New Chrome Logo - <AUTHOR> http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-chrome-logo.html

<comment><USER2> _a new Chrome logo that's more plain and boring_

Or less chintzy and less like a VCR manufacturer's logo from 1979. It looks good! It seems typical to have a strong reaction to a new name (iPad, Wii, Vista) or a new logo but it passes. Everyone will be used to it within months :-)

<comment><USER3> Yes! Yay, you made me feel less crazy. I like the new logo better, too.

Subjective retro-ness aside, the new logo is more of a _logo_ (less textures, passes the silhouette test, etc).

<comment><USER4> I'm new to the notion of the silhouette test (had to google it) so forgive my ignorance, but how does this logo pass that test? Isn't its silhouette just a circle...?

<comment><USER5> If it were to be converted to a 1-bit image (Black/white) you could still make out what it is. That's basically the silhouette test.

This one doesn't quite work because there's no separation between the three colors that make up the circle. Not that it needs to, though. This one is better than the last for this test. In this case the silhouette would be the larger outer circle and the smaller inner circle.

It's really only used in print design, or at least that's how it started because logos needed to be versatile enough to work in many different color spaces, including being sent via fax. It is useful to keep in mind so that we create clean and uncluttered logos, though.

<comment><USER3> Word. You're right. I was over-hypey :D It doesn't totally pass the silhouette test. It could with a thin edge of negative space in between each color block, OR... if we allowed a grey "cheat" in our silhouette test.

These kinda shape logos aren't just awesome for print, but in tiny places like web footers, twitter avatars, etc.

And for anybody in the thread rackin' their brain trying to figure out what we're talking about. Picture the Nike swoosh, or the Apple-missing-a-bite apple. With no gradients, colors, or shadows, their shape alone is recognizable.

This doesn't mean their every use + instance is this plain, but their logos survive such a deconstruction. It REALLY comes in handy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favourite quote from the comments: "looks ugly and is not the original"

Sums up every UI change reaction ever.

<comment><USER7> That's why I only use applications that use the Athena widget set!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel this logo looks better when sized way down to "Windows quick launch bar" or "GNOME launcher" size, but for instance on a Mac dock it's completely out of place with it's 2D look & feel.

</comment><comment><USER9> Glossy embossed days are far behind. Subtle gradients, trying to achive 3d in 2d space with less cluttered effects. I would say very in tune with Apple's next design iteration. <http://www.usabilitypost.com/2011/03/01/simpler-ui-in- lion/>

<comment><USER10> > Glossy embossed days are far behind.

Could this really be happening? Could the universe be so kind?

Glossy might look good for five seconds, but when you spend eight hours staring at shiny windows flying across your screen you tend to get sick.

<comment><USER11> I can't wait until the 70% transparent, white-fill gradient half-circle is no longer masked over logos and icons.

<comment><USER12> What exactly do you mean? Do you have an example?

<comment><USER13> I believe the white glossy circle is referring to that glossy shine on top of icons, much like the app icons you usually see on an iPhone/iPod.

For instance: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/ikoka/3660963620/>

<comment><USER12> Oh, right. Now I understand. Yeah, you see those a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While I think the original Chrome logo maybe had a bit too much "3D", I think this is a bit too far in the other direction.

Something in between this new logo and the previous would probably be appropriate IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER15> > _The latest Chrome Dev Channel release comes with a new Chrome logo that's > more plain and boring [...] Chrome lost some of its magic by switching to a > visual identity that's no longer vibrant and picturesque_

Wow. My thoughts exactly when seeing the new logo, but I'm surprised Google would put it this way!

> _An unofficial blog..._

Ah, that makes sense.

<comment><USER16> Well, plain is not necessarily boring. In most cases, including this one, I prefer the plain version. One example other than Chrome is Pepsi, the new plain logo looks so much better to me than the sort-of-3D old one. I guess it's very subjective.

<comment><USER15> > _I guess it's very subjective_

Yes it is ;-) There was a post on HN some time ago showing how old logos were in many cases so much better than new ones, and Pepsi was amongst them.

But, Google being Google, maybe they tested it? The problem with tests, I think, is that it favors bland versions because they upset the least; this new logo kind of smells of "design by committee", no?

<comment><USER17> Brand New is a blog devoted to old/new logo comparisons: <http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I _still_ think the old logo looks just like the "Morph Ball" from the Metroid games.

[http://www.google.com/images?rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS397US397&q=...](http://www.google.com/images?rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS397US397&q=metroid%20morph%20ball&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1323&bih=908)

<comment><USER19> Just a curious question that has nothing to do with the Chrome logo.

Your link has the rlz string that is presumably for your Chrome/Chromium browser. Can that be personally identifiable information for anyone other than Google?

<comment><USER20> "non-unique, non-personally identifiable" - <http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/in-open-for-rlz.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The old icon looks more at home on Windows and Mac desktops.

The new icon looks more at home among the other Google products. (<http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/options/>)

Whether there's any significance to this, I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER22> Ouch. My personal feeling now is that there's no intuitive connection between the logo and the thing it represents anymore. Firefox has a red panda curled around a globe, representing both the name and what it does (the globe being a common symbol for the WWW). Internet Explorer has a Windows-blue 'e' for "explorer" [of the internet]. Safari has a compass, which is related to both safaris and navigation. The old chrome logo wasn't great, but at least it was really shiny. When I think 'chrome', I think really shiny, so it made sense to me and I could easily make the association backwards, that the really shiny logo meant 'chrome'. The colors might represent Google, but honestly I didn't notice that until just now. When I see red, yellow, blue and green, I just think primary colors -- RGB for light and RBY for pigment. In my head, red, yellow, blue and green are just the "default" colors for anything where you want something to have four different "equal" colors without it getting clashy or garish. (As much as I love the secondary and tertiary colors, using them all together can sometimes make things look younger than intended.)

To me the new logo looks vaguely like someone went paint-by-numbers on the James Bond shutter. There's nothing there that I'd associate with the internet, the word "chrome", the concept of a navigation tool, or anything else like that. It might be more aesthetically-pleasing but that's not what logos are for.

</comment><comment><USER23> The colours need a bit more saturation to really pop, they're a bit too washed-out and pastel. I like the concept, but the execution is poor.

<comment><USER24> I agree, the old logo wasn't without its problems, but the new one, while different, is not really an improvement. It looks very..."flacid" to me.

<comment><USER25> Yep, in fact I like this version I found earlier a lot more than the one they went with: <http://www.frazpc.pl/b/275384>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like it. The old one looks like an electronic eye, monitoring my every move on the internet.

<comment><USER24> I always thought it looked a bit like a Pokemon ball.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The new logo does not appear to have been designed with smaller icons in mind - the white circle around the blue center is too small (or shouldn't be there at all). In its present form, it looks pretty bad on my dock.

</comment><comment><USER28> I find that it actually looks better. Then again, as a zen master would say, it does not look better or worst, it has simply changed.

</comment><comment><USER29> So, they took a logo with depth (3Dish) and flattened it, plus did something kinda weird with the color. It doesn't look quite right with all the other icons on my dock.

</comment><comment><USER30> Simplicity. That is one of Google attractions. So, the new Chrome logo fits that image better than the old one.

</comment><comment><USER31> It looks like they wanted to simply flatten the Chrome logo, but the gradients radically change it from a sphere with a central "node" facing us to an unappealing doughnut shape with some sort of "nipple" in the center.

And while the gloss of the original may have been a bit much, it allowed the colors to be a bit more vibrant. Now they've been diluted down to these pastel colors which are also very unappealing.

The original Chrome logo isn't perfect, it looks a little too slick, but it was the best visual design to come out of google (besides some amazing google doodles of course) and now it seems that they've dumbed it down to match the more simple and design-agnostic approach that is typical for google.

</comment><comment><USER32> I love the flatter aesthetic, but man does that strong white ring make me want to push the center blue "button". It actually brings that feature so far to the foreground that I ignore the rest of the logo. I would seriously prefer a thinner white circle.

</comment><comment><USER33> If everyone starts aiming for the little blue center, I wonder if people have a better chance of clicking the icon. Maybe they thought of it like extra padding around navigation links. When we aim for the original icon and miss by a couple pixels, nothing happens. If we are drawn to aiming for the little blue circle and miss by a couple pixels, Chrome still opens.

Here's a more design oriented discussion: [http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/chrome_l...](http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/chrome_loses_volume.php)

I, for one, just switched to the Dev channel for the updated icon.

</comment><comment><USER34> The comments on the post lead me to believe that most people would prefer an icon that blinks or rotates.

That said, I like the new icon. It's far less of an eyesore in my OSX dock.

</comment><comment><USER35> I like the new logo, but I didn't expect to see a logo change of the official Chrome that early. There are still a lot of advertisements showing the old logo around in my city.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't think the new one looks better than the old. New = too basic Old = too much details

</comment><comment><USER37> I saw this yesterday and loved it. I'll spare you my critique - the logo new logo is great!

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm on the fence for whether I like shiny logos that everyone is doing these days more or the same or less than non-shiny logos. The new logo makes it stand out, but I'm not sure in a great way among all the other gloss. I'll wait and see.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is there any design related reason that explains this change? Or is this just random?

<comment><USER40> One reason might be that the change brings the logo more in line with the Google identity. Google usually doesn't do shiny and photorealistic, the Chrome logo was always a strange aberration in that respect.

<comment><USER41> This reminded me of the 2008 Google Reader redesign, where some of the rounded borders and shadows were dropped.

