How Siri Works - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffwofford.com/?p=817 <comment><USER2> I worked at SRI on the CALO project, and built prototypes of the system that was spun off into SIRI. The system uses a simple semantic task model to map language to actions. There is no deep parsing - the model does simple keyword matching and slot filling, and it turns out that with some clever engineering, this is enough to make a very compelling system. It is great to see it launch as a built-in feature on the iPhone.

The NLP approach is based on work at Dejima, an NLP startup: [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.70.5...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.70.5385)

A lot of the work is grounded in Adam Cheyer's (CTO of SIRI) work on the Open Agent Architecture: <http://www.ai.sri.com/~oaa/>

A more recent publication from Adam and Didier Guzzoni on the Active architecture, which is probably the closest you'll come to a public explanation of how SIRI works: [https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/2007/SS-07-04/SS...](https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/2007/SS-07-04/SS07-04-009.pdf)

<comment><USER3> SRI is a great organization. They make the best language modeling tool srilm that is available to developers <http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/>

I am curious if, and what its role in SIRI was.?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> Virtually everything we call "AI" today is either a theatrical display of essentially scripted behavior (that's how most game AI works), a massive database (such as Google Suggestions and expert systems) or a vague and decidedly unintelligent jumble of neural networks and genetic algorithms._

Okay, I can understand the first two being less attractive, but evolutionary neural networks-- really? I mean, what more do you want than an artificial brain created through simulated evolution? What characteristics would satisfy people like this that something is "AI" [1]? It seems a bit like the old saying that once it's discovered, it's no longer AI.

[1] It's worth noting that I'm strongly biased since I work in the Neural Network Research Group at UT Austin.

<comment><USER5> I rather dislike ANNs. I recognize that ANNs _perform_ well and find research to improve their performance interesting, but honestly they're completely opaque black boxes with structure that only plausibly mimics the absolute simplest of biological neural networks.

I want a "brain" which was built from principles that allow its workings to be intelligible and efficient based on a technique which reflects the structure of the problem of learning, generalization, and hypothesis search and illuminates it.

So I'll buy (and often use) your ANNs, but I can't help but feel a little bit worried about the state of affairs. It's probably a whole lot like that automatically enumerated proof of the 4-color theorem. It's definitely important, but there is something unsatisfying about it. We aren't learning as much as we felt entitled to because the destination was only a small part of the journey.

<comment><USER4> _> they're completely opaque black boxes with structure that only plausibly mimics the absolute simplest of biological neural networks_

I guess this depends on how advanced your toolkit is. If you're simply using feedforward nets with fixed weights, fixed topology, and sigmoid activation, then yes that's probably right.

However, there are a lot of advanced techniques in ANNs that most people never use. Lots of more biologically-inspired approaches have been explored, such as leaky integrator neurons, Hebbian learning, and indirect encodings.

 _> I want a "brain" which was built from principles_

See, but the problem is that we don't even have the knowledge of how _real_ brains work to start forming such principals. In fact, we're starting to see computational models used to form principals of biological brains (for example, [1]).

 _> that allow its workings to be intelligible_

And what does that mean? You want to be able to discern some rule base from the system that you can understand? Even biological brains do not have that property.

 _> based on a technique which reflects the structure of the problem of learning, generalization, and hypothesis search and illuminates it._

This is very vague. Happy to dive into it if you are willing to expound a bit.

 _> It's probably a whole lot like that automatically enumerated proof of the 4-color theorem. It's definitely important, but there is something unsatisfying about it. We aren't learning as much as we felt entitled to because the destination was only a small part of the journey._

Again, very vague. Do you think having children is unsatisfying because you can't understand their actions most of the time? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the issue here.

Seriously though, I want to know what will impress people here. It's not going to be a fully general, "human-level" AI, obviously, as that requires huge amounts of semantic knowledge about the world that was encoded through billions of years of evolution, but that to me is not really a necessary condition for AI.

[1] <http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?hoffman:biopsych11>

<comment><USER6> Thank you for your solid reply. I think ANN is the real thing, and most of the other "AI" solutions that we have give the impression of intelligence, but are simply algorithms that solve problems we have in very well defined ways.

ANN is a general intelligence that gets shaped by experience and adapts figure out its own solutions. This is the path that will lead to our concept of AI presented in sci-fi and what the general public actually thinks of. It isn't some coder banging on the keyboard trying to replicate what a human would do under a specific situation, it is something that truly learns.

We have a long way to go before this becomes a reality, but it will happen.

<comment><USER5> That's very romantic, but I think instead we're going to learn that intelligence is not such a well-defined idea as to be engineered into anything imagined by science fiction.

Further, there are plenty of techniques which aren't ANNs but still are "shaped by experience" and "figure out their own solutions".

I side pretty strongly with the idea of building tools to bring the powerful modes of computerized learning close to the powerful modes of human learning. I think we're inordinately far away from replicating one with the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> OK, so, just got me a shiny new 4S and have been playing with Siri.

It quickly became apparent that it is "limited" to this list - but that's OK. It does it very well - it recognised all of my family members and workmates with 95% (or more) accuracy, and without any training.

OK so it is a modest start - but a quality one, and the options are useful.

The thing that _blows me away_ though is the speech to text. It's very accurate, as good as my 2 year old trained Dragon Naturally Speaking install. Sadly this is texts only at the moment, but I imagine we will see it in email eventually (hope so anyway).

Dictating texts is great; I just sent a few instead of emails because it is so frickin quick :)

Quality product.

(as to how it knows about stuff like "my wife" - it asks you first time.)

EDIT: I've just found out I can dictate email with it... awesome! but the icon seems to be odd in whether it appears or not (if not going through siri direct. Clicking reply on an existing email doesn't seem to give me the option.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a good start, but it's all analysis from the outside looking in. The author is probably right about the overall structure, but there are already a few things that have come out since he posted this (it's dated last week, probably right before Steve Jobs' passing): Relationships, such as "my wife" are not actually something you type into new fields in the address book. You actually tell Siri yourself, in what appears to be a sort of natural-language @define statement.

Once a much larger audience has been playing with Siri for a few weeks, we should start to get a much clearer picture.

</comment><comment><USER9> Every time someone analyzes an AI system, they invariably conclude that it isn't really AI, but rather just a complicated system of different, strung- together technologies.

At what point do systems of sophisticated text-to-speech and grammar analysis technologies actually become AI?

<comment><USER10> When they can feel emotions.

The one place where AI actually is a term of art -- gaming -- is also uniquely distinguished in that for agents both human- and computer-controlled, the goals are definite and the number of choices of action limited.

Out here in the real world, things are a lot more fuzzy and complicated. Accordingly we are not willing to give a bot AI status until it can demonstrate competence at "real world" goals (presumably including having relationships with other sapient beings in the world).

<comment><USER11> What do emotions have to do with intelligence?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some background on Siri:

"In 2007, SRI [1] spun off Siri, Inc. Siri was born from SRI's work on the DARPA-funded CALO [2] project, described by SRI as the largest artificial intelligence project ever launched. Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010."

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO>

</comment><comment><USER13> Bullshit. AI works everyday and VERY well. AI does a fantastic job tuning SQL Queries. A* does a fantastic job finding reasonable routes between destinations. AI finds optimizations to massively speed up software. AI lays out the very circuitry of most of the ICs in your computer. AI routes the packets between you and HN. It seems that as soon as something in AI works it becomes not AI.

I guarantee you that when we find out _exactly_ how a neuron and neural networks work the human brain will be equally unimpressive. Each person's brain is the product of an uninterrupted chain of evolution stretching back 4 billion years. The field of AI has been around for about 60 years, sorry it hasn't quite managed to best the human brain in every task imaginable.

Also, if one looks at "natural intelligence" they can see some pretty stupid things going on. Losing spaceshuttles due to metric / SAE conversion, wtf?

Ask the average person to name the country that lies between Iraq and Afganistan.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+country+borders+on...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+country+borders+on+iraq+and+afganistan)

<comment><USER14> Wolfram Alpha doesn't actually answer the question that was asked. Instead it answers two questions (1) what countries share borders with Iraq; (2) what countries share borders with Afghanistan. The final step (find the intersection of those sets) is a task that I would expect a computer to be better at than a human, but that is the step that Wolfram Alpha misses out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _But how did Siri learn who Scott's wife was? The demo didn't show us, but I have a suspicion about how it works.

The Mac Address Book has long had an entry for setting up relationships between contacts. I can indicate who my spouse is in Address Book. I suspect that the iPhone Contacts app will gain similar new fields in iOS 5._

I haven't used Siri so I don't know whether it'll use those fields, but I do know that if it didn't know who Scott's wife was, it'd have asked him and then remembered his answer.

I also don't know (but would like to!) whether it does said remembering by updating the contact.

Edit: seen on Twitter, "Siri doesn't just remember your mother, father, and other significant people, it adds them to your contact details." So: it's not a separate store.

</comment><comment><USER16> But none of this is how it works. I was expecting to read about the company they acquired and how they set about integrating and negotiating arrangements with service providers.

