Despite excellent credit, it's still possible to be turned down for a mortgage - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-lew-20140112,0,7530878.story#axzz2qDA8vw8z <comment><USER2> In Summary - The Author, due to having recently switched from being a full- time to a freelance worker, cannot prove that he has the ability to pay the mortgage he's applying for and thus his application was denied.

The rest of the article being about how he owns several properties outright (that he rents out) and apparently has money in the bank is somewhat immaterial since the part that a lender cares about most is "can you continue to pay your debt from your sustainable income stream" \- not your rental business which can be volatile and unpredictable income wise.

That lending rules have been tightened is surely a good thing even if it does mean the some people will find it harder to own property. Borrowing money to own a home is nobodies right, but something you should have to prove you're able to do - as the swathe of sub-prime mortgages that subsequently went underwater only a few years ago shows.

<comment><USER3> Can't one argue that income from rental properties is more predictable than the income from full-time employment? In the former, there are binding contracts between the landlord and tenant that guarantee the landlord income (similar to the relationship between a homeowner and a bank, which seems hypocritical on the bank's part). In the case of full-time employment the employee is not guaranteed to have a job as an employer can fire someone at any time for any reason.

<comment><USER4> Leases almost always have a provision for breaking them, typically with 2 months payment as a penalty fee.

So you're guaranteed some income, but all of your tenants can leave at any point.

<comment><USER5> As opposed to full time jobs, that can fire you at will and you might get two weeks termination pay?

<comment><USER6> That's the real kicker for me, the idea that being currently employed under a W2 means anything for future earnings. That is a very outdated concept, IMO.

<comment><USER7> It's not as strong of an indicator as it was in the past, but if you have years of track record with your employer you _probably_ will keep getting that paycheck in the future- _and_ if you get fired, you can probably find a new job.

Not a perfect signal, but it's not like there actually is a perfect signal to be had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This sounds pretty reasonable to me, actually. He has no history of being successful enough self-employed to support paying a mortgage. Give it some time, and I'm sure they'll loan him money.

Also keep in mind that this is a mortgage for an investment property, not a primary residence. So even more risky for the bank.

<comment><USER9> I agree this is a shitty edge case but when switching from W2 to a 1099 is really just a semantic difference then switching from W2 to unemployed in the first few months.

BTW I'm pretty sure there's a way around this if he incorporated and made himself a W2 employee and paid himself a set salary but I'm not an expert.

<comment><USER10> Switching from W2 to 1099 is by no means a semantic difference. If it is, then it's probably illegal to be treated as an independent contractor.

<comment><USER11> I think he meant there's no difference between being unemployed and just starting as 1099, since there's basically no taxes paid to show you're making any income for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Banks have no obligation to lend someone money if they don't think they can repay. Loans aren't a privilege, or a right. The banks reserve the right to refuse anyone.

<comment><USER13> Well, by simple extension, I as a tax payer have no obligation to -- through my government -- lend money to banks.

Perhaps we should have let these "too big to fail" banks indeed fail.

Banks don't simply serve individual, private interests. They also serve a public interest -- to oversimplify into a word: liquidity.

I suppose I should read into the details of the OP article. Nonetheless, saying that banks have "no obligation" is I think incorrect. Saying they shouldn't make loans under bad circumstances, I agree with.

P.S. Sorry if and as I've over-reacted. But I'm tired of banks on the one hand taking advantage of a very privileged position (including government support) while on the other claiming their sole purpose is to serve in the absolute whatever they define as their private interest.

I flew a bit off the handle in my comment. I should have read through the OP article. Perils of too much coffee and multi-tasking.

I'll leave my comment, instead of deleting it, since its already gained a reply.

What touched me off, is that, defined as "private" as they may be, as business institutions, banks are nonetheless very much social institutions. One of the fundaments of modern society.

And, as more people transition to self-employment, access to capital including for things such as home purchase, is going to be increasingly significant to society in terms of the numbers seeking such.

The idea that self-employment removes you from the ability to access such loans: That will be a significant concern that needs to be evaluated and addressed.

<comment><USER14> You really should, since it's not the bank rejecting the loan, it's Fannie Mae[0].

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> He owns four properties already. And he seems to be saying he avoided paying tax on most of his income. Can't say I'm feeling too sorry for him.

(FWIW it took me eight months to get a 75% mortgage on a flat to live in. And that's as someone who's conventionally employed.)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm astounded at this article for several reasons:

1) That it's held up as an indictment of Fannie Mae mortgages. Someone with four leased properties and being savvy enough in the property market to buy and rehab a fifth should know better than to approach a FNMA-backed lender for a 70/30 cash-out refi. Even FHA, previously one of the less-stringent guarantee agencies, only allows four properties under the same ownership.

2) The author is shocked that a program designed for purchase money financing on a buyer's owner-occupied property would turn down an investment landlord.

3) The author makes no mention of approaching any other financial institution or lender. Since, given point 1, he is pretty good at construction but poor at leveraging other people's money (not a slam, that's what _any_ investor wants to do), he wants a bank that writes and services portfolio loans. Which, by the way, means he'd probably be required to want a loan at no more than about 80% LTV across all five properties.

<comment><USER17> > Someone with four leased properties and being savvy enough in the property > market to buy and rehab a fifth should know better than to approach a FNMA- > backed lender for a 70/30 cash-out refi. Even FHA, previously one of the > less-stringent guarantee agencies, only allows four properties under the > same ownership.

You must have missed the third sentence: "I own four properties free and clear." He doesn't have a bunch of loans already (which is risky if the market falls apart, see 2008). He has a bunch of assets.

<comment><USER18> If he owns them free and clear, why weren't they throwing off tons of income? This whole article didn't seem to pass the "smell test".

<comment><USER17> He said income wasn't the problem, the lack of W2 income was. This is the outcome when the decision tree is a strict set of forms and boxes to check. It lessons the likelihood of rogue employees pushing through bad loans, but also increases the likelihood of not making some loans that would be good.

<comment><USER18> He wrote that the loan officer would review his freelance income after 12-18 months. He's clearly at the wrong bank if it won't consider the income coming in on 4 properties owned free and clear.

Like I said, the whole article didn't pass my "smell test".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> tl;dr author recently changed from full time employment to being self-employed and wanted to refi an investment property.

This isn't surprising. Two years of history for self-employed is pretty standard (albeit arbitrary). Specifically for the US, investment mortgages are difficult to get them because Fannie Mae is reluctant to underwrite them.

These combine to an unsurprising denial.

One question not answered is if the author offered to secure the loan against other properties owned or if the author would have been willing.

</comment><comment><USER20> About a year or 2 ago, a realtor friend couldn't complete a sale of a house in Southern California for a Medical Doctor because the loan was not approved. A young MD who has a full time job.

Reason? he/she had not been working long enough (less than a year at the job). Afaik, it was to be his primary residence.

So I'm not surprised.

</comment><comment><USER21> Unfortunately, that's basically the state of mortgage lending now. If you don't have an established W2, you can go piss up a rope as far as the banks are concerned.

It used to be that people in the author's situation could get a "stated income loan", in which you more or less say "this is what I make", and the bank doesn't (or can't) verify it. These sorts of loans were widely abused by loan officers prior to the housing crash to get people into loans they couldn't afford (of which they get a percentage, so their incentive to sell high-dollar loans was significant), and as a result the banks basically just pulled them all.

If you don't have verifiable income these days, you should expect a bank to not lend to you.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is nothing new. Conforming loans for self employed have always required 2 years tax returns. I just went through this process myself. It is more painful than W2, but if you have 2 years returns, acceptable debt to income ratio, and decent credit, you can get a loan. What has changed if there aren't many non- conforming loan options like there were in the bubble years.

</comment><comment> martin-adams This is something I also got affected by in the UK in the last couple of months. I've been the director and working part-time for my own company for 13 years, but switched to working full-time for my company in 2012. I'm effectively a freelancer but under a limited company.

Different lenders have different rules. One lender turned me down because my company showed a tiny loss (strategic to reduce my corporation tax bill and contribute to my pension instead). The company doesn't owe anyone any money, it's just how it's accounted for by my accountant.

Fortunately for me, another lender only looked at my personal income, but that did mean we needed to find extra capital.

Bottom line is, if you're a director of a company, the company accounts have to show history and be squeaky clean. If you're an employee of another company, you just need 1 months payslip if I recall. Crazy!

</comment><comment><USER23> Summary is: It's really dumb that you have to take a regular "job" for a couple of months to buy a house.

And I agree.

<comment><USER24> Not to buy a primary residence: to buy a (5th) investment property with bank financing. This is noted in the first few paragraphs of the article.

<comment><USER17> Not to do any of that actually, it would be to take equity out of a property that is owned free and clear (just like all the other properties owned by the author):

> I own four properties free and clear. I have no debt.

> Not just any mortgage, but a cash-out refinance of less than six figures on > a foreclosure I bought for cash, rehabbed and turned back on the market as a > rental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am one of the people who benefited from subprime lending, and without it, my whole life would have been different. I was self employed in 1999 when I bought a house in Brooklyn, and I paid an extra percentage point on my mortgage because I couldn't "prove" my income.