[http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/12/square-is-new- round...](http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/12/square-is-new-round.html)

In the case of the simplified logo, "square is the new round" would seem to apply again.

<comment><USER42> When do we get the new _square_ Chrome logo? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> /sad - I submitted this yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332488>

</comment><comment><USER44> It went from 'impressive and high tech' to 'dull and uninteresting'

</comment><comment><USER45> I feel like I would like the logo more without the gradients.

</comment><comment><USER46> It looks like a 9.

Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

<comment><USER47> i just see 666

<comment><USER48> Of an infinity of 69s! ;) My brain looped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I was more excited when I thought that this said Chrome LEGO.

<comment><USER50> Same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> From pokeballs to frisbees

</comment><comment><USER52> It's OK as a logo, except for the inconsistent light source on the shadows. As a toolbar icon, it seems like they decided to redesign it so that it violates every OS icon guideline in existence, except on Windows Phone 7.</comment>


Ukkonen's suffix tree algorithm explained in plain English - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9452701/can-someone-please-explain-ukkonens-suffix-tree-algorithm-in-plain-english#9513423

<comment><USER2> For those who want to learn more about this kind of algorithms on strings, there is a great book named, unsurprisingly, "Algorithms on Strings" ([http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Strings-Maxime- Crochemore/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Strings-Maxime- Crochemore/dp/0521848997)).

Although I must admint, jogojapan has written a really clear and thoughtful explanation of Ukkonen's algorithm on stackoverflow, the best one I've ever read.

<comment><USER3> I've not read that textbook, but another excellent text is "Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences" by Dan Gusfield ([http://www.amazon.ca/Algorithms-Strings-Trees-Sequences- Comp...](http://www.amazon.ca/Algorithms-Strings-Trees-Sequences- Computational/dp/0521585198)). It has a strong bioinformatics leaning, so you learn all sorts of interesting near-real-world applications for the algorithms.

Starts off talking about all the standard exact pattern matching algorithms, then moves on to suffix trees, then inexact matching, then finishes off with some advanced topics (that I have not read yet). Anyway, I'm really enjoying reading it and definitely recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone (like me) that isn't familiar with what this would be used for should have a look at the first link the Stack Overflow OP references: <http://marknelson.us/1996/08/01/suffix-trees/></comment>


Novogratz Halts Hedge Fund, Says Bitcoin May Drop to $8,000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/novogratz-shelves-hedge-fund-sees-bitcoin-dropping-to-8-000 <comment><USER2> For comparison, he also thinks it's going to $40K by EOY 2018.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/novogratz-bitcoin-could-be- at...](http://www.businessinsider.com/novogratz-bitcoin-could-be-at-40000-by- end-of-next-year-2017-11)

<comment><USER3> For further comparison, he ran an $8 billion fund that utterly failed to weather the 2008 financial crisis [1]. Prior to the IPO, he and Fortress' management "borrowed money, used $250 million of it to pay themselves a dividend, and used part of the I.P.O. proceeds to pay back the loan."

[1] [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/04/fortress- group200904...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/04/fortress- group200904-2)

<comment><USER4> paying yourself with borrowed money sounds good to me. as along as its not recourse that is...

<comment><USER5> Old trick among big-money managers ... the other fun piece about giving yourself a questionably-recourse (or questionably-to-ever-actually-be- collected) loan is that it's not taxable until it's forgiven. But it's still plenty spendable before that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How the fuck is some guy, or anyone for that matter supposed to know where the Bitcoin price is going to go? Yeah it could go to 1,000 or even 100... it could also go to 100,000 by next month. There are so many factors at play it's extremely difficult to make a prediction with a high degree of confidence. If this guy thinks it's going to drop to $8000 just because the price fell 20% in one day he must be new to this. There have been many many cases where the price dropped like crazy and then picked back up within no time.

<comment><USER7> By making the prediction, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He is probably just trying to make the price drop more so that he can buy even more Bitcoin.

The end of the year is often a time when people get together... Bitcoin is bound to come up in conversations. So I think that there might actually be a big rise in interest after Christmas.

<comment><USER8> The last few days have been delightful for longer term holders - it's just been wave after wave of panic selling, with everybody seemingly forgetting that there are futures contracts out there for Jan delivery at $16k+.

I think what we've just seen is a bit of a forced sell off, to drive the price down before the next big speculative bubble, which will likely mirror the one after thanksgiving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I refuse to believe that he didn't anticipate this given how insanely it was going up lately. I'm surprised he haven't bought back yet and wants it to go lower. It totally could though. Just 2 months ago $10k for Christmas sounded _very_ optimistic.

<comment><USER10> > Just 2 months ago $10k for Christmas sounded very optimistic.

Who knows, it might still be very optimistic today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is typical bullcrap from Wall Street. I think its going down but I also think its going up...if it doesnt drop in 4 months he can claim to be a sage. If it drops he can be a right that way too. What Novo is being indecisive and wishy washy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hedge funds can short too, why the cold feet all of a sudden?

My guess is he's shorting the markets or couldn't raise the capital after all. Or ultimately thought the risk to his reputation if his fund failed was too high.

<comment><USER13> It's different shorting when you have to put up so much capital to short all at once. To give you an idea, on future exchanges in the United States, you have to put up a 90% maintenance margin, compared to other commodities that allow you to maintain 40%.

Options not being written is another factor.

>Getting cold feet ? I bet it's not easy raising money when the asset you are trading falls 40% in two days.

<comment><USER12> If he knew it would and cashed in on that capital would come quickly. From the article I see part of it was regulatory burden and propriety of trading his own crypto while maintaining the fund. That makes sense but nothing to do with the current drop, good excuse though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like they forgot it's a volatile market where 30% drops are the norm.

</comment><comment><USER15> [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-22/mike-novogratz- dela...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-22/mike-novogratz-delays- crypto-hedge-fund-launch-warns-bitcoins-going-8000) \-- Funny that the price went up after his announcement. Correlation not causation, but ironic nonetheless.

<comment><USER16> The way Novogratz talks in the interview embedded in the ZH post:

[https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/12/12/the-man-who-called- the...](https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/12/12/the-man-who-called-the-bitcoin- rally-sees-this-for-litecoin.html)

is really weird. People might disagree with me but I think he comes off as unreliable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yeah, this seems like weird erratic behavior. I mean if you are raising a big fund for bitcoin and you think it's going to drop, that's good for yoi because you can buy it cheaper. And if you are not a bitcoin bull, why raise a fund in the first place? Something is up with this guy

<comment><USER18> Actually not that erratic. he doesn't have enough stake in BTC or ETH to make massive market movements. he's wants to drive the price down to buy more and the only way is through his position of "influence."

BTC will make a massive rebound in 2018. I'm sure a lot of BTC bulls have full knowledge of this possibility and are acquiring as many as possible.

<comment><USER19> > BTC _will_ make a massive rebound in 2018

...

> I'm sure a lot of BTC bulls have full knowledge of this _possibility_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So basically he's saying that there is no legitimate way to apply a value to bitcoin so the price could be worth 100 or a million a bitcoin.

Which is correct since the value of it is mostly driven by speculation right now. There's no telling how much it will swing.

</comment><comment><USER21> or $800... it's a crazy market.

</comment><comment><USER22> I want to know what platform someone like him can use to transact $250MM out of Bitcoin into USD (in his personal trading acount he said, actually $250MM was the profit).

As I understand, its not easy to convert to cash, especially in large volume.

<comment><USER19> I'm sure Bitfinex would happily give him some "USD"* for it, just as soon as they fire the printing press up again.

* Internet monopoly money

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good time to buy if it drops to that price. EOY 2018 Bitcoin could be worth 10x that.

<comment><USER24> Could also be worth 100x less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> N=1 data point says thing about stock, quick, let's all sell

</comment><comment><USER26> It was at $10.5K this morning. It bounced back to after yesterday's global dip. Don't think it's dipping to $8K.

</comment><comment><USER27> And if it went to $8K today it would be up ~1000% over the last 12 months.

</comment><comment><USER28> oooh soothsayer, tell me what you see

</comment><comment><USER29> It could also go back to $100.

Bitcoin has no mainstream use right now. It's too expensive to transact in terms of money and time, it's too volatile to be a store of value, it's too technical to be used casually, it's too fragile since it gets hacked every which way, and it's too easily copied to be rare.

<comment><USER30> >Being hacked every which way

Do you want to clarify this? If you meant what I think you meant, you're incorrect.

<comment><USER31> I assume he meant people have had their coins stolen, usually from exchanges, really not much different than your bank getting robbed, although in this cause your money is gone and the exchange doesn't cover the theft.

<comment><USER32> There is no FDIC for Bitcoin exchanges. Also a distressingly large percentage of the exchanges to date have been either fraudulently or incompetently run and lost the user's bitcoibs and/or fiat money.

Nobody would use banks if 4 out of 5 were completely cleaned out by crooks and went out of business.

<comment><USER33> yes there is. Gemini is FDIC insured for dollar deposits [https://gemini24.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/205823016-Are...](https://gemini24.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/205823016-Are-my-funds-FDIC-insured-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> and because he says it, its the truth and finally HN can say I told you so it's a bubble!</comment>


Dow and DuPont to merge - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2015/12/11/dow-and-dupont-two-of-americas-oldest-giants-to-merge-in-job-dropping-megadeal/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_dupont_dow_800am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory <comment><USER2> The two companies cultures are incompatible.

