Private equity is a scam? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1246445485860118528 <comment><USER2> None of the dismissive comments here are addressing the actual points raised by @doctorow.

The scam is that people on wall street who know nothing about building or running a business have used their political connections and existing cash to become even richer and more powerful through government bailouts, selling off assets whose long-term value they don't understand and defaulting on pensions -- in other words, without actually creating any new wealth. Blackstone/Schwarzman is abusing the fact that starting a new hospital is difficult, even if the only one in the city is incompetently managed. They are not creating new value, and so should not be getting so rich. The people who do the actual work of starting and running successful businesses should be.

EDIT: Specifically, Schwarzman et al are abusing what economists call short- term "stickiness." It is not economically productive, as the firms with artificially high profit margins are not competitive and so a new equilibrium will eventually be established, putting them out of business. (That's why so many ultimately do) This property makes Schwarzman's behavior a form of rent- seeking, and not capital investment as he would probably have you believe. Anti-trust law is designed to limit the abuse of stickiness in the economy, but as rent seeking becomes the source of wealth for an increasing percentage of western elites, anti-trust and other financial regulations designed to combat abuses have become increasingly difficult to enforce.

<comment><USER3> The problem is anti-trust is sleeping with PE folks. Our government has people coming in and out of corporations with conflict of interests.

Here is Matt Stroller's take on Private Equity. [https://mattstoller.substack.com/](https://mattstoller.substack.com/)

The reason why US is being decimated by COVID-19 is we've lost a ton of our competitive edge by offshoring and the rich wankers want to profit at any cost. Even if it means other people die.

<comment><USER4> Off-shoring has greatly increased the wealth of the United States by allowing us to focus on higher value work, while at the same time providing poorer countries higher value work themselves. It's the law of comparative advantage in action.

U.S. workers might be better at assembling iPhones than Chinese people, but if we let them assemble while we design iPhones, build it's software systems and apps, and accessories both countries come out far ahead. Chinese get paid far more while escaping brutal rural labor jobs, we develop far more software developers and designers, who get to work remotely during COVID-19 and are in higher demand than ever.

<comment><USER2> That is a false dichotomy. Americans used to both design _and_ manufacture computers in the US. IBM and Apple both did until into the 2000's. Jobs for both engineers and blue collier factory workers are possible if this cult of GDP is put to rest.

Tell the "total wealth has increased" shtick to the millions of American workers who are poorer because of offshoring, or the thousands who will die of the novel corona virus because we can't manufacture enough masks to give them to health care workers, let alone ordinary people.

<comment><USER4> American median incomes continue to climb, and unemployment was at record lows at the beginning of the year.

Paying someone $30k a year to assemble computers isn't a good job, nor is it good business decision when it would be a great job for workers in other countries at $10,000 per year.

The law of comparative advantage tells us the path to Greater wealth is to specialize at what you do best.

Imagine if you were a lawyer and an amazing typist and you want to make as much money as possible. You could spend 20 hours a week typing up your own documents because you do it twice as fast as any secretary you could hire. But you make $200 an hour for legal work and the secretary costs $20 per hour. You can do everything yourself, and make $4000 a week, or hire a full time secretary and make $7,200 a week.

Apple saves money assembling iPhones in China, which helps them to price more competitively and sell more iPhones, creating more engineering, marketing, app developer, designer, tester, and manager jobs here.

I'd rather have those jobs here instead of assembly work.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that we are slowly losing our specialization. China is learning how to manufacture better than us. Then they learn how to assemble better than us, they copy + improve.

China could destroy Apple in a heartbeat by ordering FoxConn to charge a much higher premium for Apple phones than their own local brand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, the author claims that PE is a scam where PE firms profit at the expense of lenders. If this was true, you could easily check to see how well lenders have done, on average, lending to PE firms. The author has not done this.

You could also look at lawsuits between lenders and PE firms (there have been a few interesting ones, I believe), and see how they've ended up. You could also look at the terms of loan covenants (agreements between lenders and borrowers intended to stop this precise sort of thing), and how their wording has changed during the rise of PE firms, or after high profile PE failures. The author hasn't done this either. You could also look at what sort of rates PE firms pay, or what difficulty they have raising loans, or if PE firms which have failed to repay loans have faced any consequences compared to ones which have not, but...well, you can probably guess.

In short, the author has identified a somewhat interesting topic (is there something systematically wrong with the loans PE firms take out with large lenders, and if so, why is the legal system and/or financial system not dealing with it as you would expect?), but failed to provide _any_ information about any part of it, presumably because research is hard, and writing tweets is easy.

If you know so little about your topic, you're not really going to be able to provide any value when you try and explain it to others.

<comment><USER6> It's not just lending to PE firms but to the original businesses before they get bought.

Say Basecamp gets a ~ small 100m loan from syndicate. Basecamp is quite healthy, well managed, low leveraged, so they secure 4% rate for 5yrs, without many covenants.

Then PE buys Basecamp, leverages it to the sky and beyond, Basecamp sells, and suddenly the original 100m loan is now junk-grade. The original lenders never interacted with the PE firm, but they still got screwed.

Could they have prevented it? Sure, with lots of covenants, but they have lots of added costs for all parties and often have ways around them. Which means every possible firm that _might_ get bought by PE is now a) having to deal with lots of covenants, and b) paying 6-7% instead of the 5% they would get if the likelihood of PE acquisitions was lower.

<comment><USER7> When a company is recapitalized in a PE buy the existing lenders need to either be paid back in full or explicitly approve of having their debt rolled over into the new structure. They can't be forced.

<comment><USER6> You don't need to change the structure. Change management, new management raises all the new debt.

Unless there is a bullet proof leverage covenant, then the existing lenders can't do zip about that. Thus, their only option is to go to the table and "accept" the new structure.

<comment><USER4> You are exactly like the author. You don't understand enough to make the conclusions you make. Lenders aren't stupid in general. They have covenants to protect themselves.

In the case of Basecamp, which likely has almost zero physical assets, any loan is going to be very contingent on protecting the levels of profitability necessary to repay it. Whoever owns Basecamp won't be able to get a credit card in it's name without lender approval.

Source: I spent the last year working for a firm that is funded by venture capital loans. Every other loan & credit line had to be made subordinate to theirs, and we could not borrow anything new without their approval. It wouldn't matter who we sold the business to, they'd have to agree to the same restrictions or no sale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These tweets are about how it's a scam to lenders, not PE as an investment. The way PE works, even as he lays it out, is pretty easy to understand. Why lenders keep lending? Who knows.

Playing devil's advocate with PE is where it gets a little interesting because PE tends to go after firms that are close to dying. Are they actually causing these failures, or are they just the ones delivering the bad news? Do they deliver shareholders some value by selling off what they can for scrap?

<comment><USER4> There all sorts of companies PE invests in, few are dying. Typically it's companies where your firm can add value. They can be

1) Poorly run, just needing better management. 2) Poorly capitalized, just needing access to more capital to prosper. 3) Businesses that can be franchises, like restaurants. 4) regional businesses that can be combined (rolled up) into a more valuable national business. 5) National businesses that can be expanded internationally. 6) Liquidations, where the operating business is no longer viable but there are assets (real estate, buildings, patents) valuable enough to turn a profit on the purchase. 7) Inefficiently run with hidden assets. Companies that might own their real estate for example, but don't reflect that in their price. You buy the company and sell the real estate to fund part of the purchase.

PE firms are no different than any VC, hedge fund or investment partnership. They usually have their own investors and get paid a yearly percentage for managing the investments, and a share of the profits.

Some of their investments will fail, some will succeed. If they make good profits for their investors they'll get rich and do it as long as they want. If they lose money or struggle, they'll lose their investors and have to close shop.

<comment><USER9> Yet it's also common for PE to take a perfectly fine business, lever it up in pursuit of higher returns, and watch it shrivel under the debt load. That risk may be fine for PE investors, but there are a lot of industries where the "creative" side of creative destruction can't keep up with the debt cycle.

<comment><USER8> Does PE usually go after "perfectly fine businesses?" Usually they go after businesses with some sort of problem.

<comment><USER9> Kraft wasn't taken over buy 3G because it was loosing money, it just wasn't profitable "enough". That someone thinks there's more money to be made is not the same thing as a problem.

The Sealy LBO is another one that got more attention than usual because of Mitt Romney's association.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My only question is, if the lenders are part of who's getting scammed, why do they keep lending? Do they end up getting paid enough by the predatory looting that it works out?

<comment><USER4> Lenders only lend if they believe it's going to be profitable. The vast majority of their loans are successful, and they charge enough interest to cover the losers and still make a reasonable return.

And predatory looting is mostly mythical. No one is going to give you large loans and allow you to loot the assets and walk away. The loans have lots of restrictions to prevent that.

