An Infinite Regress. Of Dumb: More Reflections on "Market Efficiency" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bull-market/the-last-time-i-saw-richard-thaler-speak-he-talked-about-the-beauty-contest-game-in-the-beauty-2e0b767d9098/

<comment><USER2> When doing any sort of theoretical work in finance or economics, academics often make the _assumption_ that markets are rational and efficient. This assumption is almost universally false. They know that markets are neither: markets may or may not be rational (we can never realistically gather enough data to know thanks to information asymmetry) and they certainly aren't 100% efficient over most timelines.

Just because the assumption is wrong doesn't mean it's not useful: without it, you can't even build a reasonable model of financial markets. But because the assumption is core to financial modeling, this means that all financial models are wrong. In fact, that's exactly how my financial modeling professor opened up the first class: by explicitly stating that all models are wrong in some way. You have to understand the ways that the model can be wrong in order to make any substantive claims about it. The Black-Shoals options pricing model assumes market liquidity; it's not very useful if you're talking about an asset that isn't very liquid.

Misunderstanding when models should and should not be applied is one of the core reasons we got into an asset bubble in the mid-2000s. Banks were pricing financial products using models whose assumptions did not hold over the long- term. They didn't understand how their models were wrong until it was too late, and it ended up losing them (but ultimately the American taxpayers) a lot of money. But because the assumption that markets are _always_ rational and efficient is wrong, it doesn't follow that markets are _never_ rational or efficient. Markets can be rational and efficient, but it depends on the relative timeframe and the structure of the market involved.

<comment><USER3> >Misunderstanding when models should and should not be applied is one of the core reasons we got into an asset bubble in the mid-2000s. Banks were pricing financial products using models whose assumptions did not hold over the long- term. They didn't understand how their models were wrong until it was too late, and it ended up losing them (but ultimately the American taxpayers) a lot of money.

I don't think this is true. Plenty of smart people who worked with various models knew their data wasn't solid and reflected just a few years of a benign market, and plenty of people understood the rather obvious idea of a Black Swan.

The reason they kept at it was systemic: they were paid to sit and cheer the market up, continue to sell product, and generally not question the business model.

The people who made a lot of money off the crash tended to be people who were able to sit out the upswing in some way, without being punished too hard. Hedge fund managers with either new funds or long track records, like Paulson and Andrew Lahde.

The crash was always coming. I remember going to a luncheon at GS where that was the major point. This was in 2006, and they predicted it would start in 2007 and culminate in 2008.

<comment><USER2> It was. Their models made the assumption that debt ratings were accurate, and they were substituting leveraged mortgage backed securities with AA ratings for risk-free debt. They also underestimated the effects that a liquidity crunch would have - any asset model backed by volatile assets assumes liquidity, but doesn't tell you what will happen in a period of non-liquidity.

Most models assume financial markets are a continuous function, when in reality markets are _mostly_ continuous with periodic step functions. When you hit a period with a step function, the market is either being irrational or correcting prior irrationality. You can't predict these step functions with any accuracy; though many of the big investment banks knew it was coming a year or two in advance. But even if you can predict them, there is no good way to model them.

Goldman Sachs, for all its faults, is run by exceptionally competent people. They came out of the downturn stronger than they went in. They understand the models well because they built most of them. But there were plenty of large market players at Lehman, Merrill, Nationwide, etc. who were ignorant of the problems until it was too late. These are the people who just did what the model told them to because it was making them money, and they didn't understand the risk exposure they really had.

<comment><USER3> >Their models made the assumption that debt ratings were accurate, and they were substituting leveraged mortgage backed securities with AA ratings for risk-free debt. They also underestimated the effects that a liquidity crunch would have - any asset model backed by volatile assets assumes liquidity, but doesn't tell you what will happen in a period of non-liquidity.

Do you think all these guys with fancy degrees did not think about this? Come on, of course they did. You don't even need to know about any model in particular to understand that models rest on assumptions. It's a high school concept they teach you in any TOK class.

The reason GS was able to react is IMO they have a great network. The culture is geared towards finding out what other people are thinking. They're the only firm I've been out to dinner with where the guys cared to hear my opinion, in depth. The same salesguy at another shop reverted back to type.

So they found out through their feedback that many, many people did not think the models were correct and acted on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Making fun of economists who assume efficient markets is a lot like making fun of physicists who assume frictionless motion. Or computer scientists who assume an infinite Turing tape. Simplifying assumptions can be very useful _if_ you know their limitations.

It seems that in the author's beauty contest game, most people are unable to analyze this game correctly at the top of their head. Maybe some people don't even bother and just pick any random number. But assume that this game is played repeatedly and for real money (like in a stock market). I think people will notice that low numbers consistently win, which will cause a downward trend towards the Nash equilibrium in very few iterations.

<comment><USER5> precisely. In fact, you see it in the markets, even among quantitative Phds, only a very small fraction beats the market. It's broadly efficient, on long enough time scales. It's inefficient on extremely short time scales, which is why HFT works so well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> About three quarters of the way down, the author draws these conclusions from a classic 1980 paper:

      - there is smart money in the market,
      - the smart money can and is outperforming right now, but that smart money isn't YOU,
      - so sit down and index.

I don't mean to be anti-intellectual, the various versions of the EMH and the responses to them are interesting, important concerns in the study of finance and economics. But the take away for the vast majority of the public should be the above. The market may or may not be efficient but you aren't going to beat it. And even if someone else can, he isn't going to use that ability for your benefit.

<comment><USER7> I think what it means any money can be "smart money"[1], but over a longer horizon, no money can be consistently smart.

[1] If you work in a company you're well placed than most in judging the value of the company. Yes there are regulations to prevent you from insider trading, but no it doesn't mean you can't invest in the company (or short it!) on the basis you know your colleagues better than others. You, however, have no advantage over the market over all other forms of investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has the author of that post every given the Beauty Contest game to the same group of people three times in a row? What happens then?

<comment><USER9> Indeed the article is poor. His beauty contest results are more plausibly explained by anchoring bias (start at 2 thirds of 100). EMH is about price dynamics so a single "run" of the beauty contest says nothing about it. I am willing to bet a significant amount that after a couple of iterations, the bids would go to zero.

I simply dont see The "paradox" the author thinks they have discovered. There is reams of empirical evidence that active fund management is GENERALLY a losing proposition for savers. Both parties to a trade can end up losers because trading costs are never zero. If you want to go quickly broke, just keep blindly buying and selling over and over. Even if you beat the spread, the fees will swallow your money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've got a tangential question about efficiency that someone might be able to help with: The perceived wisdom is that capitalist systems result in efficient companies, because they beat the inefficient ones. So for example we have Apple making tons of money because they were better at what they were doing than (most) of their competitors. So the end result of a bunch of competition is an efficient company ... but how efficient was the process of getting to that end result? So for example once you count all the failed competitors in a given market, the bankruptcies, redundancies, people who invested their time and money in failing businesses. Has anyone measured the overall 'efficiency' of a competitive system whittling down the competitors to the viable ones? Is there a name for this concept in economics?

I'm wondering because efficient end result =/= efficient process, and the process itself must have a cost to society etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> When you do find an alpha, it tends to exist for some systemic reason. The financial system is organized in some way that systematically presents opportunities to make money. It may have to do with slowness of large players, information leakage from weak order placement systems, ideological disposition towards disregarding some phenomenon, etc.

The way to think about it is not some efficient calculating machine, but as an ecosystem. Can you imagine a tiger saying "hey, there's more prey here than I need to eat and reproduce. Must be something wrong with the system"? No, he just eats and shags. Evolution keeps things in check, meaning things don't go obviously out of whack, but now and again local imbalances occur that can be exploited. The fact that they are exploited also obscures their existence from a high level.

</comment><comment><USER11> The current and long-running debt and capital gains driven financial asset market has made everyone insane. If valuations were based on tangible cash flows (dividends paid out of profits) then the question of how much stocks are worth becomes far less insanely self-referential.

Real markets work on markup-based pricing and cash flow from profits. See Steve Keen's work[1]. In a world where the banking system can introduce nearly infinite leverage into any financial transaction (see student loans) what's the price of anything?

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised- Expanded-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded- Dethroned/dp/1848139926)

<comment><USER12> I agree with your complaint, generally.

One thing I often wonder about is the value of Facebook stock. It has effectively no voting rights (Because of Zuckerberg's control), and I can't imagine Facebook issuing a dividend... so what rights does it really have? How do you value something like that?

<comment><USER11> Exactly. It's the modern world's equivalent of debating the number of angels capable of dancing on a pinhead. You have these chumps talking about future cash flows and dividend yield equivalents, all the while the board and executives march off with the actual cash.

The right thing is to eliminate the tax bias towards capital gains and make dividends tax-deductible for corporations, so they have incentive to pay profits out to, you know, the owners. Basically make them act like big LLCs, which is the fair thing: why should Grandma Jones pay the same corporate rate as Mitt Romney on her investments in Coca Cola before she sees a dime?

