BlackRock's decision to dump coal signals what's next - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/blackrock-is-the-canary-in-the-coalmine-its-decision-to-dump-coal-signals-whats-next-129972 <comment><USER3> Matt Levine, as always, provides the most honest and direct commentary about this. Here's the start, but the whole piece is interesting, as pointed out by a reply.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackr...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackrock- has-green-plans)

> Will BlackRock's decision to send a strongly worded letter about > environmental sustainability reshape how corporate America does business? > Well, I remember two years ago when Larry Fink sent a strongly worded letter > about how companies needed to make society better, and that too was > supposedly "likely to cause a firestorm in the corner offices of companies > everywhere," and now, uh, same society really.

> Now BlackRock will send a strongly worded letter to CEOs about the > environment. It will arrive on the desk of the CEO of, I don't know, giant > state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco? A company where, according to > Bloomberg data, BlackRock is the largest outside shareholder. A company that > did a bond offering last year—after the Saudi government murdered and > dismembered Jamal Khashoggi, after Fink sent that letter about making > society better—in which BlackRock was also a big investor. "We wanted the > Aramco bond to be much bigger," Fink said, way back in April, when his > public-relations goal was to butter up Saudi Arabia. Now it is January, and > his public-relations goal is to butter up environmentalists, so BlackRock > "will make investment decisions with environmental sustainability as a core > goal." Next time a big oil company is looking for money, presumably that > will change again.

> I could keep being cynical about this all day.

<comment><USER4> Disclaimer: I worked for BlackRock for about 3 years on an investment team (but its been a while and I don't have a dog in this fight)

BlackRock is a very simple business to understand. First, they only investment money on behalf of their clients and they take investment fees for making decisions on behalf of their clients (investing their money).

They break the business in to two parts:

Alpha: old school mutual funds, new school quant funds, real estate etc. Anything where managers get paid big bucks to make investment decisions on behalf of clients.

Beta: passive investment vehicles that blackrock tries to deliver for the lowest price with lowest tracking error (i.e. deliver as close to what the index returns as possible).

What BlackRock is doing here, is a VERY, VERY big deal. They are allowing clients to now pick passive investment strategies which exclude coal or other businesses that people find morally objectionable. What that means is that if you care about the environment you can move your money to these new passive investments. As more and more people do it, it will decrease demand for equity in those companies and increase their cost of capital.

On the active side, they already had that feature, and many of their clients already ask BlackRock to exclude investments from their active portfolios and were willing to accept less return. (BlackRock has offered that for a very long time).

I find very few things interesting that asset managers do, but I am going to look at all my passive investments and try to get them moved over. I bet passive funds without coal etc. will outperform while more and more people move money from vanilla S&P500 to S&P500 without coal.

Eventually those coal companies may fall out of indexes all together which will really increase their cost of capital.

Brilliant move by Fink, and I applaud it.

<comment><USER5> I'd love to be able to buy something that was exactly like VTI but scrubbed clean of oil, coal, gas, and other sources of environmental damage.

There are some specialized ETFs like KRMA, but I don't know anything that has environmental criteria that also follows the total market or some large cap index.

<comment><USER6> > I'd love to be able to buy something that was exactly like VTI but scrubbed > clean of oil, coal, gas, and other sources of environmental damage.

Show me one large company that doesn't do environmental damage?

<comment><USER7> This would be a cogent argument if there weren't degrees of damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Australia needs to exit the export coal business. We should go dig some other rocks up out of the ground, we have a lot of them...

We are responsible for 37% of global coal exports. That's massive. If we halt coal exports it would put a squeeze on the coal supply and that raise prices; probably significantly. Coal power plants are already on thin margins. If cost of coal increased for a sustained period (a few years) coal would be considered unviable as a fuel source. We should see a lot of the plants close down.

Australia always talks about its self as being insignificant and anything we could do to help prevent climate change would have no measurable impact. This incorrect relatively and absolutely, we are one of the largest per capita emitters. But we are also the third largest exporter of fossil fuels.

This is Australia's opportunity to actually do something significant to help address climate change.

[1] [http://www.worldstopexports.com/coal-exports- country/](http://www.worldstopexports.com/coal-exports-country/)

[2] [https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-08-19/australia- co2...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-08-19/australia-co2-exports- third-highest-worldwide/11420654)

<comment><USER9> "In 2014–15 mineral extraction in Australia was valued at 212 billion Australian dollars. Of this, Coal represented 45,869 million, oil and natural gas 40,369 million, Iron ore 69,486 million, Gold ore 13,685 million, and other metals 7,903 million." [1]

45B is still a lot of money to remove from the economy. It's less than I would have predicted (mining is only 5.8% of economy), but it's still a non-trivial amount. And 45B gets you a lot of lobbyists.

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

<comment><USER10> How much money do you think climate change is going to take out of the economy? Its going to be a lot more than 45 billion.

<comment><USER9> Long term of course. But you still need power in the mean time, as well as money and jobs.

You're also assuming those who are good at mining coal could somehow instead be good at both protecting the planet AND making as much money. That's seldom the case.

<comment><USER11> How many people are employed by the mining of thermal coal in Australia. You're taking like it's greater than 10%. I can assure you it's not as many as you would imagine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At this point, this is one of those policies which is both environmentally friendly and makes piles of economic sense. Even without clean energy subsidies, coal is rapidly becoming a bad investment. The cost of running existing coal plants has exceeded the cost of building new solar & wind power plants. Over the next few years, demand for coal is likely to implode.

As bankers and insurers start to internalize this idea, the number of people willing to continue investing, insuring, or financing coal operation is going to vanish and the industry will collapse completely.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2018/12/03/plu...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2018/12/03/plunging- prices-mean-building-new-renewable-energy-is-cheaper-than-running-existing- coal/#6763c5631f31)

<comment><USER13> Next they should do the same with natural gas. The data on the investments of nat gas fracking make it doubtful that it will pay back even the last round of capital investment.

[https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/12/17/us-fracking-shale- wood...](https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/12/17/us-fracking-shale-wood- mackenzie-child-wells)

<comment><USER12> As the cost of renewable power continues to drop, investing in extracting oil/ natural gas/ coal from the ground is going to make increasingly less sense. Coal has the fewest uses outside burning for power and the greatest environmental impact, so it's the most vulnerable, but oil and NG are going to come under increasing pressure.

<comment><USER14> It's a great stocking stuffer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The decision whether or not to buy shares in the secondary market will make little difference to existing coal companies (who are largely cash flow positive and trade at near 25% earnings yields). Regulations are what matter. All that secondary investors can do is increase WACC via lowered demand for marginal primary debt/equity issuances. If you want to phase out coal, focus on government regulation instead of secondary investments.

It can (and often does) make sense to invest in industries in terminal decline as price paid for an asset's cash flow is the primary determinant if returns for the investor. You can buy coal stocks for 25%+ earnings yields. Even if those plants are phased out in 6 or 7 years, one can make solid returns.

Indeed I have invested in cigarette shares in the past while wishing the government would do more to stop smokers. The fact that I hold the equity doesn't change demand for cigarettes, and only in aggregate does the investor appetite effect WACC. Someone must always hold existing shares. For every buyer there is a seller and vice versa.

Lastly I should mention that metallurgical coal as opposed to thermal coal is a necessary "evil" to smelt steel.

I've used this recent hate for coal investments(and weakness in NG) to take positions at high earnings yields in ARCH and HCC.

<comment><USER16> > Lastly I should mention that metallurgical coal as opposed to thermal coal > is a necessary "evil" to smelt steel.

Hydrogen can be used to smelt steel, and hydrogen can be produced from renewable energy.

[https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/thyssenkrupp-tests- use-...](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/thyssenkrupp-tests-use-hydrogen- steel-production-bring-down-emissions)

<comment><USER17> That is really cool. Looks like they're targeting 2050 to be 100% hydrogen based. That leaves 30 years of metallurgical coal consumption for one of the world's most progressive steel companies. I'm long HCC for this reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is really just Wall Street generating volatility. Coal isn't going anywhere in the next decade or two:

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

I wish it died but it won't. Not yet.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the link, sadly the data isn't that up to date with everything happening :(.

Data is all the way back to 2015

<comment><USER20> Yeah. Since 2015 for example UK coal usage dropped 60%.

<comment><USER21> American coal production has dropped significantly too, though not as dramatically as UK consumption:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States#Production)

and

[https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php](https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php)

From 896 million short tons in 2015 to 690 million in 2019. More decline ahead in 2020:

 _EIA estimates that U.S. coal production declined by 65 million short tons (MMst) (9%) to 690 MMst in 2019. In 2020, EIA expects total U.S. coal production will decline by a further 14% to 597 MMst because of anticipated declines in both exports and domestic consumption in the electric power sector._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> BlackRock is dumping coal because coal is a dying business. The climate change point is just a convenient PR booster. If coal was still generating lots of free cash flow we wouldn't see this.

With that being said, it's nice to see that the coal industry is losing its economic strength. Hopefully other environmentally unfriendly industries follow suit soon.

<comment><USER23> the only comment that makes sense.

the whole comment section shows how much HN knows about markets and economics. pretty much nothing.

a company wants to dump its position and people think they do it because of the environment.

much hopium.