What happens is that many PE firms like to use loans to leverage up their investments to increase returns. If you buy a company, fix it up and sell it for double in 7 years that's a 100% return but only 10% a year. Borrow half the money at 7%, and now you only net a 75% return on the purchase price, but a 150% return on your investment, or 14% a year.

Try to borrow 80% and you can boost your returns nearly to 20% a year. Like a mortgage there is a natural tension between what lenders will lend you. They want to lend as much as possible, without assuming too much risk of default.

Sometimes the natural greed of the PE firm and the lender go to far, and you get a failed deal and a default.

<comment><USER11> One of the problems in UK retail (before CV) is PE buyers, acquiring retailers and then loading them with debt

Debenhams (about to go bust this week) is a classic example - until 20yrs ago it owned it's premises, PE bought it, loaded it with debt and then split off the property into a separate company and signed the stores to ever increasing rents

Debenhams can't service the debt and the ever increasing rents (and they've lost their way as a business)

PE debt killed Toys r Us, and many other retailers in the UK too

PE leveraged buyouts are generally bad for everyone except the PE firm, and in some cases lenders

<comment><USER4> BTW, you are dead wrong about PE leveraged buyouts, they are generally good for everyone including the firm.

I don't know much specifically about Debenhams, but what often happens in situations like that goes like this super simplified example. An entrepreneur builds a successful business and eventually tires of getting up at 5 am or just wants to secure the massive wealth they've built. So they endeavor to sell what they built and shop it to interested parties, and the best price comes from a PE firm. That's good #1, because of the PE firm the entrepreneur was able to get the best price for their life's labor.

Lets say the business had annual sales of $100M, and profits of $4M, and the winning bid was $40M (10x earnings). But the PE firm knows that the firm owned all of it's buildings and paid no rent. Market rents would have been $2M a year, so the actual economic profit of the business was only $2M.

The PE firm doesn't want to tie up $40M, so it goes to a bank or a consortium of lenders to see how much they can borrow against the purchase value. Lenders not being stupid, won't let the PE firm spin out the properties into another company if they give a large loan, so the PE firm breaks up the company into two parts, real estate and stores, and gets loans for each.

The real estate arm now gets $2M in income every year from the stores at current market rents, so lenders loan it $15M at 8% interest, costing $1.2M a year in interest. The stores now have a $2M annual profit after paying rent, they also borrow $15M at 8%, and both subsidiaries net $800,000 a year after paying interest. The new owner, the PE firm, takes the $30M in loan proceeds, reducing their total investment to $10M, and they earn around $1.6M in annual dividends from the company, or a 16% return. If they hadn't leveraged up, they would have made $4M a year on $40M, only a 10% return.

Ten years pass. Rents in the areas of the store locations have doubled (a 7.2% annual increase) because those locations were so well selected by the founder to be in areas that saw a higher increase in population and traffic. Now the stores subsidiary has to pay $4M a year in rent. But the problem is store earnings haven't kept pace, sales have grown to $150M a year, but profits before rent and interest have only grown to $5M a year, because there is now also more competition from Walmart, Sprouts and Whole Foods.

Now they can't afford to keep up their interest payments, and the CEO of the stores subsidiary asks the PE firm to make the real estate subsidiary give them substantial discount on their rent, after all, the PE firm owns both of them, why favor the real estate subsidiary when the stores are at risk?

But the CEO of the real estate subsidiary argues the opposite. Their real estate is valuable, if the stores go out of business he can quickly rent their spaces to new tenants that will gladly pay full rents, and will diversify her portfolio of tenants to make her business more secure.

The partners at the PE firm by this point know full well what the real problem is. Despite the boom in population, the stores aren't reaping proportionate increase rewards because they simply can't. The founder was brilliant at buying real estate but that covered for flaws in the stores business model. Maybe they never had the necessary size to compete with bigger chains, maybe they were always poorly run, or maybe the PE firm dropped the ball in who they put in charge.

It doesn't matter what the cause is, in the end the PE firm lets the stores file for bankruptcy and surrenders it's ownership to the lenders. The lenders will fire sale the inventory to get as much of their loans back as possible, but still take a large loss.

But the real estate firm is now making $4M a year renting to new, stronger tenants in great locations, likely paying higher wages (good #2). The PE firm made around $15M in dividends from both subsidiaries before the stores went bankrupt, and at same time they sell their real estate firm for $40M (minus $15M in loans). So in the end their $10M earns a gain of $30M over ten years, despite the bankruptcy. That seems like a huge gain, but it's only an annualized return of somewhere between 15% and 20% a year depending on how dividends were paid. That's a very good return, but not a world beater.

The PE firm lost because the stores failed. If they had just maintained their original value so they could be sold for the $20M that they cost in the original purchase. Now their gains are $50M, and their annualized returns are above 20%. Very few PE firms go into deals like this planning for the main business to fail, and to make up for it with asset sales. It greatly reduces your long term returns or can even leave you with huge losses.

If the founder had never sold, the same problems likely occurred. Maybe he runs the stores better, but he would still have to deal with higher levels of competition, and finding good new locations would have gotten harder. Eventually he would have had to wonder whether splitting the business made sense, that he had a dynamite set of real estate properties being held back by struggling stores rapidly being overtaken by larger and better funded competition. The day the stores start losing money would be the day he would be forced to take drastic action similar to what a PE firm would do.

<comment><USER11> Apart from the PE firm doesn't loose as they'll extract the value of the stores they sold as a dividend long before the business fails

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can we ban these dumb twitter rants please? They're all just examples of "Brandolinis law":

The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Lovell's rule of thumb is the more complicated a bet is, the scammier it is. > If it pays 2:1 for one outcome, 5:1 [...]

I knew it! Life is a scam!

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems like criticism of leveraged buyouts, than criticism of PE. Many good companies were driven into bankruptcies when purchased for their own money and there were a lot of talks about Bain Capital in 2012 pres elections cycle. Actually, i was expecting a thread about how PE scams their investors, not how buyouts are destroying busineses

</comment><comment><USER7> The author lays out a general rule that if a bet has a complex payout structure, then it is a scam. Them he applies this to PE deals without giving an example of a complex payoff structure. The reason that he doesn't give an example is because the payoff structure to PE deals is simple. If the company increases in value, the PE firm wins. If it goes down, they lose. I think the author here means "scam" in the sense of "a bunch of people are making a lot of money doing something I don't understand, and I'm not getting any of it."

</comment><comment><USER15> What a coincidence: I have that book on my night stand. Now 75% of it is card games, loaded dice and carnivals, but the same patterns emerge over and over.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why oh why must this be written in tweet format? Is this some kind of meta self referential post-modern exercise that I just don't understand?

<comment><USER3> Because Twitter is where everyone hangs out. It's a low friction tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The financial system is made intentionally complicated to obscure the simple fact that businesses use new loan money to pay for their old loans.

The critical piece of information which is omitted is that the activities of the businesses through which money flows doesn't actually matter.

This becomes obvious when you consider that:

\- All new money enters the economy as bank loans.

\- The total amount of money in circulation in the economy always goes up every year as inflation (only some years it goes up faster than other years).

\- The inflation rate is higher than the interest rate.

Clearly, the inflation rate is sufficient to cover the interest rate.

Think about it:

2% inflation rate means that the total money supply in existence increased by AT LEAST 2% over the cost of a year. If there was $1000 in the economy at the beginning, it means that at the end of the year, there would be $1020 in the economy.

Now imagine that you are a bank and at the beginning of the year, there is $1000 in total in the economy and you print $100 out of thin air and loan it out to people at 1% interest rate.

After you do that, the economy will have $1100 in circulation. $100 of this amount, people will have to pay back to you PLUS 1% interest rate per year.

Throughout the year, you make more loans into the economy such that the inflation ends u being 2%. So for that year, it means that you injected AT LEAST $20 of new money in the economy as loans.

OK o at the end of the year, your borrowers need to pay you back $10 in interest (for simplicity, we will assume that the minimum repayment is interest only). But remember, you (as the bank) injected $20 of new money into the economy that year... So if your borrowers managed to extract just half of that new money from the economy, they will be able to meet their loan repayment for that year and still make $10 profit on top!

Note that the borrowers don't need to work or deliver any real economic value in order to get their hands on that newly created money, they just need to setup some intermediaries to take out new loans each year then forward the money to them through any make-believe business activity. It does not matter if the intermediaries go bankrupt later; new intermediaries can constantly be created.

From the perspective of the borrower, intermediaries don't even have to be directly controlled by you. If they can be fooled or coerced into taking out loans from the bank and paying you at least $10 of what they borrowed - In an expansionary monetary environment, that's all you need to be profitable.

<comment><USER4> Here is a link to Bank of America's annual report, the balance sheet is on page 25.

