SoftBank could bring down the house? - <AUTHOR> https://capitalistexploits.at/hold-my-beer/ <comment><USER2> Interesting read. For someone who has the time and patience to gather data _against_ the author's arguments, I would highly recommend going to the source of the data. SoftBank's financials - FY 2018-19[1]. I had a quick skim at the _segments_ of the company and they have some interesting sources of revenue/profit which could provide some cushion: ARM, SoftBank itself (telecom), Sprint!, Yahoo Japan.

Can someone more experienced than I am on financial matters check if they're in deep shit as the article suggests?

[1][https://cdn.group.softbank/en/corp/set/data/irinfo/financial...](https://cdn.group.softbank/en/corp/set/data/irinfo/financials/financial_reports/pdf/2019/softbank_results_2019q4_001.pdf)

Edit: spelling mistakes /facepalm

<comment><USER3> > Can someone more experienced than I am on financial matters check if they're > in deep shit as the article suggests?

I'm no financial expert but "¥15.7tn ($143bn) of interest-bearing debt" is a lot of money, in case shit will end up hitting the proverbial fan (meaning a recession that will make refinancing a lot harder) then I don't see an easy way out for them. I also don't know what "¥27tn of total liabilities" really stands for, but that doesn't sound good either.

Adding those two numbers up gives you about $300 billion that is owed by SoftBank in one way or another (debt + liabilities), that is a lot of money that cannot easily be covered by SoftBank's current assets in case they'll become hungry for liquidity. And I don't think the biggest part of that sum has a long maturity (think 10, 20 even 30 years), probably most of it it's due in the next few years (even though I may be wrong on this one, I admit).

<comment><USER4> I was under the impression most if SoftBank's loans are denominated in JPY and have almost 0% interest. If you have $143Bn in interesting bearing debt at like 0.1% interest -- as long as you buy anything that will inflate at the normal rate of inflation -- you should make a killing, right?

<comment><USER5> This is why Apple took (takes) out billions of dollars in loans despite having nearly a $1 trillion market cap of which a significant portion is cash.

If you're a large corporation and have low-interest money offered to you, it's almost fiscally irresponsible not to take the loans.

Depends of the tax laws of your home country, of course, and I don't know anything about Japan. But in the US, if you were to get offered a 0.1% interest loan, take the money now and figure out what to do with it later.

<comment><USER6> Buffett and Munger have said that they are having difficulty investing cash because they have so much of it. In this case it seems irresponsible to take loans. I don't see the point unless it's a tax dodge.

<comment><USER4> I hear everyone saying this. It seems like 12-years of global QE is gonna cause a massive spike in inflation. Everyone's valuing things as if there's been hardly any inflation since 2007.

The reality is, there's 120% MORE narrow money (M1) today than there was in 2007. There's also 74% more board money (M3).

Has there ever been a long period (12 years, in this case) where we've had only ~25% inflation with ~120% growth in the money supply?

Naively, it seems like there's either too much money (not sure how you solve that) or everything is too cheap.

<comment><USER7> Well the main issue is all of this money is going to the wealthy. And while I don't have hard data to back this up, it feels like 'inflation' is rampant in the things that wealthy people throw money at, e.g. stock market, real estate, art, etc...

<comment><USER8> High end real estate in greater NYC area is deflating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't see it mentioned in the article but I think it's an important factor: The massive intervention by the BoJ in the corporate bond market of Japan. The BoJ is even buying bonds with negative yield. There's just so much Yen printed by the BoJ it's no surprise that some of it ends up in a venture capital fund, driving up valuations of startups around the globe. After all this is what everyone is warning about: Zero or even negative interest rates will distort valuations and capital allocation.

<comment><USER10> BoJ's money printing is dwarfed by Fed's and ECB's money printing. Japan has been doing it since 1989, Softbank cant be explained by Japan alone.

> Zero or even negative interest rates will distort valuations and capital > allocation.

interest rates policy ( monetary ) has little to do with capital efficiency.

Central banks have rightly figured out a few things :

\- Their respective countries have taken on too much debt, and we need to do something to reduce it.

\- Market forces ( globalization + technology ) are having tremendous deflationary effects that is pushing down interest rates, their job is to find out that number.

<comment><USER9> > BoJ's money printing is dwarfed by Fed's and ECB's money printing. Japan has > been doing it since 1989, Softbank cant be explained by Japan alone.

BoJ's money printing is on the same level as ECB and Fed. Most recent data I could find is here: [https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/05/gundlach-g4-central- banks-...](https://www.valuewalk.com/2019/05/gundlach-g4-central-banks- balance-sheets/) Both ECB and BoJ hold around $5trn in assets, Fed is third with around $4trn.

> interest rates policy ( monetary ) has little to do with capital efficiency.

I don't know what you mean by capital efficiency. The BoJ corporate bond purchasing program lowers interest rates for all issuers on the Yen bond market, including the ones issued by SoftBank. Because SoftBank itself invests into the fund (around $28bn) and raised capital with bond issuance the link between BoJ open market interventions and startup valuations should be clear.

> Central banks have rightly figured out a few things :

> Their respective countries have taken on too much debt, and we need to do > something to reduce it.

In the case of the ECB and the Fed (don't know about BoJ) the reason is actually the opposite. Fiscal expansion has been very unpopular politically in both the US and the EU (there mainly due to the fiscal austerity demanded by Germany). Because there was no political will to increase national debts, the central banks stepped in and started to directly purchase bonds (both governmental and private) in order to rekindle growth after the financial crisis. If governments started massive infrastructure projects or otherwise expanded their balance sheets, then this central bank intervention would have been much smaller. As a result of central bank interventions - which has reduced interest rates for gov. bonds - countries have started to issue more debt once again.

> Market forces ( globalization + technology ) are having tremendous > deflationary effects that is pushing down interest rates, their job is to > find out that number.

As far as I know there isn't a consensus for an explanation why the current low inflation environment persists (the "New Normal"). Globalization and technology might well be an explanation but global demographic shifts could also be an important factor (ageing populations and declining birth rates in most industrialized countries).

<comment><USER10> Here is a much better graph showing the same data:

[https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user330...](https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2017/06/01/20170601_CBs.jpg)

You are right, since 2013 BoJ has bee busy with the printing press.

> I don't know what you mean by capital efficiency. The BoJ corporate bond > purchasing program lowers interest rates for all issuers on the Yen bond > market, including the ones issued by SoftBank. Because SoftBank itself > invests into the fund (around $28bn) and raised capital with bond issuance > the link between BoJ open market interventions and startup valuations should > be clear.

Soft Bank has assets that allows them to borrow, if Soft Bank didn't exist, somebody else would have taken advantage of the lower interest rate.

My point is that even when a lot of money is printed, capital goes to who is able to convince the bank the most. BoJ, Fed does not have much control in where the money is allocated.

> ... Because there was no political will to increase national debts, the > central banks stepped in and started to directly purchase bonds ...

The problem here is that those bonds were about to lose a large amount of its value - as private debt repayment was not possible. So yes, private debt was high. CB's had no choice but to buy them , or else face a severe contraction in the money supply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Softbank kind of reminds me of the Icelandic banks in the last bubble, in that in both cases I was wondering how they managed to get all the money they had.

Just before it all went off that time, these icelandic banks were buying up everything in sight, and I was thinking "where are these banks from a small country getting this kind of money"

Softbank seems similar, in that the scale of its funds is absolutely massive for a single company (vision fund one at $100b and suggestions of a second $100b vision fund in the offing). If there's a lot of fancy debt going on, it's the kind of that seems like it could blow up in spectacular fashion (as the icelandic banks did last time)

<comment><USER12> Saudi Arabia and MBS are reported to have invested heavily in SoftBank, especially the vision fund.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/business/softbank-son- sau...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/business/softbank-son-saudi-arabia- khashoggi.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a chart that says "Morgan Stanley caught red handed with a massive short book" \- but isn't this exactly what they're supposed to do with the "greenshoe"? I.e., oversell the offering by taking a short position themselves, then buy it back later to move up the price?

<comment><USER14> They went further than the greenshoe - Matt Levine has a great post breaking it down (see the second section of his post here: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-15/wework...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-15/wework- separates-buildings-and-beer)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "SoftBank routinely selling assets to its Vision fund."

Can anyone help me understand the real reason Softbank does this and whether investors of VF are okay with it? One case I know of is Coupang [1], a Korean E-commerce company, recently "priced" by VF at $9B. Last year, Softbank sold its 20% shares in Coupang to VF at a 30% loss (down-valuation) and then VF poured in an additional $2B to Coupang. It appears Masa did double down on Coupang but why bother to sell its long position at a loss? Not a domain expert on this, so I wonder what is really going on...