</comment><comment><USER17> When Siri was first available, there were almost no underpinnings on it would be the next big thing or how important it would be. Suddenly, after this general release on a limited hardware, we suddenly find it the next big thing.

<comment><USER18> When it was first released, a lot of people said that it was the next best thing. Take a look at Robert Scoble's initial coverage. The only problem was that, since it was an app, I don't think they got the level of attention that they were due. If you used it back then, it really did feel magical.

Now that Apple acquired them, they can use their platform to really promote it and get it on everyone's device by default, which will help a lot more people to find and use it.

<comment><USER17> Robert's article: [http://scobleizer.com/2010/02/08/why-if-you-miss-siri- youll-...](http://scobleizer.com/2010/02/08/why-if-you-miss-siri-youll-miss- the-future-of-the-web/)

I guess most of us here in hacker news would have known Siri (from Sri) from its first public release. Many of us here also would have watched that Youtube video describing this amazing combination of technology. I guess I didn't feel any magic comes from the fact that I am not living in the US (so the app means nothing to me)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The site is currently down, here is a google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?gcx=c&sourc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.jeffwofford.com%2F%3Fp%3D817)

</comment><comment> saint-loup >>> Just think how much fun it will be when I say, "Send a text to Andrea that says 'I love you,'" and Siri hears, "Send a text to Andrew that says 'I love you.'" I look forward to seeing how reliable it really is.

If some threshold of certainty isn't met, Siri will certainly ask "Did you mean Andrew or Andrea". Doesn't seem like a really hard problem.

<comment><USER15> It always (from what I've seen) confirms before doing any not-easily-undoable action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> From the article:

"if anyone has the motivation, the resources, and the smarts to get AI right, the iPhone dev team is it."

Which is why they acquired Siri, instead of writing their own? :)

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/apple-buys-virtual- personal...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/apple-buys-virtual-personal- assistant-startup-siri/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I think this is all going to hinge on weather Apple can match the speech recognition bar that Google has set. Without that (like the article mentions) all the AI stuff doesn't matter. Voice Actions can't use arbitrary grammer, and it's not as pretty as Apple's solution, or as integrated, but for dictation, it's pretty good; honed by years of Google 411 and who knows what other masses of input. Is Apple using a datacenter with petabytes of voice training, or is it Dragon in the cloud? I've got an Android phone now, and as soon as I get my hands on a 4S I'm going to put them through their paces dictating text and compare. From the reviews, it looks like Apple has at least matched Google in dictation, which means that Siri has a huge lead over Voice Actions due to all the other improvements.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've always been curious, regarding "speaking with a Southern drawl, with a stuffed-up nose from a bad cold" ... are there non-native English speakers here who have had particular difficulty using speech-to-text because of an accent? Have the British, Irish, Scottish, Australians, Canadians, Jamaicans, or South Africans had trouble because of their dialect?

Speech-to-text sounds like it will be a constantly tough problem. Even humans aren't 100% accurate, or even 99% accurate, depending on the circumstances.

<comment><USER23> French accent, my nexus never understand me when i ask for gas station, or the names of my Chinese or French contacts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If we created an AI that was actually intelligent enough to understand all of our queries and sort through our junk to find the answers we need, it probably wouldn't want to do it.

<comment><USER25> or... once we had an AI capable of sorting through all that junk, we'd pile endlessly more junk on there until it couldn't :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> TL;DR;

Siri is a simple application with constrained functionality that uses existing technology, all dressed up to make it seem much smarter than it really is.

<comment><USER27> If it's successful enough at seeming smart, in a large range of different circumstances, how is that different from actually being smart?

<comment><USER26> seeming smart != being smart

Thought I see what you're saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SvjDtey...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SvjDteykXA4J:www.jeffwofford.com/%3Fp%3D817+how+siri+works&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER29> Honestly, if you wrote Siri as a text line parser, would anyone be impressed by all the fancy features? It's more that current voice response systems are so incredibly primitive.

<comment><USER30> I think most people would be impressed if they could just type in what they wanted as an English sentence. Most users are familiar with GUIs, and may have heard of command line interfaces, but an English interface would be new. And maybe a plain English typed interface would even be useful. Some percentage of people type full English sentences into Google.

<comment><USER31> Like AppleScript.

God I hate AppleScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ok, I know it has entered the popular culture and become a myth, and thus fighting it is kinda pointless, but the newton was not a failure, neither technologically or from a business perspective.

First off, Technologically. It worked. I have terrible handwriting, and the newton I had was the 100- the original message pad. It could recognize my handwriting, just fine, well north of %90 of the time. When it got a word wrong, it was trivial to correct. I was able to write on it at the same speed that I would be writing on a pen and paper. I could increase this recognition rate to %100 by altering the way I wrote, if I wanted to, but it was more convenient to write my normal way.

Further, this was all done on an ARM RISC 610 CPU running at 20Mhz with 640kb of RAM!

It was "technology from the future", and unfortunately it came at a time when, at least in america, "computer literacy" was a big thing. Many people weren't really computer literate, and having a computer in the home was not rare, but not exactly common yet.

Secondly, the Newton was not a failure in the marketplace. The device found wide adoption in industry where its unique features provided exceptional value. In places where a Palm could compete (because the newton's superior technology wasn't significantly more valuable) it didn't do as well... but that doesn't mean it was a failure as a product or was losing money. (Interestingly, NeXT, widely also regarded as a "failure" was also profitable when Apple bought them.)

The newton was building momentum and was about to be spun out in an IPO as Newton Inc, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. I don't know the reasons that Steve Jobs killed the IPO and the product. It seems to me that letting it spin out would have been the wiser move.

I understand why it was popular for doonsbury to make fun of it, and the simpsons, etc. It exhibited a kind of hubris. Handwriting recognition? At a time when people are barely grasping the value of a computer to begin with?

I think the lesson to learn with AI like products is to make sure that the target market is receptive to the idea.

I hope people are now more receptive to Siri than they were to Newton.

<comment><USER33>
        Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
        Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
        All mimes were the borrowers,
        And the moderate Belgrade.

        "Beware the tablespoon my son,
        The teeth that bite, the Claus that catch.
        Beware the Subjects bird, and shred
        The serious Bandwidth!"

        He took his Verbal sword in hand:
        Long time the monitors fog he sought,
        So rested he by the Tumbled tree,
        And stood a while in thought.

        And as in selfish thought he stood,
        The tablespoon, with eyes of Flame,
        Came stifling through the trigger wood,
        And troubled as it came!

        One, two! One, two! And through and though,
        The Verbal blade went thicker shade.
        He left it dead, and with its head,
        He went gambling back.

        "And host Thai slash the tablespoon?
        Come to my arms my bearish boy.
        Oh various day! Cartoon! Cathay!"
        He charted in his joy.

        Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
        Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
        All mimes were the borrowers,
        And the moderate Belgrade.

<comment><USER34> OK, I get your point, but transcribing e.e. cummings poems is kind of a corner case for voice recognition, no?

What Siri is going to test is whether the 80/20 rule applies to a voice recognition based personal assistant. By constraining it to assistant-type tasks, and with what seems to be the most intelligent design we've seen yet, it has a better shot of achieving it than anything else out there. Previous entrants have been tripped up by the lack of a decent UX, failure to integrate with other data sources, or any number of shortcomings in the long chain from microphone to software back to speaker. Apple is the first company to have such precise control over every component in that chain. (For instance, I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason Siri is 4S-only is because hardware has been added for smarter noise or echo cancellation, or other subtle design changes.) And the fact that it can learn from the internet, and presumably submit its training data back to the cloud, means that maybe it will eventually be able to handle not just 80%, but 90% or 99% of total inputs.

<comment><USER35> It's Lewis Carroll, but your point stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> ok i've been playing with Siri for a few hours now. this thing is awesome!</comment>


Waffle.io Is Shutting Down - <AUTHOR> https://waffle.io/ <comment><USER2> It does seem to me that value-adding to GitHub or the like is not a great business model. Because sooner or later, if the feature is popular enough, GitHub is going to implement the feature directly (such as with GitHub Projects), rendering your business somewhat obsolete.

Having a clean migration path for people out is a nice touch though.

</comment><comment><USER3> From: [https://help.waffle.io/waffle-shutdown/waffle-shutdown- tldr](https://help.waffle.io/waffle-shutdown/waffle-shutdown-tldr)

> Waffle is closing due to market direction and the acquisition by Broadcom. > (link to blog)

[https://blog.waffle.io/farewell-from- waffle--794da4a72851](https://blog.waffle.io/farewell-from- waffle--794da4a72851)

Travis and now Waffle ...</comment>


What Does a Parrot Know About PTSD? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/magazine/what-does-a-parrot-know-about-ptsd.html <comment><USER2> An excellent and touching article.

Among the gems within: _The early German naturalist explorer Alexander von Humboldt wrote of encountering, during his travels in South America toward the close of the 18th century, a parrot that was the last living repository of the language of the extinct Atures Indian tribe._

</comment><comment><USER3> Wonderful article. Half way through the article I took my parrot out of his cage and played with him even though he had just been out an hour before.

