Ask HN: How much have you saved for retirement? - <AUTHOR> This blog post says as a Software Engineer working in the US you should have $4 Million in savings to have the same income, in retirement, as a fresh software engineer.
http://chase-seibert.github.io/blog/2014/01/01/saving-for-retirement-as-a-software-engineer.html
How much have you saved for retirement, and at what age? <comment> super-serial Nothing... because methane in the arctic will end human civilization by then. [http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/extinction.html?m=1](http://arctic- news.blogspot.com/p/extinction.html?m=1)

It makes more sense to take big risks with money and then use any big payoffs to help geoengineering efforts or prepare for living in a bunker. That may sound silly but some rich people are already doing that: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday- prep-f...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the- super-rich)

<comment><USER2> I don't dispute man-made climate change, it's obvious by now.

I also don't dispute man-made climate change bringing about more extreme weather and raising sea levels, which are catastrophic things by themselves.

However, it's when you wrote about the "end of human civilization" that I got skeptical. There is no scientific consensus for that, and no compeling reason to believe such exaggerated claims, even if "rich people" took precautions against it, or some lone climate researcher claims it in a blogspot post.

Do not plan your retirement thinking that human civilization will end before you retire, because much more likely than not, it won't. This is so absurd that you're setting yourself up to have your end-of-life tragedy be in the future a pretty good joke about taking conspiracy theories seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you live in a place like the Bay Area, the best retirement plan involves these 4 steps:

1\. Owning a home in the Bay Area by the time you retire. No mortgage, no rent. Just bills.

2\. Sell that place when you retire in order to move to a cheaper location. Use whatever's left from the sale of your home as an income for the rest of your life. Let's take a $800K home for example, if you make $150K per year, you may qualify after 2-3 years by saving as much cash as you can for a down payment. That house/condo might be worth 1.5 to 2 million dollars in 30 years from now, who knows? Despite the inflation, if you sale it for say $1.5, after tax and real estate fee you might end up with $1.2 net. This is not income money. You could then buy a $500K house somewhere cheap, then use the remaining $700K as part of your retirement money, which brings in $35K net per year for 20 years. This is roughly the equivalent of $50K gross income per year.

3\. Make sure to add a little bit in your personal saving account every month, even if it's $100-$500 it's fair enough on a 30 year period.

4\. Make sure you add up a little bit in your 401K.

The combination of all 4 will maximize your retirement while leaving in your own place. Real estate in a place like the Bay Area is the best investment because of the location. It doesn't matter if it's a tiny 1 bedroom in San Francisco or a crappy old house in South Bay, it will hold its value over the years and will most likely help you moving to a cheaper place with a lot of cash in hands.

<comment><USER4> > " _Real estate in a place like the Bay Area is the best investment because > of the location_ "

How do you know this? What you're saying sounds just like all the bankers and mortgage salesmen in 2007 promising that real estate prices will never fall. If you want to bet on SV real estate being the best investment, go ahead. But call it what it is: a speculative bet.

For those who would prefer not to speculate on their retirement savings, professionals have already put together very sophisticated calculators that tell you whether it's better to buy-or-rent. Check it out and run the numbers yourself, before trusting uncited blanket recommendations given in a HN comment.

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent- calcula...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent- calculator.php)

<comment><USER5> It is speculative, but so far it has resisted nicely.

All housing went down in the bubble bursts, but bay area still enjoyed nice 7-8% yoy growth so far.

There are couple things that could make it pop badly - like detroit like situation where it goes bankrupt, or the other is tech companies decide to move elsewhere.

I think this is where you should eiversify either way. Buying properties where tech is currently strong is a nice way to diversify

Austin, bay area, ny might be good spots for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe the guideline is that in order to enjoy a $X/year retirement income (adjusted annually for inflation), you need a nest egg of $25X. So if you'd like to retire with $100k/year, $2.5M would do it. And even less if you are willing to factor in social security income.

If you adopt a buy-and-hold investment strategy over the course of 20-30 years, with a good mix of index funds, the above should be easily within reach.