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-20/softbank-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-20/softbank- to-invest-2-billion-in-korean-e-commerce-site-coupang)

</comment><comment><USER16> I am curious if there are any counter-views published out there. Softbank is undeniably big and heavily invested in the VC basket. Is there public analysis on how well the larger entity is protected to down-valuation of their portfolio of startups?

<comment><USER17> I just wonder how one can make money if they believe that Softbank will crash in the 5 year horizon

<comment><USER18> puts?

<comment><USER19> Puts on what?

<comment><USER20> I would think on a variety of companies fitting the description the author makes. Consuming large amounts of capital with plans mostly being "growth"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >How SoftBank got here is a story as old as man itself. You see, thanks to QE, pushing investors out the risk curve fanned the largest venture capital boom in all of history. Trust me, I know this. I built, then sold a VC firm because I could see what was happening.

I feel he's projecting his own experience setting up and flipping a small VC firm ("Between July 2012 and April 2016 led the investment of $35M into 32 early stage venture...") onto SoftBank.

Mr Son "invented an electronic translator that he sold to Sharp Corporation for about $1 million" when he was 19, around and has a pretty good record of tech investment over the 42 or so years since, with Softbank started in 1981, and plans to be around a while ("... SoftBank Group, which aims to keep growing for the next 300 years") [https://group.softbank/en/corp/about/philosophy/value/](https://group.softbank/en/corp/about/philosophy/value/) [https://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/19/business/a-japanese- gambl...](https://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/19/business/a-japanese-gambler-hits- the-jackpot-with-softbank.html)

I don't think they got here as a response to QE.

</comment><comment><USER22> Before burning down the house How Son Made 62% Return on SoftBank's $64 Billion in Tech Deals

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-06/how- son-m...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-06/how-son- made-62-return-on-softbank-s-64-billion-in-tech-deals)

</comment><comment><USER23> Problem #1: Uber is already a public company and borrowing against owned stock in the company (as OP says Softbank is doing) isn't newsworthy. Article says $4bn from "Uber and two other SV groups". Even if we assume the entire $4bn is borrowed from Uber holdings, that's only 10% market cap of Uber.

Problem #2: Morgan Stanley shorting Uber for its IPO is more FUD. This is routine in the investment banking world. Underwriter knows they will have to do this to provide liquidity. Haven't seen a popular IPO in the last decade where the underwriter doesn't hedge.

Problem #3: Softbank having a large corporate debt load isn't that big of a deal since interest rates are so low (sometimes negative) in Japan. You're going to PAY me millions to borrow billions? Yes, I'll take that deal every day of the week. SoftBank makes enough in revenue to more than make up for their debt load.

Problem #4: I think everybody and their dog knows Uber, Lyft, WeWork, etc. are all overvalued and will struggle to find a path to profitability in the near term. However, we could still see a 30-50% drop in public valuations on those companies. But they make up a very tiny slicer of the overall venture capital in tech right now. The largest companies are tech and they're making money hand-over-fist. Microsoft is at a trillion dollar valuation but they make $35bn a year in profits and still have $130bn in cash in the bank. It's not systemic risk as in the GFC of 2008.

TLDR: SoftBank is starting to unwind their positions and you may see a dip in the valuations for Uber, Lyft, WeWork, Tesla, and other non-profitable tech companies.

</comment><comment><USER24> When I read things like this, I start to wonder: when wealth inequality is discussed, how is it measured? I recall hearing that Jeff Bezos regularly loses billions due to fluctuations in Amazon stock. How much of the "wealth" in wealth inequality is actually based on paper gains? In other words, it seems that the richer you are, the more exposure you might have to the vagaries of the market. Maybe you are rich enough that you can afford to take that hit, but you will also likely lose more in dollars, I would assume.

<comment><USER25> one commonly used measure of inequality is the Gini coefficient, which isn't perfect but is great for getting a "big picture" view of things. The increased exposure of the rich to the vicissitudes of valuations doesn't really get accounted for, even in more detailed analyses. I'm guess that's because it would be horribly impractical to measure; you'd have to take a detailed look at the finances of almost everybody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Semi related to this: Have there already been noticeable changes in investments in the valley since the last big round of unicorn IPOs?

Since we can assume many VCs got a lot of cash back in a relatively short time I guess they will either double down and reinvest even more in tech/startups - or they will stay out of tech for the foreseeable future.

Or is it too early to tell because new funds would have to be set up first?

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure about new investments but I'd say that the author of OP's article is onto something here.

Softbank backed Lemonade is about to IPO in 6 months with a 2 billion dollar valuation. Neither their valuation nor an IPO makes sense to anyone in the industry. Lemonade is 99% marketing hype. Both the insurance book and the tech at the company are suspect at best.

The other one that's hit my radar recently is Compass, another Softbank backed company looking to IPO in the next 2 years at a stupid high (I've heard $5b) valuation. But they're cash flow negative with no path to profitability and they're increasing their spend rate instead of lowering it. So why would your average investor buy the stock?

Neither of those are mentioned in the article but it does seem like companies backed by Softbank are behaving pretty strangely.

<comment><USER28> Giving any entrepreneur $300m or $1b (in the case of Nuro) and not expecting "strange behaviour" would be weird.... that's private jet, Four Season suites for conferences with butlers, and Thomas Keller catering for company Xmas party type money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> See

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3hA9cjBBwM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3hA9cjBBwM)

</comment><comment><USER30> Yes. One incident and a house of cards comes falling down. Too big to fail is one thing. Setting it up to fail is another. How did we get inflated valuations during the housing bubble. Fraudulent comps.

</comment><comment><USER31> A large part of the Vision fund is arab money. For Americans, the investment strategy pursued by most of the Middle East can seem counterintuitive, or even stupid. But let me tell you a story.

I worked as a quant at a portfolio analytics firm and had access to the portfolio data of thousands of different funds: hedge funds, fund of funds, endowment funds, and sovereign wealth funds. Many of our clients were in the Middle East, probably due to the founder being Palestinian (I am also half Palestinian if it matters).

These national investment authorities have _massive_ amounts of capital, larger than any hedge fund or endowment. We're talking about trillions of dollars in a single fund invested all over the Western world.

With that kind of money, you need to pretty much invest in anything and everything. Billions in T-notes, corporate bonds, commodities, equities, whatever.

The amount that needs to be invested is so large that you need to invest in things no sane person with 50m would invest in. This is the purpose of the SoftBank Vision fund: to provide capacity for seemingly infinite Middle Eastern oil money. They desperately need to diversify out of their incredibly volatile oil cash flows.

This pressure results in a glut of arab money into VC and everything, because all they want is to create a true market portfolio. And by market portfolio, I mean allocations into everything: VC, PE, REITs, bonds, equities.

<comment><USER32> >We're talking about trillions of dollars in a single fund invested all over the Western world.

I find that hard to believe. The Government Pension Fund of Norway is said to be the world's largest sovereign wealth fund with just over US$1 trillion in assets.

<comment><USER33> I agree. Norwegian fund seems to be the biggest single fund.

Saudis have three separate funds that are bigger combined. UAE has multiple wealth funds that are > $1 trillion together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Now, if this wasn't bad enough, consider that this is a company as opaque as > Casper.

I'm not sure I get this simile. Is he saying that the company is actually _not_ particularly opaque, but rather as transparent as a ghost?

Or is Casper the ghost known for being unusually opaque for a ghost?

Or is he talking about Casper the mattress company?

<comment><USER35> He has several mixed up metaphors.

Another one is "the term "corporate governance" is as foreign as that thing that came out of Sigourney Weaver's stomach." The alien came out of Executive Officer Kane's stomach (John Hurt).

<comment><USER36> To be fair the alien did come out of her once in Alien 3, and several times in Alien Resurrection (4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > But the real reason it's as nutty as a AOC's Green Deal ...

I hit this and immediately stopped reading the article. First, it's the "Green _New_ Deal". Second, it's not solely AOC's work (though she is probably its most prominent proponent). Third, it's not nutty; it's, if anything, a _down- payment_ on the work we need to do to address the climate crisis. Not to mention the rest of the article (up to that point) has nothing to do with the GND, so the author had to go out of their way to make themself look like an idiot.

<comment><USER38> consider: it's "nutty" because it's politically infeasible, not because it's wrong.

<comment><USER39> The New Deal was politically infeasible until it wasn't.

<comment><USER19> The original New Deal only became politically feasible when the country was on the verge of a violent socialist uprising.

<comment><USER40> So we know what we must do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> SoftBank is playing a game that is way above any hedge fund's pay grade, let alone some blogger.

