER49> It is not a zero sum game between you and HFT. It IS a zero sum game between an HFT firm and another HFT firm, or an HFT firm versus people specialist traders. You think that burly guy from queens who used to be a janitor and now works on the floor of the NYSE will give you a good price? HFT cuts the line in the sense that it competes with him to give you a better price. HFT firms are fast to compete for your business vs other HFT firms. HFT and the average retail investor is not a zero sum game. It is mostly zero sum between HFT and the old system of specialist traders. It turns out the biggest critics of HFT are the old specialists who have lost their jobs and people who do not know what they are talking about.

So say you trade against an HFT algorithm. If you are talking about the narrow context of the trade, it is zero sum. But that is not how the world works. Bill Gates can sell a share of Microsoft to a market maker trader/HFT. Say he does this for $26.00. Tomorrow, it goes to $30.00. In the context of the trade, Bill Gates "loses" $4 to the HFT algorithm. But that is not the whole story. He took that $26 and did something with it. Maybe he helped fund a startup which has created value and doubled his money. So now the HFT trader is up $4, and Bill Gates is up $26. Zero sum, huh? Or maybe he invested it in a Malaria vaccination program that has no easy dollar valuation but is clearly positive to the world. This is why in the context of the system, everyone can win, and it can be a positive sum game.

If you invested your savings 18 years ago for your kid to go to college, at some point you will sell that stock to raise cash and pay for college. You are investing in your child's education, so that he can have a good life, invent things, cure cancer, solve P vs NP, improve Shor's algorithm, and more. That seems like a good return, even if 4 years later the HFT algorithm you sold your stock to made money because the stock went up.

When the world changes, prices change as well. As an HFT firm, you are always sending prices that are competitive for customers. HFT being fast is the effort to improve prices as quickly as possible, or admittedly, pull prices if they are no longer fair. Often, this is a typical scenario for an HFT firm…news comes out on a stock that is positive. The old bid for the stock was 20.00. That means if you are sending an order to sell your shares in the stock, to say, raise money to send your kids to a good college, you will hit the bid at 20.00. If HFT is not fast, you will get $20 for your share, even though the news hit 2 seconds ago. HFT algorithms compete for your business in the sense that they try to be fastest to improve that bid price to 20.05. If they are not fast, you get $20. If they are fast, then you get $20.05. What is the problem here?

The bottom line of all this misunderstanding is, I believe, a distrust of where all this money is coming from that they make. It's simple--it's from them cannibalizing the old human, specialist trader business (do you know how many billions they made from retail before HFT?). It's no different from a startup upending an old industry veteran by undercutting their prices by 90% and taking away all their business.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm pretty sure that's the same business Las Vegas is in.

</comment><comment><USER51> Mark Cuban has touched on what is at the center of why financial regulation is so difficult: the roles, values, and differences of the primary and secondary markets.

All of Wall Street exists to do one thing: connect those with capital to those who want it.

The primary market exists to do what Wall Street is meant to do: a company or other entity wants money, an investment bank connects that company with investors, and investors hand over the money. Wall Street acts as a classic broker, executing the function it was meant to perform (match those with capital to those who want capital). For its services, it takes a cut.[1]

This part of Wall Street - the primary market - works reasonably well and there aren't many complaints about it.[2] In fact, people sometimes complain about the IPO market getting too hot, which really just means that more companies in the real economy are getting money. The biggest ongoing complaints about the primary market are that the big banks charge too much for the capital raises and that they hype up the securities. Neither is a particularly cutting complaint though, nor is either issue crippling in any way to the capital markets.[3]

This brings us to the secondary market - the stock market as most people know it. Most people never participate in the primary market (i.e. in the first sale of securities), but rather in the secondary market. Here's the core question: WHY DOES THE SECONDARY MARKET EXIST?

The secondary market serves a support function to the primary markets. It provides "liquidity" to the primary investors - that is, it gives them a reasonably easy and cheap way to offload their shares should they choose to do so. The idea is that if there's a ready secondary market for the shares, primary market investors will be more willing to participate in deals because they know they can get out quickly and cheaply if they want to, and they'll be willing to pay a higher price for the shares for the same reason. In more technical terms, the secondary market serves to increase the flow of capital to companies and lower the cost of capital for companies.

And this is where all the problems Mark Cuban is citing come in, plus all the problems that financial regulators were trying to deal with in the last regulatory push (Volcker rule, Glass-Steagall, etc.).

The main issue here is that you can't really draw much of a line between "market-making" and short-term trading. Market-making is something most people agree is a good thing - you want a healthy number of market makers competing transaction costs down and providing sufficient liquidity (again, all to serve the health of the primary markets). And short-term trading is something that most people feel is a bad thing - it creates short-term thinking in the markets, which usually flows over into the companies, so you have everybody thinking about the next quarter, which leads people to ignore longer-term and deeper issues. But both market-makers and short-term traders are just buying and selling securities - it looks exactly the same. This is why the Volcker rule is so ineffective. The rule stated that a financial firm could only have a few percent of its capital in "proprietary trading," but every trader at any financial firm knows that most of the trading (and most of the lucrative trading) happens on the market-making desks. Buy a portfolio of illiquid emerging market bonds at 70 cents on the dollar from an investor looking to offload quickly, warehouse it for a few days, and offload at 85 cents. That's market making. And it's also short-term trading. There is no difference. The trader had to make a judgment about whether he would profit on the trade - whether the price of the bonds would hold up until he could offload it, or whether he got it at enough of a discount that even a move against him wouldn't hurt him. He probably thought about whether he could hedge it while he held it or if he could somehow line up a buyer before he even bought it. A high frequency trader is technically doing the exact same thing - just buying and selling; they just get very fancy about figuring out whether they'll profit on the trade: fractional penny arbitrage opportunities, information about where the price is headed in the next half-second, etc.