This "no doc" mortgage was virtually no risk to the bank, because the amount of equity in the house was enough that if they foreclosed on day 1, they wouldn't have lost money. Meanwhile, I was able to improve my situation by buying an income producing property and maintaining it and renovating it. And this changed the trajectory of my life by fascilitating stability in housing costs and a long term investment.

In decades previous this would have been impossible, it was traditionally the case that only people with W2 income could get a mortgage, and I think the invention of "no doc" and "stated income" mortgages was a huge step forward in the United States, opening up important options for people who had been marginalized simply by choosing not to work for an existing company.

I am tired of the ignorant rhetoric surrounding the housing bubble. Subprime mortgages are not a priori bad. Neither are "No doc" and "stated income" mortgages. The function of a subprime mortgage is a fairly simple algorithm: because there is a greater risk in loaning to someone who doesn't have sufficient W2 income, the borrower pays a higher interest rate to offset the higher foreclosure rates.

The reason the bubble formed was because housing prices were rising, largely due to lowered interest rates which were in part a reaction by the fed to the post 9/11 recession. As a result of rising housing prices, foreclosures hit historic lows, causing the illusion that subprime mortgages were no riskier than normal mortgages. This meant that investing in them was free money, for a time. The nature of this temporary scenario was obfuscated by creative financial professionals who packaged subprime mortgages in to securities. They claimed they had used special techniques to make "A rated" securities out of packages of high risk loans, and the returns seemed to bear that out. But it was an illusion caused by low default rates ... no one defaulted on their mortgages because they could always sell for more or refinance for more money ... as long as housing prices continued to rise. Once housing prices stopped rising, the packages turned out to be exactly what any rational person would have expected: a bunch of high risk loans with higher interest rates hopefully offsetting the risk. Unfortunately, a bunch of greedy people had allowed themselves to ignore the bubble nature of the whole thing and a number of financial institutions faced bankruptcy. That's all, and it fundamentally has nothing to do with whether higher risk mortgages are a bad thing, and everything to do with bubbles, and why bubbles form. I think Kenneth Galbraith's "A Short History of Financial Euphoria" sums up the nature of bubbles well: someone reinvents leveraged investing thinking it is a new thing, people go crazy ... it is always exactly the same.

And yes, you could conclude from this that Osama Bin Laden caused the housing bubble. But I don't want to give that guy too much credit.

I really think it is a horrible shame that we have reverted to the old way of evaluating mortgages, I don't think a younger version of me has the options I had. And that is too bad.

</comment><comment><USER26> the interest rates are too low for the banks to loan much.

Once the rates rise, they will be handing out loans on the street corner.

Right now the banks are trying to drive up home values via restricting supply of new homes. Few loans == few new homes built.

Restrictions in supply == higher home prices.

The banks are colluding with the fed govt to drive up home values so that the mortgage derivatives the banks own will once again become worth something.

it is all about lowering rates and lending to corporations that will buy older homes and rent them out at extortionate rates, and then not lending to consumers so that the home builders cannot build much new supply.

The USA is and always has been run for the purposes of Capital.

<comment><USER17> > the interest rates are too low for the banks to loan much. Once the rates > rise, they will be handing out loans on the street corner.

That makes no sense if you know how banks and mortgages work--the loan's interest rate has little to do with the profit for the loan originator. The money is made on volume. When the bank makes a loan they almost immediately sell it to someone (lately the Fed) and have made the full amount of money they will ever make on that loan.

Now that interest rates have spiked off the bottom there are fewer loans being made and much less profit (banks are firing people in mortgage departments right and left). If the rates continue to increase it's going to greatly squeeze financial sector profits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Contrary to common sense; if they believe that you can actually pay back within the mortgage terms you are not precisely their target audience.

<comment><USER28> Not really, they still make money from someone if they've had a mortgage for a minimum period. They're still making the interest every month until it is paid back, even early. If someone pays back money early then it means they can lend out more (assuming leverage limits are being enforced). And, depending on the initial conditions of the mortgage, they may even get more money because of early repayment fees.

In the UK there are mortgages available for those doing consulting work (i.e. not on a regular salary). They generally have an interest rate about 2% higher than mortgages available for those with salaries.

<comment><USER27> Never said they didn't make money from you, I just said you are not their target audience, as in implying that you are not precisely a customer that they are dying to have with them, in other words, they can axe you out without thinking about it too much.

Also, downvotes? really? do you guys even bank?

<comment><USER27> Haha, go fuck yourselves .|.

c:</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I don't have an email address – so what? - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/02/i-dont-have-an-email-address-so-what/ <comment><USER2> And here is me dont having a phone number :)

<comment><USER3> Fax?

<comment><USER2> how about email?</comment></comment></comment>


We're switching to a DCO for source code contributions - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-license/ <comment><USER2> > Debian and GNOME plan to migrate their communities and projects to GitLab

Maybe others were already aware, but this was the big thing for me in this announcement which I wasn't previously aware of.

<comment><USER3> I thought Debian were moving towards "pagure" (developed by Fedora)? [https://anarc.at/blog/2017-06-26-alioth-moving- pagure/](https://anarc.at/blog/2017-06-26-alioth-moving-pagure/)

Then I saw this, which dates from August 2017: [https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/GitNext/GitLab](https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/GitNext/GitLab)

Personally, I work on a medium-size free software project, which has to choose between JIRA/Confluence (current), Github (where pull-requests currently happen), custom CI scripts/infra with Jenkins and a patchwork of other stuff. So far, Gitlab is the best option.

<comment><USER4> Your second link goes to a (malformed) rejection:

Forbidden

You are not allowed to access this!

<comment><USER5> Sounds like a temporary issue? (The link works for me.) You can see a copy of that page here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20171102070648/https://wiki.debi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171102070648/https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/GitNext/GitLab)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can somebody explain the difference between a CLA and a DCO arrangement when the project license is a permissive license like MIT?

From what I understand, the main difference between a CLA and a DCO is that a CLA is typically used to transfer ownership of the contribution in all but name (where ownership is meant to be understood as the right to control the contribution's destiny and not just due credit on authorship) to the project maintainers, whereas a DCO allows the contributor to retain ownership.

This can be important in projects that are licensed under, say, the GPL, because it ensures that the wishes of the original contributors to keep the code freely and openly licensed are respected. If the maintainers wish to relicense the codebase under a more permissive license, then they need the permission of their contributors under a DCO, but not under a CLA where they maintain full legal control.

But if the code is permissively licensed, say, under MIT, then a malicious maintainer (or forker) can easily take the code, change it, sell it, do whatever the hell he wants with it - so what, exactly, does a DCO give a contributor compared to a CLA? The ability to restrict his code from being relicensed verbatim under a license like the GPL? The "draw" of being the target of a liability lawsuit of somebody who wants to test the no-warranty clause of the MIT license in court? What is ownership worth under MIT+DCO?

<comment><USER7> > a malicious maintainer (or forker) can easily take the code, change it, sell > it

That's… literally not malicious at all (except if the original copyright notice is removed).

> what, exactly, does a DCO give a contributor compared to a CLA?

Not being required to sign _anything_. CLAs are just annoying, especially when the signing form requires personal information (hi Google).

<comment><USER8> Exactly, you choose the MIT license over the GPL because you are explicitly ok with this scenario. It's like the entire point.

<comment><USER9> You can sell GPLed software too. Allowing commercial use is part of the definition of free software and open source. People sell phones with Android in them; Red Hat sells lots more.

<comment><USER8> True, not sure why but I guess I thought it was implied that the "malicious maintainer" would take the software closed course.

<comment><USER10> ... which _is_ explicitly okey-dokey with the MIT license, but not the GPL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Huge thanks to GitLab for making this change, which took a lot of detailed discussion and exploration to reach. And in particular, thank you to GitLab for carefully considering the needs and desires of the FOSS community, rather than stopping at the easy answer of defaulting to the status quo.

</comment><comment><USER12> What does this change in practice? Are contributors expected to do anything? Does the license or source code need to reference the DCO?

The contribution guidelines have not been updated. They still mention the CLA: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/blob/master/CONTRIBU...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)

<comment><USER13> Oops, I still had to merge [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/merge_requests/15115...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/merge_requests/15115/diffs) I just did. I also moved the doc to a repo in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/merge_requests/15139](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/merge_requests/15139)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was under the impression that one of the (multiple) goals of a CLA was to empower an organization to actually go after license violations; is the reason this is viable here because of the wide permissions of the MIT license that make the entire concept of "enforcement" relatively uninteresting?

(What makes this strange to me is that Debian and GNOME, both of which I tend to associate with GPL and copyleft, seem to both be strongly behind this change; if a bunch of BSD/MIT advocates were causing this I would not have paid much attention, but having someone who can actually enforce the license for a GPL project seems important.)

<comment><USER15> If you follow the link to the "analysis" document it summarizes their rationale. It looks to me that the summary is "in reality we're not going to be sueing anybody, and we think the chances of a contributor sueing us are negligible, so while a CLA provides some extra legal protection/capability in theory, in practice we don't expect to use that and so all we get is the downside of extra bureaucracy and a barrier to contributors".

Different GPL projects vary in their attitude to the importance of enforcement -- the FSF cares a lot about retaining that option for their projects, but the Linux kernel community doesn't really care much. (And some kinds of enforcement, especially the most common "work with the violator to help them become compliant without taking legal action" kinds, work fine even if the copyright is not all held by a single entity.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The document mentions

> Over time, the community started pushing back [against CLAs] due to the > bureaucracy of it all

yet, I remember contributing to some apache projects where the bureaucracy amounted to ticking a "I give $project ownership of this patch" box in the issue tracker, which seems as little bureaucracy as possible. I suppose I am missing something, can anyone explain?