Dupont has an "employee-first" attitude that permeates the corporation and dates from its early years when the manufacture of gunpowder proved to be so risky. The Dupont family owners recompensed families of injured/dead employees by providing housing and supporting them for the remainder of their life. Safety became paramount in all operations. The attitude remains today. Despite the recent indiscretions in the LaPorte, Texas plant, Dupont is probably the safest chemical company on the planet.

If Dupont culture dominates, then this will likely prove a Renaissance for Dow. OTOH should Dupont culture be subjugated, it will ruin the value of the merger and we will all lose a company (Dupont) that has been possibly the best-run, most forward-looking corporation that has existed.

<comment><USER3> According to Dealbook [0], "The new company would have dual headquarters in Wilmington, Del., and Midland, Mich."

Dual headquarters usually works out about as well as co-CEOs.

To the point of DuPont having a great company culture, I agree. I used to cover them as an investment banker....they are definitely safety-obsessed.

[0]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/12/business/dealbook/dow- chem...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/12/business/dealbook/dow-chemical-and- dupont-merger.html?ref=dealbook&_r=0)

<comment> steve-howard Is it unusual to stage a merger like this with the explicit goal of splitting into three smaller companies in the near-ish future? If the company is planning on splitting, I would imagine the consequence of having two headquarters would be different.

<comment><USER3> The merger and the split are individually quite common, but relatively unusual as a combined transaction.

I haven't seen any announced plans to have one HQ focus on one of the three businesses and the other on another, but that would make at least a bit more sense. But then, what about the third business?

If I had to guess I'd say the decision to keep both the headquarters is psychology-driven. You don't want either the Dow folks or the DuPont folks thinking that they're the target, because usually in M&A situations the acquiror keeps A LOT more of its corporate overhead. So logically, this perhaps makes the most sense as an attempt to avert the desertion of a lot of talented lawyers, accountants, HR people, and other headquarters types.

If that is in fact the case, expect an announcement about six months after the deal closes that they're consolidating their headquarters. My guess is they'd keep it in Delaware.

<comment><USER4> Delaware? Any reason for that specifically?

<comment><USER3> DuPont is there, Dow is in Michigan. My hunch is that DuPont is in the driver's seat on this one.

<comment><USER5> Dow is headquartered in Midland, Michigan. Think of it as a one company town. The worry in state is that this is going to destroy the town.

Kind of like when Chrysler moved out of Highland Park (near Detroit) and they lost 80%+ of their tax revenue and never recovered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >DuPont said it expects 10 percent of its 63,000-strong global workforce will be "impacted," and the company is budgeting for $650 million in "employee separation costs." Analysts also expect layoffs at Dow, which employs 53,000 worldwide.

>Dow chief executive Andrew Liveris also called it a "seminal event for our employees."

Seminal indeed.

<comment><USER7> $650M / 6300 ~= 100k per employee. Granted, not all of that will be allocated to severance packages, but even half of that would be a pretty phenomenal.

<comment><USER8> Even $100k doesn't do much for you if you live in Midland, MI and just left the only chemical company in town. You'll have to move, probably out of state, and be competing with thousands of other newly unemployed folks chasing a few jobs in a mature industry. (Disclaimer: I grew up in Midland, and my family all worked for Dow.)

<comment><USER9> I appreciate the difficulty of having to find a new job with a bunch of other folks, but at the higher-end salary range is "finding a new job in town" still a reasonable expectation?

<comment><USER10> With all the shift to contract labs abroad, is finding a new job in _chemistry_ still a thing? The trend for medchem startups these days is to be "fabless", it's a dude with an idea who contracts synthesis and testing out to labs in China.

<comment><USER9> That seems like a terrible idea from what I've heard about factory IP concerns in China. Or are labs more trustworthy?

<comment><USER10> There's friction through off-site coordination, there is loss of informal knowledge, there is silo-ing - these are all very immediate concerns. IP leakage is much further down on the list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fun fact about Dow:

In 1905, German bromide producers began dumping bromides at low cost in the U.S. in an effort to prevent Dow from expanding its sales of bromides in Europe. Instead of competing head on with the German producers, Dow bought the cheap German-made bromides and shipped them back to Europe, undercutting his German competitors.*

A fine example of "predatory pricing" gone wrong (which happens more often than not).

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Chemical_Company#cite_note...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Chemical_Company#cite_note-12)

</comment><comment><USER12> The resulting 3 companies would be in separate industries, and therefore have no direct competition between them. Therefore, I would say that regulatory approval isn't certain. Probably it will be approved, but with a long list of caveats and provisions. Among them will no doubt be some environmental concessions that DowDupont would never bother following.

<comment><USER13> "Why yes, sir, we'd like to be 3 separate monopolies please."

<comment><USER14> While it's not certain, it's _only_ forecast to be "17 percent of global pesticide sales and about 40 percent of America's corn-seed and soybean markets."

Since the economics-textbook definition of the power of a monopoly is that they have power over prices, it's not entirely clear how monopolistic they will be in practice. Roundup Ready corn is nice (well, for farmers anyway) but if they raised the price too high farmers could always just switch to regular corn. And there exist alternatives to materials like Teflon and Kevlar as well.

<comment><USER15> > Roundup Ready corn is nice (well, for farmers anyway) but if they raised the > price too high farmers could always just switch to regular corn.

Or, you know, if DowPont tried that with something Roundup Ready (of which, IIRC, only first-generation Roundup Ready soy is off-patent), they would lose business to Monsanto, who will not only _still_ be the dominant seed company after the DowPont merger, but is also the creator and, for crops like corn where the initial Roundup Ready variety is not off-patent, patent-holder for Roundup Ready traits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This kind of merger seems exactly what the regulatory system was designed to prevent, right? Have any recent mergers actually been blocked? Is the regulator completely toothless now?

<comment><USER17> The combined company won't have a monopoly by any stretch: in the chemical space, it'll compete against the Germans (BASF, Bayer), and in the Ag space it'll compete against Monsanto.

<comment><USER18> But doesn't the FTC look at US companies? If a merger results in a monopoly locally, isn't that enough to warrant denying it?

<comment><USER19> Only if the market is inherently local or the combination with result in increased prices.

Market sizes vary. For airlines they look at cities or even specific airports. it doesn't matter that there are a million different airlines, if your merger creates a quasi monopoly for flights into and out of some cities. That's why in airline deals, you often see one of the two sell off routes to third party competitors.

But for chemicals and agriculture supplies--it's really an international marketplace. It doesn't really matter if they are the only US company as long as Chinese, Korean and German companies are active in selling in America.

Though the DOJ will undoubtedly look at the deal hard. Make sure things like distribution chains, retail deals etc. don't create a monopolistic effect.

<comment><USER20> Production is also international. German chemicals giant BASF's first plant outside of Europe was built in Texas in 1958, and as of late they've found Texas very attractive because of our low natural gas prices, feedstock costs are very important when you're making chemicals by the 100s of thousands of metric tons.

(Potential supply disruptions might also be an issue, seeing as how last time I checked Germany gets most of it's natural gas from Russia through pipelines going through Ukraine, and with the latter two being at war right now....)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Delawarean here!

DuPont is one of my state's largest private-sector employers, and beyond that, the Dupont family's influence on Delaware is hard to overstate.

Here are a few stories from my former employer, The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal, about the merger, touching on its potential effects on the state:

[http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2015/12/11/dupont-a...](http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2015/12/11/dupont- and-dow-combine-merger/77138022/)

[http://www.delawareonline.com/story/money/2015/12/10/under-d...](http://www.delawareonline.com/story/money/2015/12/10/under- dow-dupont-merger-del-unlikely-retain-businesses/77109204/)

By the way, did you know that DuPont's longtime CEO Ellen Kullman resigned just a couple of months ago?

[http://investors.dupont.com/investor-relations/investor- news...](http://investors.dupont.com/investor-relations/investor- news/investor-news-details/2015/Ellen-Kullman-to-Retire-as-Chair-and-CEO-of- DuPont/default.aspx)

Her exit came after winning a proxy battle led by activist investor Trian Partners:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2015/10/05/ellen- kul...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2015/10/05/ellen-kullman-bows- out-at-dupont-amid-activist-fight-leaving-transformation-unfinished/)

Trian, led by Nelson Peltz, wanted to break DuPont into pieces, and Peltz said that even though he lost the proxy battle, he wasn't finished with DuPont:

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/07/15/nelson- peltz-...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/07/15/nelson-peltz-dupont- activist/30182223/)

It's hard to imagine that the timing of the merger so soon after her departure is coincidental.

Sounds like Kullman won the battle but not the war.

<comment><USER22> And with the layoffs that already took place during and after the Chemours spinoff, this new round will really hurt the Delaware economy. Sad to see a great company start to die in the 90's and after three decades of bad management end up like this. At least the earlier DuPont family left things like Longwood Gardens, Winterthur, EI DuPont Childrens Hospital , etc. Chad and Ellen's legacy is 1000's of shattered families.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> ... but will then break up into three independent publicly traded companies, one focusing on agriculture, one on materials, and one on specialty products.

<comment><USER24> Do you imply a single landline provider, a single mobile provider, and a single ISP wouldn't be considered a monopoly?

<comment><USER23> I think I meant to imply that the combined company will then break up into three independent publicly traded companies, one focusing on agriculture, one on materials, and one on specialty products

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Bubble deals are delightful. Time Warner and AOL merging marked the height of bad mergers in the last tech bubble. Since every trading company is now basically a tech company in disguise I wonder if this time around these mega deals will be seen as disastrous in the eyes of history.