At some point it'll reverse, but it's been a good forty years, so... who knows?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > the hypothesis that there is no information in the past history of share > prices which can be used to predict the future

A belief in that hypothesis strikes me as particularly delusional. The strongest indicator of what a share price will be at `t+1` is what the share price is at `t+0`. Why would anyone delude themselves otherwise?

Maybe that would hold true if execution prices are never revealed (not even to the participants of a trade), but prices are streamed out constantly and are exactly what traders are interested in (how else can they measure their 'gains' and 'losses'?).

<comment><USER14> A market is weak-form efficient if you cannot use past share prices to predict the direction of future price changes. Or in other words, if you can't use past returns to predict future returns. There's no delusion.

<comment><USER13> Direction of change is a bit different from future price and I don't believe was considered in this treatment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's pretty easy to guess how the EMH got started: economics professors tried to trade the markets and got their heads handed to them in thin slices. Their egos, thus battered, created an excuse. What they didn't understand is that trading is a competitive game of skill: mere intelligence is not sufficient, any more than it would be if they walked onto a tennis court with Roger Federer.

<comment><USER2> This is totally wrong; there's very little skill involved in trading. Any university student with a basic knowledge of calculus can learn all there is to know about the markets from a skill perspective in a year or less. In fact, this is exactly why the big investment banks prefer to hire kids fresh out of college.

Where companies really make a lot of money is on the relationships. Goldman Sachs doesn't make $500 million off an IPO because they're better at drafting SEC paperwork than anyone else; they make that money because they have thousands of clients with money to invest that they can call and convince to fund the IPO.

<comment><USER15> > This is totally wrong; there's very little skill involved in trading.

Not only are you badly misinformed, you are spreading information that could encourage someone to risk their money when they don't know what they're doing.

First off, something that requires a university education and a year of full- time training is not what most people think of when they hear the phrase "very little skill involved". When a member of the general public tries trading for the first time, they have far less than even that (and even economics professors have less of it than they think.)

Secondly, what you're describing is algorithmic trading, not discretionary trading. I guarantee you that that math whiz fresh out of college is not allowed to risk significant amounts of money on personal hunches. (I would guess they don't learn discretionary trading at all; they have their hands full with the algorithms.) I'm sure there's a lot of infrastructure to ensure that any strategy they come up with is well back-tested before going live. Again, the general public (including the professors) isn't doing algo trading and doesn't have access to that infrastructure and that support system.

Tennis was not the best analog. Trading is more like poker. First, they both have the property that the more you win, the bigger advantage you have, and conversely. Second, as they say, if you don't know who the sucker at the table is, it's you.

<comment><USER2> I can see how what I meant could be taken the wrong way. What I meant is that you can learn 90% of what you need to know about the mechanics of investment finance in a year. The rest of your career is spent cultivating relationships so that people allow you to handle large sums of money for them.

The "skill" involved in trading isn't really that difficult to learn - it's tradecraft, which you have to learn in any industry. And you're right; the math whiz fresh out of college doesn't get a ton of money to play with. He gets a small amount and if he does well, is progressively trusted with more. The bulk of this type of trading is about risk balancing. Institutional traders will make more money here simply because they trade using proprietary platforms that get simply them better prices on securities. The algo guys optimize the ordering systems such that the prop traders get first pick at everything.

Trading at high levels (billion dollar positions and above) is a lot like poker; but the bulk of securities trading is really no different than playing a video game. I used to know a guy who worked for a big HFT firm, and that's exactly how he described it. Humans are excellent at pattern recognition, and so the HFT guys use humans to make decisions about when to get in/out of an asset. Computer programs show patterns to the analysts, who issue a "yes/no" decision and who are judged solely on their performance.

But yes, you are also right that mere mortals like us have no chance because it's not an even playing field. I mean, the algo traders pay millions of dollars a year to get Reuters feeds 60 seconds early, so by the time news hits the market, the price has already adjusted. Hell, the trading platforms that are processing your orders sell access to their incoming order feed, and the algo traders love to pre-empt your trades to drive the price up.

A more apt definition would be that trading is like poker where the guys with huge piles of chips also have X-ray vision. And they get to skim the pot even when they lose. If you have X-ray vision and pot-skimming rights, then yeah, it's just poker. If you don't, then you should just go play Blackjack (i.e. buy-and-hold investment where you play against the market as a whole, not any individual players).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science <comment><USER2> "For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."

<comment><USER3> "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't wait for the day that we are able to give a dolphin a brainwave controlled arm prosthetic and some building material/tools. I feel they're just as smart as humans but we just brush them off as stupid because they haven't built anything. But I man what do you really expect from them? They have flippers for hands and minimal resources to build anything.

<comment><USER5> That's a future just crazy enough to happen: forget about AI singularities. Just augment the other intelligent beings that inhabit the Earth. The aliens were here all along.

Of course they might be a bit peeved when they find recipes for themselves on the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Meanwhile, the more dolphins study man, the dumber we turn out to be.

</comment><comment><USER7> You have to wonder, if they had hands and arms instead of flippers, they might have built civilizations like humans have.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps they built the civilizations, realized the pointlessness, went back to frolicking in the water and ended up with flippers from lack of use.

My roundabout point is, why do they have to build civilizations? Because we humans think that's the pinnacle of advancement? Perhaps the dolphins have a difference in opinion. Perhaps they're debating this very idea over some delicious herring: "do you think humans are intelligent?"

"Mmm, could be. But they keep scurrying around building pointless crap, so I don't know."

"Yeah, good point. More herring, darling?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Naw, the irony is that we think that we are studying the dolphins while, actually, the dolphins are studying us and we still have not yet caught on to that! We're the ones in the zoo cage! And the dolphins are so smart that they can study and understand us without use of hands, computers, cameras, etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> Would it be interesting science or newsworthy if dolphins ended up being bad at something? Isn't this just a form of selection bias?

</comment><comment><USER11> Way back in 2010, Dr. Heywood Floyd had a dolphin "pet" in his home by the sea. Some people say he could talk to the dolphins, but I think that's just silly, something out of a movie.

<comment><USER12> I heard his son was fluent in dolphin language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We should stop studying them before they get brighter than us and overthrow humanity.

</comment><comment><USER14> That is such a (I don't know word to express my feelings...) "offensive"?, "humano-centric"? "hubris filled"? title. And exemplifies and perpetuates humankind's atrocious relationship with our fellow earthlings.

Dolphins are not turning out to be brighter. They were/are as bright as they always have been. Humans are the ones changing, losing a bit more of our ignorance and hubris.

This is still so pervasive that most people don't even recognize that as an "issue". Just like people hundreds of years ago wouldn't be phazed by the title "Negroid race is turning out to not be savage sub-humans after all".

<comment><USER15> The article is saying they're turning out to be brighter _than we thought_.

<comment><USER14> I said title and not article for a reason.

<comment><USER15> The title says the same thing.

"The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be" is obviously not saying our study causes them to become more intelligent.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Assembly Evolution P1: Accessing Memory and the strange case of the Intel 4004 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.julien-oster.de/2011/10/assembly-evolution-part-1-accessing.html

<comment><USER2> The 4004 is not the ancestor of the 8008; it was a completely different processor family with different antecedents. The 4004 came from Busicom in Japan and was designed by Masatoshi Shima; the 8008 followed an architecture developed by Victor Poor at Computer Terminal Corporation (later Datapoint).

Tom Pittman wrote an assembler for the 4004 which was shipped in a EPROM with the earliest development board. I (Dennis Allison) wrote the resident assembler for the Intel Development System which targeted the 4004 and its successor, the 4040. The 4040 was essentially a 4004 with logical operations as well as arithmetic ones.

The native assembler had to be completely compatible with the cross assembler which ran on IBM 360 machines (256KB partition) which was written by Bill Byerly. The cross assembler was interesting since it was completely driven by a mechanically generated bottom-up parser.

The native development system assembler fit in 4KB of EPROM memory and included a bootstrap monitor and a rudimentary paper-tape editor. For large to moderate programs, the development system needed a memory extension as there was precious little space to for the symbol table in a bare bones development system. It was slow, but designed to work with a 10CPS teletype.

The architecture of the 4004 was targeted to calculator-like devices and not general purpose computing. The chip family included:

        * 4001 - 256-bit mask ROM and 4-bit I/O device,
        * 4002 - 320-bit RAM and 4-bit I/O device,
        * 4003 - 10-bit shift register,
        * 4008 and 4009 - standard memory and I/O interface set.

The 4002 memory was organized into four blocks, each block consisting of 16 4-bit words and 4 4-bit status values rather than providing a uniform 80 nibble address space. The architecture presumed that the 16-nibble blocks would be used to hold floating point or fixed point data and the 4 status registers would hold exponent and scaling information.