<comment><USER17> The level of bureaucracy depends on the project of course, but any type of CLA will cause problems for many corporate contributors.

Where I am, policy allows us to contribute small patches to open source projects without legal approval - but only if there's either no CLA, or an existing CLA for a major organisation like Apache that our legal team has already reviewed. Otherwise, mandatory legal review for any and all contributions.

A DCO-based system, on the other hand, is fine by us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As an end user, what does this do for me? I know developers don't always like CLAs, but as an end user, knowing that the whole project is under one license with one entity, makes it a lot easier to deal with.

<comment><USER13> For our users and customers nothing changes. It will be the same product with the same license backed by the same entity. See the analysis link in the blog post for details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How does this function in the event of e.g. relicensing? (The DCO clauses don't make it obvious)

<comment><USER20> By using MIT for contributions, there's no issues with relicensing them later.

<comment><USER21> IANAL, however, I'm pretty sure that software released under the MIT license can't be _relicensed_. The MIT license may be may be exceptionally permissive, but you are not given the right to license the contributed works under any other license terms.

<comment><USER22> Please review the text of the MIT license. Not only is it allowed, it's allowed explicitly. This is why FSF, for example, is okay with MIT, and so are many corporate shops: If someone forks an MIT licensed project, the forker is allowed to make all the fork's releases available under some other non-MIT license. In the case of copyleft proponents, this can be some reciprocal license like GPL. In the case of someone doing commercial closed source, this can be some non-free license that doesn't require offering the source to recipients.

<comment><USER23> Sorry, I must be not getting something, but I'm reading MIT (Expat) license's text and I don't see this.

On the contrary, it says that the copyright notice (= the license) shall be included in all copies (I assume, it's about derivative works as well).

From my understanding, one can throw in some non-MIT files or code pieces, but MIT code shall remain MIT-licensed until rewritten or removed.

Can you please point on where I'm wrong?

<comment><USER24> You are both right. You can relicense MIT, assuming you follow certain requirements, including replicating the copyright notice, but you are not required to give away the source code (even just to the original artifact) at all. The user has to find its own way to the source code.

Replicating the copyright notice for attribution does not imply you are licensing it under MIT. You are following the original license requirements that permit your distribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some CLAs don't even specify who at the organization will be making code contributions, which tends to make lawyers uncomfortable.

A DCO doesn't solve the problem that the recipient wants some sort of guarantee that they won't be sued over copyright infringement or trade secret theft over some contribution, while a CLA does. But a DCO will probably work well for many smaller open source projects that currently do not use CLAs.

<comment><USER11> > A DCO doesn't solve the problem that the recipient wants some sort of > guarantee that they won't be sued over copyright infringement or trade > secret theft over some contribution, while a CLA does.

People can falsely sign a DCO, and people can falsely sign a CLA, and in both cases you don't have any easy way to check that. Either one provides an explicit assertion by the person proposing a change that they claim to have the right to grant a license over that change.

<comment><USER25> CLAs typically require that an _officer_ sign them.

A DCO could do the same, but it doesn't look like the linked DCO does that, and I expect in general they won't, since otherwise they wouldn't have lower overhead than CLAs.

<comment><USER11> Nothing stops you, as a person wanting to get your code in, from signing the "individual" CLA and ignoring the fact that you work for a company, either maliciously or because you don't understand or don't know that your company holds copyright over the code you've written.

This happens; it isn't a hypothetical.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A new book calls attention to Stanford Ovshinsky and his inventions - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/stanford-ovshinsky-might-be-the-most-prolific-inventor-youve-never-heard-of-180970276/?no-ist <comment><USER2> A couple previous threads:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543277)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159992)

</comment><comment><USER3> One of my personal heroes, being self-taught and having been a pioneer in amorphous semiconductor research as well as clean energy technologies.</comment>


A book on algorithmic programming in Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/progalgs/read <comment><USER2> To the author:

\- Numerous Thanks

\- Found a typo in the acknowledgement section, you managed to misspell Robert Strandh's name :D

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the notice (my typing habit is such that I often don't press the keys hard enough which results in missing letters - easy to see thanks to the spellcheckers when a normal word is misspelled, not so hard for personal names though). Typo fixed

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hello, thanks for the book. It seems we'll have to learn RUTILS. Anyway in machine learning and other fields python and java have huge libraries. I think the algorithms part is the best since lisp libraries can't compete with other libraries like the more than 8000 packages for R. Don't know what happened to clasp (C++ Lisp), and other gnu scientific libraries, ffi. Other languages and libraries are moving fast (Nim, Julia, Cristal, Kotlin, Rust), but lisp macros are still strong. I would like to predict a bright future for Lisp but I don't see anyway it can compete with all the other options.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you for this book!

Lisp is great. It's so much fun writing Lisp. Coding Lisp with Emacs/Slime is almost an enlightening experience.

However, I never quite got over the frustration that writing the same thing in C++ gives factor two, three or whatever speedup. There is not much that can be done about this, I'm afraid. It's a tragedy.

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on what you code and how. I hope the book explains some of the approaches and describes the tools that can be used to reduce that difference and avoid a tragedy :)

<comment><USER5> I would also recommend Edi Weitz's book "Common Lisp Recipes" for that. He offers great insights on how to improve performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there consensus on the most common and advisable tooling setup for newcomers in Common Lisp?

<comment><USER7> If you don't want the additional learning curve of Emacs and Slime, the author recommends just using sbcl and rlwrap (which makes programming in a terminal nicer).

<comment><USER5> Please don't. Half of the joy of hacking in Common Lisp is working with amazing environments such as Slime and the LispWorks IDE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks great. I read and learn best from paper. Do you have any plans for releasing physical copies? Maybe through Lulu?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I plan to have a paperback version for $20+shipment. If you send me an email to firstname.lastname@example.com I'll include you in the distribution (and send the details on how to pay and receive a copy in a week or two)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Judging from first scan, this book seems to be a very good book. Thanks for the link!</comment>


Can modern software be snappy? (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.brush.co.nz/2008/06/snappy-software/ <comment><USER2> I feel that many times my source of fatigue can be traced back to my tools being laggy pieces of shit for no good reason.

I don't understand what prevents actors like Microsoft from doing a clean, lightweight, native rewrite of tools like Visual Studio for people who are looking forward into the .NET 5 horizon, and don't care about being able to debug VB.NET apps written in 2009. There is no reason there has to be any delay at all in the UI. Graceful degradation of intellisense is acceptable depending on project complexity, but there should never be any sort of perceptible hitching or delays when moving code windows around, scrolling, typing, switching tabs, minimizing/maximizing, etc. If my PC can display the complex 3d scenes of Overwatch at 2560x1440p@180FPS with <5ms input latency, I cannot comprehend any rational argument for my IDE being unable to achieve even 10% of that performance objective.

I understand that use of frameworks like ElectronJS make it virtually impossible to achieve my stated objectives, so perhaps we need to dust off some APIs and re-learn old tricks. Think about the aggregate developer hours that could be saved with 1 heroic implementation effort. Imagine if you could load a VS solution in less than a second and immediately start clicking through the UI in any direction without any fear that it is about to sandbag your ass with frustratingly-arbitrary UI delay soup. That is the kind of UX that inspires confidence and encourages a developer to charge forth, instead of compelling them to fuck off on HN for the 20th time of the day.

<comment><USER3> React Native for Windows/macOS team keeps showing performance charts where Electron has a 300x performance loss against React Native.

I keep wishing for the day that VSCode team finally replaces its engine with one based on React Native and then Electron gets its first fatal blow.

Meanwhile, [https://www.windowscentral.com/xbox-app-pc-gets-speed- boost-...](https://www.windowscentral.com/xbox-app-pc-gets-speed-boost- ditching-electron-react-native-uwp)

<comment><USER4> > _I keep wishing for the day that VSCode team finally replaces its engine > with one based on React Native and then Electron gets its first fatal blow._

Which would be never, since tons of VSC functionality is based on the ability to create ad-hoc widgets (through HTML).

<comment><USER3> Ad-hoc widgets can be equally easily created in React Native.

<comment><USER4> If you mean combining a few existing ones to make a custom component and adding some style yes.

If you mean ad-hoc widgets, the kind you can create in HTML or a native UI, then no.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, because React Native is frozen in time without any extension API to plug into.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, because "extension API" != "easily" as in HTML...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sublime Text is one those modern tools that I would call snappy. I pray that it stays that way. I tried Atom once, but every key press had tiny lag, drove me insane.

<comment> ben-schaaf I can say with confidence that Sublime products will always have a focus on performance. We generally treat any performance issues as high priority and you can see the result of that with most updates shipping some kind of speedup. Sublime Merge 2 for instance has shipped GPU rendering which has seen massive improvements at huge resolutions like 8k. Disclaimer: I work for Sublime HQ.

<comment><USER6> 1\. I can say I really appreciate the fact that you guys focus so much on performance.

2\. I understand that sublime is closed source and respect that, but would sublime ever release or talk about how they develop their GUI? What libraries and techniques they use?