The best idea I've heard in terms of tackling this specific issue is to alter the tax structure. Mark Cuban advocates this in the form of a 10 cent tax on trades held under 1 hour. Another version I've heard is to levy a similar penalty tax on any capital gains reaped on a trade held less than 3 months (i.e. taxed as income plus a penalty; right now it's just taxed as income), and to move the lowered long-term capital gains tax rate to gains on investments held for more than 2 years (right now, long-term is 1 year). This would certainly discourage short-term trading, but that would mean that it would also make trading slightly more expensive for everybody, which some people think would be a good thing in that it would make people think twice before they traded something, while others argue that it would be a terrible thing because it would hurt the smallest players (individual investors) the hardest - after all, they're the ones who feel trading costs the most in percentage terms (trading costs as a percentage of the amount they're investing).

As a final thought, while all this trading and short-term thinking seems like it hurts us in the long-term, I don't think this is where our energies should be focused in terms of regulation. Trying to get people to stop short-term trading in the market would be like trying to get people to stop going to see movies for all the violence. Sure, it'd be nice if everybody thought like Warren Buffett in the market, and it'd be great if everybody just wanted to watch Stanley Kubrick films. But the important thing is not to get people to be "better," but to ensure they can't cause much damage as they're acting on their impulses. People like violence, but we keep guns away from them. People like short-term trading, so we need to keep LEVERAGE away from them. If you limit leverage, you limit bubbles and busts. It's that simple and that difficult. Bubbles and busts will still happen because people will chase up prices of some securities and then run for the hills once prices falter, but you need to make sure they're just running and not rocketing. Leverage is that rocket - limit it, and you've got the most elegant solution to the major problems of the financial markets. Don't try to enforce good behavior; just limit the power of bad behavior.

[1] Some people complain about the size of the cut that Wall Street takes for these services. The cut is stable and large for 3 reasons: 1. There's an oligopoly at the top. 2. The risks to a failed capital raise are huge, financially and reputationally for the company raising capital, so they usually opt to go for one of the few top players (protecting the oligopoly). 3. Like most large negotiated transactions, there are higher costs of doing business (think cars and houses).

[2] In the primary markets, the area that probably poses the biggest danger to the economy and society as a whole is when it gets into non-plain-vanilla securities, i.e. stocks & bonds work just fine, but derivatives and other instruments (like some asset-backed securities in the last crisis) get a bit more tricky. But I'm going to leave those aside for now since Mark Cuban is mostly addressing trading in the stock market and plain vanilla capital raising.

[3] The costs have been pretty stable for long stretches of time without seemingly barring companies from raising capital or making the capital raise so prohibitively expensive that people don't participate. And on hyping the securities, investors know that there's a financial relationship between the company and the bank, and they're for the most part pretty aware of this and therefore do much of their own research. All the major mutual funds and hedge funds do their own research and know not to rely on bankers (to the point that many portfolio managers ask that the bankers remain silent during meetings with companies that are raising capital until the discussion gets to specific deal terms, and if the company is not raising capital but just meeting with portfolio managers or analysts, the PMs or analysts often don't even allow bankers in the meeting room but ask them to wait out in the lobby or waiting area).

</comment><comment><USER52> i'm about to make a nuanced, technical argument, and i don't know if it's correct. if you understand it, your feedback is appreciated.

so, i believe information asymmetry is possible. i believe that many good ideas are in such a relationship with the world that the people who have them have an asymmetric advantage over those who don't: that possession of the idea equals wealth, as long as you are attempting to execute. (wealth in the net- present-value sense, not liquidity sense.)

this gives you the interesting situation that you can be walking along the road and, if you are the right person and respond properly, you can immediately in a bolt out of the blue become richer by the net-present-value of the idea you are just struck with: provided it is one of those asymmetric ones and you proceed to execute on it.

now. now, for the larger ideas (like Google), the net-present-value was in the millions. but if the people doing it had actually had millions of liquidity, they would not have been coding: they would have hired a coder.

so please assume p, where p is "a person with a net-present-value of $n million is currently coding something which will make money and then allow him to hire coders. assume that with probability 1 he will succeed."

as he is coding, before he actually has succeeded, what business is he in under p?

i would say he is in the information-arbitrage business. he is coding at $0/hour against the net-present-value of the idea he has. it seems to me kind of an arbitrage thing.

this is assuming p, which means that this is an assymetric condition where with probability 1 he pays off. obviously it becomes more complex as we get into probabilities other than 1 - but is this a fair conclusion about the startup hacker?

that he is arbitraging information asymmetry?

as i mentioned at the start of this comment, this is a technical argument and i'm not sure of its validity. any feedback is appreciated.