\- If SoftBank goes down, every coder loses his/her rice bowl. The pain inflicted on Son, Tim Cook and MBS is minimal, compared to your average tech worker.

\- Valuation are not isolated beasts, the nominal value looks high because of the extraordinary financial alchemy that is going on the Fed. Large pool of capitals are betting the Fed is going to continue with QE4, QE5, .... QEn.

Imagine how it feels to be a sovereign wealth fund, watching the Fed print almost a trillion dollars / yearly in good times ! You must be terrified of what happens when the ball stops rolling.

\- Owning growth stocks is an amazing way to hedge against many possible future outcome, both good and bad.

<comment><USER41> Should tech workers consider buying deep out of the money puts on tech ETFs as a form of insurance?

<comment><USER42> You should only do that if you believe the crunch is coming in three months or so.

Unless you can time the crunch exactly, put options are a mug's game. They bleed value over time (negative theta in industry parliance).

If you really want to protect yourself, just plan your finances as if your high income was temporary rather than permanent.

<comment><USER41> Can't you get options whose expiry is a year or two out (LEAPs), or is the time premium not worth it?

<comment><USER43> I used to do options in the end 90s and back then long term options were crazy expensive. You need a lot of capital for such a strategy.

<comment><USER44> Did you profit from that strategy?

<comment><USER43> I lost money. Which would make a successful startup these days :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the argument against Alibaba?

</comment><comment><USER45> > _It's the classic Ponzi scheme. You always need fresh new capital to pay off > the old capital in order for the scheme to continue. When there is no fresh > new money, everything reverses and folks quickly realise the value of > positive cashflow._

That's... just economic growth in capitalism

<comment><USER46> You're on the verge of a breakthrough.

Capitalism as typically practiced works like a Ponzi scheme. It's not sustainable without someone, like a government or a standards body, setting boundaries. For example: Banks destroy economies without a government saying "you need to have _x_ cash for _y_ loans" and "you need to pay into this fund to insure you against bank runs."

<comment><USER45> here's a breakthrough for ya: telling people tediously obvious facts and assuming their position so you can condescendingly patronise them will not get you far in any economic system

<comment><USER46> What happens when you condescendingly patronize someone who you think is being patronizingly condescending?

<comment><USER45> close, Bub. if you observe these posts just a little more carefully, you might work out _it has already happened to you_. namaste</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Old New Thing : Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/14/352949.aspx <comment><USER2> This is a good post about error handling and exceptions. I think the title should be changed to reflect that, as I almost didn't bother reading it.

I've slowly but surely gravitated away from using exceptions over the years, for different reasons than the author lays out (though I recognize some of what he's saying from my own experience).

I think the reason exceptions became popular is actually a psychological one: they are easy for the programmer. (I mean the programmer throwing the exception, not the poor sod who has to deal with it, which may be the same person of course.) You hit something you don't want to deal with? Just throw it. It's like the kids' game Hot Potato.

Ultimately, users pay the price for this evasion of responsibility, since they end up with a system that behaves erratically in cases that don't fit the happy path and is hard to understand. In the worst case, the exceptions are just thrown all the way up and the user ends up having to catch the hot potato. (Edit: you can generalize "user" here to include any programmer writing code that calls the original code.)

What I think is going on here is that programming is hard enough without error handling, and error handling makes it harder still. Good error handling models are dependent on the specifics of the program in question - they need to fit the contours of the system and of the domain itself. This is hard, so we don't want to do it, and since we can get away with deferring it, we do.

If you take a look at the author's examples, the code snippet he describes as "not bad" is the only one that attempts to handle the error in place. It's also the ugliest and by far the most complicated-looking. But the complexity is latent in all the other examples too. It's just deferred.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I am writing code on a project that uses exceptions, I'll use exceptions. If I'm writing my own code, I won't. Exceptions force people using your code to also add exception handling into their own applications. It's an intrusive error handling method, and this is one of the reasons I don't use it.

Did anybody ever prove scientifically or statistically that exceptions offer clear advantages over return-type error handling? Who decided that exceptions are the path for all programmers to follow?

<comment><USER4> Return-type errors force people using your code to also add error checking into their own applications at every call. It's an intrusive error handling method, and this is one of the reasons I don't use it.

The clear advantages of exceptions over return-type error handling is:

\- Exceptions cannot be ignored, error codes are ignored _by default_.

\- Exceptions can (and do) contain significantly more information about the error. Stack traces are typical but since exceptions are objects they can contain any amount of extra information. Error codes are typically integers. Sometimes they're just negative integers.

\- Exceptions free-up the return of functions for useful results. You can call functions as parameters: readAll(OpenFile(GetFileName())).

Pretty much any negative practice regarding exceptions apply equally to error codes.

<comment><USER2> _Exceptions cannot be ignored_

Yet they routinely are, or they are "handled" using a top-level catch that allows for no meaningful action and is little better than throwing the exception to the user.

 _Error codes are typically integers._

There's no reason why an error can't be an object.

 _Exceptions free-up the return of functions for useful results._

The practice I currently favor is to represent errors as objects of the same type the function returns, objects that represent something meaningful about the error. Of course this isn't always possible and in any case requires good design. There are a lot of advantages to it, though.

 _Pretty much any negative practice regarding exceptions apply equally to error codes._

Except the one big problem with exceptions, which is the transfer of control out of context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I quit reading when he said recogninzing bad error-code-based code is really easy, and that recognizing not-bad error-code-based code is hard. DOES NOT COMPUTE. A or ~A, for goodness sake.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes, he makes a good point. Writing good code is hard. I suppose even for him: [http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://blogs.msdn.com/oldn...](http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/14/352949.aspx)

1135 Errors according to w3c. Yes, may not be relevant or important, but I think it's interesting.

<comment><USER7> If I remember correctly, the MSDN Blogs software is written for all the blogs, and it's not written by Raymond Chen.

(Also, counting the number of errors as a statistic is tricky: It looks like that blog theme was designed for HTML, not XHTML. That would account for a large majority of the errors.)</comment></comment>


DreamIT Ventures Opens Up Applications For Summer 09 Funding Cycle - <AUTHOR> http://dreamitventures.com/node/3 <comment><USER3> They still have the default Drupal favicon up there! hahaha, no wonder they are begging for hackers...

They need to hire a copy editor "We each founded, built and successfully sold one or more business."

Seriously, the videos on this page are all quotes from very very young kids. <http://dreamitventures.com/node/16>

All those videos talk about how great everyone is and wow, it's so awesome and look around, this is totally terrific,

EXCEPT! They never say WHY! they never talk about anything quantifiable. Sure, it's fun, and exciting and great, but are they going to help you get your product to market? How much of your equity are they going to take for it? Was it worth it?

No one has talked about any of that. These guys seem like marketing scamsters and I'm highly highly skeptical.

I would suggest any young entrepreneur come here to HN first and get help before going to those guys.

Back during the dot-com boom, I saw lots and lots of incubators like this, idealabs, et all and they were largely a big waste of time. They were fun though!

If you're looking to have "fun" these kinds of shops may be the place to go, but if you are looking to be productive and build something valuable that is going to make a lasting impression on the world, I suspect these guys are a massive waste of time.

It seems from the videos and the marketing mumbo-jumbo that they are preying on the young, passionate, and inexperienced minds that would be better served somewhere else.

All the portfolio companies are Web 2.0 me toos, mostly boring, and short lasting "features" -- not real products that improve the world around us in any substantial way.

I can sense a bit of "anger" in my tone here. I feel a big sense of "these guys are not good" when I browse around their site...

But that's just my intuition and intuition can be wrong, so whatever.

<http://dreamitventures.com/node/6> anthillz is trying to get out of technology what human relationships are for. Go meet people in the real world.

Beanstockd? It was a blog and they are trying to build a company?

Drop card? Why would I waste my time putting my personal info into a shady startup just so i can text my contact info to someone when i could jsut hand them a business card?

ugh... these guys are so transparent.

Look at the videos! They just got some kids up there to do a presentation on a screen in front of a no one so they could add these vimeos to their site to make it look legit.

Watch the interview best one, there's only one old guy there and the startup is okay, but is it "worth" anything? probably not. Any motivated person isn't going to need them and i can't see anyone paying for it...

There's nothing new or novel about any of their startups...

They're marketing hope. They are behind the times, you want to work with someone /ahead/ of the times.

Look elsewhere first!!