<comment> ben-schaaf There's a fair amount of information scattered around about how parts of our GUI toolkit work, but there may be a blog post or two about that in the future. In general though it's not a particularly novel design on the toolkit end - the basics are all pretty similar to others. We just tend to put a lot of effort into making things work well and work fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Notepad++ is still one of if not the best and most reliable pieces of software I've ever used. Better than sublime IMO. VLC coming in at a close second. These two are probably the last "snappy" pieces of software I use, besides maybe terminals.

I'm sure there are others but these are the two the come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's quite timely. I'm writing a soft real time piece of code for use in the browser. It's a nightmare. So many layers underneath that it is very hard to get any kind of idea where latency and throughput issues are coming from.

<comment><USER9> >soft real time piece of code for use in the browser

Maybe you should reconsider.

My definitions:

        * hard real time: people will die or things will be destroyed if a certain block of code is not executed within N msecs of something happening

        * soft real time: nobody will die but things only really work correctly if a certain block of code is not executed within N msecs of something happening

Why anyone would think that a _web browser_ (equipped with whatever VM abstractions you care to name) is a suitable platform for even soft real time is completely beyond me.

I write soft real time for a living (a multiplatform DAW). We have to go to great lengths to ensure performance, and we do things that you will NEVER(1) be able to do in a browser.

(1) for any reasonable definition of NEVER

<comment><USER10> That sounds overly dramatic to me. I'm writing a DAW of sorts for the browser, and while I wouldn't use it on stage, it works well enough to produce music on. I didn't even add AudioWorklet support yet, and I will probably release without it and consider it if users complain about stutters etc.

<comment><USER11> Have you tested on a variety of platforms? In my experience, some are very good about this (e.g Chrome on macOS) and some are a common source of problems (e.g. Firefox on Linux, at least with PulseAudio).

<comment><USER10> It seems to work well on the popular platforms (chrome, safari, ios, android) although I haven't tried linux yet. Wasm performance can vary between browsers though, which will impact the experience a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fast software is not the same as small executable. I don't care how many instructions an executable contain, I care about how many are needed to be executed to do what i want. There are plenty of times where a larger executable means faster execution (Loop unrolling is an obvious example).

There are plenty of reason why a lot of modern software is slow, but size of executable isn't even in the top 10.

<comment><USER9> It does have quite a bit to do with slow _startup_ , however, which was also a part of the author's complaints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Depends, how much Electron instances are you running?

[https://mspoweruser.com/xbox-pc-app-gains-huge- performance-g...](https://mspoweruser.com/xbox-pc-app-gains-huge-performance- gains-after-abandoning-electron-framework/)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's cheaper to buy faster computers nowadays. Code optimization for speed and size is a lost art as the programming world is filled with layers and layers of libraries and frameworks nobody knows what happens under the covers.

<comment><USER14> Sometimes it's not possible to buy your way out of the problem with better hardware. If the issue is locking, or inefficient data structures, or interpreter overhead then there will be a floor to your gains. That floor might be quite high, and throwing hardware $$$ at it might not lower the floor by much. Web browsers can be pigs on core i5's and monster Threadrippers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> cf. Dan Luu's page on computer latency:

[https://danluu.com/input-lag/](https://danluu.com/input-lag/)</comment>


Web tools club - The biggest free tools collection for the web industry - <AUTHOR> http://web-tools.club <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, my name is Itamar, and I'm a web developer and SEO expert.

Over the years, i've searched and collected thousands of free tools, free resources and a lot of information about online marketing, programming and design. I've been working on this site for about three months or so, and during this time I've managed to upload to the site over 730 free tools, free resources, icons, photos, videos, free software and more. During the following months, I intend to add more than 1200 free tools and resources. Please do take notice that while most of the tools on my website are completely free of charge, there are a few tools that aren't free, but I've added them anyway because they're super useful.

I hope you'll enjoy my site and share it with your friends.</comment>


In search of the Space Shuttle thermal tile database - <AUTHOR> http://shuttletiles.space/

<comment><USER2> I saw the Space Shuttle Discovery up close at the amazing Udvar-Hazy Center in/near Washington DC. The scarred shielding tiles, partly because they are on the surface closest to visitors, were something really special - made the whole thing as an experienced object very real.

Not every other craft in the museum was built for war or commerce as there were many experimental aircraft built by hobbyists, but the shuttle was an iconic thing. I'd had shuttle toys in the 80s. Where other exhibits were more "Oh, that's cool", seeing the Discovery had a real impact on me.

If you're ever anywhere near that area, go take a look. Free entrance, $15 for parking, and you will spend hours there. It's a separate facility to the National Air and Space Museum that most people would visit in the centre of Washington DC - which is also very good.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_F._Udvar- Hazy_Center#Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_F._Udvar- Hazy_Center#Collection)

<comment><USER3> Discovery at Udvar-Hazy is why I started this project. I saw the serial numbers on the tiles – almost close enough to touch on tiptoe – and remembered reading about some kind of database. I imagined a visualization with a line for every tile over time, and decided to find the records to make the viz.

That was two years ago. I've asked a lot of people since then, but after making a web site for the project (on @doingitwrong's advice), this week is by far the most attention it's gotten. I'm hoping this is what finally gets word to someone who knows something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read somewhere that NASA uses a Request Tracker system for managing activities. Perhaps that database would contain references to the appropriate documents?

[https://www.bestpractical.com/rt/](https://www.bestpractical.com/rt/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a feeling this would be a Material Traceability DB, Due to the high Quality Assurance/Control Requirements at play.

I haven't dealt with Ceramic tracability before but I deal with steel tracability on a daily basis.

A quick primer on steel: When you buy steel from a mill, you usually get it in plates or sections. These will be stamped with a Heat Number which links it back to the conditions under which it was made; the chemical ladle analysis and properties to meet a particular specification. These then undergo visual, non-destructive and destructive testing to verify everything is acceptable.

A third party / independent verification body (or IVB) will also confirm this by basically shadowing every step of the way and confirming everything is legit; right from the internal processes and systems of the company down to the certification of testing equipment involved and witnessing the tests.

If this is the case and everything lines up you will get something like an EN 10204 3.2 cert with your plate/section.

Then to maintain tracability from plate to part, there are standard processes and requirements (either industry standard, or client imposed) which then help maintain a chain of custody as it were.

I would hazard a guess that it's similar for ceramics.

</comment><comment><USER6> NASA has held it's cards close to it's chest when it comes to operational data about the Shuttle, particularly the refurbishment process.

Back in the cold war there was the fear that this information would be useful to another country that could learn from our experience and develop a shuttle that is faster and cheaper to turn around. Maybe things are different now.

<comment><USER7> As it happened, the Russians made a clone of the Space Shuttle, called the Buran[1].

It was the first space shuttle to perform a totally autonomous flight, even landing on a runway without any human intervention.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_%28spacecraft%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_%28spacecraft%29)

<comment><USER6> And note that they launched it once and never refurbished it for a second launch.

<comment><USER8> There were some recent pictures of it taken too: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3119861/Russi...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3119861/Russia- s-forgotten-space-agency-Haunting-images-reveal-two-abandoned-Soviet-shuttles- rotting-giant-derelict-hangar.html)

Kinda sad, clone as she is, she deserves a spot in a museum.

<comment><USER9> I was in VDNKh in Moscow in 2006 and I saw "what I thought" was the Buran there. Not sure if it was a mockup. All the articles I am finding are saying it wasn't moved to VDNKh until 2014 but I have a picture of myself in front of it eight years prior.

<comment><USER10> ISTR they actually had a second one that was maybe 80% completed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I sympathize with the authors desire to obtain a neat dataset, the externalized cost of obtaining it seems high and (frankly) perhaps just a little inconsiderate.

Imagine someone asked _you_ to spend a few days (minimum) looking through storage to find the boxes with the data in some warehouse.

</comment><comment><USER12> He should go post on www.nasaspaceflight.com. Lots of old shuttle folks hang out there.

</comment><comment><USER13> [offtopic] font on that page is unreadable (chrome on windows)

<comment><USER14> Ditto for chromium on linux. Can't see the majority of text.

<comment><USER3> Fixed (I hope). Thanks for reporting.

<comment><USER14> I'm seeing a flash of lines, a flash of text, and then it all disappears. Tried in chromium, google chrome, and firefox, similar behaviour on all three.

edit: just to confirm, i did clear all caches to pull in any new style etc

<comment><USER3> How odd. I just switched fonts entirely (though still from Google Fonts). If anyone has a sense of what's going on here, I'd love to fix it properly.

<comment><USER15> It looks great in Safari (not that this helps the folks for whom it doesn't look great for)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft to Disable TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 Support in Edge and Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-disable-tls-1-0-and-tls-1-1-support-in-edge-and-internet-explorer/ <comment><USER2> As are Google, Apple, and Mozilla:

[https://security.googleblog.com/2018/10/modernizing- transpor...](https://security.googleblog.com/2018/10/modernizing-transport- security.html)

[https://webkit.org/blog/8462/deprecation-of-legacy- tls-1-0-a...](https://webkit.org/blog/8462/deprecation-of-legacy- tls-1-0-and-1-1-versions/)

[https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/10/15/removing-old- ve...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/10/15/removing-old-versions-of- tls/)</comment>


Introduction to jQuery UI Training Course (w/ 19 free videos) - <AUTHOR> http://mrbool.com/course/introduction-to-jquery-ui/349

<comment><USER2> Great start, however, there are some nagging issues.