<comment><USER9> It marked the height of bad mergers only in _hindsight_. Big mergers are always hard, but that doesn't make them a bad idea.

I was looking for a summary of the internet and found this lovely video gem: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/internetgiants/lecture/jCXgb/...](https://www.coursera.org/learn/internetgiants/lecture/jCXgb/the- state-of-the-internet-circa-2000)

Click through the interstitial and you can watch the whole thing, which goes into mergers [relevant!] as well as AOL/TW particularly.

Needless to say, it was difficult to predict. In terms of the top websites by traffic cited in the lecture (and looked at by the FTC for monopoly review) you had (in decreasing order w/ unique visits per 1 month, units not mentioned):

AOL 61, Y! 52.7, MS 51.4, Lycos 30.8, Excite Network 27, Go Network 23, About 20.6, AltaVista 19.2, TimeWarner 15.9, Amazon 15.3

You've got a crystal ball if you could have looked at that, predicted the future, and said "Gee, joining up AOL with a media company is a really bad idea."

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If "DuPont culture" mentioned in the comments is true, I hope they help Bhopal Disaster victims get the justice they deserve.

Bhopal Disaster happened because of Union Carbide(wholly owned subsidiary of Dow chemicals)

<comment><USER8> Just to be clear, Dow bought out the remnants of Union Carbide, after they died post-Bhophal. It didn't happen as part of Dow. Dow is extremely safety conscious, and the inexcusable things Union Carbide did would never have happened in a Dow plant.

<comment><USER26> Not denying this. Probably the lawyers ensured there exists no culpability on the buyer, for UC's past sins.

But, Dow, and now DuPont morally owe a lot, to the Bhopal Gas Disaster victims.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Looking at the stock chart in the article, "cool reaction from investors" they mention is a downward adjustment reversing most of Wednesday gains, but still putting each company above Tuesday close.

Was there another announcement Tuesday night, that set hopes high, with this one being a disappointment? What was the new information -- something about the structure of the new company perhaps?

Edit: Wednesday's article: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/business/dealbook/dow- chem...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/business/dealbook/dow-chemical-and- dupont-are-said-to-be-in-merger-talks.html?ref=topics) \-- mentions the future split into 3 companies; does not mention the layoff details or dual headquarters though :)

</comment><comment><USER28> Farmers, or their lobbyists, would be well-advised to get very busy pressuring congress to block this. If Dow and DuPont successfully merge the control of major seed will be down to two mega-corporations; the other being Monsanto. Future prices and controls will become even less favorable for farmers. A quote from a CEO I knew: "Mergers benefit at most one CEO and a minority of stock-holders -- everyone else involved suffers, employees especially"

</comment><comment><USER29> Dow and DuPont have been loosing a lot of customers to BASF in the last 5 years or so. Especially in the area of nano materials.

<comment><USER17> Dow sells nano materials? There's a market for nanomaterials??

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> >Their innovations include a sweeping variety of now-ubiquitous chemicals, including ... chlorine

Really? That's impressive, to have invented an element. Surely this must be a method of storing and transporting chlorine and not the halogen itself.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, I'm not sure where they got that part. Besides obviously not inventing the actual element, neither Dow nor Dupont were the first to produce chlorine, nor even the first to produce it on an industrial scale. And they didn't invent the main process by which it's produced (chloralkali process). It's kind of a throwaway sentence in the article though, so I doubt much research went into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> We need the competition, I don't understand why as a society we would want a megacompany controlling the international chemical market.

<comment><USER33> There's still international competition. Monopolies typically bring costs as low as possible for their consumers to block out competitors. This is a fairly positive net-effect. Theoretically, if a company was to get really bad PR then consumers would be OK paying more for their competitor and the great monopoly would show cracks and eventually break (unless it healed itself).

Yes we need the competition, but it's not so black/white otherwise no merge would go through.

<comment><USER34> How would one monopolist price more competitively than a number of competing vendors?

Consumers need competition, producers avoid it where they can. Competition sucks from a producers perspective -- price equals marginal cost and profit is zero (in perfect competition).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> So we can expect the price of glassware and plastics to what, at least double right? Capitalism. Gotta love it. If you're rich.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow, DOJ will be busy.

<comment><USER37> Why DOJ? Wouldn't it be the FTC involved with this?

<comment><USER38> The FTC will be involved. The DOJ can step in and sue to try to stop mergers at their choosing. For example:

"Justice Department Files Antitrust Lawsuit to Stop Electrolux from Buying General Electric's Appliance Business"

[http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files- antit...](http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-antitrust- lawsuit-stop-electrolux-buying-general-electrics-appliance)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Anyone else notice the headline was "jaw-dropping" but the URL was "job- dropping"?

<comment><USER40> No but that's hilarious. I wonder if it was intentional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Can't we stop this consolidation and keep the market competitive just by having a progressive corporate tax? Are there any arguments against such a tax?

<comment><USER30> >Can't we stop this consolidation

Why? Mergers are not inherently bad, and there seems to be a knee-jerk reaction against them without supporting evidence. Not to say that evidence doesn't exist, but it should if a merger is to be blocked.

<comment><USER42> It seems that logic in the comments is quite simple: bad companies = evil. Not monopolies, just BigCo: the bigger, the badder.

Which is pretty logical, because while economical benefits of such companies are spread thinly among shareholders as well as global economies, the bad stuff they cause is always personal. So, regardless of whether good outweighs the bad or not (and I won't pretend that I know answer to that), individuals will always see them as something evil.</comment></comment></comment>


What Happened to Aung San Suu Kyi? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/what-happened-to-aung-san-suu-kyi/594781/ <comment><USER2> I am always surprised again when no one mentions Buddhist principles in connection with policy toward "Muslims in Rakhine" or any other government activity. Have Burmese people drifted so far from those principles they no longer have any practical meaning to the people? Is "Buddhist" just an in- group?

This would not, of course, be at all unusual, given the example of the behavior of nominally Christian people the world over, in this and the prior millennium. In subway stations I see, every day, Christian evangelists standing right next to disabled people reduced to begging.

<comment><USER3> > The text prophecies a war fought by an army of Buddhists and the destruction > of the Muslim persecutors of dhamma; [1]

Kalachakra Tantra is classic buddhist anti-muslim text from XI century. Sadly both religions have very long history of conflict and misunderstandings.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalachakra](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalachakra)

[2] [http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14726.html](http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14726.html)

<comment><USER2> Thank you, this is informative. I gives me a window into the historical development of the present world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> She was always thus. The act she put on was to get sympathy and help when she was on the receiving end. There is no other mystery about it.

<comment><USER3> > One Blood, One Voice, One Leader

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Which leaves the question; What external support does she have? Internal politics suggest she has no real power and is at risk of government sponsored 'suicide' if she steps out of line. I think she's both a survivor and someone who, maybe just might, have the power to do something good in the future. We are just watchers. P.S. Hope I'm right for gods sake once.</comment>


MicroSD card FAQ  - <AUTHOR> http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2297 <comment><USER2> Flash is frightening.

I wrote a transactional flash file system (well, object store) in the early 90s. It used NOR flash, which allows you slam individual bits from 1 to zero in any order. Basic strategy for doing a write: Write the payload, verify it, then clear some "commit" bits, and have enough infrastructure bits around that you can handle commit failure from stuck-at-1 errors. My failure model was probably pretty stupid, but it seemed to work well and I never heard of someone losing data. Of course, flash parts were a lot clunkier back then.

Fast-forward 20 years and they're playing terrifying games with those flash cells. I worry that the people writing the firmware are willing to trade off reliability for capacity or speed. Or they make crazy risks ("Hey, this window is only for ten milliseconds, what are the chances?"). I know too many lame firmware engineers to be really comfortable.

The failure modes are not block-by-block now, either. The whole device can go dead just because the firmware lost a lookup table to a bad bit. Something like this very clearly happened to Intel a couple years ago, and I know of other manufacturers who weren't very careful with their firmware quality (along the lines of "If we bump the version number on every fix, this will just make our customers nervous." Wow).

I'd love to see an eMMC spec that:

\- Allows raw access to the underlying flash (useful for data recovery, in any event)

\- Provides metadata describing the treatment of that flash (how many reads / erases, leveling requirements, geometry info, etc.)

\- Provdes access to ECC engines, buffers and other support hardware (to reduce bus traffic and host computation)

... then we could push the data management into a FOSS layer in the host, where people can inspect it, fix it, and improve it.

The combination of a hot commodity, pressure to make it perfom, complex management algorithms and opacity of implementation do not make me feel very happy about flash.

[edit: typos]

<comment><USER3> Some great ideas there. Agree about complexity - its usually a sign of something dodgy being hidden.

Perhaps a flash raid 1 device would suffice?

<comment><USER2> The scary thing is that you lose the whole device, and flash seems more fragile this way that disks are.

Perhaps we just understand disk failure modes better, and are more comfortable with them.

<comment><USER3> Good point. Mechanical disks usually start exhibiting warning signs when failing (the disk in my T61 started clicking about a month ago is being replaced tomorrow). I'm not sure I'll get away with that in the Samsung 840 that is going in it instead.

(yes I do backups and rsync hourly before anyone slates me for working on a cranky machine).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the kind of thing that ISO900x systems could be quite good at dealing with.

Unfortunately, quality assurance systems are often just a paperwork exercise so a company can get a logo for their letter footings, so all those goods-in checks and route cards and batch numbering etc end up not being so much use.