<comment><USER4> There are not quite as glamorous as the start-ups you may have heard of but they have been around: <http://sleep.fm/blog.html>

Does that make DreamIt ventures automatically a great option? No. I think everyone who looked at the website noticed the spelling/grammatical errors, nebulous role descriptions, and laughable testimonials. Their 15,000 bucks may not be the same as 15,000 from YC but they seem to be a legitimate option. At the very least they are a "safety" incubator to YC one would think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like the idea of having lots of YC imitators to open up options, but there's ONE thing that makes me want to stay away from DreamIT.

When you apply, you have to be an "innovator", "strategist", or "hacker."

The implication is you can't be, for instance, both an innovator and a hacker. Either you're calling the shots and designing products, or you're just some code monkey that's hooked up with some people who are.

For me, part of the reason I'm an entrepreneur in the first place is the rejection of this kind of dichotomy.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Sounds like they're almost trying to hire douchebags. Innovator? Really? No innovator calls himself an innovator. Nobody who matters uses that word. With the exception of patent law, where it actually is very convenient and legitimate to use this word.

<comment><USER7> You're right, it's like a creative person calling themselves creative. Or the glaring problem with the everyone is special mentality.

 _"If you define your personality as creative, it only means you understand what is perceived to be creative by the world at large, so you're really just following a rote creative template. That's the opposite of creativity. Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time." - <USER2> Klosterman_

<comment><USER4> So, paradoxically, if you are creative according to whatever definition created by society, you are not actually creative? So if you observe your own creativity it is not creativity? That quote is quite silly.

Creativity is the ability to come up with new ideas. A creative person can certainly recognize that they are good at coming up with new ideas.

<comment><USER6> This also happens with wisdom; I had a teacher who said that the minute someone said he was wise, he stopped being wise. I don't think creativity or wisdom are like amplitudes in quantum mechanics, though; observing character traits does not destroy them. Rather, I think this is a reflection of the lake Wobegon effect: most everyone thinks he is at a higher percentile than he actually is. Most people think they are above average. The really capable people realize this and figure that they have to say they're in the bottom percentiles in order to fill in those gaps. So that's how you get B performers who think they are A performers, C performers who think they are B performers, and A performers who think they are F performers.

I don't try to be modest or arrogant. I prefer to try to be correct. If I'm good at something, I might miss out on opportunities if I think I'm bad at said thing. For example, I might take too much shit at work and not realize I can call the shots because they need me there.

I see no reason why a young man can't be wiser than an old man. Sure, an old man has lived longer, but the young man might have more experience if he's lived better and faced the truth more often. So I think I'm wiser than most people. Reality bears this out: I think there's going to be a housing bust, and then there's housing bust (I thought this was going to happen early 2006). I take Robert Schiller's word for it when he says this is going to be the worst depression since that Great one, and then it happens (early 2007). I could go on, but the point is, would I be better off by saying I'm a fool? I could have made a lot of money off these this crisis if I trusted my gut.

There are also things I know I suck at. I'm terrible at holding my tongue (4 percentile, I'm guessing). I ramble. I'm also really clumsy in a few kinds of social environments, particularly pregames.

If you have nagging doubts about your creativity, ignore them and look at your work. Is it creative? There's really no need to be bashful, at least in private.

<comment><USER4> If the quote said it works this way for "most" people then maybe there is an argument.

Some of the greatest minds have remarked at how little we know but those same great minds realized that they were great in the context of their time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The quality of a program like YC depends on two intertwined factors:

\- who is running it, so they provide real value from real experts

\- the reach they have, so that the applicants are top-notch and you benefit from interacting with other rising stars

In the case of DreamIt, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. If no one has heard of you, no matter how great your coaching will be, you end up with second rate projects and there's not much you can do to make stupid ideas fly. And once you are known for a batch of mediocre projects, none of the smart entrepreneurs want to join your program, and you are stuck.

I hate cronysm, but who you know matters so much and makes such a big difference, it's scary.

</comment><comment><USER9> I hope someone in their organization sees this thread and ganders over here to provide some insight.

When developing most products, you must know that your audience is not an engineering student or a hacker and probably don't know how to SSH into your server.

But I wonder if they have a separate perception of hackers, and if that could imply that they're looking for a different type of hacker than the type on news.YC?

</comment><comment><USER9> ... we will offer you a $5,000 DollarshipTM to participate in DreamIt ...

!!

</comment><comment><USER10> ... at least their site looks better than it did last year.

</comment><comment><USER11> What/Who is DreamIT? Is anyone familiar with these folks?

<comment><USER12> Taking a glance at the partners / speakers / advisors, there are some seriously smart and successful people in there <http://dreamitventures.com/node/2>

I think the YC crowd is hating way too quickly, there is plenty of room for more then one seed stage YC style fund... especially on the east coast now that YC is full-time in Palo Alto.

<comment><USER13> I don't understand why the HN community isn't more supportive of these YC clones. It's simple: the more clones the better your odds of getting money and getting your startup off the ground.

Also, it _theoretically_ could be better to be a "big fish" in a small pond than to be a "little fish" in the big YC pond.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So what is the tally of incubator/Y Combinator like programs out there?

1\. Y Combinator 2\. TechStars 3\. DreamIT 4\. ?

<comment><USER15> From UIUC, <http://www.iventures10.com/> < IV10.

Disclaimer: I am not associated with them.

<comment><USER16> Run, don't walk from IllinoisVENTURES. Read up on them at TheFunded.

They're probably even worse than these Dreamit guys, but they are definitely of the same ilk.

<comment><USER17> Slightly different ilk, I think, but IllinoisVENTURES will offer the worst valuations out of anyone in this game.

<comment><USER16> Their valuations are terrible and the program's entire purpose is to try to get lucky and latch onto the next YouTube coming out of UIUC.

It's like YC except without any of the benefits and with terrible terms. There is no value added.

<comment><USER18> The whole Illinois/Chicago group is a bunch of way-too-late wannabes who are looking to take advantage of people. Startupnomics is 200 bucks with real people; DePaul's startup conference is 600 with no value.

The environment here are _these people_. This is why I go on and on about "Chicago is the next Detroit".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reads like parody.

</comment><comment><USER19> There is a difference between them and YC: YC requires you to have an idea, DreamIT just wants ambitious hackers and business people. In a way they have found a way to be even earlier stage than YC.

<comment><USER20> My impression is that PG et al. require an idea as a way of figuring out who can think of reasonable ideas. They don't require you to stick with it, so primarily they're looking for good people. Requiring an idea is just another way to try and sort out the wheat from the chaff, even if the idea in question isn't the final one used for the startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One of the features is "free Microsoft software". How is that a feature?

</comment><comment><USER22> spelling error "devloper"

<comment><USER23> Overall the quality of their writing is a bit low. This doesn't mean their program is good or bad, but it just leaves a bad first impression for me.

But I would also like to know more info - perhaps someone needs to whip up a a review site for early investment companies.

Lastly I was wondering why they separate 'innovator' vs 'strategist' vs 'hacker'.

<comment><USER24> Don't worry, once you hit level 20 you can multiclass.

It actually looks like their model is that they find three strangers with different skillsets and put them together in a team. It's an interesting idea, but it seems like interpersonal problems down the line could be a pretty big problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sleep.fm.

<comment><USER16> Are these guys for real?

<http://sleep.fm/about.html>

<comment><USER17> Extremely real. The founder posts here occasionally.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ryanspahn>

<comment><USER16> I meant with that site I linked to. The front page looks pretty slick, but the other pages look like they were made in 1996.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Calling All 'Hackers': <http://dreamitventures.com/node/12></comment>


Sun/Oracle removed public firmware downloads - <AUTHOR> http://techbert.tumblr.com/post/569726833/sun-oracle-removed-public-firmware-downloads

<comment><USER2> Oracle removed public downloads of pretty much everything except the initial releases of some products. Patches for Solaris, Sun Studio, etc., all require paid support ("entitlement" in Oracle speak). So if you had a Solaris installation and hit some bugs, your only choice is to re-install using the latest release, provided it is available. For Sun Studio the situation is even more insane: traditionally the initial releases of their C/C++ compiler were always so buggy that it required immediate patching to make them usable. And since Sun historically does not release updates for their compilers (unlike Solaris), this makes Sun Studio pretty much useless unless you have paid for support.

The firmware story is hilarious. You should go read some comments on Sun's website. People bought Sun hardware and when they went to download drivers to make that hardware work with their OS, they were told they needed to pay for "software support" to get them. What they got with hardware was apparently "hardware support" and it doesn't cover drivers/firmware. One word: insane.

<comment><AUTHOR> > when they went to download drivers to make that hardware work with their OS, > they were told they needed to pay for "software support"

I smell a class action lawsuit if that's true. It's one thing to make obtaining the drivers more difficult, but completely something else to remove access to something already offered and available to users when they paid for hardware. (PS3 otheros comes to mind now...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Huh. I guess that after recent changes (Solaris downloads, etc.), most people will find alternative vendors in both hardware and software arena.