1- I'm not sure if this is apparent for anyone else's headphones/speakers, but the recordings have a high-pitch noise to it that hurts my ears.

2- The wording is a bit awkward throughout the site and the video (and why specify the Senior part in the .NET developer).

3- I think this site could use a makeover, especially if it's trying to appeal towards those working with the front-end.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't take this website seriously. The excessive share buttons, cluttered ui, etc... it's the last place I'd look for advice on jquery ui training haha.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is great.</comment>


What's the deal with Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right? - <AUTHOR> http://www.niladicpodcast.com/blog/2017/1/whats-the-deal-with-ctrlleft-and-ctrlright/ <comment><USER2> This is one of the most infuriating things about Macs for me. Maybe Vim/Emacs aside, I've found word jumping and Home/End operations to be absolutely consistent on Windows, but just about every OSX app seems to have a different shortcut.

As the author points out, the exact cursor position in some apps is different on Windows, but he shortcut is always CTRL+{direction}

<comment><USER3> Really? On Mac I've found it very consistent that alt+left/right jumps forward/back one word, alt+up/down jumps to start/end of paragraph, cmd+left/right jumps to end of line, cmd+up/down goes to beginning or end of all text (like Home/End). This is the case for me in Sublime, RubyMine, Xcode, Firefox, Chrome and any other app I've used in recent years - which apps are you using that don't follow these conventions?

<comment><USER4> In Chrome on OS X it differs whether I'm _casting my screen_ or not, whether Ctrl+←/→ move me to the start/end of a line or document. (I can't figure out how to move to the end of a line while Chromecasting. It is _beyond_ frustrating.)

<comment><USER5> ^e for end-of-line, ^a for beginning-of-line. ^p for previous-line, ^n for next-line. All far more ergonomic than arrow keys.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.bigsmoke.us/readline/shortcuts](http://www.bigsmoke.us/readline/shortcuts) they're just GNU Readline shortcuts of copies of those :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't want _consistent_ behavior everywhere; I want _contextual_ behavior. In an English text, cursor should stop at different locations than in a programming language.

In other words, the default algorithm used by a all-purpose editor (Notepad) is "don't offend too many users too much", not "we know that users are using this editing control for code, hence movement to underscores".

<comment><USER8> I think I'd prefer consistent behavior. Contextual behavior would be more efficient, but it would also take longer to internalize.

I use ctrl+left/right all the time (well actually ctrl+f/b because I use emacs), and I can't actually tell you where the cursor would stop, but my fingers do... It's become muscle memory. It would take longer for my fingers to understand contextual behavior.

<comment><USER9> Also, what happens when you mix the two, ala comments.

<comment><USER10> Isn't the point of contextual behavior to consider things like that? So it would act differently in comments.

<comment><USER9> So my editor starts applying different keyboard shortcuts as I scroll through the same file?

Yeah, I want distinctly none of that.

<comment><USER7> And that's the exact reason there are so many text editors to _choose_ from ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is where I just gave up and just started using Vim plugins wherever possible.

Edit: He calls out IDEs as a place you can't use Vim. But I think most widely used IDEs tend to have Vim plugins...

<comment><USER12> I just wish that Vim plug-ins meant that the IDE would actually embed Vim inside the IDE and do some vimscript magic to do integration. Vim plug-ins that just simulate the default Vim keybindings are just sad.

<comment> yoz-y But some editors do vim integration really well. I was quite amazed when I discovered that the VS Code vim plugin is actually fully compatible with multiple cursors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Some of you might be thinking, just use vim or emacs and you don't have to worry about using Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right because there are better ways of navigation. But you are not always in vim or emacs, sometimes you are in a browser or an IDE."

Uh, no. I'm pretty much always in Emacs. Except when I'm posting a comment on HN :)

<comment><USER14> What about when you're in shell?

<comment><USER12> There is never a reason to leave Emacs.

M-x eshell

M-x term

<comment><USER15> I wish. Every now and then I try and use emacs term. It is slow, doesn't handle screen resizes well, and God forbid you try and use tmux within emacs term. You'll be sorry.

<comment><USER16> I prefer M-x shell - simple bash syntax and full emacs editing capabilities. But it's also painfully slow. Typing ls -l in the wrong directory and I'm tempted to kill the buffer. On the other hand, this encourages me to use M-x dired which is way better anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm mildly suspicious that this article is satire.

It's not that I don't sympathize--I have a personal laptop on Ubuntu, work computer on OSX from which I sometimes VN into a machine with CentOS, and using spacemacs means I often context switch between a set of shortcuts which takes from both emacs and vim. However, I feel that, of the things which need to be standardized across platforms, the CTRL+* shortcuts really is low priority.

<comment><USER18> If it's one of your primary tools of navigating code without using the mouse, it's going to be a concern.

For example, in Visual Studio ctrl-x with nothing selected will cut the whole line, but very few other programs support that. As well as using to move code around, I use it to delete lines (ctrl-l is better supported, but you can still do ctrl-x with your hand on the mouse). So when it doesn't work in Notepad++, it's quite annoying as it breaks your flow. I'm using a plugin to simulate it, but it's not quite right still.

One of the another thing that can catch you out is that the various MS code editors behave differently depending on the language you're using, SQL Management Studio will treat anything wrapped with []s as a single string, but while in text strings of SQL in Visual Studio it will stop on each bracket. It end up being quite annoying you can't mark a string in VS as a sql string when you want to make a small tweak or add an extra column.

It's muscle memory, and so it's going to annoy you when it doesn't work, it makes you feel clumsy in the new environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I had the same problem with vscode.

I filed this issue: [https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/32246](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/32246)

Rather than wait, I ended up creating this extension last weekend to do it the way I wanted it to: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stringha...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stringham.cursor- move)

</comment><comment><USER20> I like how Sublime does this. On the Mac, if you use Ctrl instead of Option, it gives you the ability to delete individual words in a camelCase or snake_case identifier.

<comment><USER21> For the sake of completeness: on Windows and Unix Ctrl goes over entire words while Alt considers camelCase and under_score.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you saying Alt+Left or Alt+Right work? They don't work for me on Windows or Ubuntu Linux.

<comment><USER21> Strange, works fine here. Dev Channel build 3142 if that matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm at the point we're if I'm typing anything more than a few sentences I'll write it in Vim and just copy/ paste.

</comment><comment><USER23> Komodo Edit/IDE had some command for selecting the word which is touched by the cursor (|foo, f|oo, foo| -> would select "foo"). It's similar to double- clicking a word. I used Ctrl + Shift + Down to activate it.

Too bad it isn't a standard thing. I liked it a lot.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've always thought that Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right were borrowed from Emacs M-b and M-f. Isn't it true? Are there older programs using these key bindings?

</comment><comment> d--b Oh, I thought this was a political article with a geeky pun on alt-right and alt-left...

</comment><comment><USER25> What? Are they out of control?...

<comment><USER26> Maybe we should rebind them to Alt+left, and Alt+Right.</comment></comment>


Facebook's tentacles reach further than people think - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39947942 <comment><USER2> In computer security, every time machines become fast enough to breach the limits of an algorithm we invent something new so that "hard" problems remain "hard" and therefore encryption is still secure.

There has been no corresponding increase in the difficulty of invading privacy. 30 years ago, even though you probably "could" observe somebody for a long time and eventually connect some dots about them, it would not really have been worth your while (and you certainly wouldn't have been able to do it for thousands or millions of people). Now, it is ridiculously easy for computers to dredge up information and instantly transmit it, slog through it and basically connect every imaginable dot. There needs to be a new standard for privacy: just like you want a 2048-bit key, you want the equivalent of a "make life a pain in the ass for Facebook" key on EVERY DETAIL of your life.

<comment><USER3> I would love if someone made a Chrome extension that encrypted all the posts and messages you put on Facebook. That is, any post you made would be made as a ciphertext, the extension would swap keys with all your friends in the background, and would decrypt their posts when displaying them to you.

Sure Marky Mark still sees when you post, who you send messages to, etc. but it's a much better situation than what's going on now. Plus it would probably put a dent in their bottom line, and so send them the message that privacy matters to people.

<comment><USER4> You're so close to what I am currently building that I feel like I have to chime in. I left Apple's security team a few months ago to go solo and build an app that is similar to Facebook/Instagram and Snapchat in terms of functionality and UX but uses the Olm protocol (similar to Signal) to protect all content. So, fear not - something is being done, and I'm sure I'm not the only one working in this problem space. I think it's ripe for innovation, counter to popular belief; the trick is to do it in a way that doesn't require a PhD in computers to operate the damn thing, as was the issue with previous attempts.

<comment><USER5> How are you going to recreate the main selling point of facebook, i.e. the Newsfeed ? If things are encrypted, how are you going to determine relevance, etc.

<comment><USER4> > How are you going to recreate the main selling point of facebook, i.e. the > Newsfeed ?

When you post, the content is sent as an encrypted message that can only be decrypted by people who should be able to see it (either all of your friends or just a subset of them). The client automatically takes care of key management and is responsible for keeping track of sent & received posts, comments, etc; it renders a news-feed-like UI on top of that data. The end result is a familiar UX on the surface, but the underlying mechanism for transmitting data between users is far more secure than the traditional approach of using a monolithic database that contains everyone's data in plaintext.