<comment><USER3> > The 4004 is not the ancestor of the 8008; it was a completely different > processor family with different antecedents.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the 4004 was really an ancestor of the 8008, which is why I wrote:

> Overall, it bears little to no resemblance to its successor in name, the > Intel 8008 (except for the internal stack, which both had--I will cover that > in another posting).

I am pretty sure that the 8008 has its name because of the 4004, at least that is what Wikipedia told me (not a reliable source, I know). I will fix the article to make that more clear.

I have no experience with CPU-design, though, so I wrote the article from a ("modern") assembler developer's perspective.

Thanks for your comment, really interesting tidbits!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Via <http://www.pagetable.com/?p=663>)</comment>


Theo de Raadt on LLVM license change - <AUTHOR> https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=147503691302850&w=2 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure why anyone thinks there will not be a real license change process. There will. This is just the stage of settling the question of what the license should be. Everyone is quite aware of the work it will take to actually change the license (I've managed the process for a number of large projects before) and random commentary from Theo that it will just be unilaterally changed is simply wrong.

Chris's email even says this " Once we reach an agreement on the path to take, we can start talking about logistics of how to get there."

As for the corporate wannabes comment, the truth is that folks have gone out of their way to talk to both users and contributors, at the developer conference and elsewhere (and in fact, we've spent a year trying to come up with licensing solutions to ensure we don't cause problems for various one off users, whereas most projects who have relicensed usually just told them tough luck).

Past that, I'll be honest:I'm pretty uninterested in what a bunch of random people on an unrelated mailing list, who don't participate in the community at all, want to think. Especially when they have pretty much no data and have never bothered to simply ask questions on the llvm mailing list in the thread (or at the developer conference, or...), like others did. If they have real concerns, they are welcome to raise them in any of the normal ways.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reproducing the text because the site is under too much load and Coral Cache can't resolve it:

      List:       openbsd-misc
      Subject:    Re: LLVM license change
      From:       "Theo de Raadt" <deraadt () openbsd ! org>
      Date:       2016-09-28 4:27:44
      Message-ID: 91077.1475036864 () cvs ! openbsd ! org
      [Download message RAW]

      > And that is because corporate "contributor-wannabes" put pressure on the
      > LLVM foundation.
      > http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2015-October/091536.html
      >
      > It does say "this is an RFC" but that was last year. We are now in this
      > year:
      > http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-September/104778.html
      >
      > What I particularly do not like is the "IANAL but let's do it anyway"
      > drift emanating from a lot of high profile developers there.

      Well, I hope they do it.

      And then -- I hope a year or two later, some author of a component
      (especially one from Europe where the moral rights of an author still
      carries substantial weight) submarines the new licence, surfacing to
      indicate that they never signed off on the additional terms applied to
      them as a significant author, and will accept no cash to solve the
      problem.

      Then they are dead in the water.

      A cataclysm like CSRG went through.

      Then a fork of code on the original license can flourish.  A fork
      based upon the last free version -- but let's remember that is the
      history of another piece of important software...

      So this problem could be fixed, if enough people care.

      In this situation, I suspect a few people are being paid a lot of
      wages to act as agents permitting theft from their co-contributors.
      They worked with others but now they are ready to steal from them.  A
      list of all contributers (and every single one of them must agree) has
      not been published, so it is really likely this is a well-financed
      effort being performed by paralegals.  Meanwhile day by day that list
      of contributors operating under the existing model is growing..

      Someone is hoping they can get away with copyright theft.

      Want to have fun?  Submit a major diff, which (seperately) in the
      submission says you'll never agree.  Eventually most large projects
      find their inner Xfree86, I'm afraid to say.

<comment><USER4> Painting the situation as "corporate contributer-wannabes" and "IANAL but let's do it anyway" is loaded language that seems intended to bring up negative tropes. The first is sneering at the host of potential contributors, because the host is willing to pay the salary of the contributors. The second is not remotely backed up by the facts.

They've hired lawyers, and consulted the community. The community's predominant concern was whether the new license (Apache2) would be compatible with GPLv2.

In the "We are now in this year" link, it's explicated how they consulted a gaggle of open source lawyers, determined the predominant belief was the new license was compatible with GPLv2. But they didn't stop there – they had a lawyer draft an addendum to really ensure that!

Not a good look. Fever swamp paranoia, and wishing ill on a series of people clearly trying to do well and address every concern.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Painting the situation as "corporate contributer-wannabes" and "IANAL but > let's do it anyway" is loaded language that seems intended to bring up > negative tropes.

Theo de Raadt said neither phrase.

<comment><USER5> I think everybody here knows what ">" means.

<comment><USER6> Except for refulgentis, apparently.

<comment><USER5> I don't see where refulgentis claims Theo did. Clearly, those are quotes from the person Theo is replying to.

Theo seems to agree with that person though, and "wishing ill on a series of people clearly trying to do well" certainly could apply to both parties in the email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A bit of reminder on who Theo is:

> Theo de Raadt (/ˈθiː.oʊ dɛˈrɔːt/; Dutch: [ˈteː.o dɛˈraːt]; born May 19, > 1968) is a software engineer who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is > the founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects, and was also a > founding member of the NetBSD project.

<comment><USER8> Living in Canada allowed him to avoid the USA's onerous export restrictions on strong encryption; at a time when good, consumer-accessable encryption was expensive and patent-encumbered. The 'net is secure in no small part to his efforts and that of the rest of the OpenBSD team.

<comment><USER9> You mean DJB, Zimmerman, and others fighting the governments to change the status quo encryption policy followed by deployment of higher-quality stuff than average proprietary in FreeBSD and Linux that got widely adopted by most of the Internet? Nobody has ever showed me evidence that Theo or OpenBSD had any impact on the security of the Internet as a whole. Maybe on specific users of OpenBSD or the developers' higher-quality software. Not the big picture, though.

I'm open to specific examples if you have them of widespread changes in INFOSEC or massive adoption of better tech due to Theo de Raadt.

EDIT: I'm aware of many good apps they've made. To clarify, my comment is addressing this broad claim:

"The 'net is secure in no small part to his efforts and that of the rest of the OpenBSD team."

OpenSSH might get credit due to massive use. Good example. Past that, what else does most of the net on client side (mainly Windows & Mac) or server-side (mainly Win, FreeBSD, and Linux) depend on from OpenBSD developers?

<comment><USER10> Androids libc?

<comment><USER9> OpenBSD team made that? You got a link?

<comment><USER11> Google used bits and pieces of various BSD libcs in bionic. It's not definitive, but wiki has a list. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_\(software\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Theo's right of course.

Paradoxically, projects on github flourish because contributors and users by in large ignore the licenses. Granted, licenses are extremely important to protect intellectual property but nothing kills contributions to open source more than bureaucracy.

<comment><USER13> What makes you think of all the things ignoring the licenses (citation needed) is the one that made github flourish?

<comment><USER12> I won't bother contributing to a project if I have to jump through hoops. The Github ecosystem removes these hoops. The license is a secondary concern for in-house software.

<comment><USER13> I still don't see what you mean by this. All of the top projects on github have pretty clear licenses which are automatically accepted by you (the contributor).

In fact if you choose not to specify a license your work counts as copyrighted (as per github licensing documentation). So Github doesn't really remove any "hoops".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> All the comments here seem to focus on Theo, the Apache license vs. the BSD one, and for some reason the OpenBSD policy.

But my understanding of that email is about the irregularity of a unilateral change of license. The contributors own their work and licensed it under one license, and the project wants to change it without doing the Herculean job of getting permission from all.

I think Theo is correct there saying that there is a risk that one of those contributors will then come out of the woods and wreak havoc, risking a forced fork from the relicense point.

IANAL, but "you don't change the license" is one of the few things I was taught.

<comment><USER15> Both of the licenses used in LLVM contain the following clause:

> Permission is hereby granted... to deal with the Software without > restriction, including... the rights to... sublicense

The effect of this clause is that all LLVM contributors have already consented to a chance in license, whether that change is done by you, me, Debian, or the Pope.

The only question is whether the LLVM organization wishes to exercise this authority itself. It's clear that the majority of the key contributors are in favor of it, so it seems like a foregone conclusion at this point.

<comment><USER16> The whole reason that this license change is coming up is that some people in the project (and I assume Apple as well) want to provide some level of protection from patent infringement cases for the users of LLVM. The ability to sublicense doesn't help here because the patent clause in the Apache 2.0 license would only apply to the patents owned by you, the one who is doing the sub-licensing. They want these protections to apply to the patents of any of the authors of LLVM, which of course cannot be done without their consent.

<comment><USER15> There is debate about to what extent patent protection is already extant in the current licenses. One example, the MIT has

> to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation > the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, > and/or sell copies of the Software

The word "patent" does not appear here, but the words "use" and "distribute" seem to imply the granting of rights necessary to achieve those ends (of which a limited patent license would be one), and the phrase "deal in the software without restriction" is a statement so broad that it seems difficult to argue a patent license (and perhaps many future IP innovations unknown to us today) was not granted by the rules of equitable estoppel.