It might feel like he's going to a lot of effort. He should be able to spec a part; get quotes; order; do minimal checking of the delivered product (does the pack say "4 GB MicroSD? does the device have printing that says "4 GB"?); and then use the part. The lengths he's going to are normally saved for when you're forced[1] to use obsolete stock from brokers - you don't have much idea about who has had those parts or how they've been stored[2] and so you want to put them through rigorous testing. (Especially because the situation means they're usually going into things that must not fail.)

[1] I was working on a device where the manf had specified a Bourns resister network at 1% tolerance. That design had been approved and certificated and was thus "locked in" - there was no possibility to change that device. 1% devices were not available. The manf offered a complicated alternative (testing a bunch of 5% devices) but PHBs declined to use that ("What? We buy stuff and we might not use it?") and thus we lost that bid.

[2] Certificates of conformity are easy, everyone offers them. But there's a further requirement for some manfs of "traceability" - each component must be traceable through your paperwork (and the paperwork of your suppliers) to the batch where it was made. In theory this is great. If you get a bunch of devices failing you can look at what device is failing, and see where else you've used that device, and predict other failures. In practice the paperwork is nonsense; or no-one is skilled enough to do that kind of analysis. (I guess the huge manfs might do it, but people building 30,000 off builds don't tend to have the time or software or expertise to do it.)

tl:dr QA for hardware is often a joke and there's plenty of room for disruption there.

<comment><USER5> Bunnie has a lot of experience dealing with Chinese manufacturing and he's blogged quite a bit about it. The impression one is left with is that the manufacturers are always playing the 'game' which is "Can I get away with shipping X?" Where the rules are to not _explicitly_ break any rule in the contract. I've known a number of people who have experienced this game first hand.

From my reading of it there isn't any particular 'malice' in the game, its just a game they have played for decades as a way of getting business by offering a slightly lower price. Sometimes a middle-man (distributor) gets caught out, sometimes its the manufacturer. The great electrolytic capacitor purge was a good example of that game in action.

So in the rules of that game, if getting a certificate would make you the buyer look less closely at the product and thus take material you might not otherwise? Well they will go out and get one of those.

I got to experience it sort of in reverse, where a Japanese manufacturer was buying systems from my company and re-selling them. We spent 8 months on a contract that was over 200 pages because of the detail to which everything was specified. It was amazing to me and educational at the same time. I came to see lots of ways we could have made our boxes that would have made them cheaper to build but less reliable :-).

<comment><USER6> as described, the 'relatively common' providing under-specified cards with loopback tricks to make a user think it's full-sized - surely that's breaking an explicit part of the contract, not to mention wilful fraud?

<comment><USER5> Let me illustrate how the game is played. The contract says "Flash will be 128MB", card produced says "I'm 128MB"

Are the contract terms met? Even if the card only has 8 million unique locations? The contract doesn't say that the card has to hold 128M unique things all at the same time, it just says that you can address 128M things in it. So we take our clever software give you 128M addressable locations but if you try to put more than 8M things in the card you'll erase one of the other things you put in there.

You go through a process where you ask a number of vendors for a product that you've specified, perhaps you pick the cheapest one, and it turns out that they have an interpretation of the contract that isn't the same as you. (so they sold you an 8MB flash which pretends to be 128M flash). Your next step is to get them to 'fix' it, and they will, they will say "Oh we didn't realize you wanted to store 128M different things at once, we can do that too! That will by $Y" except that $Y is anywhere from 2% to 15% higher than the second or third lowest bid you got earlier.

So this manufacturer will tell you with a completely straight face about how sorry they were for mistaking what you wanted, and how its perfectly reasonable that some people really only need about 8MB of unique things, but since you have a relationship with these folks now you get to the 'real' product you wanted (128M flash) and you end up paying more for that than you would have with a different vendor at the start. They have 'won' this round, you have lost.

If you know this is how the game is played you write your contracts differently, you write : "128M Flash, which can hold 128M unique pieces of information at the same time that can be read back at a minimum of x bits per second and written at a minimum of Y bits per second, and can be re-written at least Z times at all temperatures between 0 and 50 degrees C and in the presense or absence of any magnetic field up to x Gauss, to be measured using the following tests on the following equipment that will be supplied by me and cannot be changed by the manufacturer, and will be inspected every 30 days by an agent I appoint who does not work for the vendor."

And then they know you've played the game before.

<comment><USER6> cute :)

I have my doubts that shipping 8MB cards in this way when contracted to deliver 128MB would be accepted by a chinese court - it just probably wouldn't reach court most of the time, especially when dealing with a westerner who would just learn some kind of lesson and move on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty normal in the electronics industry. From major suppliers, in the 90s we had 74hc logic which was just relabelled 74ls and some east German clone z80s delivered as genuine zilog parts. You don't usually notice until something fails test or you get a high failure rate in the field.

Comedy moment was the 1M resistors which were actually zero ohm shorts.

If there is a dollar to be made...

</comment><comment><USER7> I've always wondered if we paeons truly know what the heck is going on in our chips. I mean, the basis of trust is pretty large .. but there is really nothing we can do to ascertain whether there isn't a backdoor in every single chip package, and indeed this has been discovered to be a real situation by the Pentagon (Chinese backdoors in milspec chips), so .. I can hardly imagine that we can do much more than just plain trust, and get over it.

<comment><USER3> The truth is that you don't and this is fairly apparent when you find a buggy device and the vendor either shrugs it or threatens to sue you. (yes that does happen)

You can build out of discrete logic. The opportunity for something dodgy to be built in at that level is unrealistic. Some military equipment still works on that principle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Consumer flash cards are an example of a market where the purchaser has very little information to go on. The raw user available storage number is pretty misleading as the block remapping system (or absence of one) is a key determinant of reliability.

The fact that SanDisk and other name-brand manufacturers make a practice of switching out the underlying parts without changing the part numbers make reviews pretty much useless.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm always amazed by the lengths forgers go in order to successfully deceive their victims. Specially when only takes the same amount of work, or a little, to achieve uniqueness. Poor bastards, they don't know what they're missing.

<comment><USER4> This is something that I too find confusing.

I don't get what the added value is of a handbag that costs $2,000. There's good quality materials, high quality assurance, restricted numbers, sales from expensive shops. But still, that's no where near $2,000. So a forger can make a knock off and try to sell it for $1,800; or for $200; or a bad similar bag and sell it for $50. I don't know why they don't make nice bags for $200. This is true when you look at wristwatches. I want a nice movement in a nice case with a nice face for a reasonable price.

There's a lot of philosophy around it if you're interested in that kind of noodling.

"Bob has a science-fiction machine that can make an _exact_ copy of a famous artwork. No one will be able to tell the difference between the two pieces. Bob borrows a famous artwork, but he then gets the copy and original mixed up. Should he tell the museum? Or should he just return one? No-one will eve know, but Bob." etc.

<comment><USER10> _So a forger can make a knock off and try to sell it for $1,800; or for $200; or a bad similar bag and sell it for $50. I don't know why they don't make nice bags for $200._

Interesting enough, this happens; there are high quality fakes as well as poor quality. I've sat down with the head of brand enforcement for a major fashion house, held the different fake items, and seen what can be made.

There are different grades of counterfeit available, which basically boil down to three: the cheap and nasty; something nice (the $200 example); and something incredible.

The latter is particularly interesting; sometimes a counterfeiter will understand the brand so well, the cuts, styles and use of materials that define them, and come up with entirely new ranges that have never and will never be made by the authentic manufacturer.

I've had more than one brand manager tell me that in any other situation, the designer behind the items would be able to walk into a job with them due to their new designs being so good.

<comment><USER9> _I've had more than one brand manager tell me that in any other situation, the designer behind the items would be able to walk into a job with them due to their new designs being so good._

Thank you for telling us your experience. That was exactly the point I was trying to get through. The market that buys cheap to reasonable copies would never be able to pay the premium price of the original merchandise, thus there's no loss there.

However, the role of the high quality counterfeiter and the market that they aim for should be better understood in order to be economically explored. Though not by litigation, but by normal market channels.

In the end, instead of paying lawyers to pursue the lost revenue, we could create new brands that would fit the expectations of these unharvested markets.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What technology improved your life in 2018? - <AUTHOR> It doesn't necessarily need to be something new. Just something you adopted last year. It could be personal- or business-related. <comment><AUTHOR> I got high-quality rain gear. It's nice (and fun) to be able to go out in the rain and stay dry without having to carry an umbrella.