[https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/70858/000007...](https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/70858/000007085820000011/bac-1231201910xk.htm#s3D739B2812375B5E8CBEF24D379EE4F7)

Read it and learn, maybe you'll better understand how banks work. They don't make money up out of the thin air. They can loan out only in proportion to what they have already. BOA is levered about 9 to 1, so they use around $11 from investors or retained earnings and $89 in deposits and loans from the fed or others to be able to loan out $100.

Now, they can create demand deposits to make new loans, but even then in proportion to their equity. Some of the Deposits liability is likely Demand Deposit line item created from loans, not sure how much. But it appears they support their loans with mostly customer deposits and invested funds.

<comment><USER17> But I read in several places that smaller banks had 0% reserve requirements. Also since covid-19 liquidity crisis, the Fed lowered it to 0% for all banks. So this ratio of 9 to 1 is outdated and the liquidity crisis proved to us that this 9 to 1 ratio was not sustainable to begin with.

The small banks were the ones printing money out of thin air. A lot of that newly printed money just happened to find its way back to the big banks due to corporate centralization of capital but it wasn't enough.

You can't understand how the financial system works just by looking at the biggest banks... You have to look at all the banks in aggregate and see how the new money flows into the system.

The fact is that new money which was printed and loaned out of thin air enters the financial system faster than interest accrues on all the old loans which were themselves printed out of thin air at an earlier date.

If you're a central bank and you created your own unique currency out of nothing (which is precisely what they did) and loaned 100 units of it to some people at 10% interest over a 1 year term... How will they be able to repay you back 110 units of the same currency considering that there are only 100 units in existence? Not possible. The only way it can happen is if you keep constantly injecting new loans into the system and the credit from the new loans ends up paying for the debt and interest of the old loans.

<comment><USER18> Banks have not been reserve constrained in at least a decade, the 0% reserve requirement is a red herring. Other countries have had 0% reserves for a long time. Banks are constrained in lending by regulatory capital requirements (see Basel III), stress test requirements (in the US), and their own risk tolerance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why in the name of Satan is something like this written on Twitter? I stopped after the first 10. Twitter is not a platform for long form articles, or even relatively short form, honestly. I cannot understand why people write things like this on a platform not designed for it. I mean, when they're writing, I bet they think things like, "man, I wish there was a better way to write all my words at once and publish it for everyone"

<comment><USER20> Same answer as always: audience acquisition. This guy has nearly 500k followers on Twitter so more people will see his idea if he just posts a tweetstorm there. If you just post a link to a blog most people won't click through and fewer people will join the discussion.

But here's an unrolled version: [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1246445485860118528.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1246445485860118528.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe he has good points, but he's a fucking writer, and when I got to "20/" I noped out of reading anymore. Just write a damn article and get it published, twitter was designed for ~160 characters or whatever, it's not for long-form articles.

<comment><USER10> You're really going to ignore the content because you're salty about the way it's laid out on the page?

<comment><USER22> There's an awful lot available to read. Poor presentation, layout, grammar, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, cursing, etc., is pretty much a guarantee of equally poor thinking. Hence not worth reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like everything is a scam then.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is the 2048 post so popular? - <AUTHOR> For the sake of understanding what makes a project more successful than another, I would like to understand why would people from HN find the 2048 game worth 1000+ points?
Is it because it is opensource?
Is it because the game is really addictive?
Was it the right timing? People have Three as a success story in their mind and relate to that?
(I am very for the developer behind the project, I just want to understand what made that particular project tick) <comment><USER2> It's so hard to tell sometimes but I'd hypothesise a few reasons:

1\. It's really simple-looking and uncluttered

2\. It's an easy game to understand the rules of

3\. You can get a real sense of achievement early in the game

4\. It's hard to _finish_ the game on the first go

</comment><comment><USER3> I clicked on the link because it looked like "Year 2048". Future is always interesting.

<comment><USER4> HN titles are so misleading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was hooked to the game and continued playing it for 2 hours non stop, AT WORK. It's addictive. I could not reach the magic figure, but the experience was great.

</comment><comment><USER6> People like challenges, so if it's simple (Braid) but one of those endless games (Flappy bird), it's more likely to hit. And be useful to monetize: ads, ads for your real games and virtual currency.

2048 author: put some unobstrusive ads on that shit, dude, you're losing ton$ of ca$h.

<comment><USER7> What is this obsession everybody has with ads these days?

They are ruining media. Even "unobstrusive ads" are doing a lot of harm by collecting user habbits etc without any authorisation.

<comment><USER6> Have you seen Daring fireball?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really good question. I haven't seen something stay on the top spot of the front page for this long in a while.

1\. It naturally has a great difficulty curve.

2\. It feeds right into the kind of logic and algorithms that people on hacker news find so intriguing.

3\. It's very easy to pick up how to play and share with others.

</comment><comment><USER9> For me, it was because it gave small bits of satisfaction (merging two numbers) with a challenge that wasn't too steep nor too boring.

</comment><comment><USER10> It was posted to HN on a weekend, readers have more time to waste, so fun stuff is more likely to be updated.

</comment><comment><USER11> I see that thread when it has already 1000+ points. So I think that must be fun, and I add my little 1 point.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is simple to understand and play, and yet very hard to to solve the puzzle, hence making it addictive.

</comment><comment><USER13> It is fun, easy to look at, and kind of geeky. Just like HN.

</comment><comment><USER14> Because it's fun and challenging.</comment>


Nasdaq hackers spied on company boards - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-nasdaq-hackers-spied-directors-204123011.html

<comment><USER2> >Amid a spate of high-profile cyber crimes, the Obama administration wants Congress to pass comprehensive cyber-security legislation that would increase the government's ability to thwart the growing threat.

Haha, yes, no doubt by giving them power to seize servers without court oversight and shut down entire domains for any reason they can dream up, or no reason at all for that matter, and other red-herring bullshit.</comment>


Ask HN: Any Gamers Here? - <AUTHOR> We'd like to show you our location based AR game - https://apps.apple.com/app/id1290676739
Preview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRHG4vdPsqg
Could you please give it a try and let me know how you like it? Much Thanks <comment><USER2> Since it's essentially asking for others to try something you've build, can you use [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. Thanks</comment></comment>


Slow CI: real problem or easy excuse for developers? - <AUTHOR> https://www.codingnagger.com/2019/01/31/slow-ci/ <comment><USER2> Things that cause slow CI:

\- Not parallelizing tests. Microsoft runs something between 100k and a million tests per deploy, and that's only possible if you can run your tests in a distributed fashion.

\- Not bundling tests by stage (re-doing setup/teardown, re-doing nearly identical tests, tests at random times). Similar to the above, you have to group your tests into stages where they can be parallelized together efficiently. Example: you're a network device company and you only have a couple racks worth of gear you can test on, so you have to optimize for every device and stage, or your poorly coordinated tests will tie up infrastructure someone else could be using. (In the cloud with dynamic infrastructure, this wastes money as well as time)

\- Not optimizing tests for speed. You don't have to "micro-optimize" to occasionally do build and test profiling and replace the really slow bastards. If you _never_ do build or test profiling, you _will_ end up with slow junk.

\- Too many/unnecessary functional or end-to-end tests. You don't need to do flyway migrations on every build, you need to do it when you've changed the schema.

\- A gigantic monolithic codebase. If your code is huge and in one repo, you're going to end up with 100k+ tests, because a one-line change _might_ affect anything in the codebase, so you better test everything every time. If you design your apps well, you can segment your application into discrete components that _do not depend on each other_. This way you can do unit testing on _only the component you changed_ , and then move on to functional/e2e testing for the whole shebang.

\- Using sub-optimal tools. Changing a build or test from using one tool, library, or service to another can give exponential performance increases in things like builds and tests. Lots of people have gotten dramatic speed increases just by changing a tool. If profiling doesn't make a big dent in speed, this often can.

<comment><USER3> Both this and the article only focus on tests, but in other cases the build time before even running tests is slow. This is often the case in lower level languages with dependencies.

<comment><USER4> > but in other cases the build time before even running tests is slow.

In my experience, this is spot on. In the CI system I help run for testing graphics, a significant amount of the CI time is spent:

1) fetching source code from external locations for all dependencies that need to be built for each test, and for the project itself

2) fetching source code from internal git cache to builders

3) compiling projects (ccache helps a LOT)

4) syncing built artifacts to shared storage (NFS)

5) testers sync artifacts (rsync)

6) testers run tests

7) results sync'd back to CI master

8) process results and display to developers (the processing and display of results also takes a few minute, since it's often over 1 million tests results to process).

Many of the steps here are repeated multiple times, since we run multiple test suites across nearly 200 individual testers. Our we average around a 30 min turnaround time for results.