<comment><USER24> But you see, it's because of the environment that that it's not as economical viable.

Green sources are becoming more and more cost effective because of lots of tax money went into them because people care about the environment.

Eventually there shall be plenty of more green alternatives that are more economically interesting than coal, but they only reached that place in refinement because environmental focused measures took place.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're both way off base on this one. Index funds by their nature pretty much replicate the index, it's a mathematical play generally with no position on dumping or actively positioning on any stocks.

This was always the climate problem, neutral is not ex-climate stocks.. neutral was maths, just matching the index.

Pure indexing was not taking a climate position.

This is why this is so huge, they've reset neutral and are challenging others to do the same.

If they gain net inflows into their updated index products this will move fast.

<comment><USER25> It would be stunning if they were changing all their indexes to exclude coal or something.

They're just creating some new/modified indexes as far as I know. There are already more ETFs than individual stocks, I remember reading somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A great article posted in May 2019 by Saul Griffith from Otherlab/Makani/Instructables on decarbonisation[1] and another posted yesterday suggesting the idea of a "climate loan"[2]:

"The future can't be built on lay-away; we need a loan. America's strength for much of the 20th century was inventing new financing models and exporting those banking skills to the world. We need to put that to work once again, this time for climate change. The key insight here is to extend infrastructure financing closer to the home where the infrastructure of the 21st century will sit."

[1] [https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we- decarbonize-7fc2f...](https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we- decarbonize-7fc2fa84e887) [2] [https://medium.com/otherlab-news/solving- climate-change-with...](https://medium.com/otherlab-news/solving-climate- change-with-a-loan-d1aac4b8259a)

<comment><USER27> The big handicap in this for the US is a president that doesn't believe climate change exists at all. Will be interesting to see weather it will mean the US misses the boat on the next big economic development and if so who will jump into that void as a new world power. So far China doesn't look very interested in climate change either and Europe is very divided.

<comment><USER28> >So far China doesn't look very interested in climate change either

I disagree with this, I think it's easy to paint China as the villain across a cultural, lingual divide in an attempt to make the case that one's own obligations to reduce emissions don't matter. China has a carbon market now and produces more nuclear power than any other country. Climate change is a very real problem for a country with an encroaching desert.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> From the article:

> _contradiction between the company's new activist stance and_

I don't think I agree with calling BlackRock activists. An activist investor uses investment choices as leverage to apply pressure to achieve some other goal.

But BlackRock's statement seems to say that they are doing this for financial reasons. It says they're doing it because regulation (existing or potential) is making those investments riskier. From BlackRock's letter (as quoted in the article):

> _Thermal coal production is significantly carbon intensive, becoming less > and less economically viable, and highly exposed to regulation because of > its environmental impacts. ... we do not believe that the long-term economic > or investment rationale justifies continued investment in this sector_

They also mention "ESG risk" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_corp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_corporate_governance)) later.

So in other words, BlackRock isn't using pressure to change the world. It's responding to pressure and uncertainty. This is just market forces causing BlackRock to keep its distance purely for financial reasons.

</comment><comment><USER30> Highly recommended, Matt Levine's take on it: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackr...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackrock- has-green-plans)

<comment><USER31> I don't think I've ever read a Levine article and not been impressed. The man's a national treasure! Also, you can get his articles sent to your inbox to bypass the paywalls.

<comment><USER32> How do you subscribe to receive those emails?

<comment><USER33> [http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s...](http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff- signup)

<comment><USER32> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There are tons of economic analyses that show that these kinds of boycotts or divestment efforts (usually driven by naive university students) rarely cause any noticeable change in policies or operations at the targeted companies.

What is usually happening is that other technological or consumer behavior is already leading to the decrease in business of some industry, and the divestment push happens simultaneously (because of people's awareness) and is merely a symptom of their final decline.

Take South Africa in the 80s, or the ridiculous grape boycott of the 90s, etc. None of those symbolic acts led to actual changes happening -- those were all consumer or political changes already in flight.

People create much more effect by voting with their dollars than by symbolically calling for divestment. It usually turns out that there is someone willing to take your place as a buyer when you choose to divest. It's only through fundamental change in demand or supply that a business is affected. Stop believing in the effectiveness of the feel-good boycotts. Even Blackrock won't make a difference.

<comment><USER34> This isn't simply a divestment campaign. This is one of the largest shareholder telling the companies to change their practices. There was a business group that played a major role in negotiating the end of apartheid in South Africa (see [https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/center/private...](https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/center/privatelaw/document/makgetla_shapiro._business_south_african_transition.pdf)).

<comment><USER32> So, big shareholder tells coal companies to change their ways, or what? Blackrock will sell its shares? Hard to believe. And even if it sells its shares, someone has to buy them -- perhaps at a slightly lower price if they dump a lot at once. But what change has it produced?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wouldn't neglect from passive index investors simply mean that active investors pick up such undervalued assets themselves instead? I don't see this sort of divestment as fundamentally altering the price discovery aspects of the market. All that changes are which individuals (or institutions) benefit.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm curious who will take the other side(s) of this trade. If you can invest capital in large chuncks (aka. PE/HF) why not just go long? If you can provide enough capital to manage down the business better than where it's priced now... that's an opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER37> Yet China continues to expand use of coal power and mining their vast reserves in the western part of the country.

<comment><USER38> Nope, China's coal consumption peaked in 2013.

<comment><USER39> I can honestly not grasp what China is doing. Between PV, Coal, hydrogen industry.. do you have a synthesis to read ?

<comment><USER21> China's central government is pursuing multiple goals at once:

\- Cleaner air

\- More electricity production

\- Developing energy technologies with a substantial export market potential

\- Maintaining employment and social stability

The last goal can override the others, depending on current economic conditions and public sentiment. Provincial officials may hew to the last goal even more closely than the central government would like. Provincial government also sometimes faces perverse incentives like getting tax revenue from each ton of coal mined locally but no tax revenue from renewable electricity generated locally.

45 year old Chinese coal miners don't like switching careers and locations much more than 45 year old American coal miners do. China has also faced more and more-recent civil war than America. They will build a bunch of surplus coal plants and keep having coal miners perform make-work to fuel them if that's the price of social stability.

<comment><USER40> I flew from Shanghai to Amsterdam 2 years ago, there was a point there where there were windmills as far as the eye could see 100s and 100s, I tried toicount and gave up .... looking closer they were clustered around open cast coal pits and presumably dirty power stations - this was west of Beijing and I'd guess a big source of their horrible pollution.

It's a smart thing to do, essentially they're leveraging the existing transmission line infrastructure for coal for future wind

<comment><USER41> I wonder if it is the gansu wind farm that you saw. 7.9 GW nameplate capacity. Absolutely massive.

And I thought the walney wind farm in the UK (just under 1 GW) was massive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Whether one likes it or not, for a lot of people this will mean a good investment opportunity.

I would also hesitate to label it a decision made out of moral reasoning. Neither BlackRock nor (the majority of) their clients want to reduce coal exposure because of that. They rather want to reduce their exposure because they expect more regulatory hurting to come for those companies.

</comment><comment><USER43> 2016: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-14/norway-s-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-14/norway-s-860-billion- fund-drops-52-companies-linked-to-coal)

</comment><comment><USER44> It's starting to look like "alternative" energies might be more efficient in near future anyway, despite climate change. It seems intuitive (but don't know) that burning organic matter is not the most efficient way to extract energy from nature.

<comment><USER45> Efficiency is not the factor when considering energy source. People pay money for stable electricity, not cheap electricity.

>b...but we can store energy!

No we can't. Energy storage systems are catching fires like Australian wildfires and until it gets solved, no dice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Mass extraction and consumption of oil and coal will happen until these resources are too sparse to warrant building new plants or maintaining existing ones.

I don't really see any future where this doesn't happen. If you remove coal subsidies, or tax them, then some of the energy production currently handled by coal will change to oil, but once the oil becomes expensive enough to extract, coal mines will open back up again.

This just seems inevitable to me. Is there an angle I'm missing?

<comment><USER47> the cost of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage continue to drop. They are already undercutting coal in about half of the world. They'll depress the prices of fossil fuels until it's no longer possible to turn a profit on them at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> There's an Indian equivalent called IndiaLends [0].

They also offer an Online Personal Loan [1].

[0] [https://indialends.com/personal-loan](https://indialends.com/personal- loan)

[1] [https://indialends.com/credit-card](https://indialends.com/credit-card)

</comment><comment><USER49> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback)

Hopefully this loop is starting.

<comment><USER50> Did you really mean to reference the sort of _negative feedback_ used productively in engineering to maintain balance in control systems, op amps, etc?

That concept is quite different from _negative feedback_ related to expressions of disapproval.

<comment><USER49> >Negative feedback occurs when some function of the output of a system, process, or mechanism is fed back in a manner that tends to reduce the fluctuations in the output, whether caused by changes in the input or by other disturbances.

I'm referencing people dumping coal stocks so coal is less attractive which means less coal is produced/profitable/used which leads to people dumping more coal stocks.