</comment><comment><USER2> Fleshlight</comment>


Ask HN: Help finding an article posted long ago related to moving locations - <AUTHOR> I am looking for an article that made it to the front page related to growing your business into a new building. I remember that it discussed some perils and pitfalls.<p>Many thanks in advance <comment> happy-go-lucky Please see if it's The Curse of a New Building. The discussion is at:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6163454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6163454)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your help.</comment></comment>


Help Kickstart SF based Mobile fab lab/media lab for edu, art++ - <AUTHOR>

Imagine all the most tools from a hardware incubator, or techshop in a truck, roaming the SF Bay Area.  Big laser cutter, 3d Printers, electronics. Plus Media lab gear and robotics. Staffed by passionate, experienced creators and educators with a variety of different backgrounds.
It's called the Sustainable Magic Box, and we have only 8 days left to raise at least $6000 to fund our Kickstarter and make it happen. Me and my friend relocated from Boston where we were teaching two week immersive studios to high school kids. We created projects like a telepresence robot, a flying video game that moves your body with the action, and various EEG and Kinect controlled projects - All in two weeks, no prerequisites. Some of our rewards include workshops for individuals or team building, art, laser cutting time, etc. Our branding and text is admittedly rough, but please consider contributing to our kickstarter at http://themagicbox.org. Hardware/Software startup? Get in touch, we are the secret weapon that can make you way more effective. <comment><AUTHOR> If you have any questions, please email firstname.lastname@example.com. Some applicable links - [https://cambridge.nuvustudio.com/studios/telepresence- robots...](https://cambridge.nuvustudio.com/studios/telepresence-robots-at- cambridge/final-product#tab-portfolio) [https://cambridge.nuvustudio.com/studios/arbonauts-2_robots-...](https://cambridge.nuvustudio.com/studios/arbonauts-2_robots- at-cambridge/robo-flower-2#tab-updates) [https://cambridge.nuvustudio.com/studios/interactive-art- at-...](https://cambridge.nuvustudio.com/studios/interactive-art-at- cambridge/silicone-mind#tab-portfolio)

Those are some of the projects from HS students. Some we have taken further and added to our own art - [http://www.sustainablemagic.org](http://www.sustainablemagic.org)

Again, we know our text/branding/video are less than awesome. My Cofounder and I agree on the "big" things, but it emerged at some point that we don't agree at all stylistically. What we are looking for are a few curious individuals and/or startups to take a chance on us. What we lack in polish we make up for in experience, passion and determination. Bunnie even likes us. [https://twitter.com/bunniestudios/status/510269089118289920](https://twitter.com/bunniestudios/status/510269089118289920)</comment>


Google interview questions - <AUTHOR> http://jpaint.drizzlehosting.com/google.html

<comment><USER2> I am not sure what some of these are supposed to test, like the 0xdeadbeef reference. Geek cred?

I am lost on this one, though: "A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?"

<comment><USER3> That's a painfully old brainteaser. The answer: He was playing Monopoly.

<comment><USER4> Now that... is hilarious!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can one test if the connection to a site is secure and encrypted? - <AUTHOR> Assuming that the firmware on a router is infected or something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18086418 and I want to know if I am connected to the proper website?<p>Also, can one check if keystrokes are being recorded? <comment><USER2> You see that lock icon in your browser's url bar? If you see that, then you're using an encrypted connection, and your browser was able to verify that the site's SSL certificate is valid and is signed by at least one trusted Certificate Authority. You can click on it to get more information about the certificate, which CA or CAs its signed by, how long it'll be valid for, etc.

If the firmware on your router is replaced by a malicious program, then it could intercept all SSL connections and handle them itself. However, it will not be able to present a valid certificate, signed by a real Certificate Authority. Thus the lock icon will show as broken, and you'll know that something is wrong.

Note that in a corporate setting, it's not unheard of for an employer to add itself as a trusted Certificate Authority on your work computer. This allows them to intercept all encrypted SSL traffic and also have the lock icon not be broken. Of course there's absolutely nothing wrong with this, because your employer is perfectly trustworthy and would never betray you or spy on you.</comment>


Machine learning for financial prediction - <AUTHOR> http://robotwealth.com/machine-learning-financial-prediction-david-aronson/ <comment><USER2> It's just so ridiculously easy to overfit these models, and so so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot as a result.

For example, "I split the data set into 5 random segments and then trained a model on 4 of the 5 segments and then tested it on 5th." Such data is serially correlated (it's not good old iid) so already it looks like you have poisoned the test set with information from the training set.

The hard part is not "feature engineering" or "ensemble methods", the hard part is controlling the entropy that you feed these things because they are voracious monsters and will absolutely eat all of it.

<comment><USER3> > _Such data is serially correlated (it 's not good old iid) so already it > looks like you have poisoned the test set with information from the training > set._

Kind of. If it was that simple making money off of an autoregressive model would be trivial -> everyone would do it -> serial correlation would disappear.

I agree with your observation that figuring out what to feed the beast is one of the bigger challenges though. Case and point: train a mean reversion model on the last seven years of S&P data to buy dips and train a momentum model to buy higher highs. That equity curve would look very encouraging. Do it on a fifteen year basis, and not so much. Now the question becomes: how long of a lookback do you use when training your models? Chopping up data at random will mux out useful correlations. Subsetting into periods leads to poorly generalized models. Not fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anyone else is getting errors when loading the page, here's the google cached version [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-ciyXfS...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-ciyXfSG2XoJ:robotwealth.com/machine- learning-financial-prediction-david-aronson/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER5> More tools for ML financial prediction

[http://188.8.131.52/recommend/app/hidden_connections?query=h...](http://188.8.131.52/recommend/app/hidden_connections?query=helium&db=all)

[http://184.108.40.206/recommend/historical-trends/index- contra...](http://22.214.171.124/recommend/historical-trends/index- contracts.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are a few problems with turning your laptop into a money machine using data analysis.

Remember the maxim, past performance is not a guarantee of future results. You can develop strategies based on past data that will beat the market, but, the nature of markets is to adapt to kill your edge. Markets adapt constantly and your edge stops working at an unknown point in time. It's unknowable when that WILL happen because past data can't show that.

The other reason is transaction costs. In gambling called vig. Let's say I'm betting NFL games. NFL home teams win 51% of games. Even flipping a coin I've read come up heads 50.1% of the time. These are profitable systems. But you're paying the bookie 10% on each loss. You could find someone to bet you on coin tosses and bet heads each time. You have a positive expected return, although you need a huge number of flips to make money!

In trading of course costs is commissions. Why do you think there was a rise in HFT? The strategies are consistently profitable. (Besides the flashing/manipulation tactics) It is ONLY profitable because of extremely low commission costs that are not available to the retail (or even semi- professional) trader.

Systems that can pull $0.0001 out of every share traded overall on high volume can be (pretty easily) created, but you can't trade them profitably. In fact, you will find commissions (semi-pros who pay about $3 per 1000 shares) priced right at the point of an edge you could be expected to develop.

<comment><USER7> "nature of markets is to adapt to kill your edge"

If you are a low volume, small time trader, the market isn't going to move as quickly to adapt to you. If you have $100,000, for example, and return 30% a year, you aren't on anyone's radar.

<comment><USER8> 30% on 100k is 30k. You'd be better off getting a regular job unless you can sustain that for more than 10 years. Which you can't predict.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Plus let's remember you are adding nothing to life here. All you are doing is collecting 30k off other people with a slightly less optimal "strategy" than you.

And no I don't believe these people are "adding liquidity and assisting price discovery".

to the reply as I can't post as HN censors detractors of big finance:

I don't believe the benefits of liquidity added by HFT are worth the enormous costs firms sink into it.

<comment><USER10> _> > And no I don't believe these people are "adding liquidity and assisting price discovery"._

The nice thing about reality is that it remains even when your belief persists against it.

In large-cap stocks during rising markets, high frequency trading does improve liquidity[1]. While the effect may not be as prevalent during a downturn and it may not impact smaller stocks as much, I'd like to see your evidence that it actively harms the market or that the practice is vapid and produces nothing of value.

Or is that just a statement you made because it nicely aligns with your political conception of Wall St?

EDIT: It helps to point out that "algorithmic trading" and "high frequency trading" are not at all the same thing, especially as these terms are usually conflated on HN. An algorithmic trading system does not necessarily need to trade at high frequency. Some algorithmic trading systems make trades in intervals of days or weeks, not seconds or milliseconds. The paper cited here describes the market-making activities of what is traditionally called high frequency trading and the benefits it has over human brokers of the past, but it uses the umbrella term "algorithmic trading."

EDIT 2: The parent comment responded to this one by editing his original one, because _" HN censors detractors of big finance."_ You also claimed you don't believe that the liquidity provided by HFT is worth the capital that large firms dump into it.

In 2013 the entire HFT industry made about $1B, down from $5B in 2009[2]. HFT is not a large industry. It is eating much of Wall Street's traditional market-making inefficiencies, which is why it is widely disliked, but it is not "big finance." Big Finance is generally opposed to HFT.

You still haven't provided evidence or numbers to prove or even quantify what you're claiming. Are you saying HFT is not worth the investment to firms, or are you saying it isn't providing some vague "value to society" relative to alternative uses of investor capital?

The first case is obviously nonsensical, as many firms generate profit using high frequency trading strategies. The second case is like saying we shouldn't do anything if it doesn't save impoverished children in Africa. The added liquidity has a material and beneficial impact on trading outcomes for buy- and-hold retail investors, which is shown in my first citation here. You have yet to satisfactorily refute this.

[1]: [http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/hender/Algo.pdf](http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/hender/Algo.pdf)

[2]: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-06/how-the- ro...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-06/how-the-robots-lost- high-frequency-tradings-rise-and-fall)

<comment><USER9> Generating a profit does not equate to generating wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Former professional investment manager here...

The biggest problem with things like this, which almost nobody talks about in the context of investing, is publication bias.

100 people try to develop a profitable trading algorithm. 1 comes up with one that looks great on back-tests at a 1% confidence (in other words, exactly what you'd expect from random chance alone over 100 trials).

That person writes an article/pitch/business plan based on their algorithm. You never see results from the 99 who failed.

Going forward, the successful algorithm is no more likely to work than the failed 99, but from the perspective of the general public it sure looks like a winner!

<comment><USER2> > 100 people try to develop a profitable trading algorithm....

It's much worse than this with machine learning approaches. Imagine a million people trying to find a profitable algo, all on your laptop, and you are choosing the best one out of all of those.