Steps 2, 4, 5, and 7 take a surprisingly long amount of time, since internal network utilization depends on CI load (e.g. it could be running other CI jobs at the same time). We are constantly looking for ways to improve it.

For some of the tests that run, the syncing of artifacts and results take longer than the tests that run on the tester.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like slow CI can definitely be a huge bottleneck in large projects, with lots of tests. If you are making changes that affect lots of different areas, there are likely too many tests to run locally, so some test failures will only be caught by CI. Slow CI makes it take far longer to iterate and solve these failures, and forces you to multitask more while waiting for CI to finish, and context switch whenever you have a failure. I think that, if slow CI is a big problem, it probably indicates that your codebase is too tightly coupled, and you aren't testing the right things. But it is still a problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a developer, you should be able to run the tests that are relevant to your work manually. The CI is there to do the complete validation, and to help you. Not to be in your way.

</comment><comment><USER7> All good points, but sometimes you solved all other problems and slow CI does become the bottleneck. My last work project and open source project (Rust) happen to be in such situation.

</comment><comment><USER8> Back in 2014 I work on a project where we had ~15min test suite running on CI and this was painful so I started working on open source solution knapsack for CI parallelisation for Ruby tests.

Later on developed more advanced way with dynamic tests allocation across parallel CI nodes not only for Ruby to get CI build as fast as possible. To give you some idea how it works check [https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2017/auto- balancing-7-hours-tes...](https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2017/auto- balancing-7-hours-tests-between-100-parallel-jobs-on-ci-buildkite-example)

or watch video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUEB1XDKEFY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUEB1XDKEFY)

</comment><comment><USER9> I agree with the blog. From my experience that there are a lot of newer inexperienced devs that think that feature tests as unit tests are something valid. (It's not and its flat out wrong, and it is dangerous)

<comment><USER10> Can you expand upon this? I do a lot of frontend work, and I am slowly getting into the mindset that nearly all testing we do in react using enzyme is worthless compared to doing e2e tests with something like cypress.

I rather not have people on my team waste hours writing tests that break the moment props change, or styling changes, or a child component renders breaking the test because they used mount instead of shallow. IDK, I think I just hate Enzyme mostly...

<comment><USER9> In frontend work, you're a little bit of a disadvantage due to the language and what you're testing. If you're testing interface code (something that draws something on the screen) the only way you can test that is if you have a really good testing library that will test it in a virtual drawing space or function/feature tests.

With the backend you should have 90% unit tests (1000s of them) all completing in less than 3 minutes, integration tests (7% of all your tests) competing in under say 10 minutes, and feature tests (those shouldn't be in the build but in a post build step that can reject a change)

<comment><USER11> I disagree - your "90%/7%/3%" seems completely arbitrary. It might be appropriate for some projects but I think it's wrong to adopt as a hard and fast rule.

IMO, the correct amount of testing is the amount that lets you refactor quickly and with confidence that you haven't broken anything, and that tests pathways/edge cases in complicated logic.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bloom Unveils Its Game Changing Energy Box - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/02/24/bloom-box-launch/ <comment><USER2> Fuel required @ rated power: 0.661 MMBtu/hr of natural gas. Rated power output (AC): 100 kW

Figure fuel costs of $10 per MMBtu. So it pumps out 100kW/hr electricity for $6.60.

~$0.09/kWh for electricity in Oregon (its double that for NYC). So we pay about $9 for 100kW/hr.

Thats a 30% savings in Oregon and about 70% for the East Coast. But it still releases a lot of CO2 - 773 lbs/MW-hr.

<http://www.bloomenergy.com/products/data-sheet/>

So if you ran one straight for a year and you used all its output, it would save $20k-$40k depending on electricity prices. So if they can get the price sub $100k and natural gas supply and price stays even, they could sell a lot of them.

<comment><USER3> Natural Gas Figures for US ([https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the- world-factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/geos/us.html))

Natural gas - production: 582.2 billion cu m (2008 est.) country comparison to the world: 2

Natural gas - consumption: 657.2 billion cu m (2008 est.) country comparison to the world: 1

Natural gas - exports: 28.49 billion cu m (2008 est.) country comparison to the world: 10

Natural gas - imports: 112.7 billion cu m (2008 est.) country comparison to the world: 1

Natural gas - proved reserves: 6.731 trillion cu m (1 January 2009 est.) country comparison to the world: 5

<comment><USER4> Does that say we have a little more than 10 years of natural gas left that we know about? Or is that just in the reserve tanks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So forgive me if this sounds jaded, but I fail to see how this technology is a "game changer."

1\. Based on the EIA Annual Energy Review 2001 transmission losses only account for 3.1% of total power generation in the U.S.

2\. A modern, large gas combined-cycle power plant has a quoted efficiency of over 60% [http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/power- generation/power-p...](http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/power- generation/power-plants/gas-fired-power-plants/combined-cycle-power-plant- concept/scc5-8000h-1s.htm)

3\. From the presentation: "The carbon footprint is 50% cleaner than the grid and 100% renewable" Wait a minute, if the power generation is truly renewable, then how can it have a carbon footprint at all (other than manufacture etc.)? Isn't the whole point of renewable energy to have a perpetually renewing "closed system"? By that definition then the carbon footprint would be tiny compared to the grid.

The reason they say 50% is probably because they are thinking most people will run the units from gas, but that's definitely not renewable. Also, I can't imagine the efficiency of the unit is much higher than 50-60%, but maybe there's some data on that which I have missed.

4\. "They have created 11,000,000 kilowatts so far" How much of this is from the burning of fossil fuels versus renewable fuel sources?

I am all for fuels cells and development of renewable energy. I think what would truly be a "game changer" is if this device could be used to store the cyclical output from a local renewable energy power system - for example store the energy created during the day from a PV installation for use at night. In my opinion this is more "green washing" than green.

edit: formatting

<comment><USER6> If you move from a central hub and spoke electricity distribution to a decentralized model, that alone is a game changer. You don't need to worry about the grid at all.

1\. 3.1% seems low. Another estimate from 1995 says 7.2% ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Los...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses)). I suspect that the truth is closer to 5%. Also, the losses incurred are dependent upon the distance. Most power plants are located pretty far away from residential and commercial areas.

2\. The power plant you're linking hasn't been completed yet. Plus, this is a cutting edge design. Most existing plants won't (couldn't?) be converted to this newer efficiency. And for cost reasons, existing inefficient plants aren't going to be shut down and replaced.

3\. The fuel cell doesn't require natural gas. It can also run on biomass, which is completely renewable. And since this isn't based on combustion, you don't get the carbon monoxide, sulfurs oxides, nitrogen oxides, and heavier smog causing hydrocarbons. All of the nasties are produced with combustion. Also, since the CO2 is clean, it can be separated easily from the H2O and stored.

4\. Well, they aren't burning anything, so 0% has been from burning fossil fuels. I'd guess most of it was from using natural gas as a fuel, but none of it was burned.

One interesting thing I've read is that they are claiming that this is a reversible process, which means it could be used to store PV energy collected during the day and reuse it at night. But, this system produces so much more energy than a PV cell that I'm not sure it would be of much use. You'd need a very large (sq footage) PV installation to generate this much energy.

<comment><USER5> The points you make are good, and I agree with what you are saying. My point was that from an environmental perspective, this device is basically on par with available power generation in terms of efficiency, and when used with natural gas simply moves the co2 generation from a centralized location to many distributed locations, but doesn't cut it down significantly per unit energy produced.

IF the device were to be used with biomass fuel, it would certainly be a huge step forward environmentally, but I don't see where the incentive would be outside of environmental stewardship, which some companies value but many do not. From your reply: "...which means it could be used to store PV energy collected during the day and reuse it at night. But, this system produces so much more energy than a PV cell that I'm not sure it would be of much use." This is exactly why I wouldn't call it a game changer from an environmental standpoint. Basically we're still stuck with the fact that it's much easier to produce power by burning, oxidizing in a fuel cell, etc. than by using solar, wind etc. In my book a game changer would be a technology that enables a move to truly renewable power generation while remaining practical and cost effective. Could the energy server fit that description? Perhaps, but it depends highly upon how it is operated.

<comment><USER6> * that it's much easier to produce power by burning, oxidizing in a fuel cell, etc. than by using solar, wind etc*

I agree... it would be nice if it was easier to use solar, wind, anything with zero-carbon footprint. I just don't know if they are going to be sufficiently powerful enough to replace the current coal / gas fired plants. But, if you could effectively use a fuel cell as a battery to produce H2 from H2O during the day, and then consume the same H2 at night, that would be a very good thing since the biggest problem with PV and wind isn't the technology, it's storing the energy produced so you can deliver electricity when its cloudy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could somebody help with some background on the science?