It's not like there's no competition anyways. It is funny though, that a company like Sun, after acquisition by Oracle is deploying procedures we more commonly associate with IBM, HP, and other behemoths of the IT world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wait - you don't associate Oracle with a behemoth? You know they target large corporations and will happily recommend you to buy a cluster of 64GB 8+ core machines, right? Have a look at validated configurations... I can think of only one larger database company, but they design stuff for you from scratch.

<comment><USER3> heh, I do actually, maybe I should have phrased it better ;).

My point was, Sun was trying to be a hip and modern company, open sourcing a lot of their work, and then Oracle bought them and in the best impersonation of Eric Cartman, just said "you damn hippies" :), and fucked all that effort up.

I did expect it to happen, but I'm still sad it did happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If they force me to pay for the JRE, I will switch to Python subito.

<comment><USER5> I'm starting to worry about the future of clojure, given that it's based on the JVM.

<comment><USER6> You can use the OpenJDK to host Clojure.

At least until Oracle decides they want to collect some money for all Sun patents they bought with the package.

Oh boy... This is getting really nasty real quick.

<comment><USER5> Yes, there's OpenJDK, but I'm a bit suspicious over whether enough of a community has built up around OpenJDK to continue development without Sun support.

I'd be delighted to be proved wrong, of course.

<comment><USER6> Me too. I really don't like Java the language, but the JVM is a really cool platform to host your code on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nothing to see here. Oracle want its own, totally controlled market, with their hardware and their software, like that IBM have.

You want support - pay us. You want updates - pay us. You want JRE - pay us (coming soon =)

<comment><AUTHOR> I could understand such system for new downloads... but this just seems insane. They had to implement a new system, change the old one, retrain the phone monkeys and then waste time of both the support guys and their managers, because the issue is not easy to resolve. They might potentially gain some new annoyed support customers, but the rest will not be likely to go for Sun hardware in the future if they have a choice.

Is alienating customers ever a good choice? Apple's new rules, Facebook privacy, now Oracle... who's next?

<comment><USER7> It seems like the easiest way to make money in the post-opensource era - pay a small sum for your each move. =)

<comment><USER8> I think the sum will have to be fairly substantial. The cost of involving support, or any kind of human contact, in the chain between needing a download and getting it is likely tens of thousands times more expensive than maintaining a self-service system.

It's the enterprise sales model, where software contracts are measured in megabucks, because to do anything cheaper would be more expensive than the cost of sales. I think relying on anything from Sun that Oracle can likely find a way to charge for would be foolish, unless you're big enough to afford those kinds of costs.

<comment><USER9> Well, if they're sane enough to fix this (not requiring the opening of a "formal service case") for all hardware bought before March 16th....

I suppose we will be able to judge the likelihood of their success by if, how and how quickly they fix this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Searchin is like Taboola for recruitment - <AUTHOR> http://searchinapp.co

<comment><USER2> Never heard of Taboola. Might want to choose a more widely known analogy!

<comment><USER2> Why the downvote of a friendly suggestion? Honest question.</comment></comment>


TwitCode – A Microblog for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://twitcode.com/ <comment><USER2> Might need to change the name

<comment><AUTHOR> legal issues?

<comment><USER2> Twit is often considered derogatory slang, so a connotation issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand. thought it would be an interesting prefix for a known format, like wikileaks wiki.

researching i found that the word has existed since 2009 [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=twitcode](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=twitcode)

<comment><USER2> Just saying, I didn't click through because of the name. Also, yet another dev blog platform

<comment><AUTHOR> yes another, dev.to is cool but is a blog not a microblog.

twitcode is the first dev focused microblog I've ever seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> details at [https://dev.to/aicoutos/twitcode-a-microblog-for- developers-...](https://dev.to/aicoutos/twitcode-a-microblog-for- developers-2909)</comment>


After California decriminalized pot, teen arrest, overdose, dropout rates fell - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/15/after-california-decriminalized-weed-teen-arrest-overdose-and-dropout-rates-fell/ <comment><USER2> The burden of proof should be on the people who want to restrict rights, not on the people who want to liberalize.

This concept is more or less in line with the spirit of the Bill of Rights, but seems to be curiously absent from common American discourse.

Enforcing ANY law, even a seatbelt law, restricts rights and causes some amount of harm. I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does, even aside from the metaphysical harm of having your freedom reduced.

It is as if the harm inherent in law enforcement doesn't count, as if there are kinds of acceptable and unacceptable violence. Which doesn't seem like a philosophically defensible ideology to me.

<comment><USER3> The thing about that is you can phrase nearly anything in terms of freedom. Illegal cannabis = freedom to live in a place where your children aren't exposed to drugs. I don't agree, but for me the notion of freedom isn't very helpful.

<comment><USER4> > Illegal cannabis = freedom to live in a place where your children aren't > exposed to drugs

You're abusing the term "freedom". Freedom is the right to act, not immunity from the effects of others' actions.

<comment><USER5> >Freedom is the right to act, not immunity from the effects of others' actions.

What about the freedom to keep slaves? The slaves are "free" to run away, they're just not "immune" from the actions of the slave keeper if they get caught.

This is why the term freedom is almost useless. People inevitably mean "the set of freedoms I care about", which will always come at the expense of other freedoms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just as Eric Sterling, Ethan Nadelmann, groups like SSDP, and many other expert advocates predicted.

At least in terms of arrest and overdose, it seems so obvious; I can't fathom how people predict an increase in death, disease, and / or crime being caused by ending prohibition. What models are they using?!

<comment><USER7> _What models are they using?!_

When I was in law school, I heard a very interesting guest lecture by a law professor from another law school who has studied the history of Prohibition (of selling alchohol) in the United States. People who were opposed to Prohibition, that is people who thought that alcohol should be legal to produce and sell, pointed out that Prohibition greatly increased corruption of police forces in many places. People who supported Prohibition pointed out that alcohol causes many medical harms for many users. The historical record shows that they were both right. When Prohibition was repealed, corruption of local police forces to prompt police to look the other way and not enforce Prohibition went down, but deaths from cirrhosis of the liver and other bad health effects of alcohol went up.

I'm on record here on HN (I won't look up the links to previous comments just now) as being persuaded by Richard Branson's argument that decriminalizing marijuana in the country Portugal reduced use, and thus ended up reducing individual and societal harm from marijuana. That country still has court- supervised drug treatment programs (but without criminal penalties) for drug users. As far as I know, Minnesota's de facto policy is much like this. There is a federal law of the land in the United States that criminalizes sale and even possession of marijuana, but there is minimal enforcement here of statutes against possession of small amounts of marijuana. There is a big industry here of drug treatment centers, and people come to Minnesota from all over the world to get clean from drug addictions. If we can devote more law enforcement resources to more serious crimes, and fewer to enforcement of minor possession offenses, I'm fine with that. But I also hope that most people never start to use marijuana at all, and everyone who does use it is careful to get a reality check from sober people on how well they are really functioning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "does not lead to any number of doomsday scenarios envisioned by legalization opponents"... of course the real doomsday scenario - poorer employment prospects for Law Enforcement - hopefully will happen.

<comment><USER9> It's not just that cops make a huge number of useless, insignificant arrests for drugs, there's a whole industry built on top of those arrests: All the prosecutors, judges, clerks, bailiffs, parole officers, prison guards and the whole prison infrastructure. Then add all the retired CJ employees teaching the current policing doctrine in community colleges. That's the edifice that has to be razed to avoid the situation in Ferguson.

All of those pseudo-professions have been massively inflated and is a kind of last refuge for men with strong necks and weak reasoning skills. It's subculture, and that subculture doesn't have a beneficial effect on the nation's culture as a whole.

All of that employment and wasted activity also shows up in the plus columns for productivity and GDP, warping our ability to compare our economy to other industrial nations.

<comment><USER10> "Think of the jobs" is almost as bad as "Think of the kids" as far as excuses for things go.

We see it a lot in the realm of energy production too. LEO or Roughneck can't be the only job these folks could possibly get if there were fewer of those positions.

<comment><USER11> I'd say that "think of the jobs" is generally a damned sight worse than "think of the kids" as rationalizations for bad policy go. Jobs defense is often protecting an explicit waste of resources, while kids at least are worth protecting and tend to break libertarian models of the universe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like California is following the overall trends for the "Rest of the US" (where the data is available).

Not sure how much this actually means, if anything.