I have misgivings about people keeping parrots as pets because of the possibility of something happening to separate birds from their human flock. Lacking other parrots, a parrot bonds very tightly with human companions. I will need to live to 90 to have a good chance of outliving my parrot and my parrot ending up in a shelter years from now with strangers would not be a good outcome if he outlives me. He is 13 now, BTW.

<comment><USER4> I considered off and on about getting a parrot, but every time I read articles like this, it puts me firmly back into the "shouldn't get one" camp. I'm always shocked at how people can pay so much for one and then treat them so poorly. They're wonderful creatures, but I don't know if I can take on the responsibility of having something that's like a child that never grows up.

I'd probably feel a little guilty for also keeping a (tamed) wild creature in a cage. However, all the legally purchased ones in the United States at least were born here, so it wouldn't really be taking it from its wild habitat.

Crows would also make a fascinating pet, but having one as a pet would be illegal in North America[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migratory_Bird_Treaty_Act_of_1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migratory_Bird_Treaty_Act_of_1918)

<comment><USER5> Crows are pretty clever, I am sure you could bribe a wild crow to be your friend.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I think that would be possible. The ones where I am are kind of skittish compared to the ones I see in urban areas (I live a semi rural area).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My goodness, that was affecting. Such a pleasant change to hear of some good in the world.

</comment><comment><USER7> You folks who wanted parrots but are concerned about their lifespan, there are literally THOUSANDS of unwanted birds you could adopt.

Get an old one. Mine's 30 and he's gonna outlive me. Maybe you can adopt him in ten years or so after I kick.

<comment><USER8> What's he like? Did you know his name when you got him?

My sister has a pre=owned galah. Like all parrots he is endearing, but at the same time, crotchety and set-in-his-ways.

<comment><USER7> He was 3 when I bought him at the bird store I worked at. His name is Casanova, which is ironic because he doesn't like women except for me. He's a manly bird for manly men, but I have a motorcycle so I guess that makes me acceptable.

He was a lot more aggressive a few years ago. Since I started working him with a glove (for the same reason falconers do, protection and better footing for the bird) and making him wear a harness to go outside, his attitude has improved considerably.

Galahs are adorable, but pinchy and overpriced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" The day after she left active service, the helicopter she had flown in for the previous three years crashed in severe weather into the side of a mountain, killing six of her former crewmates. Devastated by the loss and overcome with guilt"_

Yep, that'll do it. _" People die, you feel quilt. "_ That's a Hal Moore quote. [0],[1]

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

[1] 1st Air Cav, la Drang, '65 ~ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxPeHqH4XxI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxPeHqH4XxI)

<comment> david-given Possibly you meant 'guilt' in that second quotation?

<comment><USER9> Yes. The actual quote is:

        "When your men die and you don't, you feel guilty,"

It's a quote from _" We Were Soldiers Once, And Young"_ by Hal Moore and journalist Joe Galloway ~ [http://weweresoldiers.net/joes- story.htm](http://weweresoldiers.net/joes-story.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What a brilliant article.</comment>


What Economists Still Don't Get About the 2008 Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-29/what-economists-still-don-t-get-about-2008-crisis <comment><USER2> To me the biggest mystery about the 2008 crisis is why so much QE has resulted in so little inflation.

The only convincing arguments I have heard so far is that:

1\. at the same time banks were forced to significantly deleverage, so while the fed was pouring money into the systems, banks were effectively pouring money out of the system.

2\. inflation happened but it was all concentrated into financial assets, real estate, and salaries for the upper middle class, which expenses (college tuition, luxury flats and houses, restaurants, etc) have seen a double digit inflation (my FT subscription must have doubled in 10 years!). These aren't really measured by CPI indices.

I guess it may also have to do with how the QE was introduced. If it was money printed to pay civil servants it might have had a different effect than introduced in the bond market.

But I don't know if it is reproducible. It feels like we are at the end of the current cycle (it's hard not to be nervous when looking at a 30y chart of the S&P500). QE is pretty much all the way in, rates are low. There isn't going to be much more central banks can do than print even more money. Inflation should show its ugly head sooner or later.

<comment><USER3> _> at the same time banks were forced to significantly deleverage, so while the fed was pouring money into the systems, banks were effectively pouring money out of the system._

That's not an "argument", it's an observation. Almost all of the QE "new money" was never used by the banks to make loans; it just sat in their accounts at the Fed. Why? Because the banks weren't fools: they knew they had way too little reserves for the loans they already had outstanding, so they just used the QE funds to increase their reserves. That equates to "significantly deleverage".

 _> I guess it may also have to do with how the QE was introduced. If it was money printed to pay civil servants it might have had a different effect than introduced in the bond market._

Or money printed to pay ordinary people whose retirement savings had collapsed through no fault of their own. And yes, that would have caused inflation, because you would have had a greatly increased quantity of money chasing the same quantity of goods and services. It might also have stimulated some economic growth which could have offset that effect, but that's a chancy thing to rely on.

<comment><USER4> > Or money printed to pay ordinary people whose retirement savings had > collapsed through no fault of their own. And yes, that would have caused > inflation

We did exactly that. The Fed orchestrated the greatest ordinary person bailout the world has ever seen: it reinflated the US housing market and salvaged the net worth of the entire middle class in the process.

It did cause vast inflation. Just look at the cost of a house in 2012 vs 2018 or the equity situation then vs now:

Average gain on a home sale in 1Q04: positive ~$50,000.

Average gain on a home sale in 1Q12: negative ~$50,000.

Average gain on a home sale in 1Q18: positive ~$55,000.

[https://i.imgur.com/SfktmBU.png](https://i.imgur.com/SfktmBU.png)

Median sales price for homes sold in the US:

1Q06: $247,000 (peak bubble...)

1Q12: $238,000

1Q18: $338,000 (!)

Those recent gains are very heavy with inflation courtesy of the Fed, and they are entering the real economy slowly but surely with every exit. That's also why the Fed is being forced to raise interest rates when it's the last thing the economic party wants.

The artificially juiced stock market (artificial courtesy of the low rates), which has created millions of new millionaires in the last four or so years, is also inflationary. It has also helped to salvage countless pension funds for large numbers of ordinary persons, funds that were badly under water. Every time someone sells their hilariously inflated Netflix stock at 200 times earnings, they can thank the Fed, and when they dump that into the economy (consumer goods or housing) it's inflation in action.

<comment><USER3> _> The Fed orchestrated the greatest ordinary person bailout the world has ever seen: it reinflated the US housing market and salvaged the net worth of the entire middle class in the process._

How the the Fed do this? Certainly not by QE, which did none of these things.

 _> Just look at the cost of a house in 2012 vs 2018_

What did the Fed do during this time? Most of the money printed by QE happened from 2009-2013, and QE was shut down completely in October 2014.

<comment><USER5> QE bought a lot of long term junk-ish bonds (full of "AAA housing"), no?

QE was the bridge between the two sides of the chasm, hence it's not visible on the graph. We see a rapid fall, a smooth bottom and a nice rise, but it could have been simply a big crash at the bottom and nothing for a decade.

<comment><USER3> _> QE bought a lot of long term junk-ish bonds (full of "AAA housing"), no?_

No. QE bought T-bills in order to exchange them for increases in the banks' account balances at the Fed.

TARP funds bought junk-ish bonds back in 2008-2009, but all that did was make banks and financial institutions not go bankrupt from being forced to make subprime mortgages for several decades due to the federal government's policy to "encourage" home ownership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a pleasure to read an article by a writer who understands of the history economic thought, though I suspect I will disagree with him on a lot of things.

Anyway, this is interesting. I'll look up these economists.

On the face of it, I think it's interesting how economists are hesitant to consider money real. Money is fictional to most economists. What's real is consumer surplus, utility or some other abstract way of reasoning about consumption. ...skeptical eyebrow.

I liked David Graeber's book about money. First, because I like his intellectual shit-stirring. Second, because I think he's right about the origin of money. Money evolved from debt. Debt did not evolve from money, as liberal 17/18th century thinkers assumed.

Beyond this relatively simple point, I don't think he had much of anything concrete. But, as he talked about little local revolts and the role debt played... idk. Makes you think.

In any case, from a reactive european perspective in the post financial crisis world... I suspect that what business cycles _are_ is a system wide insolvency. It turns out tat some of the money isn't _real_. That is, some of the debts floating around the economy are not going to be paid. The dollar isn't worth a dollar, your bank doesn't really have your money, the stock will never pay a dividend, the national debt will never be repaid, someone isn't as rich as they think they are, the mortgages are in arrears.

The crisis, whether it's a on banks, devaluation of assets, currency inflation... this is a bankruptcy proceeding, a negotiation determining who really owes who what, given that not everyone can get paid.

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of an amusing story I read somewhere a while back:

>It is the month of August; a resort town sits next to the shores of a lake. It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

>Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 dollar bill on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.