What strikes me as odd is that you put fuel in the fuel cell. One of the examples they give is using these to charge your hyrbid car. So, by the transitive property, aren't you putting fuel into your car?

I guess I'm trained to think of alternative energy sources like sun and wind, so I'm thrown off here. What's the innovation?

I can see that you're generating electricity locally, which I guess means we could get energy to places without running power lines. But reading the article, that doesn't seem like the point of these.

The article does claim that the energy is more efficient than what you get on the grid. But if that's the case, why don't we just put a ton of these onto the grid and push down the cost of electricity for everyone?

<comment><USER8> I think they just announced a highly-efficient natural gas electric generator. The question is just how efficient, if it's as efficient as the large centralized power plants we now build then we don't have to waste money on building and maintaining power transmission lines.

If I remember my thermodynamics correctly, the efficiency of a heat engine is constrained by the internal temperature of the engine. The higher the internal temperature, the more efficient the engine can be. This is the basic reason why we build as large power plants as transmission loss allows. With a smaller plant, the engine temperature is much lower for practical reasons, hence the loss in efficiency. (Many other economies of scale reasons.)

So if this device can really beat the efficiency of our current centralized natural gas burning plants, then this is revolutionary. If not, too bad for Colin Powell.

<comment><USER9> Fuel cells are not heat engines.

<comment><USER8> That would be exactly why this new technology might be more efficient than centralized power plants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most interesting claim is that it's a reversible reaction. This explains the "it runs on solar" comment in that it can be used in place of batteries or a flywheel to store energy by turning the excess load back into fuel during peak generation from solar/wind and then expend it later.

</comment><comment><USER11> Grinding some numbers:

The data sheet says 661000 btu/hr of fuel to run at 100kw. 100kwh is 341,230 btu, so it looks like about 50% efficiency from shipped hyrdocarbon source to electricity on site. Very good.

On the american house using 1kw, that is obviously not a peak. At 8 cents/kwh, a 1kw average use house has a $57/mo electric bill. Looking at my bills I can only presume they counted a lot of small apartments and homeless people in cardboard boxes in the average.

</comment><comment><USER12> They really blew out all the stops in publicizing this ... Just the facts:

<http://bloomenergy.com/products/data-sheet/>

Seems the 'box' we discussed a couple of days ago does output 25 kW (I had guessed 30 kW, based on a 10c/kW back-of-the-envelope calculation).

<comment><USER13> Interesting note:

"Includes a secure website for you to showcase performance & environmental benefits."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fuel Cells and Proton Exchange Membranes often use Platinum or Palladium as a catalyst - which is very expensive. Bloom's box uses something cheaper. The science/tech is used in a lot of places you might not expect, like submarines too. It can be the most efficient way to generate and process hydrogen as well. For example, if you put enough solar panels/wind turbines to power the United States - you would invest so much in power lines, and so much would be lost in transmission, that it's not economic. Fuel cells can generate hydrogen from water at the point of generation - I believe more efficiently than electrolysis. Then the hydrogen could be transported similarly to CNG. Then Hydrogen can be "burned" or run the other direction through the Fuel Cell.

The politics and economics are becoming more favorable. Glad to see coverage on Mashable.

</comment><comment><USER15> _They have created 11,000,000 kilowatts so far._

Are they saying that they've generated 11GWh, or that they've produced cells that continuously generate 11GW?

<comment><USER16> > 11 M KWH (>11 GWH), according to a slide shot on engadget's coverage

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So is this a breakthrough in fuel cell design? Did they discover a completely new way to make fuel cells? Or is this rather a repackaging of existing fuel cell technologies?

</comment><comment><USER18> They say that 1 KW will power the average US home, hu? Yeah, so long as all heating is natural gas and no one ever turns on a hair dryer. Maybe they were talking about averaged load? But then they seem to have left out the 4 tonnes of lead-acid batteries you'll need.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. But --- who heats with electricity? (Heat pumps can be a good idea, though.)

<comment><USER18> I use a heat pump. It's 55 degrees outside right now, so I'm not using much electricity. I doubt I'd save any money heating with gas.

<comment><USER19> "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" ([http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c7/page_50....](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c7/page_50.shtml)) also seems to favour heat pumps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As they mentioned it can work on variety of fuel sources, they can probably create Gasoline -> Fuel Cell -> Electricity -> Motor type powertrain and create very efficient cars like 100mi/1gallon or something.

<comment><USER21> Question for mods - why was bbot's reply here and elsewhere on this thread killed?

Both times he's simply raised the very valid point that fuel cells don't run backwards. There are some woefully uninformed comments on this thread already. A little education would help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone seen anything about costs? That actually lists dollar amounts? I know this isn't vaporware (it's running at a few companies), but I until we know how much it costs it doesn't really matter.

<comment><USER22> $800,000 per unit.

They hope to get it to ~$3000 in the next 5 years.

<comment><USER23> haha, sounded like 800k was the price for the huge box (the kind ebay is running) and $3000 is the price of one big enough to run your home.

<comment><USER24> Thats what they originally stated in the 60 minutes story. $3000 isn't bad. If what they are claiming is true then you would pay it off in less than 5 years and then have reduced electricity afterwards.

Throw in an electric car and you've seriously reduced your fuel costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The big question in my mind is can they make this small & portable enough to put into my next car? _That_ would be game changing to me.

</comment><comment><USER26> Now we know where the $400m went. Getting Colin Powell and the governator to shill for your company must require quite a bit of capital.</comment>


Back Doors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://zdziarski.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/iOS_Backdoors_Attack_Points_Surveillance_Mechanisms.pdf

<comment><USER2> This was extensively discussed yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8057470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8057470)

(284 points; 77 comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems I missed that plus I submitted a link without the www. in front (which was copied from a tweet).

Perhaps the team should update whatever regexp they use to ignore any www. in submission comparisons.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/114](https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/114)</comment></comment></comment>


Boxed.com paying for employee weddings - <AUTHOR> http://blog.boxed.com/2016/05/25/boxed-pays-weddings/ <comment><USER2> How much is that going to cost? A quick google search is telling me that an avg american wedding is $26,444.

Is a one time bonus of 26k for everyone you hire sustainable?

<comment><USER3> Some employees likely came in married already. And some will never be married. And some more might even marry another employee so the cost is split across two.

Seems like an interesting perk. I'm a bit jealous, mine cost almost $40k

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> But will they also pay for the divorces?</comment>


Tiny raytracer port from C++ to JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://democopei.de/smallpt.html

<comment><USER2> Hmm the js is rather slow! I wonder if there is any startup in computer graphics that is trying to make ray-tracer as a way to render real time apps and games.</comment>


A Pointless Cancer 'Moonshot' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/opinion/obamas-pointless-cancer-moonshot.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region <comment><USER2> It is entirely possible that we can completely cure cancer. Not just a treatment, but actually prevent anyone from ever getting cancer in the first place. It would be super duper difficult, but we know it is possible because of the naked mole rat. Naked mole rats are essentially immune to cancer (I say essentially because this February scientists dicovered two individuals that had cancer, the only two documented cases). It is thus possible that genetic therapy could create a population of humans with no (or almost no) incidence of cancer.

<comment><USER3> Ok I'll state the obvious: people are not rats.

<comment><USER2> Of course, but if it's possible in one mammal, there's no real reason why it shouldn't be possible in another. I highly doubt that our vulnerability to cancer is somehow intrinsic to what makes us human.

This is obviously far off, but genetic modification opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am going to go against the grain of the usual sympathetic responses to this type of articles, and I am going to say that this is a case of pernicious and pointless casuistry. Apparently, this now passes for some kind of deep thought on the human condition.

Well of course any medical treatment for anything just leads to more medical treatment in the future; that's not a profound statement, not as long as people are mortal. And it's not limited to cancer. It used to be, in the bad old days, that some people became almost completely bedridden as their joints gave out, and then either died early or wished they did; now we have arthritis medications and joint replacement surgeries that let many of them (not all, but very many) enjoy decades of their retirements. Does this lessen the need for future orthopedic treatment? Obviously not, since it extends their lives and keeps them on their feet long enough to develop other joint problems. Does that make orthopedics and rheumatology pointless? As someone who needed the intervention of rheumatologists, I assure you that it doesn't.

In the case of cancer, nobody believes that one can make people live forever by curing their cancers; of course, they will live long enough to die of something, maybe even another cancer. Still, I personally know people in their 70s and 80s who would have been dead and buried 20 years ago if it wasn't for cancer treatment; and the idea of the "cancer moonshot" is to give the same chance to a lot more people. I came home today after visiting a very dear friend whose cancer is, with the current level of medicine, close to untreatable. Will she live forever if some treatment is developed for it? Well of course not. Would it be worthwhile to change the several months that she has left to live into several years? Of course, and yes, it would mean that she would require more cancer treatment, not less.