The reason for this license change is to resolve the ambiguity that arises because the word "patent" does not appear as a word in this clause. It was found that the GPLv2 did not grant patent rights because it was not mentioned in that license [0], although the circumstances of that case and the text of the MIT are far apart.

As a result of all this LLVM may go around and get people to sign off on the Apache grant but it is likely to be under the banner of "clarifying" an implied patent grant rather than establishing a new one. Depending on how worried the lawyers are about the legal meaning of "deal in the Software without restriction" they may not be worried about the contributors they are unable to track down.

[0] See [https://www.fenwick.com/FenwickDocuments/potential_defenses....](https://www.fenwick.com/FenwickDocuments/potential_defenses.pdf) for an analysis of the GPLv2 situation

<comment><USER16> You're correct, I should have said better patent protection, not patent protection at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could somebody tl;dr me what is going on with LLVM and why the new licensing would be bad according to Theo?

<comment><USER18> LLVM wants to switch from a BSD-style license to Apache 2.0, with a few exceptions, one allowing use with GPLv2 code, another allowing the bits of compiler-rt and other components that get built into binaries to be redistributed without restriction.

The main benefit of Apache 2.0 is that it includes a patent grant as well. Right now, LLVM relies on a custom "developer agreement" for anyone who contributes code that includes a grant of patent rights, but it's kind of vague and fuzzy and so makes it hard for some people to contribute, and the license itself doesn't actually mention patents at all:

[http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2015-October/091536...](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2015-October/091536.html)

Theo objects to any license that applies more restrictions than the original BSD license. OpenBSD makes an exception for GPLv2 licensed utilities that have been traditionally shipped with BSDs that there's not a good replacement for, but has stopped upgrading things that have moved to GPLv3 and apparently objects to the Apache license as well.

<comment><USER19> The existing patent agreements seem to make the current license not comparable BSD but instead comparable to an awkward or even apparently extreme Apache 2.0, so isn't this about in practice removing restrictions, not adding restrictions? (This thought process is backed up by their stated reasoning and the kinds of contributors that are supposedly complaining.)

<comment><USER15> "Additional restrictions" can be funny. You may recall the FSF's position that the app store EULA placed "additional restrictions" on the GPL, a position that was and remains controversial.

In this case, it is a little harder to understand OpenBSD's interpretation of additional restrictions because they haven't listed their objections in any centralized place, but from reading around, they seem to believe:

* "You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files" is an additional restriction * "any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License" is an additional restriction * The sheer length and complexity of the Apache license suggests to them there are other additional restrictions buried in there somewhere

<comment><USER20> > You may recall the FSF's position that the app store EULA placed "additional > restrictions" on the GPL, a position that was and remains controversial.

I don't think that the position was contraversial, I just think that people took it the wrong way. The Apple EULA _objectively_ has clauses in it that state that users must follow the "acceptable usage policy" and it is enforced regardless of any external agreements -- this would mean that Apple would be violating the GPL if they distribute any GPL software in their store.

You can add additional terms that permit distribution in the Apple store (as Signal has done), but the stock GPL does not permit distribution in the Apple store because the "acceptable use policy" is one of the things the GPL was made to fight against (the idea that users must act in an "acceptable" way to Apple when running software on their own computing devices).

<comment><USER15> > The Apple EULA _objectively_ has clauses in it that state that users must > follow the "acceptable usage policy" and it is enforced regardless of any > external agreements -- this would mean that Apple would be violating the GPL > if they distribute any GPL software in their store.

And Red Hat EULA _objectively_ has clauses in it that you may not redistribute RHEL.

There is a slippery slope here, the FSF has decided for whatever reason that RHEL's restrictions "weren't really restrictive, because they were so easy to comply with" [0] but there is really nothing "objective" about that determination.

[0] [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide- gplv3.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html)

<comment><USER20> You're being a tad disingenuous here. RHEL's EULA[1] is basically the same as SLE's, openSUSE's, Ubuntu's and so on. It only states that you are not allowed to use the RedHat trademarks when you redistribute RHEL -- and since RHEL (and the other distributions I mentioned) puts all of their trademarked components in a single "branding" package then it is not _practically restrictive_ to make such a requirement. RHEL has no requirement that you cannot distribute some software (in fact, the distribution is under GPLv2 much like openSUSE and SLE).

Apple's EULA restricts users to only being able to use software they distribute under their "acceptable use policy". This is simply a violation of the GPL, with no wiggle room for discussion.

[1]: [https://www.redhat.com/en/about/red-hat-end-user-license- agr...](https://www.redhat.com/en/about/red-hat-end-user-license-agreements)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm confused. The post he's responding to is just saying that they want to move to the Apache 2.0 license if possible. Chris certainly doesn't seem to be assuming they can just flick a switch and make it happen, considering he talks about "logistics" and is pretty clear it is still in the discussion stage.

Is it a dick move just to ask the contributors if they're willing to provide the code under the Apache 2.0 license so people can use LLVM without worrying about being sued for patent infringement? This looks to me like Apple and other corporate contributors with large patent portfolios giving users without such bargaining chips some protections from litigation.

I find it hard to see that as a bad thing, unless they were in fact deciding to pretend they own the copyright of the whole project and dare contributors to sue them. Thus far I see no evidence of that.

</comment><comment><USER21> Theo deRaadt complaining about "copyright theft" is hilarious given his original stance on the ipfilter debacle.

<comment><USER22> I might very well be wrong, but I believed that the licensing of the IPFilter code, and the clarification of the attached license was part of the reason that OpenBSD, and Theo, is so much against complex licenses.

While better than the GPL, version 2 and 3, in the sense that it's shorter, the Apache 2 license is still much more complex than the ISC or the BSD/MIT licenses. Another part of the issue, for some developers at least, is that the Apache 2 license sort of acknowledges that software patents are a thing. So if you disagree that companies should be allowed to patent software, mathematics and processes, you might not pick a license that validates the existence of those patents.

<comment><USER23> _So if you disagree that companies should be allowed to patent software, mathematics and processes, you might not pick a license that validates the existence of those patents._

This sounds absurd to me. Software patents don't go away because one stops believing in them. Either the courts enforce them or not.

<comment><USER24> Sure, but I see the idea as a kind of boycott/protest. I disagree with patents, mainly software patents, consequently I will never use a license that consider patents.

<comment><USER20> That's not how laws work. At all. Even the GPLv3 (authored by one of the biggest activists against software patents) has clauses relating to software patents -- because they are a legitimate threat to software freedom and need to be addressed. Just because you don't like patents doesn't make the problem go away -- in fact by ignoring it you're making the problem _worse_ because then your code's license has no protection for your users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> OpenBSD's been around for a long time, it would be unwise to dismiss these concerns, especially considering they've demonstrated this has happened before.

LLVM/clang was recently imported into OpenBSD and is being brought into shape to potentially replace GCC, having OpenBSD developers eyes on a codebase has also historically been a good thing.. I think a future without their input will be bleak.

</comment><comment><USER25> [http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#copyright](http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#copyright):

 _" The LLVM project does not require copyright assignments, which means that the copyright for the code in the project is held by its respective contributors who have each agreed to release their contributed code under the terms of the LLVM License.

An implication of this is that the LLVM license is unlikely to ever change: changing it would require tracking down all the contributors to LLVM and getting them to agree that a license change is acceptable for their contribution. Since there are no plans to change the license, this is not a cause for concern.

As a contributor to the project, this means that you (or your company) retain ownership of the code you contribute, that it cannot be used in a way that contradicts the license (which is a liberal BSD-style license), and that the license for your contributions won't change without your approval in the future."_

OOPS.

<comment><USER26> The LLVM license (the UofI/NCSA license) is permissive, and thus compatible with just about everything, including the Apache 2.0 license. All the existing code can stay under the old license unless someone agrees to the new one. New contributions can go under the new license. The _effective_ license of the codebase will become Apache 2.0, with some pieces still available under the previous permissive license.

<comment><USER6> This is considered a _dick move_ for a project to make, often this means any non-trivial changes to existing code will be under the more restrictive licence, with no backward compatibility, preventing such changes from being incorporated by the original authors or anyone perusing a fork of the originally permissive codebase.

A common example of this kind of behaviour is GPL proponents forking BSD or other similiarly licensed software, and exclusively wrapping their contributions to it under the GPLv3.

<comment><USER20> > A common example of this kind of behaviour is GPL proponents forking BSD or > other similiarly licensed software, and exclusively wrapping their > contributions to it under the GPLv3.

A _much_ more common example is a proprietary software vendor taking a lax licensed project and creating a proprietary fork of it. Of course, BSD proponents don't mention the _far more common_ case (because it wouldn't help the narrative that GPL proponents only spend their time relicensing code).