>The hotel proprietor takes the 100 dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to the butcher. The Butcher takes the 100 dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to the pig raiser. The pig raiser takes the 100 dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel. The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to the town's prostitute that, in these hard times, gave her "services" on credit. The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 dollar bill to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.

>The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 dollar bill back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything. At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 dollar bill, after saying he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.

>No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.

<comment><USER8> It's not that clever, they might be out of debt but they are also out of creditors. Nobody got richer or poorer just balances were settled.

That's kind of the point of money.

<comment><USER9> Exactly.

> However, the whole town is now without debt

And without credit.

I next expect to hear a ingenious story about someone who pays off a car loan in a way that results in an empty bank account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been reading through Anna Schwartz's papers on monetary economics and I think they're the real story on what economists still don't get about the 2008 crisis.

If you read through the old monetarist research, you see that change in money supply has a better correlation with recession than basically anything else. This holds true even when you control for the possibility of reverse causation, when you make sure that you're actually dealing with a leading indicator of this cycle rather than a lagging indicator of the next cycle, etc, etc.

Keynesians think that the only measure of how tight or loose monetary policy is comes from interest rates, so they can't wrap their heads around how 1% interest rates can still be tight money. The real story of the economics crisis is that the banking crisis deposit:reserve ratio through the floor. This means that a bunch of money disappeared as banks preferred liquidity. The central bank didn't do enough to replace this money, so people couldn't hold the money balances they wanted and stopped spending. The Fed said they were doing all they could to spur inflation, but that's obviously false. The central bank can always inflate the currency and the fact that they weren't hitting their inflation targets shows that they had tight money.

Keynesians ultimately don't think money is important enough to model and until they change that, they're going to be confused.

<comment><USER11> Totally agree with your post, I explain it like this:

The problem with the old monetarists was always that they assumed a constant demand of money (or velocity) how they called it. Now they had some empirical reasons for this (see PhD under Friedman) but they missed something that earlier economists had already figured out. Namely that monetary demand can shift for all kinds of reasons and that any good monetary system needs to adjusts to that.

However they were totally correct on interest rate and that interest rate are a terrible guide for monetary policy.

When you actually study New-Keynesian it is perfectly clear that it is not the interest rate that sets monetary policy (or indicts it) but rather interest rate relative to the natural rate. Why New-Keynesian never explain this to anybody when giving interviews or anything like that boggles my mind sometimes.

So in New-Keynesiansim everything hinges on your assumption of the natural rate. 1% interest rate can be contracting or expeditionary depending on the natural rate.

What happened in 2008 is actually quite simple, the Fed had the interest rate fixed and didn't lower it (inflation fears because of oil prices, see FOMC meeting late 2008).

While in the real economy the natural rate was making the Fed policy more and more contractility.

Modern monetarists (Market Monetarists) like Scott Sumner have been point this out since 2009 of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My own theory after digging sometime into Economics is that no one seems to have a clear idea what on earth we are actually doing. We all seems to have our own theory, and they all seems to answer half of the question. And in practice none of them currently models the world we have now. And it will take a long time before any of those theory are proved to be correct this time around. May be we can finally say Keynesian is wrong. ( At the expenses of our generation )

And it makes things more complicated when people start messing around with how they measure things, and messing with formulas. Numbers like China which are inaccurate. Inflation number which are messed with by FEDs. IMF prediction model which has been wrong every time for years and it seems its only job is to please or more accurately manipulate the market mindset.

<comment><USER13> _> My own theory after digging sometime into Economics is that no one seems to have a clear idea what on earth we are actually doing._

I still remember the moment I realized this. It was on the first day of my first class in Economics 101, when the professor began by telling us that economics was a science built upon the assumption that people are rational actors. I thought about all the people I'd ever known, and all the deeply irrational things I'd seen them do, and got the sinking feeling that I had committed myself to studying a field of thought that had chosen the wrong rock upon which to build its church.

<comment><USER14> > _economics was a science built upon the assumption that people are rational > actors_

You may have taken a statement made in jest literally. _Homo economicus_ is a known fiction. Just as frictionless, airless physics are a known fiction. They're useful, however, for (a) defining a limit or ideal, (b) pedagogical purposes and (c) starting to think about a problem.

Microeconomics makes falsifiable predictions which can be repeated in experiment. (I'll go ahead and quibble over whether macroeconomics is a science. It's closer to an art, like politics. A field with its own rules and lessons worth learning, but without the capacity to experiment and make falsifiable predictions.)

<comment><USER15> Physics was able to go on from the simplistic models, refine and extend them to both a wide scale and very high quality of theoretical and empirical concurrence in exquisite detail and generality.

On the other hand, economics goes on from Homo economicus into a mass of mathiness with very poor empirical correlation except perhaps in very very narrow circumstances.

<comment><USER16> The second part of your analogy is off.

It's not billiard physics to general relativity, it's billiard physics to fluid dynamics and predicting the exact route of a stick through a set of rapids.

In economics our biggest complaints are around failure to determine that we're near a singularity and failure to predict behaviour through singularities (in a signal processing sense). It's understandable, as we all strongly care about the path of the stick, yet still unreasonable.

Macro is a decent enough tool most of the time, as are traditional fluid mechanics approaches. What we don't have are ultra precise CFD tools but in our arguments we act like we should/do. Sometimes traders think that they do have a great CFD solution and that's how we get LTCM crashes!

<comment><USER15> Fluids is a pretty good metaphor, but I would say that today we have sufficiently good reproducible physical understanding of fluids that we can generally fly airplanes at a high level of certainty (e.g. turbulence on the wings is both predictable and controlled in the correct ways that the plane does not crash). In comparison we crash the economy and even sub portions of markets periodically (and the last general crash was worse than many previous recessions) - we don't even have a complete picture of which turbulent areas to be wary of economically.

Or to maybe to a more human point, we can carry humans around on airplanes just fine, but don't know how to carry a payload of a nation of humans on a stable and healthy economic vehicle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not a great opinion piece with an overly-dramatic title. The forecasting failures of major world economic bodies leading up to the 2008 financial crisis were (and somewhat still are) widely examined and criticized.

> [https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2011/02/11/the- > warni...](https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2011/02/11/the-warning- > signs-they-missed)

From that article a choice quote from a referenced report:

> "In the United States, for example, it did not discuss, until the crisis had > already erupted, the deteriorating lending standards for mortgage financing, > or adequately assess the risks and impact of a major housing price > correction on financial institutions…As late as April 2006, shortly before > U.S. housing prices peaked, the WEO and the GFSR explained away the rising > share of non-traditional mortgages in the United States thus: "Default rates > on residential mortgage loans have been low historically. Together with > securitization of the mortgage market, this suggests that the impact of a > slowing housing market on the financial sector is likely to be limited."

So to say that Economists still "don't get" the 2008 crisis is a somewhat heavy rose-colored embellishment of the actual state of the field.

<comment><USER18> " _So to say that Economists still "don't get" the 2008 crisis is a somewhat heavy rose-colored embellishment of the actual state of the field._"

Have economists actually changed their models, or are they still referring to the 2008 crisis as an unexpected shock?

What are the chances that their "understanding" of the 2008 crisis will prevent them from being surprised by the next one?

<comment><USER17> The 2008 financial crisis is a pretty expansive event but it's unclear whether or not Economists were "surprised" to the extent the public has been led to believe by somewhat biased media coverage.

For example, the quote from my original comment was from an internal report by the IMF on the IMF's own forecasting/reporting in the period leading up to the financial crisis. It even calls out a presentation made by it's Chief Economist (at the time) which warned against risky behavior that was wholesale ignored by the fund's management (from the Economist article before):

> Even when some of its officials had different ideas, the fund's management > seemed not to be listening. Its then chief economist, Raghuram Rajan, > concluded a presentation at the annual Jackson Hole conference of central > bankers in 2005 by arguing that "we should be prepared for the low > probability but highly costly downturn". But the IMF now admits that:

> "Despite the importance of the Economic Counsellor's position, there was no > follow up on Rajan's analysis and concerns— his views did not influence the > IMF's work program or even the flagship documents issued after the Jackson > Hole speech."

That presentation by Raghuram Rajan is now fairly well known as having fairly accurately predicted the crisis (in 2005) but fell on ears deafened by prosperity (he was the Chief Economist at the IMF and IMF Management completely dismissed it). Here he is on a different list of 6 economists who "predicted the global financial crisis":

[https://www.intheblack.com/articles/2015/07/07/6-economists-...](https://www.intheblack.com/articles/2015/07/07/6-economists- who-predicted-the-global-financial-crisis-and-why-we-should-listen-to-them- from-now-on)

He later went on to be the 23rd governor of the Reserve Bank of India.

I am by no means an expert on the subject so take this all as a layman's loose following of the topic...but it seems to me that the lack of recognition of the dangers by Economists is only part of the problem. It also seems that many major organizations were incentivized to turn a blind eye or even actively downplay concerns in the face of overwhelming financial growth. Even before the crisis, there were Economists writing about the dangers[1] (2006); so to say the entire field of Economics were completely blindsided is itself a bit of an exaggeration. In reality, many large Economic organizations were incentivized to downplay concerns by rampant growth. No one wants to be the one that says, "Hey let's slow down," when the economy is booming.