<comment><USER51> What you describe is properly called "positive feedback" in the engineering sense.

positive feedback -> doing a thing now results in doing more of that same thing in the future

negative feedback -> doing a thing now results in doing less of that same thing in the future

If dumping coal stocks now results in more dumping of coal stocks in the future, that would be the 'positive' kind of feedback.

<comment><USER25> Which one it is depends on context.

e.g. A negative feedback loop could be

More coal -> more CO2 -> pushback on coal companies -> less coal -> less CO2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's to the point where ideals don't matter.

If you invest in energy you want renewables. Purely because of the economics of it. The only exception is if you get some shady Adani deal.

</comment><comment><USER53> > Taken in isolation, Sweden's move had virtually no effect on Australia's > bond prices and yields. But the most striking feature of the divestment > movement so far is the speed with which it has grown from symbolic gestures > to a severe constraint on funding for the firms it touches.

A lesson in the potential value of individual action -- in this case and individual nation, but an individual person can have outsize effects. I help organizations change culture to pollute less. One company refused to consider flying less. One sixteen-year-old girl sailing across the Atlantic opened the dialog.

</comment><comment><USER54> Has anyone here noted that coal is literally a black rock

</comment><comment><USER55> Isn't this just virtue signaling? What difference does all this divestment actually make towards the goals?

Surely, someone with less of a penchant for moral grandstanding will be happy to buy up shares of fossil companies at a discount. Fossil fuel business doesn't become less profitable just because parts of the equity markets decide to value it lower.

You may argue that divestment prevents companies from rolling their infrastructure. I disagree, if there's a solid profit to be made, someone will bankroll it.

</comment><comment><USER56> I think this is a great sign that the industry titans are recognizing the market incentives to migrate away from fossil fuels.

</comment><comment><USER57> Natural Gas and Oil?

</comment><comment><USER58> INB4 Short sellers...

</comment><comment><USER59> It makes me proud of the Hacker News community that there have been so many climate change articles posted at an increasing rate. This is a very important issue, more important than technology since technology won't exist when the climate collapses and destroys civilization. We need to make a serious effort educating the public about climate change, so we need to work together to ensure that, at minimum, the top article on Hacker News is always a climate change story. It would be even better if we keep multiple climate change articles on the front page at all times.

<comment><USER60> While I agree with you that it's nice that climate change related topics are discussed, this is hyperbole:

> _more important than technology since technology won 't exist when the > climate collapses and destroys civilization._

The type of climate collapse you're talking about here would have to be something so extreme that most disaster movies would pale in comparison. The defining trait of our species is tool (technology) use. As long as there are humans around, our technology will matter. In fact, improvements in technology are likely our only way out of the mess of climate change.

I think that hyperbole about climate charge hurts the cause. Some people will believe you, but once they learn that you were wrong (or lying) they won't trust you or anyone else on the matter anymore.

<comment><USER61> There was an HN comment a while back about how hard it is for most creatures to evaluate exponential growth. About how a petri dish colony took 2 weeks to get to 50% full but then they all died off in the next 2 hours because their growth was exponential and the environment static.

Once the climate starts worsening visibly, it will get much worse quicker.

The world is literally on fire now (california, australia, the arctic) - <USER2> what's lined up for the next decade.

<comment><USER47> It will get worse, but maybe not as worse as we've been thinking: [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/climate-change- worst...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/climate-change-worst-case- scenario-now-looks-unrealistic.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> oh wow, big wall street is dumping coal. _clap clap_

</comment><comment><USER62> It's alarming that a company I've never heard of has 7 trillion dollars.

<comment><USER63> Blackrock is one of the biggest group of funds. Some of them are branded as iShares.

If you've done any comparison shopping on index funds for investments, you almost certainly ran across blackrock funds even if you didn't know it.

<comment><USER25> Yes, but people are talking about a decision about _active_ funds, not indexes where most of the money is.

It would be earthshaking if they decided to substitute their judgment for the market and take coal stocks out of all the index funds. But that's not what is being reported.

The reporting seems to be kind of willfully implying a connection that isn't there to get clicks, which I guess is basically all journalism these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> BlackRock and Vanguard are supposed to be the places where people can put their money into low-overhead index funds that more or less track the market.

It's fine if they want to create new products that exclude certain types of businesses, to give investors more choices.

But what I don't like is them turning this gigantic pool of money into a spear to jab businesses with their pet political opinions. That's not the role investors entrust their money with them for - they're expected to be more of a passthrough type of management.

They've previously done this same thing with gun manufacturers and retailers, who are doing very well, so you can't make the argument some in this thread are making with fossil fuels being a dead end compared to an alternative (renewables).

So whose next on their woke chopping block? Monsanto for killing the bees? Boeing, Raytheon, et al for supporting the military? Facebook, Twitter, et al for the harmful effects of social media? All the software companies like GitHub that support ICE or the next distasteful federal agency? Like they did with guns, divestment in any company you don't like can be couched in deep concerns over "risk."

I think there's a great opportunity here for someone to start a fund that gets back to the basics of passive index funds, instead of chasing woke asspats like the activist board of BlackRock and Vanguard. I'd certainly move my money.

<comment><USER25> You probably don't own any shares of an _active_ fund from Blackrock or Vanguard. They're pretty obscure. So you can go back to sleep.</comment></comment>


Powerset internal problems - <AUTHOR> http://alwaysnewmistakes.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/powersets-internal-problems/

<comment><USER2> Wasn't Powerset suppose to launch at TC40? Wasn't a requirement of TC40 that they company should launch there?

Powerset still doesn't have anything to show for. I actually got a "beta" invite to find a bunch of "custom" searches that you can vote on and grade them. Heh! Imagine if Google said: "sure, you can search for anything as long as it's one of these 10 terms."

Powerset is just a giant hype machine that will eventually fail. People are conditioned to type a word or two into a search field and get an answer they want. No one wants to type long questions and any company that believes they can somehow change the behavior of the masses is highly delusional.

<comment><USER3> >I actually got a "beta" invite to find a bunch of "custom" searches that you can vote on and grade them.

I was messing around with mechanical turk, these are on there too. I didn't get an invite, but I did answer a few to try out the turk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> imagine if instead of typing amazon into the google search box you had to type "site to buy and sell books", and instead of Amazon you got back Half.com

Google did not invent a new way for people to search, they took the way people were used to search and made it return more relevant results. I believed Powerset was bound to fail from the beginning. the problem is when folks search for email, for files on a machine, for files on P2P networks or for web pages on Google they use the same keyword based method.

It might certainly be useful to have a semantic search capability for some obscure searches but that would work better as a Google add-on (and with all the engineers Google has in-house if building such a technology was worthwile they would do it).</comment>


Hong Kong's Hard-Core Protesters Take Justice into Their Own Hands - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/world/asia/hong-kong-protesters-masks-violence.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182798](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182798)</comment>


Twitter,  Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal - <AUTHOR> http://www.ericsink.com/entries/dual_class_computing.html

<comment><USER2> I read posts like this often, and I think the author makes the common geek mistake of assuming that the way normal people use computers is a subset of how geeks use them. Take out all the programming, modding and even file handling and you get what ordinary users need.

This is not true. Non-geeks use computers in all kinds of ways geeks never think of. They use a very specific genealogy application. They connect an obscure 10 year old water sample analyzer. They connect a keyboard and record music.

This is why all attempts to make a simplified limited computer over the years have failed. Ordinary people need the full flexibility of a computer. Make it simple to use, but not limited.

<comment><USER3> > all attempts to make a simplified limited computer over the years have > failed

Really? Ever heard about iTouch/iPhone? They are the very definition of

> Make it simple to use, but not limited.

Tivo is another simplified, very limited computer. That is the nature of consumer devices. Limited but exceptionally simple and "just works" at the thing they do.

<comment><USER4> And yet you don't buy an iPhone as a replacement for your computer. People still need a "real" computer, and for that reason we're probably not going to see computers go the way of the dodo in favor of iPads.

<comment><USER5> The only reason my parents don't use an iPhone as a replacement for their computer is the screen size. The _only_ reason. For a reasonably large subset of "people" a 'real' computer is an unnecessarily complicated device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish the title of this submission had been better. I'd have read it much sooner.

I've taken to calling iPad-esque ideas "Internet Appliance" (I'm sure I got that from somewhere else and I doubt it's original). I think the article misses one important point though - businesses. As far as consumer products I don't see my mom (metaphor) buying a standard desktop PC again assuming similar devices to the iPad come from other makers. Businesses, OTOH, I expect to continue to use traditional PCs for many years to come. People who work in front of PCs need lots of screen real-estate even those doing accounting-and these businesses have tons of legacy SW that it took them years to migrate to new systems (many of them still haven't).

This will be a boon to geeks. As businesses hold onto the traditional computers we will all benefit and continue to get much of our hardware fairly cheaply.

<comment><USER7> The average business today would fall apart if people suddenly got that time back that they spend dealing with IT. They'd fill the time with political machinations and end up eating each other alive.

More seriously, I predict that we'll see official support products for linking multiple iPads together in a workstation capacity within a year. Well, probably just two iPads at most, but third-party products might go for more.