<comment><USER6> Not sure it's safe to assume the stock market will go up and up. Perhaps it will, but where does that money come from?

<comment><USER4> The S&P 500 has a PE ratio of ~20. Which means that for every $20 of stocks that you earn, your portfolio of companies are generating $1 in yearly profit. These profits alone represent a ~5% ROI. That's where the money comes from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm 24 and have 10k in Wealthsimple because I can't be bothered to learn more about how to manage my investments myself right now (and I've been a dumbass with money for the past 6 years).

WS tells me I'll have ~$5,222,649 when I'm 65 if I continually add $5k/mo to my invesments.

They say "We include your scheduled contributions into this projection and assume a return of 5.1-5.45% on stocks and 0.74-1.05% on bonds after 0.5% fees. The impact of taxes is not included. Actual returns may differ."

My ideal plan is to have ~$600k+ in investments and withdraw 1-2%/yr to cover food costs. I'm looking at some 200-300 acre stretches of land for around $150k~ in Canada where I plan to build a house myself. Looking to hookup solar and for a freshwater lake to be running through the land. The goal is to self sustain for however long I need to so I can think and work on my hobbies without the overhead of rent/career.

I feel like trying to scrape together an hour or two here and there for a hobby doesn't do anything for me because I'm working on things that require large stretches of uninterrupted time over the span of weeks/months.

<comment><USER8> New account - suspicious. I don't doubt that startups like Wealthfront are gaslighting HN and Reddit.

<comment><USER9> Or it might simply be that people don't like to discuss specific numbers related to their income/investment on a public forum under their real name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the UK the (usual) limit you can have in your pension fund is now £1m.

I would expect to have about 20 times whatever I wanted to live on per year, and that yearly amount would high enough above what I know is enough to be comfortable. The state pension should kick in something too.

However, I don't expect to completely retire at any point though legally I currently could in only 5 years' time (then another 10 years or so to state pension age). So if I'm not doing a reasonable amount of work and keeping my brain active at 70 I would be disappointed.

<comment><USER9> This is my thinking as well. I like to think I would be working in some capacity much beyond the current retirement age. One of the reasons I like to keep a healthy lifestyle is that I want to be physically and mentally capable of continuing to make useful contributions until the very end... and that last part really scares me, but that's another conversation.

<comment><USER10> What scares you? Mortality, or being able to keep being useful, or something else? (I'm not being flippant: I live next to a graveyard which reminds me that I'm not getting out of the first of those!)

<comment><USER9> I guess its a combination of Mortality and lack of independence/increasing dependence, while bodily functions slowly get less and less effective. I am very afraid of the idea of fading away. Perhaps I would be more comfortable if, e.g. I knew that my end would come at a very specific day and that I would remain healthy until then and the poof!

<comment><USER10> Then you should know the joke about the difference between an English actuary and a Russian actuary. The former tells you your life expectancy ie an age you might expect to die, whereas the latter gives you a date, time and place.

I suspect I'm somewhat older than you, and faults are already accumulating and have been significantly so for 20 years or more. I can see how it may eventually become too tiresome to carry on if some of the breakage can't be fixed. But there are often compensations...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm 35, and have been saving for retirement and maxing out my 401(k) ever since I started working. I don't think I'll ever have 4 million dollars in my retirement account, but I think (hope?) I'll be fine.

I think it's the numbers that are suspect in this analysis.

1\. The calculator asks for your salary, then uses your current salary to determine your need for money in retirement. If you're saving 20% of your salary, then really you are only living on 80%, and that 80% should be used as your 'living expenses money'.

(fine print of calculator: We then assume you can live comfortably off of 85% of your pre-retirement income. So if you earn $100,000 the year you retire, we estimate you will need $85,000 during the first year of retirement.

I think it should be at least 85% of what you're not saving. For example, if you're making 100k, saving 20k, then really you should take 85% of 80k, which is 68 - not 85.