[1] [http://keenomics.s3.amazonaws.com/debtdeflation_media/2007/0...](http://keenomics.s3.amazonaws.com/debtdeflation_media/2007/03/SteveKeenDebtReportNovember2006.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember distinctly the moment I realized the housing bubble was going to end badly. I was wondering in the early 00's how house prices, more or less everywhere, could continue rising past what most people could actually afford to pay. I hadn't really being paying much attention to the financial world, but sometime in 2004 or so, I saw an ad on tv for a mortgage deal that seemed to make no sense. I looked it up and discovered they were selling a negative amortization loan. On late-night tv.

<comment><USER20> I wonder that same thing today. To me, it feels like the bubble burst in 2007. But, that we're still here today, seems to indicate it didn't really pop, but instead it's a side-effect of another system.

Recently in Southern California, listening to the local NPR affiliate, they were covering a candidate race where one candidate accused the other of not hearing his constituents: ~"House prices have fallen, and that's bad for our voters. I hear them, and he doesn't."

I feel like housing in California is unsustainable: pricing, development, etc.

What's strange is that the candidate doing the accusation was a Democrat. I assume he benefits from loose borders (more housing demand), but constituents who can't actually vote and get their voices heard (immigrants wanting affordable housing, not what begins to approach slum-lord style ghettos).

<comment><USER21> > "House prices have fallen, and that's bad for our voters. I hear them, and > he doesn't."

There are a few things that are absolutely essential to life: housing, clothing, food are among the most basic. If the price of clothing or food increased at the same rate as houusing, people would be rioting.

<comment><USER22> oddly enough we aren't told that food or clothing are investments.

<comment><USER21> A house is an investment, housing is an expense. Even when you own your house, the cost of housing can go up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Please also be aware that by reading pundits like Noah Smith, you are buying into what is basically a historical fanfic of economics "schools" fighting fiercly over who is right. This sells a lot of articles, but it doesn't really reflect academia (if it ever did).

The god to honest truth is that macroeconomics in aggregated form is an undertaking based on extremely scarce data, and it always was. Traditional statistical inference invariable fails if you basically only do observational studies where you observe everything once, more or less.

This is also why these grand theories have fallen out of style, except of course for those vocal pundits like Noah Smith, who literally has a job because he conjures up debates on political economy.

The gold standard in todays Macroeconomics are either some variation of VAR models, more or less assumptionless vector-autoregressions of whatever flavor, or more structural DSGEs, who are fine-tuned to explain certain mechanisms but are arguably incomplete as models. Neither of these models are Keynesian, or Austrian, or monetarist, or whatever.

It is also wrong that the mainstream is some sort of monolithic entity. The biggest econ association in Germany is trying to engage "heterodox" scholars, inviting them to conferences and such. Several universities keep clusters for agent-based models, complexity research and even econphysics. The research output, however, has been a bit lacking as of yet. In Paris, there is an active community of "Post-Keynesians" right in the top-7 econ university in the world. I know that figures like Prof. Keen are invited regularly.

In contrast, it seems to be in the interest of some heterodox scholars to conjure up a hostile "mainstream theory" and then refrain from actually engaging with it in academic channels.

The same is true for those pundits going on about Keynesians vs. Chicago boys in this day and age.

Insofar that academic discussions did occur, they have been extremely productive imo.

Well I am not an Macroeconomist but there you go.

<comment><USER24> I agree that the headline and tone of this article are engaging in unnecessary hyperbole, but this description of Noah Smith's views and arguments are not consistent with what I've read. I don't see him arguing for a Grand Theories perspective of economics, and he grounds his arguments in empirical evidence and is vocal about the need to do this.

I also think you have contrived an exaggerated view, attributed it to him, and are arguing against that. I'd like to see more quotes to back up your argument because it is difficult to find it persuasive.

Doing a quick search I found an older blog post where he touches on a lot of the same points that you just did, so maybe you agree with him more than you think:

[http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-reason- macroe...](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-reason- macroeconomics-doesnt-work.html)

<comment><USER23> You are probably correct that I am not really reasonable in singling out Noah. I apologize for being wrong here.

It's just that he is front and center in in this econ-blog industry that has been often unhelpful in making people with ideas engage the literature in an academic context, which (in other areas) I am a bit bitter about.

I am sure he is a nice guy personally, and switching from his AP position without actually doing research to Bloomberg was probably putting more bread on the table, but still, the whole WAY the debate about economics is lead in the public has been stinted away from scientific context toward hostility and tribe mentality, and I do believe he is partly to blame for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Or more simply put...unregulated greed eventually runs out of buyers and the sellers are left with overpriced junk.

Of course I still don't get why the three ratings agencies are allowed to continue without actually doing their jobs or how banks pay the ratings agencies and _tell_ them what their "paper" ratings should be.

It's all a trust game and when one of the players decides (inevitably) to game the game, the house of cards collapses....and those of us that rely on a normalized system of monetary policy are screwed.

</comment><comment><USER26> Keynesian Economics are the economics of political convenience. If something goes wrong, we can juice the economy by engaging in extaordinary activities which generate the illusion of wealth resulting in increased spending.

These ideas were very popular until Great Britain encountered stagflation - conditions under which both economic recession and inflation coincided and traditional Keynesian levers and predictions did not function.

Zero Interest Rate conditions are not normal. Never in this history of humanity have interest rates been held this low for so long.

I strongly recommend taking a long walk through the videos on the Mises Institute, reading Daniel DiMartino Booth and listening to several Peter Schiff podcasts.

I don't recommend buying gold, but if you want a real critique of what is happening, listen to the leading critics and not this weirdly mangled and factually questionable Bloomberg piece.

There are many better people to learn about this from.

We are living in absolutely extraordinary times which will need with a severe economic implosion.

<comment><USER27> " If something goes wrong, we can juice the economy by engaging in extaordinary activities which generate the illusion of wealth resulting in increased spending."

This is not what Keynesian economics is. It's perfectly rational for the government to step up their investment in things like bridges and roads as the private sector weakens for a bit. This restores confidence in markets, and keeps money flowing through the economy.

So long as there are savings during the good times, and the projects are not wasted (even though in some extraordinary cases it would actually make sense to dig holes and fill them) ... it makes sense.

Of course the governments ability to 'save' during the good times and to necessarily spend efficiently is questionable.

"Zero Interest Rate conditions are not normal. Never in this history of humanity have interest rates been held this low for so long."

Central banks as we understand them are a very new phenom. Who's to say 'what's normal' when the very construct of our current version of monetary policy is really only a few decades old?

Maybe this is the actual normal.

Maybe because we are getting older, and working an ever decreasing share of our lives, our net productivity is going down and that's being reflected in rates?

Maybe the amount of debt hanging over every economy is a drag on productivity? (Because debt levels are high and this is new)

Maybe surpluses are being pushed into the real economy and captured by consumers who are getting a good deal, so bonds and stocks just aren't getting the great returns they were before.

Maybe we haven't had a war in a long time, which leads to fixed/stagnated human organizations, and without the opportunity for 'ground up renewal' every once and a while, we can't leap forward.

Maybe the benefits of carbon fuels + industrial revolution have mostly been had, or at least, fully priced into stocks.

Maybe we're just measuring inflation the wrong way.

So many maybes.

This could be very normal.

We probably won't know until another 50 years and then only in hindsight.

<comment><USER28> >in some extraordinary cases it would actually make sense to dig holes and fill them

How is paying people to dig and fill holes better than just giving them money without requiring the useless activity? Even if "dignity of work" is a real thing, there's no way doing useless work could provide it.

<comment><USER29> Keynes wrote that that would be one way - although, he stressed, not actually a _good_ way - of escaping from a liquidity trap.

The real irony is that he was actually decrying digging gold out of the ground and burying it in vaults as he wrote that and among his critics, _that_ kind of "digging a hole in a ground and filling it up" is typically considered above reproach.

<comment><USER30> Probably because you aren't literally digging gold out of the ground and reburying it, you are transforming land, labor and capital into a finished product which, in this case, is gold bullion.

Be like saying digging a hole and "planting" a fencepost is a wasteful activity because the wood was nearly in the same state to begin with.

<comment><USER31> I think the complaint is that the gold bullion will just be hoarded and used as a unit of account. You could have achieved a similar thing with some strokes of a pen.

It's wasted effort in the same sense that bitcoin mining is wasted energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Basically, this theory holds that when asset prices rise — home values, > stocks and so on — without a break, investors start to believe that this > trend represents a new normal. They pile into the asset, pumping up the > price even more, and seeming to confirm the idea that the trend will never > end. But when the extrapolators' money runs out, reality sets in and a crash > ensues

So what's new here?

<comment><USER33> That zero is a real number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Adjusted household income has been essentially flat since the 70s. The percentage of those households with two earners has gone from 25% to 60% during that time. Productivity has grown nearly every year during that time.