We can debate if the "moonshot" model is right for cancer (personally, I think it has merits), but these pseudo-profound dismissals of medicine are simply vulgar and annoying.

<comment><USER5> A while ago I was reading a harrowing description of life in the 1930s. One of the author's memories was the sound of a neighbour in a nearby house screaming - and screaming, _and screaming_ \- in unbearable pain while dying of cancer.

We've definitely moved on since then. Moonshot or no, anything that helps make that experience less likely _has_ to be a good thing.

<comment><USER6> That neighbor's tumor type could still well be incurable, but palliative care and pain management have improved significantly since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _We are essentially temporary cell colonies evolved to relay life to the next generation, and as long as we are human, there will always be another cancer._

That sentence made that great article awesome.

<comment><USER8> ... and also, perhaps inadvertently, explains some of the appeal of transhumanism.

"as long as we are human" could also be read as "as long as we are built on legacy hardware" ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure how you get from, "this is a difficult problem that won't be solved soon", to, "throwing money at this problem is pointless". It seems like the best way to solve problems is not to give up, but to keep the people who are trying to fix it well funded.

Does he just want a more dourer PR campaign? I suppose "We probably won't cure cancer, but, I guess this is better than nothing" would be more realistic.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a verge that is going to be crossed for cancer soon. The reason that cancer research and development is a slow, expensive, ugly morass is that 99% of the people involved are targeting biochemistry peculiar to a very small number of the thousands of relevant varieties and subtypes of cancer. A year of lab time is much the same ballpark of cost whatever you happen to be doing, give or take. So if it takes a thousand distinct cures to defeat cancer, it'll never get done.

BUT.

There are range of new approaches to cancer that are not particular and specialized to a very small number of cancers, or that can in principle be adapted with comparatively little work to target different cancer types from a common core platform.

This is what will produce meaningful control of cancer: attacking the commonalities present in many or all cancer types.

The best and most promising approach here is interdiction of telomere lengthening. All cancers must lengthen telomeres. They have to. If they can't, they wither. So block telomerase, block ALT, and cancer goes away. You can either block these mechanisms globally for a while, long enough to kill the cancer, but not long enough to kill the patient due to stem cell depletion, or combine this with any of the targeted delivery mechanisms under development to turn it off only in cancer tissue.

There are a few labs working on aspects of this, more on the telomerase side ( e.g. [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-05/cndi- csa05111...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-05/cndi- csa051115.php) ) than the ALT side, because ALT cancers are only about 10% of the total, and ALT is still not completely cataloged. ( See: [http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/42444/...](http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/42444/title/Control-ALT--Delete- Cancer/) )

SO.

It is foolish to talk about cancer as a thing that medical science cannot get to the bottom of. There are very clear approaches to get to the bottom of cancer and fix it.

<comment><USER11> Therapies that could reliably cure any cancer are often worthy of research, but I'd put the expected value of these approaches lower than that of "ugly morass" standard research.

Reason 1; cancer therapies have to effectively kill cancer cells and not important non-cancer cells. Cancer therapies that exist today achieve this by mucking about in mechanisms that are important to cancers and not (or not so much) to other cells. But cancers are diverse- there may just not _be_ anything that's common to all cancer and not shared by healthy cells. Telomere regeneration is a nice candidate, but as you noted, its also important to stem cells- can humans withstand enough damage to their stem cell populations to make a meaningful difference to difficult cancers? (For that matter, telomere regeneration is also important to gametes, so telomere-based therapies may also render the patient infertile.)

Which means we're likely to be stuck dealing with a dozen or hundred-odd different treatments, each of which targets some eccentricity of a specific cancer subtype, _but_ -

Reason 2: There are _lots_ of smart people plugging away at this problem, backed by lots of research money. In addition to being an objectively important problem for humanity, cancer is also an interesting biological conundrum and _also_ the most likely cause of death for a bunch of old people with stratospheric net worths. Even hacking at the problem in bits and pieces, its not unlikely that cancer will become a completely tractable disease (even if a golden-bullet "cure" doesn't arrive) within our lifetimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am not cynical about humans living longer etc as this article seems to claim. However I am cynical about the approach of calling everything a moonshot. For Moonshot, there were clearly measure-able goals before you were able to land on moon in say 10 yrs. Now in Cancer research or any research is not executed in the same paradigm as planning a voyage to moon.

Yeah my point maybe a minor one, but I dislike the dumbing down of things or appealing to past glory.

</comment><comment><USER13> _the better we get at keeping people alive, the older they will get_

I'm generally not a fan of people either but there are kids with cancer that I feel should get some time to enjoy their lives outside of dying in a hospital if at all possible, someday.

Besides, there are still many, many millions of people in the USA who can't get insurance so even if there was a "cure" or life extension, they couldn't afford it. Don't worry, they will die for you because emergency rooms don't treat cancer. For example if I got cancer, I'd be screwed.

<comment><USER3> Why don't you have insurance? It's mandatory now.

<comment><USER14> It's not mandatory in the US; you just pay a penalty the next time you file your taxes if you went too long without insurance.

Spoiler: the penalty is far less than the cost of having insurance, which means it's still cheaper to just be uninsured (so long as you stay relatively healthy) and pay up on your tax return.

<comment><USER3> No it is mandatory, hence the penalty for not having it.

<comment><USER15> It effectively is a fine, but it's not a criminal penalty, so it's kind of like an opt-out fee that's significantly cheaper than most of the supposedly affordable plans. (Which are extremely expensive even at the low-end where they're completely useless with $10,000 deductibles.)

<comment><USER16> I think you are dramatically underestimating the cost of getting "actually sick" if you think a $10,000 annual out-of-pocket maximum is "completely useless". Not to put too fine a point on it, but $10k could be a mere couple hours of care in the ER.

Also, there are cost-sharing reductions which would reduce that $10k significantly depending on your income.

If you do find yourself in need of actual medical care but without any insurance, the workaround is simply you will have to move to a new state, which will allow you to sign up outside of open enrollment periods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well that was a lot more pessimistically fatalist than I was anticipating.

</comment><comment><USER18> With the rise of antibiotic resistance, cancer will become less relevant.

<comment><USER19> I think you're way overestimating the impact of antibitoic resistance.

<comment><USER20> Antibiotic resistance is the biggest health threat we face.

<comment><USER19> Maybe, but we don't even know if it will happen (mass drug resistant infections).

I'd say cancer is worse!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Latent Semantic Analysis in Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://blog.josephwilk.net/ruby/latent-semantic-analysis-in-ruby.html

<comment><USER2> LSA is incredibly powerful but requires some effort to make the results meaningful. Having a good interface in a familiar language is really helpful and lowers the bar to those who already understand the complexities.</comment>


Ask HN: CMS and Shopping Carts? (from the view of a web developer) - <AUTHOR>

I graduated from college this past year, so I've just begun working full time on my web startup. I just consulted with a couple of high school band directors who want to redesign their web site. They're asking for advice and/or someone to do it. I've agreed to consult with them a bit to give advice on their options, but have not yet offered to undertake the job myself.
Their current site is just static pages maintained by a volunteer; they want to be able to edit their own content and sell products and stadium tickets on their new site.
As a web (Pylons) developer, I know how to create completely custom sites, but I am unfamiliar with the landscape of CMS and E-Commerce solutions out there.
Two questions:
1. What CMS and/or E-Commerce products out there would you recommend for something like this?
2. Should I accept this side project myself (if the CMS/e-commerce isn't hard to maintain) or should I continue focusing exclusively on my startup? (I suppose I should consider time, energy, cost... Gut instinct says to keep my focus, but the experience/name-dropping might be beneficial in the long run) <comment><USER2> I've been through the CMS selection process five times now, and it's always turned out bad, until the most recent selection. I've heavily used (as in, built and launched a site used by thousands of people every day) Zope, Plone, OpenACS, Joomla, and now Drupal, and experimented with (as in, installed and tinkered with for a few days just to get a feel for) a half dozen others. I _think_ Drupal is actually going to work for us for years to come; while every other CMS I've ever launched a site on has immediately shown itself to be really problematic once it was being used by a lot of people. It is the least frustrating, the best supported by its community, the most actively developed by competent developers (Joomla seems to have a lot more third party developers, but they seem to predominantly be web designers turned developer, and their inexperience shows in the extremely poor quality of most modules for Joomla). We've had it in service for a couple of months now, and I spent a lot more time evaluating and developing for it before choosing it than any other CMS I've deployed, and its flaws are the least offensive and the easiest to fix or workaround of any of the ones I've used, so far.

Ubercart is the nicest to customize and extend of any of the CMS shopping carts I've used, and also seems to be developed and maintained by competent, friendly people.