Why you don't have a problem with proprietary forks but do have a problem with copyleft forks is beyond me. Especially since sometimes copyleft forks are created because the developers made so many changes that it stands in its own right as a separate project (and the developers feel that user freedom trumps upstreamability).

<comment><USER6> The proprietary "forks" are often not distributed as source, they're either internal forks, or simply part of a larger product. The difference is that proprietary forks of permissive code is often kept in sync with upstream and you only ever learn of its existence when they decide to contribute back patches. They typically have the courtesy of making those available under the original license terms for everyone to benefit from.

<comment><USER23> Internal forks are not subject to the GPL requirements anyway, so that can't be an argument against it.

<comment><USER20> In fact, licenses that do not permit private copies of the modified software are not considered free software according to the FSF[1] (which I agree with).

[1]: [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license- list.en.html#NonFreeSof...](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license- list.en.html#NonFreeSoftwareLicenses)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is dual license a possibility?

<comment><USER28> Not really.

The anti-patent protections Apache provides don't work if the patent holder has the option to use the license without those protections instead. I believe this is why it's common for projects to dual-license under Apache and GPLv3 - both licenses have anti-patent provisions.

<comment><USER29> But it's not the patent holder that uses the license at all. It's the downstream user. Any downstream user would be protected by the patent clause as long as they're using the Apache 2.0 license regardless of what the patent holder wishes.

<comment><USER28> Hmm. That's a good point; I've probably misunderstood that. Thanks! I'll do some more research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's common for open source projects to change licenses. To be honest, I'm pretty sure that most projects have set the bar much higher than it legally is. In other words, I think de Raadt's fantasy isn't going to happen, and if it did, the fallout would likely be that many projects would lose the ability to enforce their licenses.

Usually, when a project changes its license, it either tries to get permission from each contributor; or it makes an announcement that if any contributor objects, they will remove that person's contributions on request. But US law doesn't actually require that. In the US ( [http://copyright.universityofcalifornia.edu/ownership/joint-...](http://copyright.universityofcalifornia.edu/ownership/joint- works.html) ):

"Each joint author has the right to exercise any or all of the exclusive rights inherent in the joint work. Each author may:

"• Grant third parties permission to use the work on a nonexclusive basis without the consent of other joint authors

"• Transfer his or her entire ownership interest to another person without the other joint authors' consent".

In other words, unless you have some kind of enforceable agreement between all contributors, _any_ _contributor_ can relicense the work, without the consent of the other contributors. I'm not sure whether the GPL qualifies as the kind of agreement that could prevent this; the FSF has spent years saying the GPL doesn't meet all the standard requirements of a contract because it doesn't need to be a contract. The FSF famously requires contributors to transfer their copyright interest to the FSF because Stallman says an attorney told him that makes it easier to enforce the GPL. Or, as Eben Moglen says ( [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why- assign.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html) ):

"If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.

"... [I]n order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment, and, where appropriate, a disclaimer of any work-for-hire ownership claims by the programmer's employer."

Many open source licenses other than the GPL don't have any chance of qualifying as the kind of agreement that could prevent a single contributor from relicensing the project on a whim.

Also note that "contributor" doesn't necessarily mean to "contributor to the parent project." I haven't been able to find any legal reason somebody can't fork a project (following the license), make enough changes to become a joint copyright owner as far as their fork is concerned, and then relicense the fork. I guess the original contributors would also be joint copyright holders as far as the fork is concerned, and could relicense the fork as well. I'm not sure where that would end; and I'm glad that so far nobody's been creative enough to start such a battle.

So, back to LLVM: Apple is, without question, a joint copyright holder and can relicense the code as desired. De Raadt's idea is that a European could say "well, the relicensing was OK under US law, but not under European law." But I don't see how moral rights would prevent relicensing. The Berne Convention establishes moral rights as ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights) ):

"Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation."

Note, (1) that is "independent of an author's economic rights" and (2) the contributor has the ability to object to any modification, mutilation, distortion, etc., _of_ _the_ _work_ ; not of the terms the work is distributed under. Countries can establish their own idea of moral rights, but I'm pretty sure they will follow the Berne Convention's definition pretty closely.

So I would predict the outcome would be a court opinion that any contributor has the right to change the license, and that moral rights aren't the right tool to stop a relicensing. And if anybody can fork, become a contributor in the fork, and relicense the fork, I don't see how anyone can enforce any license restrictions.

<comment><USER31> "I would predict the outcome would be a court opinion that any contributor has the right to change the license"

You think Microsoft, who has put tens of thousands of lines into Linux, has a right to change the license of Linux away from GPL? Is that really what you're positing?

<comment><USER30> I'm saying that I don't see a legal obstacle to Microsoft doing that. There are other potential obstacles, such as reputation damage.

So far, open source projects act like copyright either requires unanimous agreement among the copyright owners to make changes, or each contributor has copyright only in their specific contribution (so, in practice, you need unanimous agreement). That's simply wrong for joint works, and joint works are defined as works meant to be combined together to make one work (the alternative being a collective work, where the parts are simply combined into a collection, does follow the "each contributor has copyright in just their contribution" model).

Copyright law is based on certain assumptions, like "if the co-authors get into an argument, it will be about how to divvy up royalties, and there will be a contract involved." Another is "co-authors work together at the same time, and know each other." Those assumptions are wrong for open source projects.

<comment><USER32> You're wrong. Absolutely, undeniably, wrong.

A party simply can't change the license for code that they did not write. They can only change the license for their own work.

<comment><USER30> A party can become a joint author, and then they can change the license on the entire work. The part "joint copyright holders can distribute the entire work under any conditions they feel like, even without agreement from any other joint copyright owner" is well established. You may not believe me, but it is the law (I already linked to the University of California, and Eben Motown's statement that to enforce a licence you need the cooperation of each copyright holder, acknowledging that a single dissenting copyright holder can kill an enforcement action; but here's a link to Stanford: [http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/copyright- ownershi...](http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/copyright- ownership/#who_owns_the_copyright_in_a_joint_work)).

The FSF avoids this problem by requiring copyright assignment. To be honest, I'm not sure that's enough, but I think they're hoping for a sympathetic judge. Most projects have never looked at what the law actually says regarding joint work, and think it works the way they would write the law. I know what the outcome of that will be.

<comment><USER20> I don't think that your claim has been tested in court when it comes to code. This might be true for some kind of music or something, but I find it hard to believe that a court would agree that two people who have never met and have only communicated over the internet would have formed an implict contract allowing relicensing of a work several orders of magnitude larger than the contribution of the relicenser.

It's like claiming that someone shouting outside of a recording studio has the right to relicense the music created inside the recording studio. While it might be true, I'd want to see an actual legal case before claiming things that are that outlandish.

Not to mention that the GPL has been tested in court and has held. So there's that.

<comment><USER30> It's not a question about contract. It's about how joint copyright works.

I know what the arguments would be, but I'm not sure how the court would rule. The hypothetical depends on legally making a fork, and the GPL (as an example) only gives permission to fork if you agree that any distribution will be under the terms of the GPL. If you violate those terms, you've committed copyright infringement. But can a joint copyright owner be guilty of infringing his own work?

I remember Eric Raymond discussing a commercial copyright infringement case where a contractor was hired to update a program, and started distributing the updated program without permission. This was his argument.

However, he hadn't made significant changes to the program. Using your words, the program was several orders of magnitude larger than what the contractor added. The court got creative, and declared the contractor only had a collective copyright -- like somebody who has copyright on a single article in an encyclopedia -- and not a joint copyright -- even though his changes were meant to be combined with the original work to create a single work and not a collection of works. A collective copyright owner only has copyright in his contribution.

You are right that courts would be reluctant to allow the tail to wag the dog, but there is some threshold where the contributor has made enough changes that he has joint copyright, and at that point he can do what the law says a joint copyright holder can do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Everybody enjoys free (as in "freedom") software. Turns out, even quality-wise free software is often much better than non-free, closed-source software. On the other hand, it may be hard to really understand the rationale behind it. The idea goes against the principles of capitalism (based on property rights). Also, if it is completely OK for hardware design to be proprietary, why should it not be OK for software? What is so special about it? The arguments put forward by proponents of free software do not seem very convincing, and sometimes their personalities do not help attracting people to their cause. Often, this ideal becomes a nuisance even in the world of open source. If you want to use Debian, for instance, you are pretty much forced to use "non-free" repositories (or a "non-free" Debian re-distribution) for your setup to be useful.

<comment><USER34> >Turns out, even quality-wise free software is often much better than non- free, closed-source software.

This is only true in the very narrow segment of 'tools for geeks by geeks', 'tools that big software companies need but don't provide a competitive edge/need to be OSS for adoption so they opensource' (Apple, Google, Microsoft) and companies that sell support for OSS (RedHat, Novell, Canonical, etc.)