 _if you hate my assumptions (specifically, p) i still would appreciate to go with them as well as any other thoughts you may have, which you can address separately._

<comment><USER53> I think I understand and don't think that you are necessarily wrong but I'm not sure it is a particularly useful way to look at the world.

Enron was famous for booking predicted lifetime profits based on the ideas that they had and look how that turned out. It isn't logically wrong but it probably is too hard to do realistically, not just predicting the profits in the first place but updating them with circumstances.

If your person had his bolt in the blue and became richer the moment he/she heard about a competitor launching before them with a similar idea would instantly become poorer (as they wouldn't have the market to themselves) and they should remark their book value.

BTW without capitalised sentences and in stream of thought style I found this really hare to read. I suggest you work on the presentation before explaining it to anyone else.

<comment><USER52> sorry about the format, i'm intentionally trying to not so much to be accessible as to reach certain people who might already know. i'd like their feedback.

you are completely right that it's hard to peg the shift in present-wealth without a crystal ball, which nobody possesses - moreover, the future isn't even written.

so let's give you the crystal ball - it jumps wildly between valuation your net-present at a few million and hundreds of millions and sometimes billions and sometimes tens of billions and then millions again. it's useless.

but suppose that it is quite consistent that the idea is worth at least $20 million in net-present.

so, in this case - what is going on here when you, an only "competent" coder, are coding the idea yourself? Why would a millionaire code at a quality he could barely sell in the market (not being a coder), and which is just enough to show a prototype which gets funding, which gets the ball rolling, which... (all the things that lead to the net-present jumping between $20 million and billions, but never lower than the former).

So, what is going on here? Why is the person working at $0/hr producing work that's worth maybe $3-$4/hr? (buggy poor-quality spaghetti code php with no source control, for example.)

He is also directly losing a wage he could be earning elsewhere.

what is this behavior? What is going on here?

one answer could be, couldn't it, that he's producing low-quality, poor labor, because he has the chance to buy a chunk of a high-quality idea with it?

i mean, i personally know of a lot of stories of hundred-million dollar exits that started with an idea that the founder started following up on by-

\- doing poor-quality accounting and business founding,

\- poor quality legal research

\- poor quality coding that had to be thrown away after his company was bigger

\- poor quality biz dev that was mostly spinning company's wheels

a lot of other things of very low quality...

... but of quality just high enough that the idea pulls the company through, and his preconceptions can be changed by high-quality lawyers, his code is thrown away and rebuilt by real engineers, his b2b attempts are repeated by someone who can actually push deals through, his logo is replaced by a real logo that doesn't make you laugh, and so forht.

so, what just happened in this whole last example? what was the beahvior that led to it? (in abstract, theoretical, technical terms).

i want to know why he's buying his own low-price, low-quality labor, and why this works.

<comment><USER53> I agree with the logic but let me propose some additional benefits/reasons to do it yourself.

Freedom from responsibilities to others (employees, investors) could allow creativity.

Singular vision for the product without compromise.

No need to describe requirements to others.

Get a basic understanding of all areas while it is fairly simple before scale up (accounting etc.).

Also the pure logical case only really works when you have enough cash to invest yourself in building the business or you would have to put the effort into finding and managing investors.

The low quality version might actually be a good investment in the shift it makes in the external perception of value is sufficient.

<comment><USER52> thanks for these thoughts.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Composer to Manage Your Wordpress Dependencies - <AUTHOR> http://geekpad.ca/blog/post/maintainble-portable-wordpress-using-composer-wp-cli

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been using this workflow for a few months now. When you have a dev and production versions of your Wordpress sites it's become super useful. Let me know what you think.</comment>


Energy saving light bulbs offer dim future - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/6110547/Energy-saving-light-bulbs-offer-dim-future.html <comment><USER2> More garbage science.

You can not measure lux when you are so close to the bulb, and lux is not the correct measurement for light bulbs anyway, lumens is.

Lumens: total light produced by bulb in all directions.

Lux: amount of light hitting a sensor, adjusted proportionally based on size (area) of sensor. (It's actually light per area.)

If you put the sensor close to the bulb most of the light from the bulb will bypass the sensor.

An incandescent is basically a point source of light, so putting the sensor close works fine.

Florescent is not, the light output comes from a large area. For the real world, unless you need a spotlight, this makes no difference, since you are illuminating an entire room. But if you try to measure with a small sensor you will underestimate the light output.

</comment><comment><USER3> _11W low-energy CFL produced only 58 per cent of the illumination of an "equivalent" 60W bulb_

So use two and you get over twice as much light for about 1/3 the energy consumption.

<comment><USER4> > So use two and you get over twice as much light

Over 15% more, 2x58 = 116 not >200.

Or get a 22W CFL. The issue here is the false claims of equivalence between 60W incandescent and 11W CFL.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you're correct. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The really weird thing is that a normal, useful technology, which produces no bad externalities (no extra pollution, etc.) is being banned outright, rather than being taxed - instead of this why didn't they just slowly raise taxes on incandescent bulbs, to force people to notice? And instead of that, it'd be even better just to raise taxes on energy itself - that way people could choose where to cut energy costs, and not be forced to cut it specifically from the light bulb portion of their total energy cost.