Also costs change as you get older. While you may spend more for health care, you hopefully won't have to pay rent, for raising children, etc.

Finally, they seem to say they want to take all the money and purchase an annuity. It seems like as soon as you retire, your money stops growing (other than for inflation) because of the annuity, but if you kept that money growing while you were retired, it would probably be even less.

Really the big trouble is you can't rely on ever increasing markets with some 7% yearly rate of return. It could be higher, it could be lower. If it's lower for a long time, basically the US retirement systems (both 401k and pension) are in huge trouble.

<comment><USER12> They take the 85% of 100k because it's assumed when you retire, you won't be saving any of your income, just drawing down.

This calculator is often uses to demonstrate different savings rates : [https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement](https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement)

The reason why saving more quite rapidly lowers your retirement age is because it's a twofold saving. Firstly you are saving more money which is good, and secondly you are learning to live on less.

To take a super simple example. Let's say you can live on 50k a year. And you can get 3.5% on term deposit rates (You can in NZ). Then you should need 50,000 * (100/3.5) = 1.4 million approx to retire and be able to earn 50k a year off interest alone.

<comment><USER11> Totally agree with all that, and that's what I rely on, that I can live frugally.

But in the article, they link to the calculator that gave them the 4 mil figure, and that asks how much you make, and how much you are saving. But it doesn't take the savings out first. So it's saying you can live on 85% of what you need now, if you save 0% or 50%. Since they have the number you are saving, it doesn't make sense to me to bake that into the 85% number, when they can calculate it based on the info you provide. I really think it's that on average, you only need 85% of your income, likely due to some smaller cost of living changes, but also tax implications, etc.

Your calculator is much better, and assumes you have enough money to draw down only the gains, and not the principal, but that's not what the calculator in the article does (as they mentioned in the fine print), they buy a fixed income inflation adjusted annuity at 6%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _This blog post says as a Software Engineer working in the US you should have $4 Million in savings to have the same income, in retirement, as a fresh software engineer_

Fidelity is always telling me I need some ungodly amount of money saved in order to continue the lifestyle to which I've become accustomed. I don't need that much. Here's what my current income pays for that won't be an issue in retirement:

1\. Maxed out 401K at $18K/year. The wife's doing the same.

2\. $3K a month paid to mortgage principal, in addition to the house payment. (It is financially unwise to pay down a 2.5% loan quickly, but I'm not retiring with a house payment.)

3\. Commuting expenses.

4\. A hell of a lot more eating out than I plan to do in retirement.

5\. My current tax rate. A lower tax rate in retirement is the whole basis of the appeal of tax-deferred accounts.

And let me give you some anecdata to work with as you ponder your starvation in retirement: my parents. Mom just bought a brand new Corvette last year. Dad is talking about a new $65K truck to replace the one they bought just a few years ago. The just bought a new $35K fifth wheel camper this year. A large, long-paid-off house on six acres in Florida. Lots of camping trips, which means feeding that hungry diesel truck that's pulling that fifth wheel, and camp spots with hook-ups ain't cheap. Maybe it's not how kings live, but I'd have no problem with the lifestyle. They're in their 70s now, I don't see the money running out any time soon.

And they retired in their 50s with about a million dollars.

You'll need $4 million if you still hold a mortgage in the Bay Area and you're stilling hitting the $EXPENSIVE_NIGHT_SPOT thrice a week, while having Uber Eats delivery your dinner every night. Which you won't be doing when you're 55 or 65 if you have any sense. Which means you don't need anywhere near $4 million.

To get to answering your question, I plan a minimum of $1 million, and a max of $2 million, when we retire. We're not going to continue to live in Redmond, WA, I don't think. Taxes are pretty good, IMO, but we'll sell the Redmond house and buy something in, say, Bellingham and pocket the difference. I have absolutely no reason to believe we'll be anything other than just fine and dandy. Especially considering that the median person of our mid-50s age has less than a tenth of our current savings, and you don't see masses of retired people starving in the streets, do you?