As soon as you move from IT infrastructure/dev tools there is no contest between OSS and commercial packages or they only cover small a niche. Compare GIMP vs Photoshop, Blender vs Maya/3DSMax/ZBrush, Cycles/Yafaray vs VRay/Renderman/Lux, OSS CAD tools, LibreOffice vs Office, etc. They aren't in the same league most of the time in both quality and functionality supported.

<comment><USER20> The point of the free software movement is not quality, it's user freedom. Would you prefer having an electronic heart implant that is proprietary and is "totally safe trust me", or is free software but isn't the best thing in the world to interface with. I know which I'd pick, and the same logic applies to everything else I rely on in my daily life.

<comment><USER34> The parent comment was making a statement about quality to which I responded.

And if the proprietary software has been an industry standard and deployed in millions of cases before I would have no problem taking the closed source variant. It would be nice to have the source but in most cases I wouldn't know what to do with it anyway as it requires specialist knowledge, so I'd be relying on the community vetting it vs. legal requirements for approval by the regulatory agencies, I mean it would still be better to have the source but I could live without it.

Anyway my point isn't even related to preference, I'm just saying that the conditions for successful OSS software are limited to one of the models under which it makes sense commercially for the companies using it (most often IT giants), some sort of commercial support/free software deal or in rare cases it's a labor of love for geeks. Most of the software written out there doesn't fall nicely in to those categories and so OSS is not viable in those areas.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Peter Principle Isn't Just Real, It's Costly - <AUTHOR> http://www.nber.org/digest/may18/w24343.shtml <comment><USER2> This is probably just a variant of Berkson's paradox, similar to Google's observation that success in programming competitions is negatively correlated with job performance: [http://www.catonmat.net/blog/programming-competitions- work-p...](http://www.catonmat.net/blog/programming-competitions-work- performance/)

The mechanism would work this way: sales people exhibit multiple features, and they are promoted based on some combination of those. If a sales person has outstanding other credentials, they might be promoted despite poor sales percentile. Those other credentials might actually be better predictors of managerial experience. Conversely, many of the top sales people might have been promoted on the grounds that they were _good sales people,_ without exhibiting any other skills.

Note that there might still be a positive correlations between sales skills and managerial skills, but due to how the promotions are selected, you end up observing a negative correlation in the promoted group.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox)

<comment><USER3> > similar to Google's observation that success in programming competitions is > negatively correlated with job performance

I find it very interesting that Google then interviews with programming challenges...

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty convinced half of that is ability to handle arbitrary bullshit, and the rest is just an IQ test with a different name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The corollary to the Peter Principle, I think, has always been that it's _caused by_ bad management. Taking "is good at IC duties" as the measure for "should lead a team of ICs" is sloppy. You are not considering the person/what they're good at. You're just using an easy shortcut to reward them for their performance.

One problem is high-contributing ICs who _think_ they should get promotions to manager. For whatever reason: it's how things are done, they really want to do it, etc. There needs to be a separate, _equally status-conferring_ , career track for them if they're really not going to be good at managing people. They need to be convinced that the best thing for them is to stay where they are, being awesome. Which is probably hard. The idea that you are awesome, therefore you become a manager, get an office, etc. is pretty pervasive.

(The bonus would be that those of us who never, ever want to be managers no matter how much our directors want us to would have that career path available too.)

<comment><USER6> My favorite thing is seeing people I wouldn't hire to be a low level IT tech as CIO/IT Director because they're a "network guy".

So not only do they end up not understanding 90%+ of IT's functions in any real sense, they are typically not even trained on how to manage.

I work with one such moron at my current job. The entire company goes around the fool, yet they keep him. Why? The acting CEO is likely embezzling and competent IT might shine a light on it. That and the CEO outsources work to her husband's company for 10s of thousands a month with no deliverables or results (beyond what I suspect is the normal embezzlement in other areas).

I've been in this field for ~25 or so years. Maybe I'm jaded by working in consulting/contracting for most of that (and working for myself). I have never worked with an IT Director or CIO that I would personally hire for my own business in that entire time. Being technical enough to make the right decisions and having enough managerial experience/knowledge to be a good manager at the same time is extraordinarily elusive.

Another question is, how do people hire a CIO, when they themselves don't understand IT (or even want IT it seems). They guess or outsource it. I've never seen that work either.

<comment><USER7> I have the problem of being the "moron" at your work. I wanted to just be a web developer. It's the only thing I'm good at, and I'm not even really great. Just functional.

But people start to ask you for IT related things because you are the "tech" guy. If your honest and say you need to hire someone to do that specific task, often people are ok with that.

I follow this simple guide when hiring someone to do something I don't understand.

1\. Explain to me how you would solve problem X, in as many steps as possible. I make them walk me through it, and ask for more and more detail. Usually spending about an hour.

2\. If they have no problems getting into the details, then we set a roadmap and schedule and I check in periodically to make sure we are staying close to it. If they can't stick to their own plan... I move on.

3\. If they could give me enough detail to start with, and too much of it was, I'll have to do research or figure it out when we get there, I don't hire them.

4\. This results with me having a solid bank of IT people I can outsource problems too, and in tern executives depend on ME to deliver actual results.

That doesn't sound awful, but it actually is. I get to spend extremely little time doing something I could potentially be great at, WEB DEVELOPMENT. And I know the people that work for me, think I'm an idiot and don't understand why they don't have my job.

I try to ask questions and get domain knowledge as I go, but unless you are a genius or spend many years, its just too hard to know everything. And I can't pretend that I'm an expert at managing people, because I'm not. I just do those 4 steps, and then try to be friendly. That's it.

I feel like I'm stuck managing a team of people, when I would rather be an intern for a master developer.

<comment><USER8> The ability to hire contractors who can actually do the work... that's a _formidable_ asset to the company. You're not the moron. You're not the incompetent. You are actually very valuable.

The problem is, you're being very valuable doing something that you don't actually want to do. You may not feel that it is emotionally rewarding. You may just want to do what you like. That's fine; I'm not trying to argue with that. But don't feel like an incompetent or a failure at what you're doing. You're not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think in some countries, cultures and industries there's some kind of legacy class system where only people of the managerial class can share in the spoils of the company, so the only way to reward a competent and skilled employee with an income above a certain level is to make them a manager, while it's also assumed that's what the employee is also striving for. I see this in various engineering industries in developing countries, where in the same country no one thinks that a specialist surgeon can only be rewarded by being given the job of hospital manager.

<comment><USER10> That certainly fits what I see. Managers are a separate class in larger companies, similar to officers vs. enlisted in the military.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the nice things about agile (done well) is that there basically are no managers and the engineers have equal status to people like scrum masters and product owner. They don't get to make every decision about everything but everyone is similarly constrained to mostly make decisions about what they understand best — the product owner sets requirements and priorities, the developers figure out how to make it happen, and the scrum master makes sure things are flowing along.

At least where I am, there's no management role I could go to that would make me happier or better paid.

</comment><comment><USER12> My hypothesis is that salespeople do best without strong managers. So when a poor-performing salesperson becomes a manager, the sales team is forced to step up to the plate and give it their all because the manager isn't carrying the team. But when a high performing salesperson becomes a manager, the team rests on the manager's performance and individual effort decreases.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was a high performing software engineer who just got promoted to management and is currently Petering it up. Any tips on how become a competent Charlie?

<comment><USER14> Most devs going into management need to spend less time coding and more time communicating. Another thing is I've found doing testing is a good way to see the quality of what people are doing.

A big thing about management is knowing how to keep people engaged and motivated, with freedom to be creative but enough oversight so they're kept on track and not lost. You'll have to experiment with this. Also importantly different people need different guidance, so the experienced old hand needs little advice just steer them in the right direction, where the new guy needs daily help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't read the actual paper, but from this summary it sounds like people who have just started doing one job aren't as immediately effective as people who've shown they're experienced and effective over time at a completely different job. That doesn't sound like a very controversial finding, nor does it tell you very much about their long-term prospects.

</comment><comment><USER16> The motivation, and reason for their perfomance, of some "high performing salespeople" might be to get out of the ditches and into a comfy management job. They might not be able to keep up such a pace for long, but consider it more of a sprint. In other words, the direction of causality might be inverted.

</comment><comment><USER17> Costly compared to what? Did anyone figure out what the article is comparing against?

</comment><comment><USER18> The dots on the plots tell an even more compelling story than the fitted lines.

<comment><USER5> Wow, indeed! That outlier at the 5-ish% sales mark needs more study.

<comment><USER19> Hypothesis: High outlier @5pctl - outstanding graduates groomed for management. Low outlier @10pctl - family/friends/favours groomed for management.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The trouble I have is assuming that one can measure "managerial performance." Measuring worker performance is straightforward, after all, they do the work.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why assume that someone wants to be forever competent in his position?