Also, the fact that people haven't stopped using incandescent bulbs naturally just shows that electricity is still ridiculously cheap.

<comment><USER6> I don't agree that people still using incandescent bulbs is evidence that electricity is ridiculously cheap. Electricity bills aren't itemised so only when the total becomes painful will people consider the cost of their individual appliances. Bulbs are priced individually and so people are hesitant to switch to an option, CFLs, which they may perceive to be the more expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had six daylight-balanced mini fluorescent bulbs in my living room and I had to remove three of them because they were blindingly bright. These are 8w bulbs.

</comment><comment><USER8> Too bad EU is on 220v. I'd ship you guys incandescents from the US.

<comment><USER2> You could actually, if the sockets are the same. The light will be twice as bright, and the bulb will last probably 1/4 of the normal lifespan. The energy efficiency will be higher.

The hotter the filament, the shorter the life, but the better the energy efficiency (also slightly less reddish light). Light bulbs have a filament length tuned typically to 2000 hours.

TV studio lights are often tuned to last just 50 hours, but they are way more energy efficient. But not necessarily dollar efficient.

<comment><USER9> No, they burn really bright for about 1-2 seconds and blow out. Voice of experience.

<comment><USER2> Experience trumps theory every time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Several things: 1\. Ok, 15w or 11w - not a big deal, the difference in energy savings less than 10%. Irrelevant worry. 2\. But real issue is spectral content of light, it is not same, and frankly, I find flourescent light very unpleasant.

<comment><USER11> You might prefer daylight-balanced tubes then. Alternatively, just hold out for LEDs which offer a wide range of color temperatures.

Protip: if you absolutely cannot live without the incandescent look, get the bulbs you want at a photography store and put a dimmer into the power line (because they're typically 200w+). You might get some sticker shock with your next electricity bill, though.

<comment><USER12> The color temperature is not the issue in how fluorescents look. The color issue is that there are a only a few phosphors in the bulb, and so all of the light coming out is at just a few discrete wavelengths. An incandescent produces a smooth combination of all wavelengths in the visible range. The light from a fluorescent looks like the right color on a white surface, but many dyes reflect specific wavelengths of light. This means that colors under even good fluorescent lights look different than under incandescent or daylight. LEDs have the exact same problems.

<comment><USER13> Check out Viva-Lite -lamps. They produce "Full spectrum light", which is quite frankly just awesome.

I'm not affiliated with Viva-Lite, just a happy user. Having 26W model here, it's maybe bit cold (5500 K), but still reproduces colors accurately.

edit: At least my lamp has quite long warm-up time. I haven't actually measured it, but I think its far longer than 10 minutes used in the article. Thats a major downside in ESL.

edit2: I actually forgot to add the link: <http://www.viva-lite.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > In our test, we used a simple lamp with a light metre placed half a metre > away,

A light metre is 1 / 299 792 458 or 3.33 x 10e-11 seconds

</comment><comment><USER15> Dear Daily Telegraph,

When an energy saving light-bulb is on, can you see?

Good, now be quiet.</comment>


Tell HN: New Google homepage, A/B testing gone crazy. - <AUTHOR>

Today, I was served the new Google homepage, the first that struck me out was how inconsistent it was. I started to look at all the inconsistencies and found many of them:
- 3 different arrows for the more links. - mixed use of upper/lower case for the "M" in the more links. - the position of "advanced search" between the home page and the results page. - the position of the search button (kind of within the input field on the results page but below with space on the home page). - you see "Everything" with an icon in front of it (why the icon?) and then you have a link with more, what is more than everything? - etc.
It can be a game to find so many design errors, things totally wrong when looking at the whole page.
I asked myself, why? Then I found, it is simply A/B testing gone crazy. They have tested gazillions of independent small changes in their multivariate tests, found the optimal combination, but, forgot the big picture.
So maybe the new home page and results page are the optimal ones, but they are inconsistently optimal. For the first time in many years, the Google pages now "feel wrong".
This is annoying me a lot, for 2 things:
- I hate it when I search. - It will spread like wild fire because if Google has done it, it must be good, so bad designers will just copy the design without thinking twice (so I will need to support that in many other websites).
And you, what do you think about it? How are you designing your A/B tests not to fall in this trap? <comment><USER3> It is the first time for me that I think that changes to the google homepage are really a step in the wrong direction. In the past they seem to have had it together on this one, if there were changes they were subtle and did not seem to get in the way of getting the job done.

Now they've gone overboard on the 'b(l)ing' factor, presumably to compete with other search engines that look 'spiffy'.

I'd rather have 10 text links (or even 30) per page without adornment than all the stuffy they've been adding lately.

Duckduckgo could easily capitalize on that, give us the very early google interface with better results.

That would make me switch, their scroll-down-to-get-more trick already is very elegant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for reminding me about Duckduckgo, I always dismissed it because of the javascript requirement, but trying again today I found it pretty clean. I will need to commit myself to a one week long test to better assess how good it is.