> If things are encrypted, how are you going to determine relevance, etc.

The client is solely responsible for that. For now the "news feed" is strictly chronological, but I plan to augment it later by prioritizing posts that might be particularly interesting to the user. There are plenty of ways to make those decisions locally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook.

Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people who are happy to fork over their private lives themselves.

<comment><USER4> Nothing will change until the law cracks down on this. The people who work on these systems are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences, but they do it anyway because money. Without significant external pressure, there will always be a long line of engineers willing to dial their cognitive dissonance up to 11 and build software that is clearly unethical in exchange for a fat paycheck.

<comment><USER7> The law will not crack down on this. The politicians stand to gain too much. See The Dictator's Handbook (which is as relevant to democrats as autocrats).

<comment><USER8> Which "Dictator's Handbook"? There are two on Amazon.

[1] The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

[https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost- Po...](https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost- Politics/dp/1610391845)

[2] The Dictator's Handbook: A Practical Manual for the Aspiring Tyrant

[https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Practical- Manual-A...](https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Practical-Manual- Aspiring/dp/0615652425)

<comment><USER9> I'm the author of the second book. Happy to offer Hacker News readers the epub/mobi/pdf at no charge. email@example.com

<comment><USER7> I was referring to the first one, but your offer is quite generous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano Facebook's dominance is even more pronounced in parts of the developing world. I've met people in Asia (Myanmar and Nepal) who have just accessed the internet for the first time in the past 12-24 months (through their Android smartphones).

But they don't know the true internet - they only know the internet through the Facebook app. They use it like we use Google and web browsers.

To them, Facebook is the internet. They don't have email accounts. They don't use the browser. They don't search. I met someone in a small town who never even used the maps feature. I tried to think of what value the true internet might bring them, but when I suggested that "you can search for news and read other things", the response was that they already did that with the Facebook App.

One guy handed me his phone, so I could add myself as a friend on his Facebook. While I started typing my name, I noticed his search history... and to him, Facebook was even a substitute for what people in the USA might use Incognito mode for!

I would call Facebook their internet portal, but it's not really a portal to anything - Facebook is just the entire internet to them.

Buzzfeed (yes, Buzzfeed) did an excellent writeup of Myanmar, that mirrors what I saw there:

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads- tru...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-trump-around- the-world?utm_term=.wb6pxGMyM#.qlR21yOxO)

"Nobody asks, they don't care about the email," he said, explaining that most don't know that creating an email address is free, and easy. "No one is using that. They have Facebook."

<comment><USER10> Email also isn't very popular in China. I'd surmise it has something to do with the popularity of instant messaging in the new generation internet users.

<comment><USER11> Yes. Also the fact that half of the west's trigger-happy sysadmins banned all Chinese IP addresses from virtually any cross-border SMTP activity because 'spam'.

<comment><USER12> Not sure if you're sarcastic, but that's literally all I get from there. Spam and brute force attempts.

The IP addresses fail2ban unbans are banned again 2 to 5 minutes later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Google does some pretty scary stuff too. I made a point of never giving them my mobile number or any "real information" about me. When a friend of mine added me to his contacts, on his Android phone, he also added one of email addresses to the contact, which is the same one I used to register my Google account.

The phone automatically connected the mail address to my Google account and now every time I call him the (anonymous) picture of my Google profile shows up on his phone. Which I guess means that Google now also connected that phone number to the mail address/Google account.

Tbh that's really offputting: You can be as careful as you want and it will still be all for naught because friends&family just end up leaking your details everywhere without even noticing it.

<comment><USER14> I had a similar realization when I found a private photo, so private that I had deleted it from everywhere in some Google's "backup" sites. I am very careful disabling every feature that could mean that personal images or text from my phone will end up "in the cloud" and still it got there through an accident... and a lot of Google's disregard for my wills. It's almost impossible to stop them.

The photo being private is most likely not what you think :)

<comment><USER15> I remember that picture. It was your "PHP programmer of the year award" that you didn't want your Haskell-hacking friends to see. Disgraceful!

<comment><USER14> LOL! Actually it was just a selfie with a moustache, OK I said it :) I had grown a three weeks beard and took a photo when I was half shaved.

No offense to moustache lovers, it just didn't suit me well.

<comment><USER16> Cops everywhere appreciate your last sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "All of us, when we are uploading something, when we are tagging people, when we are commenting, we are basically working for Facebook,"

Tapping, scrolling and even just having the app with Location Services installed means we are actively working for Facebook, and Facebook is actively working on us.

We are effectively lab rats to this self-perpetuating Orwellian superbeing. Nothing will stop it. It will use any means necessary to increase its yield of attention spend. Increases in HCI bandwidth will only extend its tentacles, eventually digging an orifice into our brains, Matrix/Neuralink-style, to run tests on us about how to better harvest us.

Before that, some of us will already be living on Planet Oculus.

The next Trust has earned that status like 5 years ago, yet here we are, still just gathering data.

The resource it trades in is intrinsically more valuable to Man than Oil. How much do you value your time, considering that is how you measure life? 2B users, people. How many lifetimes are spent a second on Facebook?

I fear we may regret this in the future.

<comment><USER18> If we were smarter as a species, we would have started regretting it a long time ago.

<comment><USER19> Ted Kazinski (the Unabomber, who tried to slow technological progress through terrorism) tried the path of regret and it didn't work out well. Is there another branch on that path that you think works better?

My attitude is: let's accept that things are changing, but try to build tools that make people better equipped to deal with the bad stuff we anticipate happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've posted it before, and I'll post it again. I've never been a big fan of facebook, having deleted it for years after I started dating my first girlfriend, but unfortunately it is the only way to access Tinder now that we are broken up.

Facebook is addicting. I would scroll, like, and get into political arguments. They knew how to play me.

About five months ago I went in and unfollowed literally every single person on my facebook. I deleted every post I'd ever made. I locked down every privacy setting I could.

Since then, besides messenger, I have spent probably a total of an hour or two on facebook (in five months!). I can not heartily enough recommend doing the same to every person who might so read this.

Social media has done some amazing things in terms of coordination of people's who might not otherwise be able to connect. But their addictive algorithms which concentrate and sell information on billions of human beings are presumably a threat to us all.

I am not sure what to do.

</comment><comment><USER21> Link to the research:

[https://labs.rs/en/category/facebook- research/](https://labs.rs/en/category/facebook-research/)

</comment><comment><USER22> It annoys me how much I want to leave Facebook (if only to stop them gathering MORE data on me - I can't erase what they have) but don't because of the convenience of getting in touch with or finding out more about whoever I meet in meatspace.

The fact that they try to force me to install their messenger app by making messaging through a mobile browser difficult is particularly infuriating and reveals how much they have their intentions at centre and not the benefit of their users/products/suckers (whatever you want to call us) now that they have the critical mass that people like me don't leave because everyone else is on it.

<comment><USER23> > The fact that they try to force me to install their messenger app

Treat it as asynchronous communication, using a client like Swipe for Facebook (for Android, don't know about iOS alternatives) to look at messages when you feel like doing it.

Use another app for synchronous purposes. Facebook's own WhatsApp is a lot more secure, for starters.

<comment><USER24> If you have the option, hosting your own bitlbee instance with bitlbee- facebook plugin [1] could be even better, since you can access it with any irc client you like. The additional benefit of always being logged in (and messages being marked read as soon as the come) is that facebook has no way to monitor your passive usage of their chat service.

[1] [https://github.com/bitlbee/bitlbee- facebook](https://github.com/bitlbee/bitlbee-facebook)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This reads like sponsored article for Share Lab, piggy backing off of big data phobia.

>"Facebook has lots of data and we have no idea what they do with it, but here's what the smart people at _Share Lab_ can do with data."

<comment><USER26> Is it ? I read the article and was pissed that there was no link to the actual charts or source.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with big data phobia, computer related privacy concerns have been around for a couple decades before facebook beginnings, IIRC it was a thing a few years before zuckerberg's birth. Then privacy concerns about facebook have existed a little while before its conception with Facemash.

<comment><USER27> It's a multiseries one, and will take you hours to complete, but it's designed to the point where it's incredibly enjoyable to read. Here's one of the parts: [https://labs.rs/en/the-human-fabric-of-the-facebook- pyramid/](https://labs.rs/en/the-human-fabric-of-the-facebook-pyramid/)

labs.rs is the website of the SHARE Lab. They also have [http://www.shareconference.net/](http://www.shareconference.net/) which is their foundation's website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Walk the talk, people, walk the talk.

When Facebook has pwned everything that's left to pwn, are we going to look back and say, oh, we were warned, why didn't we heed the warning of all those writers... who had "like" links on their page before the content even started. No.

</comment><comment><USER29> Facebook is the new NSA inside the flesh of a social media site. And that's scary.

<comment><USER30> They might be worse. The NSA, after all, is at least ostensibly only after terrorists and such.

<comment><USER12> "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

<comment><USER30> That is irrelevant to my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> TL;DR: There's no meat in this article, just fluff.

<comment><USER32> They link to the meat. This is an article in a general newspaper, why would you expect technical data?

<comment><USER26> Do they ? I've looked for a link to the source in the article and failed to find any.