<comment><USER8> > _More seriously, I predict that we'll see official support products for > linking multiple iPads together in a workstation capacity within a year. > Well, probably just two iPads at most, but third-party products might go for > more._

Are you talking 'iPad-like devices' or actual iPads? If you're talking actual iPads, I see the price as a barrier to these becoming ubiquitous devices. If the 'pad' market follows the PC market, Apple will just be at the luxury end of the spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those that don't know the source of the headline:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxFrgql5dc>

(I shall never forgive Fox for canceling that show. Never.)

</comment><comment><USER10> "The genius of the iPad is that it cannot get things like viruses."

safari can certainly be compromised, but even with the sandboxing that claim seems like a stretch

<comment><USER11> It will be way less common, specialy considering that you can't execute anything in there...

<comment><USER12> That's a very, very silly idea. If the device can be jailbroken by browsing a webpage that exploits a vulnerability in the browser, such a page could also infect your device. The idea that the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad are any less vulnerable to viruses than any other networked device out there is just plain wrong. People can and will attack these devices, it's just a matter of how difficult it is; from my experience with auditing Apple's products, the difficulty level is generally somewhere between trivial and damn-near-trivial.

<comment><USER13> The difference is that fixing an iPad won't require a repair shop; it'll require plugging it into your computer, which will go through its normal syncing cycle of backing it up, then upgrading apps—but it'll notice the invalid app checksums on infected apps and overwrite them with App-Store- canonical versions. If kernel-level viruses become prevalent, it'll simply start checksumming that too, and offering to restore from an IPSW with all your data (but nome of your config) intact (but that won't be a problem, since part of Apple's aesthetic is "low configuration.")

Interestingly, it'll mean that only jailbreakers—and those with no access to a computer to sync with—will ever have viruses for more than one sync cycle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For me this article boils down to this one bullet point:

"The industry is finally ready to sell things that make geeks feel frustrated instead of things that make normal people feel helpless. What does this mean for geeks and our role in society?"

It'll mean great things for geeks. A userbase who no longer fears computers or hates IT departments will allow for more interesting applications, better collaborations and the end of geeks as second class citizens in many organizations. That is, as long as they play along.

</comment><comment><USER15> It turns out that interface innovations for Mom also work for hackers - provided that you still have access to a *nix toolkit. Witness the popularity of the Macbook among developers. But then you wouldn't really want bash on an iPad, would you? That is not what the iPad is for. Hackers also passively consume information too, and when they do their needs aren't different than Mom's - an intuitive interface that does not get in their way.

<comment><USER7> I doubt I'll need bash, but I'm gonna want emacs. Maybe Bespin will be adequate, I don't know.

<comment><USER16> I'll need multi-tasking before I can consider this anything more than a toy I'm using in the same room as my laptop.

<comment><USER13> Pretend you could have as many of them as you wanted—10 to run 10 apps at once. Would that make it less of a toy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have been banging on for a long time that as soon as someone produces a decent home computer that is actually designed to be a consumer good then the price of computers as we know them will start to rocket upwards.

We probably need to start thinking about just what constitutes a good developers platform so we can all get behind it and achieve some sort of economies of scale.

<comment><USER3> > designed to be a consumer good

That is the iPad, and iPhone/iTouch before it. I don't know what you mean by "decent home computer" but for me "decent computer" is not compatible to "consumer good". Consumer goods are black boxes that just work, computers are DIY tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sure way to make me read a blog post: reference a line of Firefly dialogue in the title!

</comment><comment><USER18> He presents a false dichotomy. There is nothing stopping an iPad-like UX being configurable in a way which makes geeks happy. It's just a matter of putting the configuration controls out of the way of most users.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure how to put this, so bear with me. Once you go down the road of "configurability" you immediately lose the focus that would come with a device like this. IMO the reason that the IPhone/IPod/IPad interface "works" is because they PREVENT things. It isn't for everyone, sure, but it works for most people. Good UX design is as much about removing abilities as it is about gaining them.

Your average "joe on the street" doesn't want a computer, they want a consumer electronic device (a game console, a point-and-shoot camera, a television).

<comment><USER20> Yes, it's a common nerd delusion that the UI is a presentation layer on top of something else and that you can therefore have an "iPad-like UX" presenting some complicated underlying system.

This thinking leads to a kind of UI cargo cult where the nerds are copying superficial aspects of the iPad without understanding what fundamental properties make it "iPad-like".

<comment><USER8> Why not go the game console route and just have an 'Other OS' option? Pad-like devices don't preclude geekiness. It's just that Apple is currently the only 'real world' implementation and they are very anal about their devices.

I think that most people are 'up in arms' about things like the inability to install 'unapproved' apps. When Microsoft was trying to push the 'Trusted Computing' platform people were rabidly against it because then it would cause Microsoft to be the sole approver of applications for Windows. Now that Apple has created the same thing within the iPhone/iPad-OS people praise them for it and call it innovative and revolutionary.

> _This thinking leads to a kind of UI cargo cult where the nerds are copying > superficial aspects of the iPad without understanding what fundamental > properties make it "iPad-like"._

So people look at a device, and copy the aspects of it that they like. Now they are a 'cargo cult' because these aspects are not the aspects that you like?

<comment><USER13> Apple makes decisions based on consumer experience. They made Boot Camp because they wanted the user experience of dual-booting Windows on an Apple computer to be something even grandma could learn to work with. Unless there's some specific, other OS users are demanding to run on the iPad (Android?) Apple won't make the investment to create something Boot Camp-like for it—and that means they won't support it, because they're perfectionists.

<comment><USER8> > _because they're perfectionists._

I think that you mean _he_ is a perfectionist (as in Steve Jobs). I doubt that everyone at Apple is a perfectionist, but perfection is expected of them as an edict from 'on high.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really don't see the authors point and completely disagree with him. Computers were originally used by people to get work done. It's why they were invented in the first place. And the only way to get work done was to know how to write a program. Now the "normal" people just want to use the web and chat with their friends.

</comment><comment><USER22> Look to Japan for making technology appliances.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702>

This is a country where high speed Internet connection is common but from my observation, a lot of households to not have a general purpose computer.

<comment><USER23> This may help explain why so many Japanese websites seem to be utterly atrocious--fewer people looking at them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What i don't agree with is that he focuses on the older generation, his mom, when the problems he describes won't exist as much for younger generations. His mom started using a computer past the point where it was hard for her to learn things. Of course it will be confusing to her.

Coming generations grow up with easy access to computers, and will know how to use them well. Eventually we will get to a point where very few people are computer illiterate.

Some anecdotal evidence. It took my mom 3 months to figure out how to make an itunes account, another few months before she figured out how to install an app. My 3 year old son had to show her how to play movies, on both the iphone and on boxee.

<comment><USER25> This really just depends on your definition of computer literate. I don't buy that having a facebook account makes you a computer wiz. Neither does owning a smart phone. There are computers in my car and I have'nt a clue how they work.

What does computer literate even mean? If it means comfortable with the command line / terminal, then I absolutely don't beleive that tomorrows kids will fall within the classification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think the middle ground of this possible fututre is very interesting. What happens to all those folks who use specialist software such as CAD, Design, Music and other areas that still need highend systems and that know nothing about computers. I have plenty of musician friends who know nothing about computers but know Cubase or Logic like the back of their hands. The next 5 years will be interesting!

<comment><USER27> Same thing that happened 15 years ago,perhaps?

I have a gorgeous SGI Indigo in my basement office courtesy of the company I worked for when they were tossing them (lots of them!) in the dumpster. Back in the day, you needed a "Workstation Class" PC to run the big CAD applications and many mechanical engineers had a computer whose _only_ purpose was to run that CAD system.

I don't think we'll go all the way back to "a computer only for CAD" but we will have computers sold that are optimized for CAD, music production, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> _What should we call the class of devices that help normal people manage their Amazon wish list?_

Momputers?</comment>


Blackberry voted "Coolest Brand" by South African youth in brand survey - <AUTHOR> http://www.newstime.co.za/ScienceandTech/Generation_Next_Names_BlackBerry_South_Africa%E2%80%99s_Coolest_Brand/26027/

<comment><USER3> Do we really need the fucking (R) sign after every mention of Blackberry. I went into the article thinking perhaps I'd written off RIM too early - <USER2> likely.</comment>


South Koreans triumph in US robot challenge - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2015-06-south-koreans-triumph-robot.html <comment><USER2> Fast motion video of the winning robot: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0)

1min trailer of the winning robot: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4B5BhDoS9o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4B5BhDoS9o)

</comment><comment><USER3> That was a big change in the standings since yesterday. IHMC and KAIST weren't even in the top 3 as of 5 PM yesterday. I thought Tartan Rescue had won.

</comment><comment><USER3> I get the feeling that nobody responding here watched the competition. Is there a forum where anyone is discussing this subject?

Notes:

\- Everybody using the Atlas robot had stability problems. Nobody seemed to be outside of static stability (base of support under CG) let alone outside of ZMP stability (base of support under CG modified to account for momentum.) Any loss of balance meant a fall. They're probably using the basic DLL that Boston Dynamics provided to get teams going. (One team admitted this.) That has functions "walk slowly", and "stand maintaining balance using only joints from the hip and below", plus direct control of joints. Boston Dynamics has demonstrated much better locomotion control than that, but the teams didn't have access to it. (Boston Dynamics supplied the Atlas robots and thus could not compete.) IHMC was working on balance recovery [4] but didn't have it working in time.