<comment><USER3> While you're testing, try gigablast.com as well, they're pretty impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like Douglas Bowman was right and its only got worse since he bailed. <http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html>

<comment><USER5> Bowman is more describing why he doesn't _like_ working there; he really doesn't make a claim that Google is making poor design choices from a business standpoint. He criticizes the use of data (aka, you know, _evidence_ ) as a crutch without giving a single example, theoretical or otherwise, of how reliance on data rather than the gut instinct of a good designer leads to a bad outcome.

<comment><USER6> I think its the same difference between investing in company lead by a former- consultant/bean-counter/"professional"-CEO and a real founder.

data is important, but it only gets you so far: table stakes. the thing that differentiates us is the ability to use intuition.

don't forget that your "gut" has been developed over millions of years of evolution to keep you alive, and its done a pretty good job. playing with numbers? couple thousand?

<comment><USER5> Intuition/experience is important when there is some aspect of reality that is hard to measure. Insofar as the data tracks your target, intuition is unnecessary. That's why I would want an example in which data was failing.

For instance, a fast food chain might take some data and find that they can decrease the quality of their ingredients without immediately loosing customers because people have habits and don't really notice right away (and because consumers will chalk up a few bad experiences to variance at a place they know well). But, over time, the chain develops a reputation for lower- quality food, and customers slowly leave.

The problem with this example is that the data can easily measure long-term effects, especially the subtle damage to reputation. This is a case where intuition may be needed to override data.

But where's the similar example with Google?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I mean....

these are such tiny gripes. Some arrows are different because they aren't of the same priority..people will click "More" more often than they'll click 'more search tools', so that arrow is smaller. makes sense to me.

How exactly is the search button inconsistent with the homepage? You think it would look better BELOW the textfield on the SERP?

I don't see any mixed case anywhere.

Not trying to be a troll or bust balls or anything, I just find your criticisms a bit nitpicky. The overall design of the site is incredibly simple and easy to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> What really annoys me is that you have no space between the input field on the SERP (first time I discover this acronym) and the search button. On the homepage you have some space.

Also the advanced search link is now below, not anymore right from the input, it kinds of make this new SERP cluttered. Note that when logged in, it is even worse, I have another link for the safe search.

Also you will note that you have 4 or 5 different size of fonts.

I agree with you, roughly it is working (it what the data prove anyway, else they would have not done it) but nevertheless for me it feels wrong.

<http://xhtml.net/documents/images/logged-in-google-serp.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's my problem with the design: With the old one, my eyes could act like magnets, being quickly attracted to either the left or right side, sliding up and down either side when viewing search results / ads. Now I have to do this balancing act, putting in quite a bit of effort to keep my eyes on the center column. Whereas I previously just let the magnetic forces direct my attention with the old design, I now have to resist the pull from both sides to keep center focused, making it extremely uncomfortable. Part of me thinks this new design probably yielded more ad revenue because now people can more easily succumb to the pull from the right. It's a lot less polarized than before.

<comment><USER9> This is exactly how I feel. I have Adblock, but there is still a very strong pull to the left column that's distracting as I'm searching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is commonly talked about in the design field as well (since at least the 1960s, probably earlier). On the one hand, there's a very industrial- psychology-derived HCI tradition, based on user-testing everything with statistical significance and so on, that tends to do relatively small changes, e.g. assuming that most of the design will stay as it is, how about widget A versus widget B? Against them, there's more of a _design_ tradition, derived from architecture, graphic design, art, and other areas, that looks at more holistic sorts of issues, and tends to think that doing 1000 A/B tests does not add up to "design", and isn't likely to produce good outcomes either. HCI hasn't really resolved the issue over several decades, and it flares up now and then (my impression is that the main HCI conferences/journals are ~80% the industrial-psych sort, but the 20% dissenters have persistently stuck around for decades).

<comment><USER4> There is a fundamental misunderstanding of design at play here though. We're talking about a culture that doesn't understand that when it comes to design, 1+1 should equal 3 or more. You cannot separate out individual elements and A/B them without looking at the bigger picture. The net result is this - <USER2> kind of unsettling, uncomfortable inconsistency. The element level granularity of design hierarchy & planning is obvious. I love agile and I'm a fan of fast iteration and lots of user testing but a strong, consistent design requires top-down discipline and bold decisions, you cannot increment your way there.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I agree with that. It's not even particularly surprising from a scientific perspective: any scientist knows that if you measure A, B, C, and D, you don't necessarily know anything about union(A, B) or union(A, B, D), unless you also measure pairwise and higher-order interactions. At some point, instead of doing more A/B tests than there are atoms in the universe (since this explodes exponentially), it might be worth thinking about the problem using human intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps another way of saying this is that Google's A/B testing has merely taken them to a local maximum, but they need a strong, coherent design discipline to reach the global maximum.

</comment><comment><USER12> You should provide some image links when commenting on visual appearance especially WRT A/B testing as other users will get a different experience by definition.