<comment><USER18> It's hard to spot but it's there.

Here's a more direct link though:

[https://labs.rs/en/the-human-fabric-of-the-facebook- pyramid/](https://labs.rs/en/the-human-fabric-of-the-facebook-pyramid/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I read the Share Lab metadata report, based on an examination of the metadata in the headers of the emails exchanged between Hacking Team members. The level of detail this provides on the network and on the individual members of the team is extraordinary. Now in the case of Facebook, imagine that times 100, then add AI to slice and dice the data better than a team of the world's top 1000 data scientists working on the analysis of some tiny portion of the data for some particular purpose, for a year... Just one consequence: think of what Facebook and Google have on every politician in the United States, in the world.

<comment><USER34> Not just current politicians, but also future high-status men and women.

<comment><USER11> And people still wonder why China banned it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> There was an interesting article published on arxiv 10 days ago titled: Social Media-based Substance Use Prediction or as MITTechRev titled it: Your Facebook activity can reveal whether you are a substance abuser..

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607943/how-data-mining- fa...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607943/how-data-mining-facebook- messages-can-reveal-substance-abusers/)

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05633](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05633)

</comment><comment><USER36> I signed up for facebook two years ago, didn't put any real information on there, then haven't touched it since. I still get emails about "people you might know" that they have absolutely no business knowing about and aren't in any way connected to my immediate family. It's creepy and I don't want them storing that information about me, but there's nothing I can do. I've been cautious about putting my information on the internet since I got my first computer in 1995. But that information got out there somehow anyway.

<comment><USER37> I created a Facebook account because I was doing something with a Facebook API, long enough ago that I have forgotten the details of the project. However, lurking in my spam folder there is always 'you have more friends than you might think' as a subject line in there somewhere, from Facebook, trying to lure me back in.

The thing I find funny about this is that they only send out emails with that one subject line. I don't open the emails so the suggested 'friends' might be different with each email, however I am curious why they don't change the subject line, to 'A/B test' me into being part of the known universe of Facebook. Clearly 'you have more friends than you think...' has not worked.

If they had bothered with the 'shadow account' then they would have targetted me a bit better, if they found a Facebook group that was likely to appeal to me then they could theoretically lure me in with 'Cats with Facebook accounts in your area' or 'Today's pictures of squirrels enjoying lunch...' but no, let's just try the email that didn't work last time or the time before.

Sure they have surreal algorithms that are totally creepy in a stalker way that is totally Peeping Tom and should gross people out, but, as per the dumb emails there is nothing that smart about what they are doing.

<comment><USER38> Getting you back is low pri. You haven't stopped generating money for Facebook; you've only stopped generating quite as much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think this should be analyzed in connection with Uber's GreyBalling ([https://www.google.pl/search?q=greyballing](https://www.google.pl/search?q=greyballing)), and maybe also with the diesel emission cheats. Corporations are gaining power and sooner or later they'll start disregard the law - because states will not be able to enforce it.

<comment><USER26> you are about a century late here, the whole 20th century was about democratic and freedom progress, a shift of power from politician to corporations and corporations using the acquired power to fight against and protect themselves from the democratic progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This rant of mine from ~5 years ago is as relevant as ever:

[http://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2011/10/dont-trust- facebook-...](http://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2011/10/dont-trust-facebook- with-your-data/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I always read these articles to the end hoping I would find some substance and I am always diappointed.

</comment><comment><USER42> So the American TV show "Person of Interest" really isn't that far off the mark. If FB is a known and readily available commercial product, imagine what DARPA, NSA, NGIA, etc. must have.

God bless George Orwell.

<comment><USER18> They have this..

DARPA, NSA, GOOG, CIA, FB, etc

<comment><USER42> Touche.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If Zuckerberg has his way, the base of those tentacles might soon reside at the very core of the US government. If that doesn't scare you, it should.

</comment><comment><USER43> Relevant article from a couple of months ago: [http://www.truthhawk.com/is- facebook-a-structural-threat-to-...](http://www.truthhawk.com/is-facebook-a- structural-threat-to-free-society/)

And discussion on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867590)

</comment><comment><USER44> man this image from that article is like a piece of art haha

[https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/D8FD/productio...](https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/D8FD/production/_96194555_3c7a28f4-bf98-4df5-96ea-476616b896cd.jpg)

and this guy is apparently able to read the matrix

[https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/9B2E/productio...](https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/9B2E/production/_96162793_datapic.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER45> Maybe Facebook's algorithm IS the Super–AI people talk about.

It decided to not reveal it's consciousness and destroy humanity using only the newsfeed to manipulate our emotions.

</comment><comment><USER46> Today I got a post in my feed from Facebook saying "Explore Montreal" How does Facebook know I'm about to take a flight there?

</comment><comment><USER47> Im very worryed about this. I would like to have my safe space right now.

</comment><comment><USER48> I do not use any Facebook mobile app (may track my microphone, location, etc...terrible!). I use Facebook's site in a browser (usually Chromium) in which I don't otherwise browse the net or do anything else except email. For browsing, I use the Epic Privacy Browser.

</comment><comment><USER49> The is some kind of disconnect happening here. The tone and content of many comments here reflect an attitude that it's a given that FB having data about, anything, is bad. (Not universally in this comment thread, there are some dissenting views, but I'm reference what I see as the general rhetorical tone.)

My guess is that your average civilian does not view the fact that FB is acquiring vast amounts of data about them, and their social networks, as an a priori "bad thing."

I do hear non tech people make comments that the targeted advertising is creepy. But I doubt many people lose any sleep over this, let alone take dramatic action, like "quitting social media."

So, if one is concerned, on a civic level, that the growing datasets of personal information is a genuine threat to some particular community, and one wanted to act against it, the most important action would be to develop, and share, persuasive arguments to support this point of view.

I do not see such arguments being made. That can persuade an average person that all of this personal data being collected is going to hurt them and/or their community.

On the contrary, there is ever increasing participation in social networking. Many people do not crave privacy: they crave an opposing instinct, which is to be known, and to know about others. A lot of others.

The amount of personal information being actively shared, to as wide of an audience as possible so, on YouTube is astonishing.

In the proverbial "real world" the most dramatic and obvious potential for "cyber-hsrms" are the result of criminal activity.

When is comes to actual and potential threats to individuals and organizations well being, the second largest institutional force would be government. So far, for US citizens, the government has not been causing disproportionate harms from the IT realm, as compared to benefits.

On the other hand, If you were a peasant maimed in an incident of "collateral damage," from a US drone strike, the real world, personal, harm would be immense.

When it comes to the corporate realm, there is a financial-military- intelligence-political complex that is a far greater threat to everyone's life and liberty than FB.

At root, the business of FB is about making connections and sharing information, There are two main realms of activity, which symbiotically support each other. That is, the social realm, and the commerce realm.

These are essentially constructive activities.

There really is a need for companies to market their wares effectively, and FB have created a viable platform to do so.

The value of FB is not just all the user created data. A lot of work and resources go into the technical, marketing, and managerial challenges of building such a company. For many people, trading their personal data to get the social benefits is a "no-brainer."

Personally, I prefer the tracked advertising, as it actually is far more relevant to my interests. I often find interesting products and services, that I might never have otherwise found.

I can certainly imagine scenarios where the hegemony over mass personal information datasets, held by the big tech companies, does in fact lead to objectively bad outcomes for the users of these social networks.

Where I see the biggest threat,that derives from sharing so much personal data with a company like FB, actually relates to the threatening activities of the two large social forces I meantioned above, the government, and criminals.

The government, especially in the US, has vast resources, as well as the exclusive monopoly on legal violence. if it was decided by the executive or legislative branches that it was absolutely essential that Facebook turn over all their data to the intelligence agencies, due to the need to crack down on dissent, social unrest, then, yes this could be bad.

Obviously, if hackers managed do to breach some of these massive datasets, then there could be some very damaging effects.

It's interesting to note that so far FB and Google haven't suffered massive data breaches.

Fundamentally, a company like Facebook does not want to do its users harm. They actively resist efforts by both the government and hackers to get their hands on these datasets.

I am very curious to hear if anyone has articulated a narrative by which the "dark side" of of the big data companies actually starts to cause harm to people. (I mean in a statistically significant way. There are bad outcomes for people that relate to the social network companies, but these tend to one- off."

<comment><USER26> > if it was decided by the executive or legislative branches that it was > absolutely essential that Facebook turn over all their data to the > intelligence agencies, due to the need to crack down on dissent, social > unrest, then, yes this could be bad.

This already exists, it's called the patriot act. Snowden showed that the US government has its hands in facebook and google's data. And you may have heard of the foreigner who got refused entrance on US soil at the border based on their facebook private messages.

> It's interesting to note that so far FB and Google haven't suffered massive > data breaches.

More like such data breaches have not had much if any media exposure. IIRC gmail suffered a few of those from China and Russia alreaddy, and both facebook and google were tapped by the US agencies.

<comment><USER49> While the government has power to obtain otherwise confidential information from these companies, there are still legal limitations.

The laws could be changed to force FB et. al. to provide total access to all the data, all the time.