This, combined with our rising income inequality, means that the economy is not okay for most people even if a few widely-watched numbers are high. It should not come as a surprise that such an economy would be more fragile than those high numbers would indicate.

<comment><USER11> Whatever the truth is about the numbers you present.

The argument that the recession happened because of a fragility of inequality is a highly speculative theory. I have not heard a single economist make that claim.

Also, it fails as an explanation because you are explaining a momentary event with a long term situation.

<comment><USER18> " _Also, it fails as an explanation because you are explaining a momentary event with a long term situation._ "

Yes. This is why plate tectonics is widely known to be false.

<comment><USER11> The earth quake does not just happen because of tectonics. You need some sort of translation mechanism how a long term buildup can lead to a event.

Just saying, 'there are plates' is not an acceptable explanation of earth quakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Umm, Austrian Business Cycle Theory?

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

<comment><USER24> "Umm" what about this exactly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> One of HN's favourite quotes applies here too:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Ironically, the incentives for economists to understand booms and busts are much weaker than the incentives not to understand.

</comment><comment><USER37> Reading through this thread we have a bunch of theories about what must be right. And there are a few predictable responses of "the government didn't do enough."

So I'll throw in the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle to the mix: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_business_cycle_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_business_cycle_theory)

Basically, the artificial expansion of bank credit kicks off the boom. The bust must inevitably follow. And the credit expansion is enabled by an unsound fiat money and banking cartel protection, such as the US Federal Reserve system.

<comment><USER11> One should not that this theory is not incompatible with modern monetarism.

Hayek had a concept called secondary deflation they fit the pattern of 2008.

The problem with ABCT is that Hayek and Mises both made the mistake that they assumed to much correlation between the boom and the bust.

While Hayek had the 'secondary deflation' concept, he failed to realize that this was the far more destructive part (if mishandled by the central bank).

So Hayek did not spend enough time on that and it caused him to misunderstand the Great Depression even when his theory was actually capable of explaining it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The one thing all the predictors mentioned in the article seem to have in common is that they're all efforts by the financial industry to wring more profit out of the real economy - i.e. the one that produces goods and services of more tangible value than numbers on a balance sheet. Without proper regulation, competing on the basis of investment returns inevitably creates a race to take ever greater real risks, independently of the risks as portrayed to investors, and employ ever more sophisticated tactics to obscure the difference. That's why I and many others who've lived through more than one economic cycle know that when the ratio of finance-industry profits to real productivity takes a sharp uptick it's time to run for cover.

</comment><comment><USER39> Lots about monetary policy, and very little about what will actually cause the next big recession. Bank executives, shareholders, and creditors have learned well from the last go-round. They can do whatever they want, and unless their interests are opposed to those of Goldman Sachs, the USA government will bail them out. It won't be smaller next time.

This will continue until it brings down the republic.

</comment><comment><USER18> " _These are important innovations, and they address glaring deficiencies in the pre-2008 models. But they don't feel like a big break with the status quo. Most importantly, the basic notion of recessions as driven by rational actors' responses to unpredictable, sudden events — or shocks, as economists call them — remains in place._ "

One of the fundamental weaknesses of modern economics is its reliance on un- knowable, extraordinary, incomprehensible "shocks" when faced with evidence that their theories have flaws. One thing it does is to prevent their theories from making progress in understanding...economics.

One might even call such behavior irrational.

<comment><USER11> Do you actually know what economists talk about when talking about 'shocks'? I mean outside popular media.

Economist do actually quite a bit about studying these shocks, and trying to explain what they are, where the come from and so on and so on.

Take a simple example, tomorrow there is war between Iran and Saudi Arabia and there is no more oil coming from the middle east. That would be a supply shock.

It is true that sometime we can only observe that something change and sometimes its hard to say why that happens, but that is a problem you have in all complex systems.

Your asserting that economists invent 'shocks' when the evidence doesn't fit there models is totally incorrect and leads me to believe that you don't know anything about modern economics.

<comment><USER18> " _Take a simple example, tomorrow there is war between Iran and Saudi Arabia and there is no more oil coming from the middle east. That would be a supply shock._ "

Would it be? One would expect, given that oil prices and the middle east are some of the most watched economic sectors, that there would be a very visible run up to such a war, the effects would be estimated and accounted for, and there would be no economic discontinuity. This is economics working correctly.

As late as 2006 and 2007, we have economists on record as saying "everything's dandy". This was not due to a lack of data; they had most of the information then that we're arguing about now. Instead, it was because their models said what happened couldn't happen.

<comment><USER11> Tons of war happen without run up. Even if the run-up happened threw-out a period of months, it would still be shock.

A shock is change relative to some trend, not necessarily a fixed thing that happens in the news.

> As late as 2006 and 2007, we have economists on record as saying > "everything's dandy". This was not due to a lack of data; they had most of > the information then that we're arguing about now. Instead, it was because > their models said what happened couldn't happen.

In 2006/2007 everything was more or less ok. While there was a housing crisis, GDP growth was on track and unemployment did not go up. You seem to think that everything after late 2008 was predetermined, witch is false.

<comment><USER18> You seem to be asserting that events like 2006-2009 are, in principle, unforeseeable. If so, you are making my point for me.

<comment><USER11> No. The point is that the recession happen because of monetary policy mistakes in 2008 and the only way to know if it was gone happen would be to have perfect knowlage of how the central bank is was to respond to monetary demand changes in 2008.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> until the word 'usury' is resurrected and reintegrated into economic thought, nothing changes: there will be cycles of capital concentration followed by credit collapses and, eventually, social unrest

thus always to debtors

</comment><comment><USER41> _Some_ economists don't accept the damage that austerity coupled with the lack of robust fiscal stimulus continues to exact on the economy.

<comment><USER42> > lack of robust fiscal stimulus

Have you been living under a rock? We've been in continuous quantitative easing for over a decade. The Fed is just now started to raise rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, by their theory what happens if the central bank collapses NGDP by 20% tomorrow? Would that not cause a recession?

I simply don't see the need for a new theory. If you have a monetary contraction its gone cause a huge problem with wages and prices and that has been the most solid empirical result in economic history. It explains tons of stuff that simply could not be explained by this high debt theory.

So lets just look at some basic evidence for that.

As you can see here:

[https://marketmonetarist.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/ngdp- ez...](https://marketmonetarist.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/ngdp-ez-us.jpg)

Is is totally clear that in order to go back to the original trend inflation would have to be above 2% for a short time to get back to the level. However the Fed and the ECB were simply not willing to do that. The Fed often repeated that they would do 'everything' but then followed it up with 'but if inflation goes up we stop'

However that policy does not make any sense. The monetary disruption has already happened and then they are massively below trend and are unwilling to go back to the original trend.

This policy however is totally mistaken because it makes macro economic sense to go back to the trend as you want to stabilize long term wages and prices and not force the whole economy to adjust to a new level.

(Btw this is called 'level targeting' and has huge support from many monetary economist)

Now, some New Keynesian agree that this should be the policy, they like the term 'flexible inflation tarting' because they assume perfectly rational central bankers that will figure out the right number but essentially the agree that 'the right number' is going back to trend.

However some of them believe this is not possible because of the 'liquidity trap'. However here is where this recession actually showed that their assumption is simply false. Many countries, like Switzerland have shown that if the central bank is willing boosting NGDP with zero interest rate is no problem. This was actually tough in mainstream monetary macro books before the crisis but somehow this was ignored because 'fiscal stimulus' was the politically favored narrative.

Lets look at one economy that didn't have a recession. Australia is a good example, they never had a drop in NGDP and they didn't have a recession even when their housing 'bubble' and many other things are not that different from many other countries that had a recession.

One more thing:

> other measures are needed. These could include quantitative easing, forward > guidance ...

Well, if funny how nobody remembers history. Before the New-Keynesian revolution some of those tools were called 'monetary policy'. This nothing new, but rather the way monetary policy has been practiced for a long time. Central banks that didn't build their entire operational model New Keynesian interest rate theory were perfectly able to act at the Zero Bound.

By the way this is in many way the same problem as in the early 1930s, the theory for this is nothing new. R. G. Hawtrey spend the whole 20s to try to explain people what would happen if there was a nominal contraction and he was exactly 100% on point.

</comment><comment><USER43> Ah bloomberg news, understanding that a new economic slowdown is in the cards wants to reassure the public that the economists have learned something. What they've learned is that they are ever more desperate to attempt to coax additional growth out of a slowing machine that increasingly just fails and takes ordinary people with it. Without new markets, the economy will continue to slow and monopolization will continue to increase.

Look to Africa for the empire's new concepts: [http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175567/tomgram%3A_nick_turse...](http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175567/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_america%27s_shadow_wars_in_africa_)

</comment><comment><USER44> No credit to libertarians and the Austrian business cycle theory?

They are describing it on the page, but no mention that this idea has existed for decades. Meddling in the economy wins out due to politics, but it always leads to gigantic downturn.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> the post-2009 recovery is now the longest ever ,exceeding the 90's even, and I think it will last much longer given how low interest rates still are and the absence of any problems. I think this calls into doubt business cycles and other concepts economists take for granted. The steady-state economy (similar to that of Australia) where there are few, if any, recessions may be the applicable model. People get too hung up on 2008 and forget that although it was bad, it was brief, relativity speaking, and the economy has not only recovered but made huge gains too.