Getting commercial support for the code from competent core developers has also proven much easier than for any of the other CMS I've used (with the possible exception of Zope/Plone; the Zope people are top-notch and fantastic to work with, though not cheap, and I found I needed help a lot more than I liked because the docs were out of date and inaccurate and they've reinvented every wheel so existing knowledge, like of relational databases, doesn't map to Zope/Plone).

Anyway, our new site is also the hardest working of any CMS-based site I've ever built. It is expected to do more: forums, ticket tracker, ecommerce with quite a lot of customization for license management, documentation, extensive and heavily used email notifications (we send thousands of notification emails every single day, and while it's not perfect, Drupal is the most flexible and generic of all of the notification systems I've used).

It's probably worth mentioning that I don't like PHP as a language (I would choose Perl, Python, Ruby, or pretty much anything else, over PHP, if I were only selecting based on the implementation language). Despite that, Drupal is what I selected. I guess that's a pretty ringing endorsement.

I'm not even going to try to tell you what to do on question 2.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I was you I would take it just for the experience. I would use Drupal for the CMS. From what you describing should take you two-three weeks to learn Drupal and redesign the site.</comment>


London Stock Exchange hires 81 C++ developers for delayed Linux system - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3249268/london-stock-exchange-hires-81-c-developers-for-delayed-linux-system/

<comment><USER2> Guess they've never heard of Fred Brooks...?

<comment><USER3> I am always amazed at the number of very senior IT people who have never heard of him. I read his book as a very junior employee and felt like I was in some kind of secret club compared to everyone above me. People can be forgiven for going down technical dead ends or any of a multitude of bad decisions that are only obvious in hindsight. There is _zero_ excuse for repeating mistakes that are well-documented and avoidable. The funny thing is, it's not like his book is all theory. Anyone who has spent 5 or more years near most big corporate IT shops can readily identify most of the things he mentions in their own organization.

<comment><USER4> > There is zero excuse for repeating mistakes that are well-documented and > avoidable.

I once showed the CAP Theorem to a former employer. A few of the guys there were still convinced they could have a fully distributed system that would be consistent and available. I left soon after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And you wonder where all the potential start-up technical founders in London are ending up...

</comment><comment><USER6> It could be that they have 810 developers and need to increase their staff in 10%

I gather it's for the Department of Objectively Overzealous Management of Endpoint Drivers project...

<comment><USER7> yes because the project is 10% behind schedule

it all makes sense

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They're hiring 81 additional people for a late project and I should still believe that their earlier failure was Microsoft's fault?

[http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_aban...](http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform)

What these people need isn't software or more people, it's just a minimum of the soft stuff that the brain is made of.

</comment><comment><USER7> bad news: they are all Hurd developers

</comment><comment><USER9> It was 81 because they assumed there would be some attrition among the newbies. They probably really only need 67 or so.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know why the LSE purchased a company based in Sri Lanka for the work? I'm probably totally out of touch, but I would expect to find a company developing trading systems to be based near a major exchange (London, NY etc.).

<comment><USER10> Ah, there is a Colombo Exchange. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombo_Stock_Exchange>

<comment><USER11> Yes, MillenniumIT started proving services for CSE first and then moved to Malaysia, Boston, London, etc based on the initial platform developed for CSE

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That mythical man month is BS, there are lots of open source project with hundreds of contributors..

I wonder what kind of skill they are looking for specifically? (Education, experience, etc)

<comment><USER13> > That mythical man month is BS, there are lots of open source project with > hundreds of contributors..

Non sequitur. Have you read the book?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why 81? it seems that they tried to hire as much as possible, not wise.

<comment><USER15> They placed them in a 9 by 9 organizational matrix to fuel synergies through increased communication by placing them in a physical 9 by 9 cubicle matrix.

Or maybe that's all the headhunters could find.

<comment><USER16> What is this synergy/syngeries/synerging I keep hearing about? I know the meaning of the word and I see that it's some kind of a big company cliche, but where'd it come from?

<comment><USER17> Most of these terms seem to have been introduced by strategic consulting firms (e.g. McKinsey or BAH) and then filtered out into general management usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If they had stuck with plain C they'd probably only need 2 developers.

</comment><comment><USER19> For the Horde!!!</comment>


We're treating personality disorders the way we once treated mental health - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2018/10/subscriber-says-we-re-treating-personality-disorders-way-we-once-treated <comment><USER2> No proof of most of these treatments working. Sure to have treatments is one thing, but outcomes are halariously bad. Its obvious these catagorations are way off, and we are worse of for it. Posting this to police discorse, is even more laughable and neurotic. And yes, I meant that literally, as per the definition, not as a perjorative, the point of your article.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm posting this because it's a somewhat better discussion about personality disorder than the god-awful grade A horseshit that normally gets spewed in HN threads.</comment>


Show HN: Convert any Webapp to Desktopapp in one click - <AUTHOR> https://appmaker.xyz/web2desk-for-business/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HackerNews readers,

We're super excited to introduce Web2Desk Business.

Now Businesses and Startups can easily convert existing WebApps into Desktop apps that are compatible with Mac, Linux and Windows. And the best part is you only need to optimise your WebApp just for Chromium.

Some use cases: 🧰 Productivity Tools SaaS products 🧳 Enterprise Solutions ERPs and Softwares

8 months ago, we launched Web2Desk ([https://appmaker.xyz/web2desk/](https://appmaker.xyz/web2desk/)). Started out as Weekend project, Web2Desk got us featured on LifeHacker, Windows Club, Asana Training and many out there. Our users have created over 25,000 desktop apps till today and continue to grow daily.

We found many of our users were startups and entrepreneurs creating Desktop apps for their products, of which most often required installer, updates and support from our end. Web2Desk being a free product had its own limitations.

Thus Web2Desk for Business was born. Now businesses can look no further to create Desktop Apps along with Installers for their Webapps that's supported on Mac, Linux and Windows.

</comment><comment><USER2> So, the main point is to make enterprise users install chromium before they can use your enterprise dashboard ? I mean, it's a bit user hostile compared to creating cross browser compatible web app, but i can see the appeal for a startup on a tight budget. I'm surprised you're not bundling an android and ios wrapper at the same time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. We seen lot of startup leveraging chromium desktop apps, which reduces additional work/bug for supporting multiple browsers. Additionally some users prefer desktop apps over webapp which is a click away. For example we have over 3000+ apps created for asana alone with our free tool [[https://appmaker.xyz/web2desk/](https://appmaker.xyz/web2desk/)].

We are offering webapp to android from here [https://appmaker.xyz/webapp](https://appmaker.xyz/webapp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does this just wrap your website in Electron?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, It wraps website in electron.

<comment><USER3> So why charge for it if it's just reusing an open-source tool?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not charging for the service we are providing not for electron. Here is the free version we are providing without installer and updates [[https://appmaker.xyz/web2desk/](https://appmaker.xyz/web2desk/)]. Anyone can use electron and build a desktop app for their webapp. They'll have to make installer and manage updates by them self. What we are doing is we'll manage all of those for a monthly price. Technically we're are not billing for electron, We are billing for the service we provide

Hope this answer</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GitHub: How many physical/virtual servers does Github have? - Quora - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/GitHub/How-many-physical-virtual-servers-does-Github-have <comment><AUTHOR> apparently this is just enough to run a reliable service of which serve 478,000 people hosting over 1,448,000 git repositories</comment>


A Maze of Murderscapes: Metroid II - <AUTHOR> http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?p=1384825#1384825 <comment><USER2> OT: This is a throwaway comment in a caption near the end:

> _Samus' underwear are a reference to what Ellen Ripley wears at the end of > Alien, but Alien had a reason for it._

A little OT, but I believe Alien and Aliens may be the only popular movies we'll ever get in which the heroine whose gender isn't treated as anything more than a matter of fact. In both movies, she has nearly zero amount of dialogue relating to romantic interest, and acts and is treated as just _someone_ , not specifically a woman, on the crew...which makes sense given that the character was originally written for a man. Even her climactic victories arise organically from her character background, not in a cartoonish let's-see-women-kick-some-ass, as with the Bride in the Kill Bill series...Early on in Aliens, she is shown proficiently operating a Power Loader because of her past work experience, which foreshadows the final confrontation...in fact, it's funny that Ripley is sometimes referred to as a kickass gunslinger, when it is her inept use of flamethrowers and grenades that inadvertently lead to the final fight.

Anyway, this is just a long way of saying that Alien and Aliens are still not only two of the best action/sci-fi movies out there, but perhaps the only times in a major movie in which the woman is so asexual (the closest comparison I can think of is Marge Gunderson in Fargo)...So when that she does appear in her underwear at the end of both movies...it feels _logical_ (she's getting into the cyrochamber), and not as a contrived way to capitalize off the sexiness of the actress. I guess it was "cool" that Samus was revealed to be a woman at the end, but the race to beat the game to see more of her underwear was an unnecessary bit of game design, IMO.