\- This is the new Atlas robot, unveiled in January 2015. It's still mostly hydraulic, but it's now self-powered, with a big battery backpack. I think there's also a hydraulic accumulator in there, so they can recover some energy when running, but nobody at the event went fast enough to gain from that. Mechanically, that machine is far more capable than it appeared to be in the competition. It's quite capable of picking up objects from the ground, and getting up if it falls. Nobody did either in the competition. The teams only got these new robots around February, so they really haven't had the time to develop software to use them effectively. Right now, the hardware is much better than the software.

\- Everybody was doing their manipulation by almost pure teleoperation. As soon as DARPA introduced delays into the data links (which they do to penalize teleoperation), the robots spent most of their time stopped. The operators were stuck waiting for enough data to get through to update their screens. Not much autonomous operation here. Here's the winning team video, sped up about 30x.[2] Note that although it's capable of walking, it was run in kneeling wheel mode almost all the time. Only for the stair climbing did it walk.

\- Nobody had combined manipulation and locomotion working at all. That's why getting out of the vehicle was so hard - it takes coordinated leg and arm movements.

\- The CMU team had a partially tracked base, and the NASA/JPL team had a "monkey" robot with rollers at knees and elbows. They both did reasonably well. If you're going to teleoperate, a dumber, statically stable robot is easier to deal with. Of the top 3 finishers, only one used an non-wheeled robot, an Atlas. Here's their first run, with two falls.[3] Again, this is a 30x speedup. The penalty for a fall or a need for repair was only a 10 minute penalty, not disqualification.

\- The tasks were dumbed down twice during the project. The original specs called for the robots to have to replace a pump. The final competition only required turning a valve and cutting a hole in very soft material with a power drill. Basically, the tasks were reduced to the point that they were hard, but not so hard as to lead to total fail.

\- Schaft did better in the first round back in 2013, but after Google bought them, they were pulled from the competition. Google, remember, now owns Schaft, Boston Dynamics, and several other robotics companies.

I look forward to the next competition. If work continues, in a year or two the results should be far better.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27HkxMo6qK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27HkxMo6qK0) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDXnlgNkRl4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDXnlgNkRl4) [4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soPM7LddLY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soPM7LddLY8)

<comment><USER4> This is all more or less correct… just a few things to add (I'm on Team IHMC Robotics) :)

1\. It's _highly_ unlikely that this version of Atlas can get up from a fall under its own power, at least not expediently; it weighs much more than the old one and it actually has a slightly weaker hydraulic system. The old pump motor was a constant speed/constant displacement 3000 PSI system. The current one is a variable speed/constant displacement system that tops off at around ~2600 PSI, and the robot is around 35-40 lbs heavier than the old one. Even if the arms are strong enough, none of the COTS grippers that integrate with the robot could handle getting up; the fingers would explode. I've seen lots of videos of the old tethered Atlas getting up. I find it amusing to think that the current one could pick itself up.

2\. We (IHMC) don't do ZMP based stability. All of our walking/balancing is based on something called Instantaneous Capture Point, that the head of our lab pioneered during his PhD and which several other researchers have gone on to refine over the last 10 years or so. Lots of people use it for fall recovery (MIT does in their recent Atlas video that's similar to ours) but we also use it for walking as well. We call it ICP, but vision people get cranky when we say that because ICP is also short-hand for Iterative Closest Point.

3\. amjaeger is correct, our robot was very badly damaged by our falls on Friday. Enough that we were very worried about how it would impact our performance. Our falls on Friday were both more or less the result of operator error (with some hardware problems mixed in, but mostly operator error), and our stability issues on Saturday were the result of the falls on Friday.

4\. The comment about manipulation being pure teleop is a little reductionist. It is teleop in the sense that it's not autonomy, but almost nobody was doing direct joint servoing which is what I usually think of when somebody says pure teleop. For example, we actually operated continuously during comms blackouts. When we cut out the wall on Saturday, almost the whole thing happened during a blackout. But when your 400lb robot doesn't have a safety line, it behooves you to be extra careful. We cut out the wall just as slowly during perfect comms back in the lab because there's lots of ways to screw that task up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To the South Korean team: Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER6> This is just the beginning, both for robots and for asian dominance. Culture plays a huge role, and in our culture we're happy to watch Reality TV and let government babysit our kids. Government doesn't care about robot competitions. I assume in Korea but believe in general in asia, the parents are more on top of their kids, so that even if they have a "lower quality" government (Which is always debatable) in China, for instance, eventually we're going to be less and less the source of these kinds of technical advances over time.

Hell, even if the chinese culture doesn't inspire creativity and achievement, just by demographics they should produce three times as many innovations as us, since if the innovative people are %0.1 of the population, they have three times the population.

<comment><USER7> "Government doesn't care about robot competitions."

That was a DARPA competition they won.

<comment><USER8> Which confuses me. I wasn't aware DARPA opened it's competitions to non-USA teams.

<comment><USER9> Well, now you're aware.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, it seems my comment was taken with an assumed connotation. I simply wasn't aware that DARPA opened it to any one outside of the US since, well, it's DARPA. It probably wasn't the most insightful comment in the world, but, yes--now I am aware.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


As Microsoft Shifts Its Privacy Rules, an Uproar Is Absent - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/technology/microsoft-expands-gathering-and-use-of-data-from-web-products.html?_r=1&ref=technology

<comment><USER2> An uproar is probably absent because nobody really uses these services. Anybody remotely tech savvy ditched hotmail years ago and bing has never really taken off.

<comment><USER3> Hotmail is the world's largest webmail service. Bing has 15% of the search market; Google only has ~4 times that. Let's not pretend nobody uses these sites.

<comment><USER2> By "nobody" I mean very few people who go on the internet and create uproars. Hotmail is probably mainly used by grandmas and spammers.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Myself and a few tech-savvy friends only use hotmail as a spam collector, you know, to sign up for one-time stuff that insists on getting a password from you.

<comment><USER5> I use Hotmail as my primary. Hate gmail UI. Yahoo is really the one I'd like the most but I have been using Hotmail since ages and love the skydrive integration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Company becomes as evil as Google" does not cause much uproar, because people don't really consider Google evil (yet).

I think what is more interesting is that apparently Microsoft feels it will make more money of competing with Google head to head with information revenue, than by 1-upping Google by having a more consumer-oriented privacy policy.

Would you think, keeping the recently revealed awesome outlook.com in mind, a good reminder campaign by Microsoft about how they _don't_ invade your privacy like Google does could have pulled you or your peers away from gmail (or Google-apps)?

Perhaps that would've been too much risk, this being the obvious easy way of making revenue..

<comment><USER7> ""Company becomes as evil as Google" does not cause much uproar, because people don't really consider Google evil (yet)"

But there was an uproar when Google did that, and that's the point of the article. But I think it's as others have mentioned. People just don't use or care about Microsoft's services, so there's no one to be outraged by it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No uproar because the previous uproar was strongly backed by Microsoft. Google apparently doesn't care about funding a 'Microsoft is a bunch of hypocrites' campaign, which is probably for the better.

</comment><comment><USER9> Microsoft invests an amazing amount of resources into the creation and dissemination of FUD. Here's their internal manifesto: [http://techrights.org/wp- content/uploads/2008/08/comes-3096....](http://techrights.org/wp- content/uploads/2008/08/comes-3096.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> Microsoft realized these privacy rule changes allow for things like google now, so after criticizing google they realized their stupidity, then copied google, which is their current business plan as of late. I'm betting they're working on their own google now clone. So here we have another example of Microsoft missing the boat. Yet Microsoft tries to get the government to investigate google for anticopetition. Google is where they are due to being smarter than their competitors, and this is one of many examples.

The reason for no uproar is Microsoft is better at PR. When google introduced the privacy changes, Microsoft went into PR overdrive mode. You have to hand it to microsoft, when it comes to PR, they are innovative.

</comment><comment><USER11> Single page link: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/technology/microsoft- expan...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/technology/microsoft-expands- gathering-and-use-of-data-from-web- products.html?_r=2&ref=technology&&pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER12> Microsoft's motto is "Don't be so evil that the government can successfully break you into pieces". Google's motto is "don't be evil". We expect vile bullcrap from Microsoft.

<comment><USER13> If you read the article, it's talking about how Microsoft changed it's privacy policies to match those of Google (who where met with uproar at their introduction) after publicly calling out Google on it's lack of value of privacy.