If you are used to pen-and-paper trading strategies, or even excel spreadsheets, machine learning is just a completely different level to this. And probably how it works will be unintelligible to anyone. I don't even see how someone can write a business plan based on this.

<comment><USER12> The type of approach used has limited effect on survivorship bias, what matters is the number of people employing different approaches and the size of the effect. So if machine learning approaches can produce real results, the data will show this. Survivorship bias is real, but it is not the full story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you can actually reliably generate alpha from a model like this there is no point of running the strategy yourself. There are any number of hedge funds that will sign you on, let you keep all of the IP you develop, and give you 10-12% of any returns you generate. That sounds small, but it's mitigated by the fact that you will have access to potentially billions of dollars in capital to trade if your strategy has the capacity for it. So you get 10% of a much bigger pie, with way less downside risk. Plus you get access to all their internal trading systems, execution services, data feeds, etc, which are usually orders of magnitude better than what an individual has access to.

<comment><USER14> Who do I contact? I have a deep learning startup that is trading forex right now, I would like to make some contacts and see if I can integrate

<comment><USER15> Why FX? More direct access to exchanges?

<comment><USER16> it's the most liquid market on earth, it's 24 hour for the majors, its depth is enormous, and it is less prone to event risk than individual equities (as long as you stick to unpegged currencies) so you can get tons of leverage on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think financial prediction via machine learning will be a useful cruicible for defining AI from non-AI. So far, so many companies that have applied machine learning to prediction have ended up on the wrong side of the order book at the wrong time. I don't know if this is because other algorithms figure out what they are doing and rapidly develop a counter algorithm to fleece them, or if its just savvy traders intuition about what the algorithm is keying on and manipulating it. Sort of like good RTS game players that figure out how the opponent AI is playing and start playing against its programming rather than some strategy from first principles.

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone know where he got all the raw data to feed his algo? Clearly he used a lot of data and the two main sources of free info i know of are google finance and yahoo finance. At least with google finance i run into issues with their api if you execute too many calls simultaneously, a bunch end up not returning any data

<comment><USER19> Not sure where he got his data, but you might want to try [https://www.quandl.com/](https://www.quandl.com/)

They have a free, community, curated data set of ~3200 stocks.

<comment><USER18> Wow i have not heard of that site before - thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting article. I do something related, and here's my take:

Data mining is useful because it gives you things that are predictive that you might not have considered at first, but make sense after. This is mainly due to combinatorial explosion in the potential number of formulas.

You generally have a vague idea of what might be predictive, eg cheapness vs earnings and cash flow, but there's a huge number of ways that might show up in the data, and there's a huge number of ways it might hide in the data.

So for instance an old school analyst might do a ranking of price/earnings as well as cash flow, or whatever bespoke formula desired.

A data mining approach could take all the fundamentals and generate formulas mixing the variables, yielding a number that seem to be effective. Out of those, you'd look at them and decide that they capture some thesis (low P/E, upward trend in earnings). Then you'd look at whether the formula is sensitive to small tweaks. For instance, if you regressed the last 6 earnings and it had phenomenal performance, but with 5 or 7 it wasn't, you probably conclude it's some sort of random result.

There's funds that take the mass approach to an extreme. They have huge databases, with a genetic algorithm that generates expression trees, and a battery of stats (incl backtests) to decide what works. They end up with many thousands of strategies that are a great deal more effective than your standard one-trick pony fund.

<comment><USER21> very interesting. Can you recommend any resources for someone with a fairly strong stats / programming background but no real substantive finance experience?

<comment><USER20> Igor Tulchinsky has a fund that does this. He also writes books and papers about how he does it, with everything you need to do it yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's a hedge fund built by anonymous data scientists - [https://numer.ai](https://numer.ai)

You can use ML to make money on encrypted stock data for free. Think Kaggle but the winning models are used to trade.

<comment><USER23> It looks like the feature set is fixed on numer.ai? If so everyone's probably developing mega ensembles (this is what netflix's competition ended up as, with teams merging because their models did better together). Compared to quantopia, where you're responsible for feature engineering too (though numer.ai is probably easier to get started, since model selection is imo the fun part).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Really successful traders spend their obtaining insider information, not massaging public data. It stands to reason that an ensemble of technical trading methods would regress towards the mean.

<comment><USER25> Using insider information is illegal. If you mean insider information then this is total nonsense. Sure, there are a few that do illegal things (and inevitably get caught since there is so much monitoring going on).

<comment><USER26> Exactly, when I heard drugs usage was a problem in some communities I too knew that was impossible because selling and using drugs is illegal.

Sure, there are a few that do illegal things (and inevitably get caught since there is so much monitoring going on).

<comment><USER10> Your middlebrow dismissal doesn't work here because the parent didn't say it's not a problem or that it doesn't happen. The parent is refuting a point that successful traders exclusively become that way by trading on illegally obtained information.

<comment><USER27> The point being refuted is a straw man - nobody said anything about 'exclusively'.

<comment><USER10> No it isn't. The original comment might not have said "all successful traders spend their time...insider information" but the implication is there as it was stated. Given what the grandparent comment replied with, it appears I wasn't the only one who inferred that message.

<comment><USER27> Just because more than one person infers something doesn't mean it's really there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'll invoke the Black Swan ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_%28Taleb_book%2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_%28Taleb_book%29)) since it hasn't been done yet in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER24> ...spend their time and resources...

</comment><comment><USER29> Hello

I'm Kris, the guy who wrote the article that started this thread. Thanks to all who have read my article and taken the time to comment. In the context of my motivation for starting my blog, it means a lot. I'm an engineer who became interested in quantitative finance and machine learning a few years ago. I learned how to code and apply my maths and stats knowledge to finance independently - no formal training whatsoever. This meant that for a long time I was conducting research and developing trading systems in a vacuum; I had no one to bounce ideas off or learn from. So I started writing about what I was doing in the hopes of getting some feedback. So thank you all for providing some. The insights were immensely valuable and I learned a lot.

I thought it would be useful to respond to some of the comments.

mathgenius brought up the extremely valid point that regular k-fold cross validation in a time series context doesn't make sense since the data is autocorrelated, not iid. I no longer use this approach for time series data, instead favoring Rob Hyndman's time series cross validation approach, also known as forward chaining. I believe this approach is the best representation of a real trading environment. The issue becomes deciding how large the rolling window of training data should be - older data may be obsolete, but excluding too much history can lead to not enough training instances.

dpweb raises a good point too, namely that just because your model performed well on past data, even if that data was out of sample, there is no guarantee that the future will be sufficiently like the past, meaning that your model may well become useless at some point in time (possibly very quickly). This is a valid point, but no reason to abandon the markets. It does however require that any algorithm's live performance be objectively monitored such that the level of deviation from expected performance can be statistically quantified. Once a pre-determined confidence level in the model's obsolescence is reached, it should be removed from the portfolio.

mcbrown's comment about publication bias is a good one too. Even worse, I've personally developed hundreds of trading systems that I haven't published. Other bloggers and publishers have most likely also done the same. This form of selection bias is very likely rampant, and is especially applicable to models 'discovered' using machine learning techniques that may not be rooted in traditional economic or financial principles. The moral: absent some form of robust accounting for selection bias, view all of these types of systems with a healthy dose of skepticism, and the published performance as a theoretical upper limit to what could be achieved in practice.

hendzen's point about partnering with a fund or proprietary trading company rather than running your reliable, alpha generating strategy yourself is also a valid one. I have happily found this out for myself recently.

Also, lordnacho is spot on regarding his take on the utility of data mining in finance.

Thanks again for all the comments!

</comment><comment><USER30> Never understood why anyone would spend time creating any trading method given even if it did work (possible, but unlikely) the SEC would audit you and then leak how you were making the outperforming returns.

Welcome any thoughts, in part because legally beating the market is possible, just don't get the SEC & OPSEC aspect.

<comment><USER20> Why would the SEC audit you? Just by random chance there are many people outperforming the market. They can't audit you just for outperforming.

If they do audit you, how will they discover how you are generating your trading decisions? Their remit is to make sure you aren't doing something illegal. There's no reason they would understand what you were doing in anything other than a superficial way.

Also, something can be profitable, and obviously so, without being easily reproducible. For instance there are firms that do simple footrace arbitrage on the same security between different exchanges. Not hard to understand, but you still can't do it. There's a whole spectrum of strategies that are on a frontier on the map of easy-to-understand vs easy-to-implement.

Besides all that, I think even if you were to learn about a way to beat the market, the way you found out might lead you to be very skeptical of whatever was proposed. If a guy is selling it on a website, you will probably not believe him, right? And if he showed you backtests that worked, you would suspect they were generated from a random generator of some sort. And if he then shows you the math, you would almost certainly find fault with it. Why did he do this or that transformation on the data? Must be random...

<comment><USER30> Few years back, SEC started being very agressive about finding entities making above average returns; my understanding is that if over a set amount of transactions you're making over 30% that you will get "knocked" and the auditors have zero reason not to leak the information. Best example I know is the Walmart parking lot satellite imagery analysis; happy to dig up a link.

<comment><USER31> I'd love a link as well as additional examples, if you can think of any.

<comment><USER32> Googling "walmart parking lot analysis" yielded the following as the first result.

[http://www.cnbc.com/id/38722872](http://www.cnbc.com/id/38722872)

<comment><USER31> Thanks. It has no information about the technique being leaked by the SEC, though.