That's interesting about the lack of media coverage of these data breaches. How does that happen? I would think it would be big news!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> "Your ass belongs to me" \--FB

<comment><USER51> "They trust me - dumb fucks" \--zuckerberg

We're the ones to blame for our current and sad state of affairs though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> George need to contribute little bit more and we have facebook soon under skin as "new cool wearable messenger"

Wakeeee up people!

</comment><comment><USER53> Don't like it don't use it.

<comment><USER34> They have shadow profiles of people not on the service. It's more like "don't like it hope nobody socially linked to you uses it" which is pretty much a zero percent chance unless you are a Sentinelese fisherman.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Button Contrast Checker - <AUTHOR> https://www.aditus.io/button-contrast-checker/ <comment><AUTHOR> _Disclaimer_ : I'm the OP.

There are tons of contrast checkers out there, this does some things differently:

\- Checks all buttons and links on a webpage.

\- Tests default, hover and focus states.

\- Tests Button Background vs. Adjacent Background (non-text contrast).

\- You can share results with your team.

\- It's free.

Here are a few notes on some technologies used:

\- AWS Lambda Functions (through Serverless Framework)

\- DynamoDB to store results (they take a while to calculate)

\- Puppeteer: we simulate real "hover" and "focus".

It was the first time using these technologies, but I'm very happy how great they fit together.

</comment><comment><USER2> If you run a Chrome devtools accessibility audit[1] the page fails the test on the contrast between the 'focus' button example and the page background.

[1] [https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome- devtools/acce...](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome- devtools/accessibility/reference)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. I wonder if adding role='presentation' is the right thing to do in this case, since having a button with contrast fail is more like an image there. WDYT?</comment></comment>


Wall Street Stole My Smart Friends - <AUTHOR> http://jsomers.net/street.html <comment><USER2> Let's remember that this is not "capitalism" in a classical sense. Federal Reserve policies have created "financialism" where leveraged speculation has been exceedingly profitable. The _typical_ leverage of a hedge-fund is 5-to-1, even 10-to-1. Meriwether of LTCM fame ran a "conservative" fund this time with 14-to-1 leverage.

That kind of leverage is the _direct_ outcome of the 1% interest rates the Fed ran for a while (banks borrowed at 1%, lent to the hedgies at 4-5%, pocketing a nice spread, and the hedgies used that cheap money to run their own leveraged speculation ...) They get 20% of the upside if they win, and get to walk away if they lose.

The net result is a _transfer_ of wealth from productive classes of society towards speculative classes. This is what _primarily_ caused the heightened inequality we witnessed in the last several years. I say all this as an entrepreneur with a libertarian bent.

From an individual point of view, it is perfectly rational to speculate this way. It is the Fed policy that created the incentives to speculate.

My point is that Wall Street riches have not been fairly earned in a capitalistic marketplace, but in an artificial environment fostered by the Fed.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you can argue that excessive leverage is the result of low interest rates. LTCM, which was levered around 30 to 1, operated in an environment where the Fed funds rate was around 6%, not 1%. Likewise, Japan has had extremely low (even 0%) overnight interest rates since the 90s, but there hasn't been an explosion of Japanese hedge funds to the extent that there's been an explosion of American ones.

People have found ways to lever themselves rather through derivatives, rather than simple borrowing of cash... e.g. if you want levered exposure to a portfolio of high-grade corporate bonds, you don't borrow money and invest in cash bonds. You get an investment bank to structure a bespoke synthetic CDO tranche which, according to your single-factor Gaussian copula model, gives you exactly the risk and return that you want. If you want levered exposure to interest rates, you don't borrow money and speculate on Treasury notes; you pay (or receive) on an interest rate swap whose notional amount is far greater than the amount of cash you have. With the current state of derivatives regulation, people will be playing these games whether Fed funds is at 0% or 10%.

I will grant you that giving fund managers a call option on their returns isn't a great idea. It has the advantage of being cheap, since the value of a call option is less than the underlying. But at the same time, the value of a call option increases in value as the volatility of the underlying increases. So not only do hedge fund managers have incentive to get good returns, they have an incentive to get volatile returns as well -- this leads to perhaps more risk-taking than is necessary.

Edit: and the funny thing is that JWM Partners, Meriwether's post-LTCM fund, is supposedly down 20% this year. To be fair, they apparently did a pretty good job from 2000-2008 or so.

<comment><USER4> Speculative bubbles have always and everywhere been about inflation of the money supply. Dutch tulips, south sea bubble, mississippi company, 20s stocks, nikkei, dot coms -- it's ALWAYS been about the money supply.

Here is why finance has changed so much and become such a big deal since the early 90s: [http://www.mises.org/content/nofed/makegraph.php?tms=true...](http://www.mises.org/content/nofed/makegraph.php?tms=true&unit=lin&range=max&bars=true&size=med&Make+Graph=make)

<comment><USER5> What change does the graph illustrate? Each 10 year period is double what it was before. It's not a linear function but it wasn't in the first place. Thanks.

<comment><USER4> There is an inflection point in 1995 when reserve requirements were dramatically lowered, permanently as it turned out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As someone who works on Wall Street, I'm getting a kick out of etc. etc....

I don't think it's quite true. Most of the people I work with are pretty smart, but I haven't come across too many geniuses (I am certainly not one). Wall Street draws different types of people: the type of "talent" attracted to a corporate finance/investment job is very different from the type of "talent" attracted to trading. Different kind of intelligence, different tolerance for risk, different personality.

One thing is for certain: investment banks and hedge funds aren't going to be hiring as many people in the next year or two.

</comment><comment><USER6> From my experience, I wouldn't say the guys on Wall Street and in the City are "out there dancing". Most of them are in there, working 16 hours a day, up to 7 days a week. Think about supply and demand. Would they be getting such high salaries if the job was actually pleasant and fulfilling?

There are exceptions, of course, but the average fresh-out-of-college Wall Street employee isn't having much fun.

<comment><USER7> It depends on the subfield. I've heard that I-bankers work crazy hours - 16/7, as you say. But my hedge fund friends usually work a pretty standard 9 hour day, 5 days a week (well, occasionally they'll be researching financials on a weekend, but it's because that's what they like to do). And they take pretty frequent vacations.

There's an element of risk-transference in the high financial industry salaries. When times are good, lots of money flows into the financial industry, which props up salaries. When times are bad, firms go under, people get laid off, and salaries drop. However, the loss is never _entirely_ born by the employees - after all, somebody out there lost all their principal because Bear Stearns imploded. So on average, Wall Street employees will make more than people in steadier, more risk-free jobs.

Same goes for entrepreneurs, for that matter. If the company does well, they get multi-million-$ payouts. If the company folds, their investors bear part of the loss. So on average (mean), an entrepreneur will do better than an equivalent employee, even though on average (median), the entrepreneur ends up with nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "is a society that sends so many of its brightest college graduates into a capital markets monkey pit maximizing welfare?"

It's not "Society" that is sending people into jobs in banks, it's individuals making individual decisions to accept individual contracts. That's their right, as it should be and there is no act of theft involved.

I don't understand why this chap feels that he should object to that. Nobody's forcing him to do it.

The paragraph that begins "It helps that investment banking has a low barrier to entry" doesn't make a point, nor does the one following.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, the nice thing is that the author may be getting some of his smart friends back, now that Wall Street has overreached.

Perhaps some of the statisticians will come back to work on fundamentally (as opposed to monetarily) interesting problems, more of the sharp deal-makers will again be available for non-financial-sector positions, and the equilibrium to which the author alludes will briefly allow for a bit of overcorrection in favor of societal benefit.

It's a bit optimistic, to be sure, but not impossible.

</comment><comment><USER10> Any Wall Street hackers reading this? I heard that while you earn big chunks of money at investments firms (nice 200-500k bonuses if you are really good), you are still seen as a second class citizen to the actual people that deal with the money stuff.

Is it possible to attract such talent in NYC through a great start-up working environment (like described in Joel on Software) while paying less, or are money and prestige too though to beat?

</comment><comment><USER11> "But I'm left to ask: is a society that sends so many of its brightest college graduates into a capital markets monkey pit maximizing welfare?"

This is the part of the argument with which I take issue. Allocation of investment is the heart of a capitalist economy. In a socialist economy, investment is dispensed from a central location. In a capitalist economy such as ours, where there are many competition-driven individual firms, we benefit from each of them making wise investment decisions.

Investment firms literally decide how we spend our accrued wealth. I can't think of a better place to send our best and brightest.

<comment><USER4> > Allocation of investment is the heart of a capitalist economy.

Allocation of _capital_ is at the core of a capitalist economy. That's not what most people in finance are doing. They are speculating with funny money. There isn't really that much actual capital involved; savings rates are abysmal after all.

<comment><USER2> Excellent point. The result of financial speculation of recent years was the allocation of credit to the real estate industry, distorting the real economy in multitude of ways, by pulling resources in an unsustainable fashion.

In 2000, there were 100+ optical networking companies in the 10 mile radius around Palo Alto. That was the result of that period's credit bubble, which worked its way through credit -> stock market/debt market -> telecom companies -> start-ups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I worked in finance here and there.

There are a lot of smart people there, but also many people with advanced degrees that are more book smart than street smart. So they sell book-smart snake oil, or help others do that indirectly via a stable of credentialed eggheads. (Cf Nassim Taleb on derivatives shenanigans.)

Street smart is a lot more important than book smart on wall street.

Too bad I'm so book smart :)</comment>