<comment><USER12> Right. My claim is: "Google does something evil" is news, "Microsoft does something evil" is not news.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Lack of quality Junior Developers? Bad luck or an industry issue? - <AUTHOR> I have been working with a few Junior Developers recently, almost all out of coding bootcamps.
Now, I will say I have (what I think) are realistic expectations about what a Junior Developer is - little or no commercial experience and with often significant yet understandable (and forgivable) holes in knowledge.
However, the (majority of) Juniors that I have worked with of late seem to really lack a) common sense, b) problem solving ability, and c) curiosity to learn.
I have one Junior at the moment who literally copies and pastes every error message in the console and Slacks the whole chunk to me. No context. And waits for a reply. Sadly, this mentality seems to be more common than not. My default response to this is now that 'you can work this out for yourself' (am I being too harsh?).
Have I just had bad luck? Is there a general lack of good quality Junior Developers, or do I have unrealistic expectations of what a Junior is these days? Is this because of the fast-track nature of these bootcamps, or maybe even the "framework" culture that means you don't really need to understand what's going on under the hood most the time?
Would love to hear thoughts. I'm really keen to help Juniors, but I can't help but look back at when I was one and compare my peers ability to figure things out for themselves (is that not how you _really_ learn?). <comment><USER2> Haven't working with developers from the coding bootcamps - we require all developers have a 4 year CS degree. Generally not seeing the problems you are. Don't know if that's a different between bootcamps and 4 year degrees or if it's just an anecdote. I _do_ know that there are some people who simply have no problem-solving skills - and these are people having 4 year degrees. I haven't run across many of them but there have been a couple that are as you describe.

Since you're hiring so many people from coding bootcamps maybe you should try a different tactic: find out what they were doing _before_ the bootcamp. Were they doing something that required analysis and problem-solving like an auto mechanic, handyman or plumber or something? Or were they doing non-analytical white collar work where you follow a set process? The former will make good developers, the latter, not so much. Heck, we hired a photocopier repair man who though he didn't have a 4 year CS degree, he did have 5 years experience in IT with another firm (the "or equivalent" clause) and he's been an _awesome_ developer. Anecdotally speaking, I've noticed most developers who fix their own cars, do their own handyman work or simply worked in fields doing a lot of analysis and problem-solving are very good at being developers. It's the analysis and problem-solving skills you're after, the domain knowledge will come with time.

In a separate vein, if you're looking at people who have 4 year degrees and attended a bootcamp so they could find work, the 4 year degree is an indicator of their ability to analyze and problem solve. Mathematicians, engineers, and the hard sciences tend to be very good developer candidates, for example.

Good luck!</comment>


Ask HN: Rails or Django? - <AUTHOR> For the past 5 years I've been a PHP developer.  For the past 2 I've been using frameworks to make my life a lot easier.  The thing is, I'm a bit bored with PHP.  I'd like to expand my horizons and learn a new language + framework.
Currently I'm looking at Ruby + Rails and Python + Django.  I already know a bit of Python (I write back-end scripts with it), but not enough to have it influence my decision.  The criteria I'm looking at are:
* Adoption - Are a lot of people using this framework and does it look like it is still gaining followers?
* Community - Is there a strong support community around it?  Are there good resources for learning?
* Jobs - What are the job prospects like for this language + framework?
* Scalability - Does the framework scale well?  I imagine this is determine by application design too, but lets assume that it's designed well.
* Fun - Is it a fun language to code in?  Does the framework make writing web applications enjoyable?  CakePHP made PHP fun for me again.  Does Django or Rails do the same thing for their respective languages?
I'm also open to other suggestions as well, but these two languages and frameworks are the ones I see floating around HN the most. <comment><USER3> I do both; they're both worthy of your time to investigate. I've had more success with Django. They both offer roughly the same thing, but when it comes to taking something live and handling significant traffic, I find it's easier to go out of the box with Django. That is, when the plain vanilla is no longer sufficient, Rails, as a matter of course, fights you. I appreciate the "we know better" paradigm that it operates under because it can teach and enforce some pretty good practices. Although I speak only for myself, I've had many conversations with some very experienced folks, and I've felt like we were on the same page.

Also: if you're already comfortable with Cake, the jump to Rails is probably quite short. I'll bet you become very productive on it very quickly.

The Python job market in New York is hot, and Django is very popular. I don't see too much other than Rails opportunities for those that bring Ruby knowledge, but there is certainly enough Rails work to keep you busy. The upside is that there are lots of CMS and infrastructure stuff that is Ruby based, but they tend to be products in their own right rather than tools to hack on. In my opinion, Rails carries Ruby in the market. Without Rails, Ruby would probably fade back into relative obscurity.

</comment><comment><USER4> Jobs, Adoption, and Community - plenty of adoption of both, but I've seen more Rails opportunities than Django

Scalability - you'll be fine with either

Fun - <USER2>

After completing a bunch of PHP projects, I recently completed a project for a client where I spent about 6 months with Django. It was fine and I'm glad I did it, but I can't say I would call it "fun". There were a few points that I found painful. The django admin is customizable and for certain types of apps, it works well. But I wanted my clients to use it to manage data in a legacy database. The inspectdb command was cool and generated models for me along with some data management forms. However, getting the forms to work in ways that matched the workflow of my clients was difficult. I found myself wanting to do things like a "reverse" inline -- there were several things that I couldn't figure out and StackOverflow searches didn't reveal good solutions. On my next django project, I decided not to use the admin because it took me longer to figure out how to customize it then it did to just use ModelForms outside of the admin. I haven't found many of the contrib apps to be all that useful or flexible.

And for reporting, some of the more complicated queries just didn't work well with the ORM, and I found myself doing ugly things to avoid writing SQL (I know Django doesn't prevent you from writing raw SQL).

I just didn't get the same "fun" feeling I did when I first developed a Rails app, first grabbed a Vimeo API or flickr gem off of Github, and first pushed it up to Heroku and saw it magically work. And I didn't feel like I was any more productive than I was with PHP -- the main benefits were that 1) my code was more readable and 2) it led me to another opportunity in a completely different area that involves writing python -- but rather than Django, I get to work with Twisted, and this has expanded my horizons greatly.

<comment><USER5> Django admin isn't designed to handle any kind of workflow - it's just for adding data. That's all, plain and simple.

If you're expecting to need any kind of workflow, it's actually prefererable to start your page from scratch, and use some of the other django page creation tools than use the admin module.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've done a lot of Django, Rails and PHP. The choice always depends on what your app looks like.

If your app has a lot of non-user facing CRUD (i.e. a CMS or publishing app), Django offers some incredible shortcuts with the built-in admin app.

I also think Python is a better systems programming language (i.e. calling out to unix during web stuff), due to it's scientific background.

Otherwise RoR and Django are roughly the same MVC frameworks -- opinionated conventions about models with a database abstraction layer, and views and controllers (templates and views in Django terms).

Likewise, Ruby and Python are roughly the same -- object oriented scripting languages.

But for your specific questions, I'd say Rails wins by a long shot. There are a lot more Rails companies/jobs in the Bay area (though more Python than Ruby jobs, again because of science). Rails 3 shows the community is still going strong.

Sinatra is the most fun for simple web services and it integrates with Rails no problem.

And most importantly, you can use Heroku for Ruby deployment, which is an incredible short cut for launching a site and its impossible to go back to being a sys-admin once you realize it's not necessary.

<comment><USER7> You should check active scaffold plugin for rails. (fork <http://github.com/vhochstein/active_scaffold> for rails 3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This isn't a complaint, because although some may be tired of this question being asked, I personally enjoy the subject being brought up a lot, because of the new perspectives and quick pace of development for each project, but you'll find a lot of additional insight by back searching for "Rails vs Django", too.

There is no right answer, and you can't go wrong with either. Try both, run through _many_ tutorials for each, and decide.

Remember that _everything_ sucks. Find the one that sucks less for you.

I'm still more productive and knowledgeable in Python/Django, but find Ruby/Rails/Sinatra more fun, and I enjoy the new ways of thinking it causes in this old Perl programmer.

Downsides?

I'm still trying to grasp many of the concepts in Ruby, and the rapid pace of development and prevalence of trends is daunting. Many things in the Ruby world are hackish and/or poorly documented. I question DHH's wisdom.

For Python, the indenting thing still bugs the bejeebus out of me. I'm not a trendy kind of guy, but it is a bit too untrendy to me.

They're both great, overall, though. Find the one that matches you, because nobody else can decide that for you.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like both languages and frameworks and honestly I don't think either has a huge edge of the other on any of the criteria you're looking at.

In general however I prefer Python as a language and Rails as a framework.

I think Rails is hands down the best architected and easy to use framework out there. I think Python is one of the most well curated and thought out languages. I should say this, I doubt I would have every learned Ruby if not for Rails (though its my "go to" language now for simple scripts, having replaced Perl), I'm pretty sure I'd have learnt Python at some point regardless of Django.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you go searching around for comparisons between the two, keep in mind that Rails just released v3 which is significantly different and improved over versions 2. _

</comment><comment><USER11> As a professional Rails developer, I will try to answer all your points from a pro rails point of view. Granted, I have dabbled with Django and found it satisfying also.

* Adoption - Rails is being heavily adopted, especially with the startup community, but also state agencies, hospitals etc.

* Community - Rails has a strong community of core devs, plugins devs, conferences, books etc.

* Jobs - Tons of Jobs in my experience. We have a hard time finding good Rails/Ruby devs. I have checked the market, seems like there are plenty of Rails jobs across the country. Check out: <http://jobs.37signals.com/>

* Scalability - Yes, Rails can scale. Check out: <http://rails100.pbworks.com/Alexa+Rankings> Ever heard of Hulu, JustinTV or Big Cartell?