<comment><USER13> The significance is more that the panic-mongers are wrong. Even if California is just following trend, it means that prohibition makes no difference, so from a social policy perspective you have two choices:

1) Some number of people smoke weed, there are no violent gangs involved in its cultivation and sale, harmless college students don't have their lives ruined by a drug arrest and the security-industrial complex gets smaller while its former minions have to go do something that isn't a deadweight loss.

2) Exactly the same number of people smoke weed, there are violent gangs involved in its cultivation and sale, harmless college students have their lives ruined by a drug arrest and the security-industrial complex gets bigger while its minions suck the life out of the productive economy.

Which would you choose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pot decriminalized, arrest rate falls. Tautology?

<comment><USER15> They are not counting arrests for possession prior to the change in law in the stat, so not a tautology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is not enough data to draw any conclusions.

<comment><USER17> What annoys me the most: They only include one year of data before.

So, assuming they would have shown US and California data for, say, 5 years before legalization, and during that time, there would have been a strong correlation between the two, in the numbers shown. And then a sudden split (decrease in correlation) in the two years following, it would have been much more convincing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The most shocking thing in that article is that the US-wide suicide rate for 15-19 year olds has increased by 11% in a year.

When your kids are killing themselves in increasing numbers... you have to wonder if your society is really as healthy and wonderful as you like to think it is.

<comment><USER19> This article is misleading. Im not agains mariuana, but still. These numbers are distorted.

F.i, there isn't a 20% drop of overdose in CA, its only -0.6%. In the US its +0.1%.

There is no 11% increase, the 11% is the % increase of the percentage of suicides. In ca, the increase in suicides is 0.5%. And in the rest of the US it is also 0.5%.

Really think hard when seeing numbers, you're fooled easily.

<comment><USER18> When telling others they're fooled easily, do check your assertions first, otherwise you look like an ass!

7.8/100,000 -> 8.7/100,000 is an 11% uptick in the number of deaths by suicide. I'm not saying that that's even remotely related to weed.

There _is_ a 20% drop in overdose - that's not -0.6% no matter how you shake it - that's -0.6 deaths per 100k - which in absolute terms means the OD rate per cap has shifted from 0.003% to 0.0024% - so actually a 0.0006% change in the overall rate - but a 20% delta. It's -23.3% for 2010 -> 2012.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Every time I see a headline like this my reaction is along the lines of "yeah, sounds about right". I imagine there have got to be people for whom they these headlines are surprising, and that confounds me.

</comment><comment><USER21> Won't somebody please think of the gangsters! How are they supposed to earn a living now? Imagine poor old Al Capone without a market for expensive booze, how would he have gotten by?

This message brought to you by the "Partnership" for a Drug Free America. (never quite clear on who the "partners" are)

... with apologies to Charles Stross :-)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#Merchant_Princes...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#Merchant_Princes_series)

<comment><USER22> > Won't somebody please think of the gangsters! How are they supposed to earn > a living now?

It may sound funny, but to me it's one of the few reasonable arguments against legalization (or at least something to think about). I don't know in the US, but where I live (in France), there are a lot of people that live from selling cannabis. They're not Al Capone or dangerous criminals, just poor people that don't have better opportunities.

From our leaders perspective, this may be one reason not to address the problem of legalization (that, plus the fact that it's still largely unpopular).

<comment><USER23> Well, here in Brazil they _are_ dangerous criminals and very, very violent, and no, they won't turn into upstanding citizens if the money from drugs dries up. They'll turn into other forms of cime, probably just as violent. However, in the long term they won't be making as much money as now, so they won't have the crazy arsenal they have today (military grade stuff, like rocket launchers, grenades, etc). I find it ridiculous that we keep it illegal, which drives the price way up, which fuels the gangs pockets, so they become _heavily_ armed, and in turn so does the police, and the result is that not a week goes by in some cities where an innocent isn't hit by a stray bullet. In the end, I'd rather have someone die of an overdose because they chose to and ended up (unfortunately) in that situation than to have the whole city hostage to this unwinnable war, and to have people die just because they happen to live in a bad neighborhood.

<comment><USER24> Maybe they won't turn to other forms of crime. Maybe they'll get into the newly minted legal recreational drug industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Logically, if you stop criminalising people then you get less "criminals". Makes me wonder how much more senseless laws should be abolished for the greater common good...

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm glad Marijuana overdoses decreased.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is my surprised face.

</comment><comment><USER28> Apparently locking kids up for their own good didn't do much good after all.

<comment><USER29> "doesn't" \- There's plenty of helpful/entrepreneurial kids still going to jail, and plenty of other drugs that are still harshly criminalized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Dropout rates fell, but presenting the data as a percentage change of a percentage is a bad way of reporting the data since the number of students in the system may have changed because of demographics.

<comment><AUTHOR> 14.7% to 11.4% is a pretty solid change in two years, and it was progressive (13.1% inbetween). I wouldn't expect demographics to impact much in two years.

The improved / stabilized economy may have had a big impact however.

<comment><USER19> But it is really overselling the picture. This article is misleading.

Numbers, numbers, numbers and numbers... are hard.</comment></comment></comment>


On Adria Richards - <AUTHOR> http://gist.io/5212877

<comment><USER2> Can we give it a rest? There are already enough Adria Richards-related threads floating around.

<comment><USER3> I agree; it's a shame that she over-reacted, that the employer of the person who was fired over-reacted, but I think we've heard enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didn't knew about this (pathetic?) story, but reading the linked venturebeat post with the explanation and the socks joke clearly this Adria doesn't come out too well...

As an european i must admit that my first reaction to the whole thing was thinking "only in the US", overreacting when sensible topics are involved. If this really happened as she describe, i would have just officially warned the guy for being _extremely_ childish/idiotic at a public event. But this is just me and my desire to be surrounded by adults.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not only Adria Richards should apologize.

The company that fired the programmer must also.

</comment><comment><USER6> "TL;DR" should go towards the top of your writing.</comment>


The Worst Programming Environment in the World? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER3> From the write-up:

"BANCStar actually came with a "screen generator" that was supposed to be used to construct applications. But the 5.1c version of the generator was so limited that experienced programmers soon began to pry off the covers and modify directly the intermediate code that the run-time module actually executed."

All of the numbers you're looking at are an object code for a VM that (apparently) allowed for user-defined screens in the BancStar product. Programmers found themselves reverse-engineering the meanings of the different numbers and began to build the text-format object-code by hand.

This doesn't appear to have ever been intended to be a programming environment in this form.

<comment><USER4> I feel like this is an important point. One could easily say "omg look at this horrible programming language I have to deal with --

30001000: 55

30001001: 8b ec

30001003: 6a ff

30001005: 68 90 10 00 30

3000100a: 68 91 dc 4c 30"

When it's just x86 and nobody is supposed to be using it directly. Of course, we have workable tools that sit on top of machine code so we don't have to, and apparently that wasn't the case for OP, but I think that's more of a statement about their inability to do the one thing makes progress in computing possible: create abstractions.

<comment><USER5> There was certainly a time that people wrote assembler, and even machine code, directly.

People of course still do write assembler directly (but not as much as they used to!), but I don't think many have written machine code directly for a while. (Maybe for some specialized hardware?).

But yeah, it's good to note that this underlying sort of vm code wasn't intended to be written by humans... but I wouldn't say the customers were wrong, exactly, to successfully use it to do high business value things with the product they were locked into, that they couldn't otherwise.

It does make one think how happy the customers would have been if the vendor had provided an actually intended fleible scripting or 'macro' language, and then to think about the aspects of the market that still didn't lead to the vendor doing so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kind of reminds me of MUMPS, which is a real bunch of crazy that I had to use for a time.

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

Edit: The examples on the wikipedia page make it look less crazy than it is. For example every keyword can be abbreviated to a single letter, and _was_ abbreviated to a single letter in the code I had to read. Also, each variable is connected to a global database which (in 1990) had no ACID properties or staging system, so better hope your undebugged program didn't delete any patient data (or worse, randomly modify it).

<comment><USER7> oh, and if we're discussing a certain emr company in madison...

in the beginning, in the 70s or so, ram was very tight and the source was interpreted, not compiled; variable names were shortened to save memory. So the oldest core routines have single letter variable names

variables aren't declared; when you use a name, the interpreter just travels up the call stack looking for somewhere that variable is defined. so if you accidentally use the wrong name, especially with the strong bias to very short variable names, in nested enough code you will find that variable. This led to some amazing bugs

the prefix of the command to delete a node in the internal db (really just global sparse arrays) deleted everything. A coworker fat fingered that in a customer's prod systems and took down a hospital chain you've heard of. I just heard him wail, "Oh SHIT" and sprint out of our office; I later found out he ran for the recovery team.

they also had 15mm lines of vb6

oh, and they love h1b slave labor. Bring them over, abuse them, threaten to fire them if they don't work their asses off, and leave them with no transferable job skills. I presume the ceo uses her billions to salve her conscience.