<comment><USER45> Australia absolutely has business cycles and recessions. Here's a paper describing them:

      https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/30/Key-Features-of-Australian-Business-Cycles-15438

Granted, the paper is from 2001, but it describes what's unique about the Australian cycle--symmetry between growth and recession periods. Rather than short, sharp recessions with prolonged growth, Australia has extended periods of growth followed by extended periods of recession. Moreover, it says that Australia's cycle strongly correlates with changes in supply, which I suppose isn't shocking considering that Australia in many respects has an island economy.

<comment><USER46> That paper looks at the 41 year period from 1959 to 2000, so the fact that Australia hasn't had a recession for the 17 years after that is fairly significant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think they just don't understand almost anything.

I have a real problem with the economists. Take four professors of economics into a room and ask a simple question. A question like "is this a good thing for X to implement Y", like "is this good for the Great Britain to exit the EU" or "is this a good thing to increase taxes for the rich".

Just ask - you will get at least 5 different answers to every question. Those answers will usually exclude each other.

So now me: I listen to those professors and who's right? I'm sure some of them are not. Some of them are simply saying the truth, some are lying.

And now take just one professor - ask him/her something - you will get answers. How should I know that they are right? I simply cannot. I simply don't believe them.

<comment><USER48> _> Take four professors of economics into a room and ask a simple question. A question like "is this a good thing for X to implement Y", like "is this good for the Great Britain to exit the EU" or "is this a good thing to increase taxes for the rich".

Just ask - you will get at least 5 different answers to every question. Those answers will usually exclude each other._

Have you actually done this? Survey results from people who _have_ done this (such as [1]) suggest that economists frequently do come to a majority consensus.

Furthermore, if you ask a group of software engineers how to design or implement complex software. you'll find many conflicting suggestions about which languages, libraries, programming models, databases, etc to use. Does that mean none of them know what they're doing, or does it suggest that complex systems don't have simple, straightforward solutions?

I'd like to gently suggest that you might not know as much about economists and what _they_ know as you think you do.

_______________

1\. [https://people.uwec.edu/jamelsem/fte/fte/efl/teacher_stuff/a...](https://people.uwec.edu/jamelsem/fte/fte/efl/teacher_stuff/articles/economists_agree.pdf)

<comment><USER24> I like your point about software engineers. Economics, like software engineering, is a dynamic field where knowledge advances at an irregular pace.

IGM Economics Experts Panel is interesting to read example of an expert survey. Economists also self-report their confidence and how strongly they agree with a statement.

[http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/trade- disruptions](http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/trade-disruptions)</comment></comment></comment>


How the next version of IE, codenamed 'Spartan,' might support extensions - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/how-the-next-version-of-ie-codenamed-spartan-might-support-extensions-7000033685/ <comment><USER2> the only thing i care about for the next version of IE is progress on this list...

[http://status.modern.ie/?iestatuses=notplanned,underconsider...](http://status.modern.ie/?iestatuses=notplanned,underconsideration&browserstatuses=notsupported,indevelopment,implemented&browsers=chrome,firefox,opera,safari&ieversion=11)

<comment><USER3> You'll be pleased to know that we just updated it yesterday. A good chunk of ES6 is now under development. See the IE blog for further info: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/09/18/updates-to- our...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/09/18/updates-to-our-platform- roadmap.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not to be overly negative but if I had to guess the extensions system will be hobbled and sub-par. This is just based on my years of experience with IE and other MS products.

If it had an extension that could give me the hours of my life back that I have spent trying to support their awful browsers that would be great though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Cortana, Spartan, are they lifting all their project names from Halo these days?

</comment><comment><USER6> I remember the IE panel of this year /BUILD, they said they were considering adopting Webkit for future IE. Even if that wasn't true, time had really changed.

</comment><comment><USER7> If IE gets rebranded, I hope they change their dev strategy or at least open source Trident. I can't stand waiting around for Microsoft to implement/fix something. If Microsoft could open up its engine, IE would become the most progressive browser in the world.

I for one would love to dig into Trident and get my hands dirty.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is IE _at all_ relevant any more?

<comment><USER9> Yes definitely. Outside the fickle world of consumer internet usage, tech media and devices/appliances (basically leaving businesses at all levels), it's #1 and shows no sign of slowing down.

99.5% of our web hits are IE7-11 (financial sector). The other 0.5% is our dev team's Firefox instances.

<comment><USER10> Would that be in part due to Citrix? I know of several cases where friends in that sector are forced to use Citrix and the only approved browser to access intranet sites in that setup is IE...

<comment><USER9> We have a couple of clients using Citrix. It's on the way out though as to be honest it's inflexible, knackers client performance and is of dubious value these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Extensions would be great, way better than the clunky dll addon system. I really think they eventually have to rebrand (and I hope they do) IE because of the notoriety it has gotten. Like something on the lines of Cortana.... that would be wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER12> poorly?</comment>


Peter Thiel Bashes Dick Costolo's Management of Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/17/tweet-tweet-pass/

<comment><AUTHOR> He mismanaged an $8 billion hedge fund into the ground and still has the gall to talk shit about people building real things. Peter Thiel is simply an asshole.</comment>


Tolstoy's 'Resurrection' is strikingly similar to how we treat prisoners today - <AUTHOR> https://macroaffairs.com/tolstoy-resurrection-prison-industrial-complex/books/ <comment><USER3> > But what do we do? […] We do not merely do nothing to get rid of the > conditions in which such people are born – we actually encourage the > institutions which produce them. We all know what these institutions are: > the mills, the factories, the workshops, the inns, the pot-houses, the > brothels. And far from wiping out establishments of this sort – considering > them necessary, we encourage and regulate them.

Would the world really have less crime if we didn't have factories and inns? Agrarianism is so alien to modern life I can hardly imagine it being a dominant philosophy.

<comment><USER4> My understanding of the US prisons was that many people with mental issues end up there instead of proper mental health care [1].

I can imagine that people with mental issues are also more likely to end up in inns and brothels. These people remain problematic after closing those locations. Even more so with factories as you already pointed out.

[1] [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/saving- normal/201303...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/saving- normal/201303/prison-or-treatment-the-mentally-ill)

<comment><USER5> We had a case once where a guy kept breaking into a local business. Didn't take anything, just broke the door or a window and picked things up and moved them around a bit then left. Did it repeatedly despite a series of warnings and discussions.

Guy was not malicious, just not mentally healthy. Doing nothing meant the business would continue to get harassed.

Judge and prosecutor and defense attorney had a long conference about how none of the options available were any good.

Mental health courts are one approach being tried out in a few jurisdictions: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health_court](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health_court)

Basically like a plea agreement with conditions to enter into a community based support program or some kind of treatment program.

They aren't without criticisms, but they provide a tool to deal with these messed up situations the criminal justice constantly gets stuck with.

<comment><USER6> So what was the end result? Did they send the guy to prison or try and get him the help he needed?

<comment><USER5> They had no authority to compel treatment.

I think they used the minimum sentence then worked to set up a mental health court for future cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In US constitution, the 13th amendment leaves out only prisoners from salvery clause. It was bit shocking because US constitution essentially says that government _can_ use prisoners jus like slaves!

I feel our current system of punishments and prisoners is very barberic. In my experience, people change dramatically in beliefs and who the are every 7-10 years. So having a prison term longer than that is essentially same as transferring sentence to quite different person. Also things like solitary confinements are beyond bewildering. I hope future prisons are essentially closed large spaces where prisoners make their own sustainable living. Prison shouldn't be about enslaving a person but rather isolating him/her from society for safety of others all the while retraining them to be part of society again after no more than 7-10 years.

<comment><USER8> > _In US constitution, the 13th amendment leaves out only prisoners from > slavery clause. It was bit shocking because US constitution essentially says > that government can use prisoners just like slaves!_

It's definitely a shocking feature of the constitution. I've been wondering lately if it really can be (or has been) used to justify things like forced labor benefiting a for-profit corporation at below the legal minimum wage. The text says "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime...". Couldn't one argue that being in prison is the punishment - <USER2> working in a corporate sweatshop is additional servitude used not as punishment but as abuse of people already being punished?

<comment> daniel-cussen Well, it's antiquated. Back in the day the basics were expensive, so just keeping someone alive who wasn't working to pull his weight was basically unthinkable. If you fed people for nothing, _back then_ , people would commit crimes just for the sake of being imprisoned.

But now that food is way cheaper, and so is clothing and shelter (not the real estate and finance component--just the construction), I think the rationale is out of date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The 'we' here seems to assume the USA? Because this is nothing like the prison systems around here.

<comment><USER10> A good point. The thread name could be updated to have <USA> at the end perhaps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > No Spoilers.

This is a weird fixation we have in the modern world. Is anyone really thinking that by knowing the plot of a 120-year-old novel their experience of that novel could totally be ruined?