* Fun - Ruby was designed for programmer happiness

</comment><comment><USER12> I just returned to Rails after a brief stint with Django. I was working on a stackoverflow-ish site and wanted to make use of an existing OS project if possible. Django has OSQA, and Rails has Shapado. Shapado would've naturally been the better choice for me, but they use MongoDB and at the time I started the project, I questioned the wisdom of that decision. Learning Django (since I already know python) and using OSQA seemed like the better option, as it would allow me to use my beloved PostgreSQL.

Bias warning...I've used Rails for far too long now, so it's very familiar to me and I'm comfortable with it. That said, here's the heavily opinionated and subjective reasons why I'm back:

* urls.py - the python regular expression syntax makes your route definitions very ugly as they grow. I find Rails' route DSL much more intuitive.

* Lack of model-level validation - OSQA uses Form objects to validate models rather than letting the models validate themselves (as Rails does). In OSQA, the Form objects are rather heavily bound to the UI interaction, so if you need to create models outside of the web app itself (I did) it gets painful. I kept having to hack these form objects to get them to validate properly. I've been told that Django now provides model-level validation, but OSQA doesn't use them (for now).

* ORM - I find ActiveRecord to be a much cleaner and intuitive ORM.

* Django's template language - I don't work with designers, so I don't need to be hobbled by a template language that is limited by design. I know you can use other template engines, but I was working with what OSQA provided, so I was stuck.

* Community - the Rails community in general is more active.

* Language preference - at the end of the day, Ruby just feels more natural and clean to me. You could attribute this to familiarity, but I actually knew python long before I knew ruby. I do like python, but tend to "think" in ruby.

I re-assessed my progress after a month and realized I was just not reaching the same level of productivity I was used to. I decided to switch course and learn MongoDB, which was probably the decision I should've made to begin with, and my productivity instantly improved. I was able to move the features I'd created in Django over within a few nights of focused effort, and I couldn't be happier with Shapado (and, surprisingly, mongodb).

This is simply my experience. If it were a completely new project, my experience might've been different. YMMV.

<comment><USER13> With regards to urls.py, I would greatly recommend using surlex. It makes it much nicer and much more readable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Adoption: Rails is bigger. Both are healthy, and neither is going anywhere.

Community: These are roughly equivalent. The Rails community is probably significantly larger, but there's more than enough activity and information coming from both to keep you plenty satisfied.

Jobs: It's easier to find a Rails job.

Scalability: You can scale both. Both frameworks are pretty heavyweight, but they're also both designed with scaling in mind (e.g. decent caching is built in).

Fun: If you like CakePHP, then assuming you don't just irrationally hate Python or Ruby you should feel right at home with either one.

Full disclosure: I do Rails for a living.

</comment><comment><USER15> Meh.

Do a tutorial in each language, it'll take you a day at most. Then pick a framework that matches the language you liked better.

</comment><comment><USER16> As everyone else said, both is best. If you're looking for which one to get started with first, I've always felt that Django has a less steep learning curve.

Check out what's generated for you when initially starting a rails app: <http://twitpic.com/30sz41> vs. a Django app: <http://twitpic.com/30szgk>

I think Django is a little less overwhelming for beginners.

</comment><comment><USER17> You already have some python experience, I'd say give Django a try. It's not hard to get a simple app up and running, and if you already understand the underlying language basics you'll find it even easier.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think this is more of a decision between languages rather than Frameworks.

I'm a passionate Pythonist with a deep respect for Ruby. I personally find Python to be extremely elegant in both syntax and paradigm, but Ruby is the next thing I'd use if Python were to disappear today.

In my experience, Python generally has more backend libraries and tools, while Ruby has more frontend. Of course, there are hundreds of exceptions to this, but the premise of what I'm saying is this: Python developers tend to come from other unixy backgrounds, and Ruby devs often are web-centric.

As far as the frameworks themselves are concerned, Rails has a bit more magic "convention over configuration", while in Python "explicit is better than implicit", so Django is a little more engineer-friendly.

I highly recommend you read the Zen of Python to see if the language is a good fit for you: <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/>

Something to keep in mind.

<comment><USER18> On another note, I have reason to believe that Ruby + Rails will be the next go-to "language of the web", as PHP (is) was two years ago.

On yet another note, Pythonists are in HIGH demand. Good Python devs (who aren't actually Java devs who've dabbled with Python once or twice) are hard to come by. Excellent job opportunities because of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are plenty of reasons why you should use Django or Rails over the other, but I rather discuss why maybe you _shouldn't_ use Django. I haven't used Rails, so I will not be discussing that side of the coin.

Django is a wonderful framework as long as you work inside the box. There's a large enough of a community for support, plenty of documentation, and alot of the pieces for a website are already written for you and work just fine.

Where Django seems to break down is:

1\. When you upgrade Django, or 2\. When you start customizing Django

With just about every release of Django, something breaks. Thankfully, these changes are usually outlined in the release notes, but this often results (from what I've seen) in projects running on fairly old versions of Django because nobody wants to break a working website or app by upgrading their framework. Where I come from (sysadmin turned web dev,) you don't want to run outdated software and you don't want things to break. With Django, you're constantly stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Theoretically, you can write all the middleware, decorators, backend authentication modules, etc you want and plug it into Django and have it work flawlessly; however, this isn't always the case in practice. This blog post from one person explains their gripes with extending ,and eventually replacing, Django: <http://blog.brandonbloom.name/2009/08/dropping- django.html>

It's important to keep in mind that Django was ultimately developed for news websites. This makes it a great framework for building CMSes, blogs, etc but causes it to break down when you start moving outside of that use case.

(Also, FWIW, Django doesn't natively support schema migrations, although their are tools such as "South" that implement this functionality.)

I think that if you're interested in using a Python-based like framework, you should also consider Pylons and Tornado.

<comment><USER20> Pylons or Tornado probably implies SQLAlchemy...and I have to say south is a much better tool than sqlalchemy-migrate. (Not that the migration tool itself should heavily influence anyone's decision to use a web framework. I actually prefer SQLAlchemy itself to Django's ORM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The one factor I haven't seen mentioned so far is that Python has more math and science libraries. So if those kind of problems interest you, that is worth considering.

On a semi-related note, at Art.sy we use Zend, a PHP framework, for our web app (all our AI is in a separate Java service). We've found Zend to be great and I've noticed that large companies like AppNexus, NextJump, and (initially) Facebook use Zend too. Yet I've never seen it mentioned on HN. Curious if anyone can explain this.

</comment><comment><USER22> The problem domain you're working in is also important. For example, if you're doing heavy duty number crunching for finance or image processing, Python has NumPy, for which AFAIK there is no equivalent for Ruby.

Then again at very large scale you don't want to restrict yourself to one language in which case you can lash together various components using a distributed job scheduler like Gearman (<http://gearman.org/>).

</comment><comment><USER23> You should just learn both (and more). You shouldn't isolate yourself to 1 language, you should learn as many as you can, because the diversity and understanding will make you a better programmer. It's not like that Python or Ruby are that different from each other anyhow.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree, but learning them in parallel won't yield good results for me. I'm interested in both, I'm just looking for which one I should learn first.

<comment><USER24> Yes, don't feel pressured by all these comments saying "Why not learn both? They're not that different anyway." You're probably better off semi-mastering one before you focus on the other. There's a lot more to a language with its idiosyncrasies in general use than what simple examples reveal, and it's going to take significant experience to really be proficient.

I'd say pick the language that you can develop the most passion to learn. Spend some time doing a little research. Are you a specialist in another technology? How well does either Python or Ruby integrate in whatever way with what you already know. If you're really at a loss, go with Python and Django.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Honestly, I think these "Ask HN: X vs X?" posts should be strongly discouraged here. The Rails vs Django threads get posted at least once a month, often more frequently, and it's beyond tiresome. They already get flagged and killed half the time, but people still post in them as if it's totally normal to have the same question posted week after week.

Edit: Instead of downvoting, explain why you think this same discussion needs to be rehashed month after month, sometimes week after week. When it comes to other topics we have no problem reminding people to search HN rather than ask the same questions repeatedly.

<comment><USER20> Have to say I disagree here....both frameworks are evolving over time and it's good to get a _current_ comparison, as answers from 6-12 months ago may not be relevant anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> As someone who has a passing knowledge of both, I also find that I like Python more than Ruby but I like Rails more than Django. The main reason is that the Rails community is larger and more active than the Django community.

That said, it depends on your needs. Rails has a slightly steeper learning curve than Django (mostly because there are a ton of helpers and options in the API). If you want something that will get you started quickly, I'd go with Django. Later on, you'll have to do a lot of Django hacking to get some things that come for free in Rails.

</comment><comment><USER27> I would stick with PHP and try codeigniter. Going down the 'Rails' or 'Django' path. Ultimately just gives you a new toy. I wouldn't say it was worth it. But that depends on what your goals are.

Ruby is a nice language though. I do all my non-web stuff in that.

I highly recommend Peter Cooper's Book: Beginning Ruby, Link:[http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ruby-Novice- Professional/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ruby-Novice- Professional/dp/1590597664), if you'd like to get started with it.

<comment><USER28> I second that...CodeIgniter is really nice with no fuss...Rails is nice too unless you get familiar with it...in the mean time CodeIgniter is your rescue. Simple framework that's quite flexible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Regarding jobs for each framework, there are far more Rails jobs than Django jobs: <http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=JBPFd8i2nk>.