<comment><USER8> That same company refused to even consider me for a job after I graduated from the University of Minnesota because they thought my GPA was too low. So instead, I ended up in Seattle at Microsoft where I managed a good chunk of the Visual Studio IDE.

It wasn't until years later that I realized I'd totally dodged a bullet.

<comment><USER9> I once got an email from them rejecting me for a job there.

I had never applied...

<comment><USER8> You might even say that's...Epic.

Or not. I'd recommend not.

<comment><USER10> Ah, thanks! You filled in the final piece of the puzzle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And I thought 'EZ-C' was bad. Still, it was the worst I've used. As far as I know, a large retailer still uses the data format and libraries from an awful "4th generation language" called 'EZ-C'.

Fun parts: There were a fixed number of variables. All variables were global. There were two control structures: if/then and goto

Imagine a Point-Of-Sale application written in such. A 100,000+ line Point-of- Sale program. Imagine the fun of chasing down re-use of a variable with no debugger.

EZ-C was supposed to be a simple language with built-in screen handling (via curses) and data file handling (with variant records and multiple indices). The theory was that you wrote code in EZ-C and debugged it, since the simpler syntax would reduce errors. EZ-C came with a program that would comple your source and link against EZ-C libraries. The best of all possible worlds - <USER2> nice interpreted language that compiled for blazing fast speed!

That was the theory. In practice, the compiler was broken, and so all programs ran via an interpreter called 'dparse'.

So (and I can hear you saying) I started to do what many of you would do: I started to write my own parser with the idea of building a compiler for the language. And that's when Mike, one of the older developers/admins/jack-of- all-trades/wise elders, stopped me. "Don't do that," he said, "because if you do that, we'll never stop writing in EZ-C."

And so I stopped immediately.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Fun parts: There were a fixed number of variables. All variables were > global. There were two control structures: if/then and goto

It's just like BANCStar! I forgot to mention that one of the most useful features of the LIST annotator was to generate a cross-reference listing. That feature alone made the practice of re-using working-storage variables _much_ safer, because you could compare the cross-reference indexes of two different programs at a glance easily. I strongly encourage the development of that kind of safety/error-detection/error-prevention tool in any environment whenever possible.

Seriously, your Mike sounds like a wise person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I Thought I'd repost some of losethos's comment, seeing as he is hell-banned, but the comment was quite relevant.

losethos: Smart American kids my age had C64s and Apple IIs. We all entered 6502 machine code into DATA statements in BASIC programs. Everyone did it. It seems so fantastical and primitive to a monkey, doesn't it. Generally, we used monitor program to disassemble and assemblers, though you had to buy an assembler. Every store had magazines with BASIC programs full of DATA statements with graphic and machine code data. People typed it in. We had xsum bytes on blocks.

<comment><USER13> _Smart American kids my age had C64s and Apple IIs. We all entered 6502 machine code into DATA statements in BASIC programs._

Yeah, but (similarly to the 'environment' that is the subject of the post) those DATA statements contained the output of some sort of tool. Nobody _wrote_ machine code this way.

<comment><USER14> > Nobody wrote machine code this way.

I'd be careful about that claim.

It was not _that_ unusual to "hand assemble" programs, as it was not that unusual to remember the codes. The 6502 has less than 60 documented opcodes (and quite a few undocumented ones with various weird but in some cases somewhat usable behaviour) and only a few addressing modes, and all opcodes are single byte, so knowing most or even all of them doesn't take that much exposure.

Some of those values are so ingrained that I still remember the decimal values, despite the fact that the moment I started using tools to work with assembly on the C64, it was all hex

e.g. 169 decimal is "load accumulator immediate" (LDA #[8 bit operand) on the 6502. (or A9 in hex)

<comment><USER13> _It was not that unusual to "hand assemble" programs, as it was not that unusual to remember the codes._

Yeah, I grew up with 6502s, too.

You'll think I'm weaseling out here, but "hand assembly" isn't what I was talking about.

I feel the original comment implies that some people, intending to write significant machine code, sat down with BASIC and started typing in DATA statements. And I don't think _that_ happened to any significant degree.

As in the case of the "programming environment" under discussion, machine language routines force-fed into BASIC DATA statements were the output of another tool or process -- whether assembled by hand or by machine -- and were an intermediate form that was never intended to be editable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of one of the things we work with in our company, Amadeus EDIFACTs. I want to buy the person who initially wrote the parsing for it at our workplace a beer.

Example snippet, with fake data (AIR- BLK791;7A;;232;0750058720;1A1216900;007501\r\nAMD 0750068617;1/1; \r\nGW759208;1A1216900\r\nNXC1A 4O0ORDT030;0751;XYZC7213P;67502886;XYZC7213P;67502886;XYZC7213P;67502886;XYZC7213P;67502886;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;TA 4O0ORDT\r\nA-LACSA;LR 1330\r\nB-TTP/INV/T3/RT\r\nC-7906/ 1833SEGS-1173LGSU-B-9--\r\nD-127531;121751;121751\r\nG-X ;;XYZXYZ;\r\nH-001;002OYYZ; ... continued)

<comment><USER16> Sigh.... I'd forgotten about this (used to do this in a previous job)

Parsing airline flight bookings straight from raw sockets was not fun.

Thing is, it does the job, and if you watch users requesting and making bookings with the system (or other similar travel service bookings using things like VT320 terminals), I'd bet a web interface couldn't actually be faster. But only if you know how to use it.

Rather ironically, about 4 years ago, they added a "web service" to this which just wrapped the console output directly in a single set of XML tags - I kid you not - no attempt to nicely separate atoms into separate tags.

<comment><USER17> Someone needs to invent a word for the job of gluing together horrific data formats and/or scrubbing that data with regex and trying to semantically parse it.

Anyone who hasn't had this job during their programming career is very lucky.

"Poogrokking"?

<comment><AUTHOR> The _Oxford English Dictionary_ needs to know about this word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of this ol' gem.

[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/We-Use- BobX.aspx](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/We-Use-BobX.aspx)

But yeah, BANCStar still probably takes the cake.

<comment><USER10> I did a search for bobx... It brought up some... Interesting... Results!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _I 'm not too worried about revealing a lot of proprietary information here, as only about ten people in the world can read this code:_

and here I thought my friend's quip, "they're only about 500 of us in the world" who can write in the Q programming language (for kx systems, another financial system) was mind-boggling. (Q is also knows for having incredibly terse, nearly unreadable syntax)

<comment><USER20> Lately I've been giving J a shot, and if Q is anything like it (IIRC Q comes from K and K is a parent of J via APL) it definitely is...

<comment><USER21> Q isn't too bad depending on how it's written. The book "Q for Mortals" is a good read. [http://www.amazon.com/For-Mortals-Tutorial-In- Programming/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/For-Mortals-Tutorial-In- Programming/dp/1434829014)

<comment><USER20> Problem is, I don't want to tangle with a non-for-commercial use language (and I can't pay.) At least with the GPL (J) I could do what I need behind the scenes and use the language as I see fit.

But I'd love to give Q a go, just for geekiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just write a simple assembler or compiler yourself?

<comment><USER23> That was my first thought (after looking for existing solutions). REPL and [https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9](https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9) for bonus points.

Also: [http://www.oocities.org/connorbd/tarpit/bancstar.html](http://www.oocities.org/connorbd/tarpit/bancstar.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well, lets get crackin' and see if we can reverse engineer this bad boy. I've done a lot of assembly and only a little direct bare machine language coding.

There's no lines without a first column, unlike pretty much all the others. I theorize the first column is opcode. You're running a lot of 3001 so I'm guessing thats "load" and it seems like you're clearing something a lot and occasionally stuffing real values in.

The second to last column looks kind of binary flag-y to me. Like LSB and 2LSB somehow team up to mean "zero flag". In fact I'm guessing opcode 8500 is a conditional skip.

The second column has a strange affinity to 1316 and its neighbor, and occasionally uses totally different class of numbers. So I'm guessing its the equivalent of variable name or more likely memory address.

I have a gut level guess the 11000 series opcodes are some kind of ALU op. Probably add. And you can add a constant, and condition codes in the 2nd to last column do things based on add result.

Another gut level guess... you're using signed ints and the last column is some kind of conditional jump and the OS lives in the upper half of memory which would be a negative number as per the last statement returning to the OS. I think you put your global libraries in the 30000 range and this module or whatever happens to live around reserved range of 22000 ish.