Google homepage is like <http://imgur.com/sc5h6.jpg> for me so I'm guessing you mean the logged in personal home?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your screenshot is for the home page before moving the mouse, of course you see nearly nothing, so it is consistent. Anyway, here is a commented screenshot of the search results page (not all the comments fit in, especially the font size on the left for the tools, so I did not include them). This is especially this one annoying me because I access google through the search box of my browser.

<http://xhtml.net/documents/images/new-google-page.png>

<comment><USER13> I don't like inconsistencies either, but I don't mind them as long as they're consistent within a conceptual section.

The arrows on the sidebar, for example, cause a different behavior when clicked than the arrows up top. The pipes between the links on the right are between links relating to your personal settings as opposed to the links on the left, which are filters for the search results (with the exception of Mail, which is inconsistently placed).

Overall I like the new look but I can see how it may not be the most cohesive design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, I'm losing my religion. I already have a Greasemonkey script to stop the fading top row. Look at the results page for "cat toys" in Bing and Google. Maybe Google should just redirect to Bing.

I get that they're trying to satisfy a diverse user base and drive UI changes from testing, but it sure came out ugly.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, what struck me was that if style was your differentiator for using Google versus Bing, you just lost your motivation to stick with Google.

Some examples:

Bing's style: <http://www.bing.com/search?q=mortgage>

New Google style: <http://www.google.com/search?q=mortgage>

Compare to the old google look: [http://www.darrinward.com/img/articles/screenshot-google- sea...](http://www.darrinward.com/img/articles/screenshot-google-search- mortgage.jpg)

<comment><USER16> Excellent post. I had no idea how similar the Bing and Google result pages are now. What is up with that? It couldn't have been unintentional, could it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What exactly are they optimizing or testing for here? Just number of searches, or clicks on that feature. Have they eliminated that people might be clicking on all these odd ball changes because its novel? I know I've expanded some menus and clicked on stuff and hovered over shit I wouldn't normally just because these changes were all shiny and I wanted to see what they do.

But in the end, the only change I like is the logo. Everything just looks a little odd. But my only real gripe is the location of the search results. Is it just me, or have the serps been left justified or were they much more in the center of the screen before? Every friggin machine is getting wide monitors, so to make stuff go left these days and just give me all this whitespace in the center and the right, makes me a little nuts.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just a thought - it may feel uncomfortable because people never accept changes, we all need time for brain patterns to rebuild. My first impression was - get the old page back. Second impression was - it now exposes some functionality I usually had to go to advanced for. I'd wait a month before jumping to any conclusions.

Yes there are inconsistencies but nothing 3 lines of code won't fix.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have been stuck in an A/B hell myself, there is a fat sidebar to my left that I can't get rid of. Googling for a fix turned up a page saying it was an experiment and will be over soon.

For the last week I have been using Bing.

<comment><USER20> Delete your cookie for google.com. It drove me nuts too.

<comment><USER19> I have some of the most aggressive security settings. And to be sure, I went back and deleted all cookies again. No dice.

Well, this will give me an excuse to sample other search engines. I was a heavy Altavista user until I found this new search engine out of Stanford ..

<comment><USER21> May be they were sampling based on user (you must be logged on?).

While doing such large A/B tests, they should definitely give an option to opt-out. Or at least a prominent feedback button to tell them how bad is their new design. It is as if Google will A/B test a new design and no-one will notice it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nobody else in the world has anything even close too as many visitors as google, so it's really hard to apply normal logic to this testing they are doing. My feeling is that every single tiny and seemingly insignificant change will have an impact on their bottom line. If it affects 0.1% of their users, that's still a whole ton of people. I see nothing wrong with this multivariate a/b testing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Google is know for many things good, design not being one of them. Sure, minimalism was their thing and it was good, but once they went in for design it showed that they have no clue. Usability yes/maybe, but aesthetics definitely no.

</comment><comment><USER24> Talking about the new sidebar, I really think it doesn't blend very well with the rest of the page. Compare this to the sidebar at www.clusty.com which feels so much "at home".

</comment><comment><USER25> I kept adjusting the contrast of my monitor until I reailized the logo was changed.

</comment><comment><USER26> I guess it's probably easy to create a Stylish user style to revert changes.

</comment><comment><USER27> Who uses the Google home page anymore?

</comment><comment><USER28> Experimenting on customers.</comment>


How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing - <AUTHOR> http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/changed-by-web-and-weblog <comment><USER2> Unfortunately for his argument, Greenspun seems to be unfamiliar with the history of the magazine. He writes:

 _"Suppose that an idea merited 20 pages, no more and no less? A handful of long-copy magazines, such as the old New Yorker would print 20-page essays, but an author who wished his or her work to be distributed would generally be forced to cut it down to a meaningless 5-page magazine piece or add 180 pages of filler until it reached the minimum size to fit into the book distribution system."_

This is simply untrue-- there have been, over the past 500 years, many magazines and journals publishing 20-page pieces. The shortening of the average magazine piece is an artifact of the past 75 years. To view the history of publishing as one monolithic period from Gutenberg to the Web is absurd.

<comment><USER3> Also, what about books of essays? I'm not entirely sure it would address Greenspun's point about where to publish an article on how to put together a workable DSLR setup, but essayists have published many 20-page pieces just by putting together enough of them to make up a book.