For me, I periodically use Django for content-centric sites with standard CRUD operations primarily performed by a small number of privileged users, but I prefer Rails and Sinatra for most projects. I prefer the Ruby web development ecosystem, with libraries like Haml, Sass and Compass.

<comment><USER30> Although that's true, I would guess there is possibly far more competition for those jobs from a larger quantity of Rails programmers than Django programmers.

<comment><USER29> I'm in Chicago, but also do work for Asian firms. In my admittedly completely anecdotal experience as a contractor over the past few years, I encounter PHP (which I don't work with) and Rails applications, but have never been approached for Django in my freelance work, despite telling people that I can work with both Rails and Django. I do almost no self promotion and I still have Rails contract jobs handed to me. I've been approached by non-technical people to work on Rails sites they didn't know were built on Rails and without them knowing what my exact skills were. When I meet startup people (which I do fairly regularly despite not going to meetups), they are almost always running their startups on Rails. YMMV, but this is what my experience has been.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I picked Django because:

* The documentation was better than Rails * Python is more useful outside of Django than Ruby is outside of Rails * The Python syntax seemed easier to read

Since then, I've become a big fan of Django and Python. With that said, plenty of smart people are using Rails. I agree with some of the other commenters that you should do the tutorial for each framework before deciding.

As for jobs, both Rails and Django have tons of open positions available and hot startups using them.

<comment><USER7> Arguable, but I think Rails haw way more docs than django: <http://railstutorial.org/book> , <http://guides.rubyonrails.org/> , <http://railscasts.com/> to name a few

<comment><USER31> "was" being the operative verb. This was two years ago.

Nonetheless, I just looked at those three links and IMHO, the Django docs are more concise and well-organized:

<http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/>

For me at least, it's all about maintainability and parsimony, two things that Django/Python has in spades and for which excellent central documentation is a necessary requirement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I tried (and still working) with both languages that power the respective frameworks, and from my own opinion they are the same. I've been in your situation too and the best way to find what framework suits you is to go and try them, build something.

I wont respond to your question as I've a little more inclination to Ruby/Rails than Pyhton and I don't want to influence your decision, you should really try them both and find by yourself.

</comment><comment><USER33> The correct answer of course is "both". There are many similarities between the languages and the frameworks, and there are good job opportunities for each.

Go do a side project with one of them and release it. Then go do another side project with the other and release that. Then go get a job or contract with one or the other. You'll be able to say you've used each, you'll be able to give pros and cons to each, etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm just learning Rails now, and while I still prefer Python over Ruby, Rails is more fun and I'm feeling I'm getting more done with less effort.

On the other hand I think Django is simpler to understand in-depth, with Rails I feel like a lot of it is magic and it'll take a lot more work to understand how it works (but it isn't stopping me being productive with it).

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm surprised this got upvoted so high, since this has been discussed ad nauseum on HN. But I will say that I had the same question and I ultimately chose Ruby simply because it intrigued me more. Since they are THAT similar, if you just go with your instincts, you can't go wrong.

</comment><comment><USER36> Gaining followers might not be the right metric to follow. A stable framework might not gain followers at the same rate as a hyped up shiny-new-thing.

Since you say you are "bored", why not try both out for a day or two and see what's more "fun" to you?

</comment><comment><USER37> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER38> After considering all of the angles, we chose Django over Rails. At the end of the day, the biggest difference between the two is the languages they're each based on. And at the end of the day, we prefer Python over Ruby. This is for a number of reasons, including massive community and commercial support, libraries, etc.

This is not to say RoR is not awesome, it's mostly a preference of language.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm not familiar with Rails, but in Django you are 100% tied to SQL databases. There are some efforts to make talk to NoSQL databases (like App Engine). Google actually gave up those efforts.

In Rails, I believe the database backend can be either. Look at Twitter - their using Cassandra.

<comment><USER40>
         Google actually gave up those efforts.

Was there ever a Django-related effort from Google to update the ORM?

Also, the Django ORM is pretty flexibile, and the architecture just got improvements for NoSQL in 1.2.

<comment><USER41> I think he was trying to refer to was Google's Big table integration which app engine uses instead of NoSQL.

<comment><USER40> Dude, what are you guys talking about? What Big table integration? What NoSQL?

There was a Django patch somewhere that used a thin layer to make the API "look" like the Django ORM, but IMHO it is broken in a lot of ways and you're better off using the raw App Engine API (which is in no way related to Django).

But it is a half-ass attempt, looking like some patch somebody did in an afternoon to get something working: and that was the "Google effort"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> go Django you wont regret</comment>


A proof of the Riemann hypothesis - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.0090

<comment><USER2> Terence Tao says there is a problem with the proof.

[http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/structure-and- rando...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/structure-and-randomness- in-the-prime-numbers/#comment-30714)

</comment><comment><USER3> He'll have to get in line. [[http://secamlocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/zeta/RHproo...](http://secamlocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/zeta/RHproofs.htm)]

If you peruse the Number Theory papers on the arXiv, you'll see that there is a purported proof of the Riemann hypothesis every few weeks. So far, none of them have been vetted by a professional journal. I'd be very surprised (but happy) if this turned out to contain a correct proof.

A more interesting question would be "Why is this particular proof by this otherwise unknown author getting so much attention?"

<comment><USER4> At least two answers to your question:

1) He authored <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%27s_criterion>

2) I believe some theorists have already looked at it and I haven't heard anything negative [disclaimer: I'm far from an expert and wouldn't be able to even agree or disagree with their analyses].

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone know enough math to be able to tell if this is a serious contender?

<comment><USER6> This isn't my area, but I know enough to say that he speaks the right language and builds on existing results in the field.

So I'd classify this as a serious contender... in the same sense as other serious contenders have been put forward every 1-2 years for the past 50 years, only to be withdrawn after someone points out mistakes. I'd say that it's almost certain that there are mistakes somewhere in this paper -- the only question is whether they're serious flaws or just minor errors which can be worked around.</comment></comment>


Popular social media sites 'harm young people's mental health' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/19/popular-social-media-sites-harm-young-peoples-mental-health <comment><USER2> > We need to teach children how to cope with all aspects of social media – > good and bad – to prepare them for an increasingly digitised world. There is > real danger in blaming the medium for the message."

Or perhaps it is the medium that we should blame. I'm kind of getting tired of this cluelessness when it comes to understanding why we get so stuck just scrolling our lives away.

Instagram is owned by one of the largest advertising companies in the world (Facebook) and their goal is to make us, and our kids, to spend as much time in their application as they possibly can. I would argue they're doing very well and I don't find it hard at all to understand why spending that much time in real-time slavery doesn't make us happy people.

Let us find other mediums through which we can express ourselves. They might not be centralized and they're certainly not owned by a multi billion dollar corporation.</comment>


New CTO School MeetUp in NYC - <AUTHOR> http://www.ctoschool.org/

<comment><USER2> Anyone know of a Silicon Valley equivalent?</comment>


The Fast Fourier Transform - <AUTHOR> http://jeremykun.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/the-fast-fourier-transform/

<comment><USER2> " As noted by his former pupil and collaborator André Deprit, Lemaître was one of the inventors of the modern Fast Fourier Transform technique.

Lemaître was well ahead on his time regarding machine computing. As early as the thirties at MIT, he used the machine perfected by Bush to solve the Störmer problem. "

source : <http://www.uclouvain.be/en-316446.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like a great blog. I'm trying to get through The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose that's supposedly capable of giving a layman an idea of the math and physics behind modern physics including string theory, but I'm finding Jeremy Kun's treatment of some of the same mathematical concepts using animation and colloquial language to be easier to understand.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow. I hadn't come accross this blog before. It has a fantastic wealth of content, all relevant to my interests. Very impressed.

<comment><USER5> Love his tutorials. Motivates PCA by walking trough a creepy eigenface decomposition, and solves a political prediction problem with a ID3 implementation of a decision tree. I actually used the latter initial code scrap for writing an entire damn random forest implementation!

Really looking forward to his future discussion of computational topology and persistent homologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Excellent article! In case anyone has use for it, the other day I wrote a quick little javascript implementation of the FFT for inclusion in sjkaliski's numbers.js[0]. It hasn't been merged in yet, but my implementation[1] is tiny and (hopefully) easy to read. (complex.js and dsp.js work fine on their own, without the rest of numbers.js)

[0] <https://github.com/sjkaliski/numbers.js>

[1] [https://github.com/napoleond/numbers.js/blob/master/lib/numb...](https://github.com/napoleond/numbers.js/blob/master/lib/numbers/dsp.js)

</comment><comment><USER7> Great content! Nice mix of math, backstory and practical examples along the way to keep the reader engaged.

I was a little concerned that the Python cmath library might be written in Python but from what I can tell, it's native-code from C.

<comment><USER8> Yep! In general, any Python library prefixed with a C will be native.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone who _doesn't_ want to roll their own FFT, take a look at this excellent pure C implementation: <http://www.fftw.org/>

<comment><USER10> This is a parallel agorithm...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> When you present the Fourier transform as frequency spectrum, what are you actually plotting? Magnitude? Real part?</comment>