Many people just want to be mangers, even disregarding the salary. I would take a management job anytime even if my salary is reduced and even if I'm not competent enough.

What do they think that I'll be productive in my current role forever? NO. I'm productive now so that I can be a manager someday.

</comment><comment><USER22> _> Taking "is good at IC duties" as the measure for "should lead a team of ICs" is sloppy. _

What's an "IC"?

<comment><USER23> Individual contributor

<comment><USER22> _> Individual contributor_

Thanks. First I've heard that one.

<comment><USER24> I just have a hard time with this term. It feels.. disconnected... I don't know.

It reminds me of George Carlin's bit on "Shell Shock"/"Post Traumatic Stress Disorder".

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

<comment><USER5> You're not wrong. I admit, it's a term from the euphemistic cogs-in-the- machine language of management. But I've found no way to entirely avoid adapting to "their" culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's real, but I'm not a fan of the application in tech.

You have junior people who are evaluated according to arbitrary metrics. So they try to put in a process and get a bunch of people to give feedback. So now you have these people getting evaluated according to arbitrary metrics in an overwrought process. You have overhead and barriers and all sorts of politics in place just to prevent a junior engineer getting promoted to mid level with slightly less experience. The impact to the company of doing that is negligible. The impact to the employee can be negative, but if they don't make that level fairly quickly they get fired anyway.

I'd say the impact of that person giving up and quitting and getting the next level at another company is worse. Now you have lost someone you put years of effort into.

I've seen this first hand. Surveys showing that a majority of engineers don't know what it takes to get to the next level, don't believe they can make the next level on their current team, frustration with promotion processes. Orgs arbitrarily deciding to ignore new guidelines because they think they are too easy. All because of a lack of transparency and a broken process, developed as a result of the dreaded peter principle.

No different than shitty interviews powered by false negatives because "it's too costly to hire someone bad".</comment>


Welcome to Google TiSP: Sign up for our free in-home wireless broadband service - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/tisp/ <comment><USER2> \+ "(2007)"

See [http://www.google.com/tisp/press.html](http://www.google.com/tisp/press.html)

<comment> jack-r-abbit \+ "(April 1st)"</comment></comment>


Apple Pay a No Go with the Amazon Visa Rewards Card - <AUTHOR> http://macnotes.com/apple-pay-a-no-go-with-the-amazon-visa-rewards-card/

<comment><USER2> I have one of these cards. When I went to add my other cards to Apple Pay yesterday, I was surprised to see that it wasn't automatically added as my default Apple Pay card because it's my main iTunes account card (which is supposed to be what happens).

Puzzled, I tried manually adding it. Nope, unsupported.

So then I activated my Capital One card, which went perfectly fine. Then tried my Simple.com debit card, which failed, but I know they're working on compatibility. My Fidelity account card I never expected to work, but tried anyway.

So then, still curious about what was going on, I called Chase directly and spoke to someone about it.

She really did seem to be confused, initially, about why the Amazon card wasn't supported. She acknowledged that some of their cards weren't supported right now and was about to make that her official statement on the matter, but then after a minute or two she seemed to either look something up on their internal computer systems, pull out some paperwork about it, or silently gesture to someone in the vicinity (manager? who knows), and then told me that the Amazon card would be working with Apple Pay in the near future. What information she based that on, I can't say, but that was the clear indication.

Given that Chase is obviously ok with customers using Apple Pay (they likely see it as being in their favor for us to use Apple Pay due to lower risk of fraud related to merchant leaks. Target. Home Depot. Enough said), I imagine they would like me to use this Chase Amazon card with Apple Pay too, particularly since I use it a lot everywhere.

I expect this issue is likely some boring detail that hadn't been worked out by the time Apple Pay went live, rather than a political issue over Kindle books or hypothetical competition from a mobile Amazon Payment service tied to Fire phones.

And I doubt Amazon has all that much say in what Chase does with customer accounts that they consider "theirs" anyway. For all intents and purposes, this is a Chase credit account and a Chase card, not an Amazon card (Amazon Store cards exist, but this certainly isn't one of them).

Chase is the one extending the credit line, Chase is the one who assessed my risk and ability to pay before setting the terms on the account, I can visit a local Chase branch to talk to them about it, I pay it off by visiting chase.com or using the official Chase mobile app, and were I to default, it would be Chase suing me. The only indication that Amazon is even involved is their logo on the front of what is otherwise VERY obviously a Chase branded card, and that the rewards for the card are applied as credit toward Amazon purchases.

We'll see what happens, but a week from now, a month at the latest, I expect it'll work. And if it doesn't and Amazon really is screwing with this card's Apple Pay compatibility, the only effect it'll have is to make me favor other cards instead, and only use this one to pay for Netflix every month just to keep it in use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good to hear! Thank you for the detailed comment... much appreciated! I really hope you're right and it's just as simple as a "boring detail". Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It could have nothing to do with Amazon being petty. A coworker was complaining of the same thing, only the Chase card that isn't supported was some airline-branded card. The rest of his Chase cards are supported.</comment>


Ask HN: Google App engine pricing vs. AWS? - <AUTHOR>

Roughly, how does App engine pricing compare to AWS. Of course, App engine is free at first (although it's hard for me to get a sense for how much you get for free).<p>In particular: I have a forum app running on AWS, costs me about 150$/month, getting about 500,000 pageviews. Could I run this for free on Google Appengine? <comment><USER2> Besides pricing, be sure to keep in mind some of the technical limitations with Google AppEngine. Here are two serious ones:

1) Last I checked there was still no naked domain support. So if you plan on defaulting to <http://mystartup.com/> instead of <http://www.mystartup.com/>, you might want to check if this is possible yet.

2) HTTPS support is limited to <https://mystartup.appspot.com/>. You CANNOT use <https://www.mystartup.com/> last time I check. This is due to a technical limitation in SSL certificates that I'm not sure was considered at the time that Google designed the AppEngine architecture. There are ways around this, but it's messy and inelegant.

One of the great benefits of AppEngine is using it as a cache server, because if I remember correctly this is either free or really cheap. I forget the exact details of how we worked this out at my last startup, but it's worth looking into because using Google's global datacenters for caching is much much cheaper than paying for AWS bandwidth and you also get much lower latency times.

<comment><USER3> I heard flat files and binaries were intentionally bottlenecked to deter people using app engine as a binary cache/edge cache.

Do you have data/etc on the performance?

<comment><USER2> dotBen,

I will contact the devs I used to work with and ask them about that and let you know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html>

Assuming that is your daily pageviews, you could run that app for free on Google Appengine.

The only down side to Appengine in my experience is the cost of rewriting the app and migration, and performance issues (and cold start up times) related to Appengine's architecture.

</comment><comment><USER5> You will need to rewrite your forum for AppEngine (or find some forum software written specifically for AppEngine).

AWS's main selling point is that you can programmaticly add and remove instances. If you are not using that, I'd consider migrating to a VPS such as slicehost or linode, where you should be able to run your forum as is.</comment>


Banking "automation tipping point" could reduce headcount by as much as 30% - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/bank-layoffs-are-coming-2016-3 <comment><USER2> Discussion of Citi Group PDF sited in the article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11396263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11396263)</comment>


Chisel – A fast TCP tunnel over HTTP - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jpillora/chisel <comment><USER2> Why TCP over websockets? You can just use the HTTP bodies as a stream in both direction. Which means the proxy just has to strip or add HTTP headers before forwarding. The overhead afterwards is 0 -> you just write to the socket.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, this choice is indeed strange, websockets still are blocked in some restrictive set ups (squid?).

But still, what is the way of doing stream in both directions? Do you mean opening multi-part form data for uploading and transfer encoding chunked for download? But that would be 2 tcp connection for 1 tcp tunnel. And I believe there's no other way to do it without the overhead of HTTP request/response headers.

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily ... you would have to issue a HTTP request per uplink chunk but HTTP can use connection pooling so that does not necessarily translate to a single TCP connection [0]

Agreed it's not quite as straightforward as the parent poster suggests. I can see issues with this approach for realtime/streaming applications but for applications relying on a similar request/response flow of traffic it would do the job.

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

<comment><USER3> Isn't connection pooling just using several connections to download one resource using content-range?

<comment><USER4> Connection aggregation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me get this straight: you took an application layer protocol (HTTP) that runs on top of TCP and ...reimplemented TCP over it!?

(see: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-HTTP- pr...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-HTTP-protocol-and- TCP-protocol))

<comment><USER6> Pfft. Amateurs!

> Once upon a time at evening I have decided to properly brake the famous > browsers communication problem and as a result you have landed in here. I > have created implementation of BNC networks model with simple TCP/IP layer, > that as transport packet it will use browser's cookie object.

[http://theprivateland.com/bncconnector/index.htm](http://theprivateland.com/bncconnector/index.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks to be TCP over websockets; which isn't really that interesting IMO.