<comment><USER4> You must have missed this part:

"How about a collection? If an author writes enough essays, eventually they can be collected into a 200-page book and distributed commercially. Many authors are experts on only a single subject and should not be encouraged to continue scribbling."

<comment><USER5> All the essays in such a book don't have to be from the same author.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For some reason, whenever I read Greenspun's writing, I get the feeling it is written partially tongue-in-cheek.

This particular article is mostly on the mark, but in the world where everyone's thoughts are heard, filtering becomes extremely important.

</comment><comment><USER7> Where are those 20 page essays on the web? The typical blogging format seems to be 2 paragraphs and a link to someone else's 4 paragraphs. Or maybe there arent enough people with anything thoughtful to say.

<comment><USER8> <http://paulgraham.com/articles.html>

<comment><USER9> Paul writes short articles. His most recent was barely three pages long. He writes _good_ articles, but let's stop citing him for everything in the hopes that we'll get YCombinator circlejerk karma.

I'm checking my own blog sources. Very few people ever reach five pages, let alone twenty. Steve Yegge's penultimate post was 17 pages.

<comment><USER10> What do you mean by "penultimate"?

<comment><USER11> Second-to-longest, I think... or second-to-last...

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article was disappointing. I thought he was going to identify the salient features of writing designed for the web. Hopefully he will in his talk.

<comment><USER9> "Writing designed for the web"? You're firmly in Bullshit Central if that's your mindset.

No good writing is ever designed past a point. Novelists, essayists, journalists, all have a distinct style. Most of them break all the rules there are. Online, there's an even huger difference, even in similar fields. Jason Kottke versus Andy Baio. FiveThirtyEight versus Andrew Sullivan. Nobody sounds the same. That's the point.

Do you want Copyblogger? "Make bullet points, bold words to emphasize, write short paragraphs, include five links in every sentence, include a picture of a naked woman with lolspeak written above?" Because all you'll learn is that there's no such thing as a "salient feature" of writing. There's writing, and different people do different things, and some people like certain kinds of writing more than other. Some people write paragraphs with a few hundred sentences, and people read their stuff because it's good. Other people write in very sparse shorthand. It's all allowed, and it's often all good.

<comment><USER12> I understand that there are a wide variety of acceptable writing styles. That said, there are many literary devices and techniques that wouldn't have been possible without the Internet. And, when writing for the Internet, it often makes sense to incorporate these as they tend to improve one's writing.

<comment><USER9> "Literary devices and techniques?" Do you mean... hyperlinking? Because there's nothing else that's been done online that wasn't done previously in other mediums.

<comment><USER13> I'll offer Michael Joyce as an example:

<http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon:_a_story>

I think you could consider this a use of hyperlinking before the web. And if you count "As We May Think", then it is a use _way_ before the web.

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

<comment><USER9> Very cool stuff! I knew of Joyce, though I've never read Afternoon (I'm worried it won't meet expectations), but As We May Think I'd never heard of before.

<comment><USER13> After I heard about him, I went to my campus library and checked out "Afternoon." It comes on one 3.5" floppy disk and couldn't be removed from the reading room. So I sat down (at the only machine left with a floppy drive) and clicked through it for about an hour.

It is certainly very different from a usual novel. For starters you have no idea how long it is. Hyperlinks aren't highlighted as we've come to expect and so I have to admit that I was doing some Myst-style random clicking at times. You'll often get back to the same paragraph but through a different path, these paragraphs are usually written in such a way that they would make sense by any path that you'd arrived at them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure about his thesis, but I like his evidence. e.g.

[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/12/01/why-pretend- to...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2003/12/01/why-pretend-to-care- about-others-when-we-have-professional-therapis/)

"Being poor is caring about your friends" (paraphrasing)</comment>


Mail Online web browser warning reversed - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47088224 <comment><AUTHOR> "But the company said Mail Online still failed to gather and present information responsibly"

Does this not then undermine the meaning of the green tick for sites that are responsible?</comment>


CSS-Powered 3D Engine (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://keithclark.co.uk/labs/css-fps/ <comment><USER2> Around 2012, there was a startup called Famo.us who raised $30 million for a CSS-based 3D engine. Looks like they pivoted to some kind of brand CMS eventually:

[https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/nopen- source/](https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/nopen-source/)

The company claimed to have a secret sauce for accelerating HTML5 graphics, which turned out to be the matrix3d() function for CSS transforms.

<comment><USER3> They pivoted again to be a figma competitor. Yeah I think these days webgl is the way to go...

<comment><USER4> Totally.

[https://threejs.org/](https://threejs.org/)

<comment><USER5> Or babylon.js

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's also someone who does incredible artwork using only hand-written CSS:

[http://diana-adrianne.com/purecss-francine/](http://diana- adrianne.com/purecss-francine/)

How it works:

[http://diana-adrianne.com/how/](http://diana-adrianne.com/how/)

<comment><USER7> This is nice. But she is still using images right? It's the same. Choose a great texture, apply it to objects.

<comment><USER8> No, all the stuff in these images are divs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love this crazy project. In Firefox I get 1 fps and crazy graphics glitches, and in Brave I slowly float into the sky. Runs fine in Chrome though.