Then again maybe its crystal clear and if you just translate it into octal, you'll see PDP-8 instructions. Probably not, but...

I have this gut level guess this is a practical joke, like I'm supposed to recognize based on pattern matching that its a recursive implementation of a factorial.

<comment><USER20> 3001 is block conditional according to the post...

<comment><USER24> Well, thats interesting. I was working out of the wikipedia page not the github with more content.

I see the last column is for constant numerics and zero = 10000, interesting. I bet making a deposit or withdrawl of more than 10000 at a time takes some interesting code (or more likely, the UI hardcodes only 4 spaces)

Per the writeup, I imagine having 7 programmers on staff helped figure out what to do.

<comment><USER20> Well, I think this is nightmarish, from a purely context-switching type of thinking. I don't mind using letter opcodes, strings then are pretty clear to distinguish. But come on, number opcodes? Add 5 to B and store in AX (or whatever) turns into a nightmare of numbers. Of course, after a while you probably "get" that 3001 is a conditional. But I wonder how this affects the way you feel numbers from now on: what do BANCStar programmers think about the 2000 effect, 3001 Final Odissey (heh) or the TV show 24?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> And these are the people that we trust to handle our money. Sometimes it amazes me that the whole financial system hasn't already collapsed in a smoldering heap.

<comment><USER26> Well, it sort of did in 2007. But that wasn't a software error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This doesn't seem that bad.

It's basically machine language (i.e. lower level than assembler). I remember programming in machine language on an Apple II - I had no assembler, just a photocopied table of the OP codes, and I calculated them myself and entered the hex numbers and ran it.

I wrote part of a tetris clone that way (although never finished it).

<comment><USER12> Exactly. My very first thought was why on Earth would you even bother trying to program using that? Write an assembler, and then write a C compiler, for goodness sake!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> With COBOL as the obvious alternative (at the time) for financial applications, then I have to ask; why on earth would any sane company choose this programming language?

<comment><USER29> The real question is why haven't they written a library in a higher level language.

They have to be smart guys. If they didn't do it then there must be a good reason which is unfortunately ommited. Or they did it and this article is misleading and baity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of the people on the project were vocationally trained ex-mainframe programmers. You could say there was a general lack of awareness that there was any other way to do things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> From Wikipedia: "The BANCStar 10.0 release changed the "Screen Code" format to binary, and rearranged the numeric codes into an opcode with a variable number of parameter integers. The 10.0 opcode encoded a bit mapped length value that indicated the length of the command in words."

</comment><comment><USER31> I am a regular brainf*ck programmer and very interested in esoteric languages but this is beyond my expectations.

Maybe writing some kind of compiler would be a better idea. Or at least add a comment support and character check and more user friendly labels. They probably did that though (I hope they did).

</comment><comment><USER32> So, who's up for writing an LLVM backend?

</comment><comment><USER33> I thought RPG/400 and XSLT were bad. This is worse.

<comment><USER34> I'm OK with XSLT, but programming in RPG/400 using the SEU is somewhat akin to reading from the Necronomic%^^&$@#a-483&#&@^H NO CARRIER

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me of the scripting system for the custom scenario editor for the computer game "Realmz". You had a list of 8 text fields to enter numeric commands in, and 8 fields for arguments. There was a dropdown to use for reference for what the commands meant. If you needed your script to be longer than 8 commands, you had to create "sub-macros" and call those.

I can't find a screenshot of the macro editing screen, but here's a different screen from the level editor to give you an idea [http://rlmz.org/divinityscreens/divinity05.gif](http://rlmz.org/divinityscreens/divinity05.gif)

</comment><comment><USER36> Language? Maybe

Environment? The default Uniface "IDE" (Version 7 when I saw it in action) is a monstrosity that is surely given to programmers sent to hell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well...I used the word "environment" thoughtfully. It wasn't just the language, it was the dot-matrix printouts on continuous fan-fold paper (with no line numbers, you _didn 't_ want to get pages out of order), the hands-full of different coloured highlighter pens, the ring binder stuffed full of dog- eared photocopied pages (and pages and pages) of magic numbers, and the ever- present feeling of terror when you had to pick a "safe" working storage variable to steal the use of for a while.

God, I miss it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Still better than M4 though, right?

<comment><USER38> Better than Blankspace, without a doubt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't want to seem mean or anything. So, please don't take offence ^^; but: why didn't you parse it a more readable format and change it back into goobledigook when you wanted to use it?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good question, and a fair one. I did take a few stabs at it, but other programmers resisted any changes to their workflow that would have been required if a different source code representation were used. _They really could read that code by sight._ The LIST annotator slotted right into their workflow by highlighting the numbers they wanted to focus on---the English- like representation to the right was almost completely ignored---the arrows and boldface highlighting in the numeric listing, along with the line numbers, were what they used. Editing still had to be done on the raw numeric files, in KEDIT.

Of all the tools I tried introducing, LIST was the only one that was adopted. It took off spectacularly well and was beloved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Out of interest - for languages as horrendous at this, could someone not create an abstraction language, that essentially could compile to it, or be decompiled from it?

I mean, even if it was a simple abstraction that just made it a little more readable. Like ASM vs machine code.

</comment><comment><USER41> The worst for me has been sitting thousands of miles away working on a VDI, watching the screen refresh line by line with every change in code. We spend 8 to 10 hours for 3 hours of productive work. :-(

</comment><comment><USER42> While we are on the topic of programming infernos: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge)

</comment><comment><USER43> Nice try, but emacs already has a command for that.

</comment><comment><USER44> ... okay, somebody finally beat ASP.Net webforms.

<comment><USER45> I have to say that, having done Webforms over the summer, it's pretty bad but not _that_ bad. Webforms does have some (a few) strengths. There are a lot of simple apps where the "just freaking synchronize it" model works well. You could probably got most of the benefit/ease[0] with some stuff on top of, say, Django.

[0] Notice I didn't say "simplicity". ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Why wouldn't you write an intermediate language? Just a preprocessor for keywords and labels would do, I think.

</comment><comment><USER47> it would be trivial to make a some mnemonics and a compiler for the custom machine code.

</comment><comment><USER48> And I tought I had suffered with c++ builer years ago

</comment><comment><USER49> This seems like a case of people choosing to do something terrible than someone designing something terrible on purpose, though.

</comment><comment><USER50> This language should not exist.

<comment><USER51> Absurdities exist just so we can observe the absurdity. This is more a historical curiosity at this point, but I'm glad that it does exist. Just so I can be curious about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Title slightly misleading for non-programmers.

I imagined soemthing like programming for Al-Qaeda with a pistol pointed at you. :-)

<comment><USER53> > _" slightly misleading for non-programmers."_

You're on Hacker News.

<comment><USER54> Hence he has to overanalyze the headline.</comment></comment></comment>


To help soldiers make sense of data, the US military now issues the iPod Touch. - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/id/194623

<comment><USER2> yowza-- check out the photos/screenshots at the sniper software firm's site:

<http://www.knightarmco.com/bulletflight/>

<comment><USER3> Kinda surprised Apple approved software meant to help kill people. This seems like an app best meant for the enterprise distribution method.

<comment><USER4> I'd prefer it if Apple didn't enter the moral policing world. Well, beyond their already no-porn policy. But then again, Americans always were prudes(puritans) by European standards.

<comment><USER3> I never said I was against it being in the store, but it just seems like the sort of thing they would have an objection with (simply to avoid the bad PR). They have banned many other apps for much less obvious reasons.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


#NoEstimates isn't crazy - <AUTHOR> https://ronjeffries.com/articles/018-01ff/no-estimates-logic/ <comment><USER2> To a developer, estimates may seem useless. Which is understandable given how they're often abused as a bludgeon. I'd argue that management that holds developers to hard deadlines based on estimates is dysfunctional.

"Software should be built in the order that value is created." It's difficult to argue against that, but I'm going to try.

Maybe instead of being built in order of value created, it should be built in order of highest to lowest ROI. But to understand ROI you need to know not only the value added but the cost of building it. And the cost includes both the developer hours (direct investment) and the opportunity cost (what else would we be able to build during that time if we didn't build this?). Both of which require having some idea of how long/how much effort it will take.

If we build Foo now, will that push Bar back by a week? Or by 6 weeks? Or by 6 months? In an organization with sensible leadership, that will determine whether it's worthwhile to build Foo now or later or not at all.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you get news on China VC and tech scene? - <AUTHOR> China recently surpassed the US in volume of VC deal. But I read very little about all these deals on Hacker News or elsewhere.<p>Do you have sources you recommend? Both English language and Chinese. <comment><USER2> On the Launch newsletter they show all the deals going on, and many are foreign to US. You should see those there.</comment>