<comment><USER3> Sure, if you ignore the mother/daughter relationship between Ripley and Newt in Aliens, and the clearly-hinted-at-but-never-really-acted-upon romantic connection with Colonel Hicks.

But for Alien, I would agree.

<comment><USER4> Minor point, Hicks is a private in Aliens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Imagine a game where Samus' goal is less about killing and more about > exploration. She befriends the fauna and they help one another. Regardless > of the designers' intent, Metroid II ends on a promising note that implies > murder mazes aren't the future of videogames. Regrettably, the bulk of the > game is still a maze where Samus does her murderscaping._

You know, this sentence made me realize that the game Waking Mars is essentially Metroid without the murder. Quite the opposite in fact: you are bringing an ecosystem back to life.

[http://www.tigerstylegames.com/wakingmars/](http://www.tigerstylegames.com/wakingmars/)

<comment><USER6> Good point.

As an aside, Waking Mars is one of few games[1] that I actually enjoyed playing on mobile. It works well with touch and has a nice atmosphere to it that makes exploration fun.

[1] Tower defence games are the only others I sometimes play on mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a beautiful piece about a wonderful, wonderful game. As much as I love Super Metroid (which, despite her criticisms, I think is superior in gameplay and puzzle-platforming), she is spot-on about the ham-fisting of the story.

We should all write like this about video games from our past that made us feel something special.

> Samus' motives in keeping the last metroid alive are unclear: are they > purely utilitarian, or has she had a change of heart? The game's rules, > possibly mirroring Samus' wishes, don't allow for the metroid baby to be > killed—bullets seem to barely miss or pass through the metroid. Of course, > killing the metroid would doom Samus to a slow death deep underground, but > this is not immediately apparent.

I didn't ever think about that until just now!

<comment><USER8> Ditto. One of her complaints is about the doors in Super Metroid, and I can understand it. Thinking back, I think they may have been going for 'someone's already been here' (which is done masterfully in Uru). But it's so relentless, that it never sets in. Eventually you just gotta blame the goofy space pirates. (In fact, I think this is lampshaded in Metroid Double Prime where the pirate logs make note of how inconvenient the door mechanisms are.)

But especially in the two Primes, it feels contrived. I absolutely adored the two games, but there's a feeling the whole thing is a setup for the character. Too many special circumstances in the ice or rock that somehow awaited Samus showing up at just the right time with the right weapon. The earlier games don't have that, I think, and I can see how Super Metroid starts the trend.

<comment><USER7> I've long suspected that Super Metroid is my favorite--and I think this logic applies for many other video game series--because it's not only the first one that I played, but the first one that I beat. I find myself nodding along to every criticism of the game, but there is just something special about that first play through. That incredible sense of simultaneous delight, fear, wonder, confusion, and suspense is still a really vivid memory for me two decades later.

Believe it or not, I have never played any of the Primes.

<comment><USER8> Totally understood. I feel that way about the first Prime: I'm slightly embarrassed to say it was the first Metroid game I really played (the original Metroid was just too much for little kid me). But I played it to full completion; it's possibly one of the first things I ever really finished in my life up to that point. I played MP at a friend's house, a couple hours at a time, utterly losing myself in the graphical beauty of the game (dude you can see her gun hand's gesture in X-ray mode!) and the calm exploration music. It was soothing, and I appreciated it a lot. The friend was an older disabled gentleman who kept his home open for the neighborhood kids to have a safe place to hang out; I knew him from church and wasn't a part of any real social group, but he thought I might enjoy it. And so I rode my bike over and played and left in the cool evening. Often he'd be tidying up his Animal Crossing dailies before or after.

I wish I was as eloquent as the OP in describing the experience, since I would love to have that feeling again. Oh well.

The circumstances of a good game well played can burn in and amplify the experience. So I consider myself lucky, since quite few games feel that much deeper given the state of my life while playing them. I can see and agree with all sorts of flaws in the games, but they'll remain special simply because at the time, they were.

<comment><USER7> > I can see and agree with all sorts of flaws in the games, but they'll remain > special simply because at the time, they were.

I don't really have much to add to that, except that this is a really succinct way of describing, I think, what you, the author, and I are trying to say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> RandomCode (dead comment): yeah, me too. I just lose interest in games so easily any more, and with so many other priorities fighting for my time, game playing seems needlessly wasteful. I just can't enjoy it unless it's a social event with a bunch of people, which you see less and less after 30. But I do remember spending hours obsessed with games like Metroid, and love the nostalgia posts like this evoke.

<comment><USER10> Well probably 90% of games are just brainless mass entertainment productions and it's quite pointless playing them anyways. But a few games are true works of arts and playing them, just like going through an insightful book/movie, gives you a lot. This might be the most convincing reason if I were to keep playing certain games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Metroids are a constantly exploited species that are incapable of > interplanetary travel, but they're frequently treated within the Metroid > series as some sort of galactic threat. This is bullshit.

I disagree. Metroids are presented as ready-made bundles of destruction, whom an enemy _send_ across the interplanetary gulf to a target planet.

The risk is not their agency, but their use as weapons. Their lack of spaceflight is a _bonus_ to those who might exploit them, making it easier to use them against only the desired targets.

</comment><comment><USER12> This mentions the killing aspects of games multiple times, and does make me wonder if we can make more games that aren't about overt violence.

I know a lot exist, but it feels like if a game has some "story-ness" to it (so not a God game, but something with a narrative), and it has more than a minimum of mechanics (unlike puzzle/adventure games) , the mechanics end up having to be about violence. Maybe I'm wanting to come to this conclusion

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, after all most games are commercial projects using which you have to feed a lot of people(investors, programmers, designers, composers etc.). Therefore you cannot expect them to present really serious and deep stories, in the way authors are able to do personally in literature. Therefore trying to interpret too much into the story/taking them too seriously mostly won't get you anywhere. There might be occasional strokes of excellence but in general storywriters for games were just rushing to meet deadlines. In this case, bringing back the last Meteor could be a touching story, however for the sake of commercial production they couldn't really produce a coherent narrative for it across all Meteor series games, and in the end Samus just ended up being a self-conflicting and basically brainless and senseless character. Yeah, games played at certain stages might bring deep nostalgia, but those most likely come from personal experiences instead of the stories themselves.

By the way, quite a remarkable story in terms of personal experience.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm about to buy a Gameboy Pocket just due to this post. [http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/02/lets-play-some- gam...](http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/02/lets-play-some-gameboy.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Honestly this is great. I just played through Super Metroid and I felt so strongly about how we need a new Metroid that is 2D and has the same aesthetic. There is no comparison to how clean and slick and original that game feels.

<comment><USER15> Try the ROM hacks. Redesign (hard), Golden Age (fun) and Phazon (cool art) are all great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very good article.

Having played the Metroid games, but not II, reading this explained a lot about the exact inspiration for REDDER ([http://auntiepixelante.com/?p=540](http://auntiepixelante.com/?p=540)).

<comment><USER17> This one[1] in the same vein is pretty amazing, too.

[1]: [http://www.kongregate.com/games/CosmicMaher/after-years- in-d...](http://www.kongregate.com/games/CosmicMaher/after-years-in-dark- tunnels)</comment></comment>


Dead pigs in Shanghai water supply don't ring alarm bells for Chinese officials - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2013/0311/Dead-pigs-in-Shanghai-water-supply-don-t-ring-alarm-bells-for-Chinese-officials

<comment><USER2> The article only mentions 2,813, not 5,000.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/number-dead-pigs- float...](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/number-dead-pigs-floating- shanghai-river-rises-6-000-article-1.1286389)</comment></comment>


Examhack for Android-Predict Questions of Indian CBSE Exams - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.gonative.android.ywlqe

<comment><AUTHOR> Examhack app predicts questions of your next Indian CBSE exam by trawling past question papers according to marking scheme and lets you solve important questions what you want from over 1000 question papers.</comment>


I/O Ventures VC Paul Bragiel Goes On Hiatus To Train For The Winter Olympics - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/20/bragiel-sochi-olympics/

<comment><USER2> During the London Olympics my friend and I investigated doing something like this. We were thinking more about curling, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> This guy has a ridiculous beard. I want to see him make it just to see an athlete look like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Paul's beard is legendary. Here's a link from Ke$ha's blog:

[http://putyourbeardinmymouth.tumblr.com/post/14184840145/uhh...](http://putyourbeardinmymouth.tumblr.com/post/14184840145/uhhh- not-really-sure-whats-going-on-here-but-i)</comment></comment>