<comment><USER10> Funnily, this runs with 20-30 FPS on a (lower end) Windows Phone with Edge mobile. Is Edge optimized for CSS performance?

<comment><USER11> Edge has always been extremely fast and competitive with other browser engines. It really shocked me when they deprecated it because in the last year of developing an app that only targets chrome and edge, I've never once had a bug that was edge-only. It seems that MS was never able to get out of the shadow of IE.

<comment><USER12> Casual users are now trained to use Chrome. Because they browse on mobile more than on desktop, and Chrome is "The Internet" icon on their phones.

Techies and power users were never going to give Edge a second glance, because they launched without plugin support (i.e. no way to block ads).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is from 2013: [https://keithclark.co.uk/articles/creating-3d-worlds-with- ht...](https://keithclark.co.uk/articles/creating-3d-worlds-with-html-and- css/)

I remember seeing his old one in 2012 and spending an 8 hour plane ride with a bottle of vodka and a laptop trying to recreate the windows maze screensaver the same way. (Needless to say, the vodka was the only winner)

</comment><comment><USER14> Three.js has an (old) css renderer too [https://threejs.org/examples/#css3d_molecules](https://threejs.org/examples/#css3d_molecules)

<comment><USER15> Same author :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Neat! Also, is it me or are those flammable barrels from Half Life 2? :)

<comment><USER17> I think they are :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks good, I don't know if lighting is pre baked or what but I was surprised. EDIT: Site does mention lightmaps.

Running on Chrome on Android on a Pixel XL I did encounter the following:

* Freelook camera allowed for too fast of movement, the engine struggled to keep up. Panning back to polys that were in view less than a second before reveals that they've been unloaded the instant I looked away. This allowed me to see through walls to polys that should have been fully occluded and would have been much safer to cull. What was rendered would only seem to update if I moved either stick, and so after I started to have issues I never managed to have a correctly rendered frame again. Loading missing polys would mean bringing more unloaded polys into view. Seems like one of those bugs where I would believe it took 5 seconds or 50 hours of work to resolve.

* I did start to notice the vertical seams on the barrels on my second time through, this time with the automatic camera mode. Once I noticed them, I wasn't able to stop, it was very distracting.

EDIT: I went back in to confirm, the mobile control version does not show vertical barrel seams, while the auto camera version does. Different builds for each perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER19> Check out Keith's project's page - [https://keithclark.co.uk/](https://keithclark.co.uk/) \- and his lastest js1k entry - [https://keithclark.co.uk/articles/js1k-2019-flux/final/](https://keithclark.co.uk/articles/js1k-2019-flux/final/)

He's a clever guy

</comment><comment><USER20> If css can do this maybe someone can program a better layout engine with it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Crashed first time on mobile safari then ran fine when reloaded. Ran pretty smoothly on my iPhone 7 too.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think Webgl, and other JavaScript API on top of Webgl are the way to go for 3D on the Web.Like banylonjs.

This is what I use to do this : [http://free-visit.net/index.php/fr/demos/les- frigos-de-paris](http://free-visit.net/index.php/fr/demos/les-frigos-de-paris)

</comment><comment><USER23> Crashes on mobile safari

<comment><USER24> Works on my iPad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I feel high quality 3D is one of the final things that we need to master in the browser. Once this is done, I can imagine PWAs get more widespread adoption for gaming and AR etc.

Kudos to the good people working on it!

<comment><USER2> WebGL has been working fine for years...?

<comment><USER25> Depends on your definition of fine. In certain cases it would crash browsers on load, in other cases it would deliver a solid 60fps. I think 3d on the web does need a bit more polish so that it's a good experience universally.

<comment><USER26> The Unity engine has been outputting WebGL builds for years, and having played a bunch of them (and deployed a few myself), I've never once seen a problem that didn't exist in other builds of the same game

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The modern equivalent of ASCII art

</comment><comment><USER28> what about the reverse: how is styling done in game engines ?

</comment><comment><USER29> doesn't work with firefox

<comment><USER30> Yes it does.

[https://i.imgur.com/asXYCnZ.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/asXYCnZ.jpg)</comment></comment>


Christa McAuliffe's lost lessons finally taught in space - <AUTHOR> http://www.therepublic.com/2018/01/19/us-sci-challenger-lost-lessons/ <comment><AUTHOR> I can't believe it's been 32 years since the Challenger disaster happened. I was in aeronautics class in high school when I heard the news. The happy thought for the day is that her lessons will finally get taught.</comment>


Need some advice on Mentoring - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/need-some-advice-on-mentoring-80f77aa90d <comment><USER2> There's a difference between mentoring which is usually or always for free and coaching that you get paid for. If you want to be paid for your time and expertise, you can sell your coaching/tutoring services. If they accept, then it's a win win for the both of you.

In my experience, most people that have asked me for my help have not been too serious. If you went out of your way and it didn't work out, that's not a good sign. It's good to do an easy test or just say no.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank You</comment></comment>


Microsoft killing off TechNet subscriptions - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/microsoft-killing-off-technet-subscriptions/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the dumb move by Microsoft.

Why don't they just limit activations or increase the price.</comment>