<comment><USER12> I don't see why the age of the novel factors in. Reading is a subjective experience with a variety of modes and conditions, so if for example the subject is working their way through old novels as a hobby then yes, I really can see why it'd be just as annoying to have the 120 year old plot spoiled as it would be for a brand new movie.

Still, I think "spoiler alert" is a lot better in cases like these than "no spoilers." It gives freedom of choice to the reader.

<comment><USER13> One should never read literature for it's plot. Learning the plot of a literature book should have no affect in its enjoyment. This is similar to enjoying a painting for it's plot: "oh so a man is looking up, it's night time, there are a lot of stars, a large tree covering left side of the canvas, the man has some sort vision problem and stars look really huge and yellow. Then there is moon, shining yellow. Below the sky one can see a small city blending with the dusk of the night." Is this an equivalent experience?

<comment><USER14> > One should never read literature for it's plot.

Says who? What if I want to read literature for the plot? What if the excitement of what's going to happen is what I care about, and the characters are just a side thing?

What if some days I want to read for plot, other days I want world building, other days I want character development?

> Learning the plot of a literature book should have no affect in its > enjoyment.

And if it does affect it? Should we tell people not to read that book?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Strings in WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/wasm/strings-in-webassembly-wasm-57a05c1ea333 <comment><USER2> The Mozilla developer working on web assembly wrote some good articles on types

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface- type...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface-types/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe it was just me but this felt a bit overly pedantic. Understanding the internals of wasm bindgen is important for understanding how rust handles strings in WASM, but I was expecting a higher level discussion of how strings are passed to WASM.

</comment><comment><USER4> Due to the the lack of native strings in WebAssembly different Wasm compilers have different memory layouts and string encodings. For example assemblyscript uses ucs2 for the sake fo compatibility with JavaScript. This obliges to carefully work with memory bounds, string length estimation due to difference in host native and guest string encodings.

For the specific goal of working with Strings in rust and assemblyscript I've created this project: [https://github.com/onsails/wasmer- as](https://github.com/onsails/wasmer-as).

<comment><USER5> I'm wondering why AssemblyScript uses UCS-2 instead of UTF-8. Do browsers use UCS-2 as well?

<comment><USER6> [https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript- encoding](https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To quote the Medium comment from Masklinn:

> Actually, humans generally think in terms of graphemes, which may or may not > be composed of multiple Unicode code points (irrespective of the > normalization form being used).

</comment><comment><USER8> Medium delenda est.

<comment><USER9> "Delendum". Medium delendum est. It's neuter gender unlike Carthage which was feminine like many city names.

<comment><USER8> How many Romans? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it unusual for a VM not to have a string (or at least a bytes) type? I have little experience in the space, but it seems clunky. Curious why WASM went this direction.

<comment><USER5> WASM just reached MVP. The design goal of the MVP seems to be a small spec that includes the minimum amount of requirements.

I guess that is the reason why all four major browsers cloud adopt it almost in the same time, without having many proposal ping-pongs between Google vs Mozilla vs Apple vs Microsoft.

<comment><USER10> This article, and proposals for reference types, though, make it sound like working around the lack of strings/bytes/chars might have been more work in the end. Sort of like a unicycle isn't really a bicycle MVP :)

<comment><USER5> Right, but it is better than having to wait more years until browsers reach consensus. I'm not sure but specifying a WASM-native string representation might be more favorable to a specific JS engine than the others, depending on its existing JS string implementation. This might cause disagreements.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Death Star Costs $15.6 Septillion, 1.4 Trillion Times the US Debt - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5146010/death-star-costs-156-septillion-14-trillion-times-the-us-debt

<comment><USER2> Well, it might sound like a lot of money and a lot of steel, and a lot of penne a l'arrabiata, but it's the Galactic Empire, and it has the economic power of many worlds, not just one like the Earth, and some of these worlds might be many times the size of the Earth.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this based on NASA costs? Something tells me it would cost significantly less (just a few septillion?) if SpaceX would be making it.</comment>


Show HN: Maildown – markdown based email API - <AUTHOR> https://maildown.dev?v=2 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, creator of Maildown here. I built this as a no-nonsense way to send transactional emails via an API, for those who aren't fussed about tracking clicks or playing with WYSIWYG editors, and instead just want to fire out cleanly formatted emails quickly via REST, using markdown syntax for simplicity.

Hope you like it

</comment><comment><USER2> I really like this! Seems like a great way to quickly add email to a side project. I've definitely experienced fighting with HTML email styling and been like "where did those 2 hours go?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Ive done a few side projects too and always end up thinking the exact same thing myself and its very frustrating. Especially when half the time, all I'm trying to do is get a user to verify their email address

<comment><USER2> Amused to see this quote on the landing page. Good luck with the project!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment>


Sarcasm Analysis Using Conversation Context - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.07531 <comment><USER2> "Internet Argument Corpus (IAC) is a publicly available corpus of online forum conversations on a range of social and political topics, from gun control debates, marijuana legalization, climate change, evolution, to name a few (Walker et al. 2012). The corpus comes with annotations of different types of social language categories such as agreement/disagreement (between a pair of online posts), nastiness, and sarcasm. There are different version of IAC and we use a specific subset of IAC in this research. Oraby et al. (2016) have introduced Sarcasm Corpus V2, a subset of the Internet Argument Corpus V2, which contain 9,400 posts labeled as sarcastic or non-sarcastic (balanced dataset)."

<comment><USER3> I wonder if there's a corpus labelling comments and posts based on the context of, "/s". Because labelling a comment as sarcastic is a great indicator the poster understands how sarcasm works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A sarcasm detector. That's a real useful invention.

<comment><USER5> This is the perfect response. I assume you're being sarcastic, but I can't tell for certain. Even most humans have trouble detecting sarcasm in print - would a sarcasm detector?

Since sarcasm is the biggest weakness of sentiment analysis, I don't have much faith that sentiment analysis tools will produce truthful results when aimed at social media.

<comment><USER6> "I assume you're being sarcastic, but I can't tell for certain"

What if the person you're responding to (for the sake of argument) really doesn't know?

I mean, it can take some time to find out if an invention is truly useful.

So if we point it at that statement and demand a verdict, it's sort of an undecidable problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who is going to write the app? It is sorely needed.

</comment><comment><USER8> The computers can save us from Poe's Law. ;)

<comment><USER9> "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article." \- Nathan Poe

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If this becomes an app, I'll buy it

</comment><comment><USER11> Finally, visitors from Betelgeuse no longer have to rely on a human interpreter.

</comment><comment><USER12> Please use it to analyze this thread :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Lets aim it at the LKML. ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> sucking all the fun out of comment sections.</comment>


Some Thoughts About Concurrency by Ivan Sutherland (2010) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR9pAaQlVRc <comment><USER2> Interesting.

My interpretation: when writing code for synchronous machines, you are immediately encouraged to construct things that have no notion of spatial locality. But what if programming tools encouraged being mindful of this? Very crudely, a programmer could simply look at a grid of FPGA components, so that program modules correspond to geographic regions on the grid. This is absurdly constricting, though-even electronics schematics jettison the idea of a 1-1 geographic mapping of notation to component.

Is there something in between, though? Something like Unix pipes or CSP, but presented in a geometric layout, that encourages programmers to structure their programs so that information propagates locally throughout, and therefore in principle maps well to asynchronous hardware.

Then there is the idea of referential transparency, which seems to trivialize parallel synthesis, but seems to have nothing to do with spatial locality.

</comment><comment><USER3> Extremely thought provoking. One bit I didn't understand was his description of a sequence of UNIX programs communicating using pipes as being concurrent?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe he means that the downstream programs can do some of their work before the upstream programs have finished doing all of theirs.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Immediately reminds me of him talking about how we can be stuck in our current way of thinking, and that I need to challenge my own viewpoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting talk. I'd like to read some of his research, and learn about the concurrent processors his team has created.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's more here, with a bit more detail on the circuits: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXVUoT_objA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXVUoT_objA).

These are interesting talks. Sutherland of course is the genius who created Sketchpad, described by Alan Kay as the Newtonian leap of software. But these talks go into his decades of work on asynchronous circuits. It's fascinating stuff with historical context, such as his anecdote about how clocks came to be added to digital circuits. They needed them because they were clamping wires together with hand tools and couldn't do it the same way every time, leading to noise in the circuits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny to hear him discuss people omitting "to be" in Pittsburgh. The car needs washed. (@3:30)

That was one of my more difficult habits to break. Anyways...just kidding.</comment>


Creating a website theme switcher with CSS only - <AUTHOR> https://alexandersandberg.com/theme-switcher/ <comment><AUTHOR> Wrote an article explaining a way to create a website theme switcher with CSS only, something usually accomplished with (a small bit of) JavaScript.

Maybe not worth using in production, but it's fun to push the boundaries of what you can do with HTML and CSS only.

You can find the source code here: [https://github.com/alexandersandberg/theme- switcher](https://github.com/alexandersandberg/theme-switcher)</comment>