<comment><USER8> Yep, because many firewalls ALSO block websockets; so comparing it to crowbar for speed isn't terribly fair, as crowbar only uses POST/GETs.

<comment><USER9> They can't block websockets over https.

<comment><USER7> Most corp+school firewalls block https or make the user add a MITM cert (well, it's managed via active directory for company machines). Rarely do these firewalls allow websockets.

<comment><USER10> K-12 schools definitely block HTTPS at some places, mostly because they can't inspect it.

<comment><USER11> Wow, so they can only use HTTP? That seems crazy. Would be fun to try and mess with the network though. Yeesh.

<comment><USER12> Not common anymore. Now it's usually an ssl proxy that uses a cert on all computers to mitm the connection and enforce policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does this deal with double congestion control?

<comment><USER14> I was asking myself the same thing. TCP implements many RFCs for congestion control, flow control, etc. Many of them might be redundant if everything is being sent over HTTP (over TCP).

I would use "link conditioner" or a similar tool, simulate packet loss and see how this compares to the other software.

<comment><USER15> [http://sites.inka.de/sites/bigred/devel/tcp- tcp.html](http://sites.inka.de/sites/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html)

Even for applications designed to tunnel traffic from the outset (OpenVPN), TCP over TCP is a mess and it's kind of a non-starter for anything that's not a toy (unless you have no other choice, like with certain mobile carriers where path MTU and CGN cause issues).

<comment><USER3> That's very interesting, thank you. I think there should be a way to control retransmission times on the client that would alleviate that problem. Probably taking out tcp connection out of kernel space and controlling the protocol in user space will allow to control the lower level tcp to work nicely with upper levels. But still, is there a possibility of a meltdown on the routers further down the line which might be controlling tcp connections? They would be routers which are not simply passing the ip packets, but working with the protocol in a more elaborate way though, either deep packet inspection or some other network mechanisms?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Annoying that this has the same name as [https://github.com/ucb- bar/chisel3](https://github.com/ucb-bar/chisel3)

<comment><USER17> Sorry! Was originally a rewrite of [https://github.com/q3k/crowbar](https://github.com/q3k/crowbar) so I chose a synonym.

<comment><USER16> TireIron. ;- )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And no reference to the _standard_ mechanism for HTTP tunnels, which has only existed for 18 years.

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.9](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.9)

</comment><comment><USER14> Many superlatives, which immediately raise suspicions.

If you are trying to solve the problem of NAT traversal and such, I suggest you rather attempt to do this:

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

<comment><USER3> this surely is great and i can't wait for a moment when someone finally comes up with a TCP Hole Punching as a Service.

vpnazure kinda does this, but has the overhead of softether vpn service on top of it... I would rather go with punching myself an ssh port.

<comment><USER19> I do it at Wormhole[1] in a very similar fashion to "vpnazure"; also with SoftEther.

Why would you rather "punch yourself and ssh port"? Do you mean that your main problem with vpnazure and the like is the need of an agent/client software installed? I am not sure I understood your concern, but I would be very interested in hearing more about it. Feel free to email me to the address on my profile if you prefer, although a reply here works for me.

IMHO the best way to make it transparent for any application is to have a virtual interface. It offers an expected environment for any new or legacy app (instead of proxying stuff explicitly).

Thanks!

[1] [https://wormhole.network](https://wormhole.network)

<comment><USER3> That's seems like an awesome service, thank you for the work!

> main problem with vpnazure and the like is the need of an agent/client > software installed

Yes, and at the same time vpnazure creates a vpn set up (I think it's server/client set up, not bridge), while for my simple usage I only need a single TCP connection through which I'd work with SSH. And from this point, I could spawn a ssh tunnel and forward the needed traffic through it, alleviating the need of vpn. Maybe it is a really basic use case, but for work/home environment I find it to be the thing I actually need, and not the full blown vpn.

Another problem with vpnazure I had is that I'd have no way of seeing where the traffic flows inside the vpn interface. Thinking about it now, probably could be seen in traceroute. But at the time, I thought about looking into tcpdump of vpnserver or setting up a firewall. And that was too complicated for my hobby set up. The point of my concern was that I wanted to see whether any traffic is leaking onto third party servers managed by SoftEther or otherwise. Of course I'd want the traffic to flow across the internet, but I'd expect it to take the path it would take if one of the nodes was a natural server.

Also, all the traffic is managed by vpnserver (softether's one), which makes it a little opaque in terms of where the packets go out of that process.

Of course a client would be inevitable for any hole punching SaaS, but preferebly I'd like if it'd only run during the connection establishment period of time.

That's my 2 cents, coming from a personal set up.

<comment><USER19> Hi! thanks for sharing your opinion!

I think what you're looking for is [https://ngrok.com/](https://ngrok.com/) \- it's quite popular among developers.

> Another problem with vpnazure I had is that I'd have no way of seeing where > the traffic flows inside the vpn interface. Thinking about it now, probably > could be seen in traceroute. But at the time, I thought about looking into > tcpdump of vpnserver or setting up a firewall. And that was too complicated > for my hobby set up. The point of my concern was that I wanted to see > whether any traffic is leaking onto third party servers managed by SoftEther > or otherwise. Of course I'd want the traffic to flow across the internet, > but I'd expect it to take the path it would take if one of the nodes was a > natural server.

> Also, all the traffic is managed by vpnserver (softether's one), which makes > it a little opaque in terms of where the packets go out of that process.

I see what you mean and I understand your concerns.

If you'd like to see the path from your connection to the VPN servers you can always do a traceroute to its public IP. However for concerns regarding what they do at the server level, if a 3rd party manages the VPN server, you only have your trust in them and their degree of transparency. Next step would be to go self-hosted, but then you need to trust the hosting provider too.

Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there any difference with corkscrew? Either way, really keen to test the perfomance of it for getting out of restricted proxies where corkscrew saves me life.</comment>


How I Organize React Projects - <AUTHOR> https://blog.danawoodman.com/articles/organizing-react-projects <comment><AUTHOR> Some thoughts for how I approach structuring React applications. I'd love to hear any feedback/suggestions and hear how everyone else chooses to structure their applications!</comment>


The hilarious, weird world of Wish ads washing up on Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@olly/the-hilarious-weird-world-of-wish-ads-washing-up-on-facebook-52176cdf3407 <comment><AUTHOR> For Wish, Facebook's algorithm gave product priority to clicks and shares, not purchase intent. What happened was people mainly shared the bizarre products because of the shock value, causing a hilarious and horrible feedback that quickly promoted the weirdest products all over Facebook :p</comment>


Ask HN: Ultrawide vs. Dual Monitors - <AUTHOR> I'd like to hear what the community thinks about ultrawide vs. dual monitors. I've been using a dual/triple monitor setup for years and am considering the switch to ultrawide. I'd like to see the communities opinions first! Much appreciated.<p>*Edit, I want to add that my usage is mostly for work/productivity purposes. <comment><USER2> I've done both and only use "large" monitors now. Be it ultrawide or large high resolution monitors... I can't stand the bezels and turning my neck larger distances/more often always bothered me. I think this is just one of those personal preferences things though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. With triple monitors, it was annoying that I had to move my head back and forth. My preference so far has been with dual monitors. How about productivity? About the same?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've used both, and I prefer using multiple monitors over the ultrawides. I've found that multiple monitors gives me much more flexibility, as I can orient them in a manner that's most conducive to the task at hand (for instance, being able to aim one monitor towards visitors to show them things).

But, honestly, my preference is a slight one -- if I have to use an ultrawide instead, that's actually fine.

<comment><USER4> I use both,and i find that both setups have their advantages depending on the intended use, i use an ultrawide in my home studio for music production and video editing, this is great because i can see a long horizontal timeline. At work instead i use 2x24in to view datasheets and schematics side by side.

<comment><AUTHOR> This might be the way I go...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use both at once.

Left monitor is a Dell U3818DW 38" curved (3840x1600)

My right monitor Dell Ultrasharp U2718Q 27-Inch 4K IPS Monitor (3840 x 2160)

If you price them out, they are are very cheap per day - $4 a day.

<comment><USER5> 1,629.98 = $1,119.99 + $509.99

$4.46 day = $1,629.98 / 365 days

I was a bit off, but you get the idea. I feel it is a good ROI.

<comment><AUTHOR> haha I see what you mean. I usually keep my monitors for 5 years. I guess if I get the Dell, I can say $1119.99/ (365*5) = ~$0.61. Good idea!</comment></comment></comment>


Iowa Caucus chaos likely to set back mobile voting - <AUTHOR> https://www.computerworld.com/article/3519217/iowa-caucus-chaos-likely-to-set-back-mobile-voting.html <comment><USER2> Let's not confuse a caucus with anything resembling a democratic free election. Public Vote, time-consuming, low accessibility and so on and so on. Secret ballots with a paper trail are still the best way to do things.</comment>