<comment><USER33> Not sure about SEC leaking anything, but satellite data is a tool for investors to use satellite imagery, and image processing to see things like how many cars are in several big branches, make assumptions and correlations to spending, and then act on the information before Walmart releases a quarterly statement, sort of.

Number of container ships docked or leaving port around China can forecast trends in China's exports, again before any official numbers are made available. I don't see this as insider trading. You pay for the satellite time, you gamble on your data analysis, and you either win or lose. If it were certain, others do the same, and the edge is lost quickly by market adjustments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Slacker – Post funny replies to Slack as your favourite character - <AUTHOR> http://slacker.ngutechnology.com.au/

<comment><USER2> Yeah if I could get you to add official support for Pepper Brooks, that'd be greaaat.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea. I think his default message will be "That's a bold strategy Cotton. Let's see if pays off".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice one. Adding Kanye right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> How did I not think of Kanye?! Adding him to the built-ins right now.</comment></comment>


Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust (1984) - <AUTHOR> http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html <comment><USER2> If anyone is wondering why this has come up again, this was referenced by the US government during their proposed hack on xcode and the iOS SDK.

Leaked NSA discussion 'Strawhorse: Attacking the MacOS and iOS Software Development Kit': [https://freesnowden.is/2015/03/10/strawhorse-attacking- the-m...](https://freesnowden.is/2015/03/10/strawhorse-attacking-the-macos- and-ios-software-development-kit/)

Article: [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/10/ispy-cia- campa...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/10/ispy-cia-campaign- steal-apples-secrets/)

</comment><comment><USER3> >I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode.

Prescient.

If I was a 3-letter surveillance agency with an unlimited budget, lots of gifted engineers, and significant legal leverage over the two largest players of the PC processor market via such instruments as National Security Letters, x86 microcode is exactly where I would hide backdoors.

</comment><comment> raving-richard (This comment originally posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023247) )

Please have a look at David A. Wheeler's page on Trusting trust [1], including his 2009 PhD dissertation [2], where he clearly demonstrates that it is possible to have trusted (not in the MS sense...) computers (I think).

You may also be interested in 'Countering "Trusting Trust"' on Schneier's website [3], which discusses a 2006 paper, also by Wheeler.

[1] [http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting- trust/](http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/)

[2] [http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting- trust/dissertation/html/whe...](http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting- trust/dissertation/html/whe..).

[3] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_tr...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_tr..).

<comment><USER4> Your second and third links come out dead for me, ending in ... .

<comment><USER5> It appears he's copied them verbatim, including the ellipsis, the broken links (from the original post) are supposed to be;

[2] [http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting- trust/dissertation/html/whe...](http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting- trust/dissertation/html/wheeler-trusting-trust-ddc.html)

[3] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_tr...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_trus.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is a classic - but also quite old - there are some new techniques for countering this: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_tr...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_trus.html)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for this - yet reading through the comments, I wouldn't place much stock in the technique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everyone feel safe using a compiler written by a twisted mind like that?

(Ask someone who uses Go today, for example ;)</comment>


Messaging as a programming model  - <AUTHOR> http://eventuallyconsistent.net/2013/08/12/messaging-as-a-programming-model-part-1/ <comment><USER2> I like this, but can I make one recommendation? Ditch the classes and just operate on primitive data! You're very close to thinking functionally with the pipelining of commands operating on a message, but you've got a bit of overhead with the explicit data types.

Of course, this is just an opinion from someone who has been doing a lot of functional and declarative stuff these days with Javascript using underscore, d3, and angular, so your mileage may vary. :)

<comment><USER3> Yes this totally looks like a lisp approach.

Though I would have to disagree with you about explicit data types. In static typed languages key to productivity is using data types and resolve most of the bugs at compile time as opposed to run time. It would be a bad call in this case to borrow advices that better apply to other environments.

<comment><USER2> In a very subtle way I was also implying to ditch the statically typed language. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amen, for a different take on the same concept with syntax support look no further than Clojure's core.async: [http://swannodette.github.io/2013/07/12/communicating- sequen...](http://swannodette.github.io/2013/07/12/communicating-sequential- processes/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure I see the benefit of creating a generic pipeline vs just having a "manager" class or function that calls each step in succession. The process of "logging in" is conceptually a single step, thus it makes sense to have one unit that abstracts over the entire process. Factoring out the logic of successive calls into a pipeline doesn't seem very useful here. I could see a benefit if it were the case that each subprocess existed and is executed independently, but in the login case and probably most cases in general web development, this usually isn't true.

To me, the benefit of a pipeline is when each filter can register itself (e.g. an event queue), thus the entity generating it has no knowledge of where it is going or who is processing it. A key indicator of this is when order of execution doesn't matter. In the case of logging in, order is critical so something somewhere must control the order each filter is ran. At this point you might as well have a unit that orchestrates this process itself.

<comment><USER6> What about the case where you would have multiple managers? For example, today you wrote a FooManager that handles all the Foos, next month you'll write a BarManager, and after that a BazManager and so on. Each of these will probably have a slightly different way of handling things...

Creating pipelines for all of these scenarios seems like it would mean you're doing things consistently across your code base, which will hopefully make it easier to maintain. It also might make it easier to reuse code (you can share filters between different services).

<comment><USER5> The problem I see with this is that the pipeline concept also constrains your code in other ways. For example, using the pipeline there is no clean way to allow communication between each successive subprocess. Return values in this case aren't clean (would involve casting), and mutating the data passed around seems like a cure worse than the disease. I know of no way to construct a generic pipeline that allows for all the flexibility of simply successive function calls. I suspect most problems won't cleanly fit the constraints imposed by a generic pipeline.

<comment><USER7> > no clean way to allow communication between each successive subprocess

I think this is much of the point behind this pattern, actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People are mentioning the Lisp-y nature of this writing, even if is not about Lisp. Is this not specifically something from Erlang, with message-based communication? Granted, this article is short on where that shines in Erlang, cross-process/cross-thread communication.

<comment><USER9> I don't see erlang mentioned at all, yet he's talking specifically about things erlang can do.

<comment><USER10> Or, more generally, any "actor" concurrency system. It's built-in in Erlang, you can use Akka in the JVM, there's just a ton of options for message-passing concurrency in Clojure, Go channels offer something similar, and pretty much every language you can think of has _some_ library implementing it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model#Actor_libraries_and...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model#Actor_libraries_and_frameworks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is the word "actor" absent both in the original article and in the HN comments?

<comment> a-nikolaev and "process calculus" too, imho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Welcome to the 70's.

<comment><USER13> Hey, he could have been banging out payroll programs in COBOL for most of his career and just been confronted with his first Java or Smalltalk program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Odd that Web API was chosen over servicestack.net given 'Messaging-based web services' has been the fundamental concept behind servicestack.net for several years which has always promoted a message-based design as a first-class concept where all its features are built around message-based DTOs to take advantage of the benefits of messaging: [https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Advantages...](https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Advantages- of-message-based-web-services)

The pipeline described in the article is very similar to ServiceStack's request pipeline ([https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Order- of-O...](https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Order-of- Operations)) where Global, Service and Action Request and Response Filters allows composition of custom logic to be selectively applied at different levels of granularity and priorities.

ServiceStack's message-based design is what allows it to provide .NET's most succinct, end-to-end typed API without any code-gen or post-build steps. You're able to re-use the code-first DTO's services were defined with, as-is, inside clients. This has many benefits, message-based DTO designs are more resilient, and support the natural evolution of services. It's inherently simpler with less friction as client and server call-sites have symmetrical parity as the same DTO the client sends is transparently hydrated into services on the server.

Message-based design's are also inherently more re-usable as they encapsulate services in their most re-usable form, which is what allows the same service in ServiceStack to be called via HTML/Web, REST, SOAP, MQ endpoints in JSON, XML, SOAP 1.1/2, HTML, CSV, JSV, MessagePack and Protocol Buffers formats with no effort.

</comment><comment><USER15> Any research in concurrency is a good thing. The massively parallel program model that I want to know more about is IBM's TrueNorth.[1]

None of the articles I've found had any substance, but the it was fitting that hardware diagram[2] looks very similar to Bret's "vision from the 70s" :) [3]

[1] [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517876/ibm- scientists-s...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517876/ibm-scientists- show-blueprints-for-brain-like-computing/)

[2] [http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/080813-ibm-devises- sof...](http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/080813-ibm-devises-software-for- its-272651.html)

[3] [http://worrydream.com/dbx/slides/slide.032.png](http://worrydream.com/dbx/slides/slide.032.png)

</comment><comment><USER16> Every so often somebody rediscovers messaging as a cool programming model. This has been going on since the 80s at least. Somebody wrote a paper on the duality of procedural vs message based coding.

Messaging has some cool properties. Static deadlock analysis. Potentially idem-potent design allowing response-less interfaces (e.g. send a state message instead of an incremental update; eventually state will settle). Transparent distributed processing. Queuing and fault tolerance, not for free but pretty easy.

It takes a mental wrench to move to this model, but I think its worth it.

</comment><comment> lost-theory I see a parallel to aspect oriented programming / advice. The "filters" are equivalent to aspects and "registering" them is equivalent to advising a method. The neat thing about an AOP system is that aspects are cross-cutting and can be applied to any method. It seems like this approach requires special setup (the Pipeline object).

</comment><comment><USER17> Avoiding errors by using primitive data structures instead of objects and threading them through functions. Sounds like functional programming to me!</comment>