<comment><USER14> I agree with you completely. I view my current income as almost irrelevant when it comes to determining how much of a retirement nest egg I need to have.

My approach is to actually contemplate what retirement looks like and develop a budget based on that to determine what our expenses will be, and subsequently how much income will be required to support that lifestyle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> $0. I'm focused on building a six-month emergency fund first.

I don't need anything approaching 100% income replacement, as it would make no sense to pay exorbitant rent for proximity to jobs as a retiree.

I doubt I'll save enough over my lifetime (outside of 401k) to scratch a down payment on a Bay Area 1-bedroom condo, but it'll be more than sufficient to buy a palace for cash anywhere else the _moment_ I don't need to live here anymore.

(I have worked in Midwestern IT cost centers, never again).

<comment><USER16> Make it one year fund. Even better, have make one-year fund using peak expense month as a reference. The probability of not needing to use it fully is high, but not 1.

<comment><USER15> I think it would be silly to prepare for long-term unemployment in the Bay Area. I can move to within a few blocks of my parents' house and live almost the same lifestyle for ~50% of the cost, or a lifestyle befitting a long-term unemployed person for ~25% of the cost.

Moving costs _something_ , but would pay for itself very quickly. If I leave my furniture to the Craigslist scavengers, just the lease-break fee of 1 month's rent and a plane ticket with a couple of checked bags.

At some point it becomes important to start the ball rolling on that sweet compound interest, pick up the preferential tax treatment (saving the max of $18k to a 401k would only cost me about $10k), pay down student debt early for a guaranteed 4.5% return, and (yes) travel and enjoy being young.

Effectively, the fund I'm working on _will_ be worth even more than a year, as long as I relocate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Less than 2% of the US will ever see anything near $4 million in their bank account.

Most people would consider it a LOT to save $20k a year, which would be well under a million by retirement.

<comment><USER18> It would only be below a million if you stuck your money in a savings account. If it's in an investment account, after 30 years at 7% growth per year and $20k deposited per year, you should have $1.87 million dollars saved. Which isn't tons when you consider inflation, but it's definitely better than what you're suggesting.

<comment><USER19> 7% returns are unrealistic moving forward; I would target ~5-6%.

CalPERS came to this conclusion a few months ago, and they're a bit behind the rest of Wall Street when it comes to returns estimation.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/08/calperss-sees-58-percent- retu...](http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/08/calperss-sees-58-percent-return-with- new-allocation-below-7-percent-goal.html)

Some Wall Street veterans are predicting returns even lower.

[https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Historical_and_expected_retu...](https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Historical_and_expected_returns)

<comment><USER18> This honestly doesn't surprise me. The fact that tons of men aren't working anymore is an indicator that the old methods of maximizing productivity by lowering wages and increasing hours isn't going to work as well in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's a bit of an odd analysis.

The biggest chunk of my income is eaten up by taxes and rent. Once you've retired and your only income is from long term capital gains, taxes are much less of an issue and hopefully you've purchased a home so you don't need to rent. It also ignores social security, which based on the quick calculator at ssa.gov seems to be not an insubstantial amount, though I get that people don't want to count on that.

On the flip side, it completely ignores inflation which may mean that while your savings may be very large compared to how much you need to live today, they may not be adequate 30-40 years from now.

Without a good estimate for what your expenses will actually be, the number you "need" turns out to be complete nonsense IMO.

<comment><USER13> _Once you 've retired and your only income is from long term capital gains_

You'll also likely be drawing down a 401K, and the government wants their deferred taxes back. So capital gains taxes aren't the only tax consideration. Granted, you most likely will in a lower tax bracket come retirement time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Ballpark, you make about $100k a year in your 20s

I'm green with envy... With that much money i could have probably retire right now at 30, and i'm half way there.

Then again, i live in a country with free medicine, free education, no lawyers, a recently-ended oversupply of housing leaving me with 1.5 apartments and a house from grand-grand parents who "moved on", and all bills and necessities coverable by about $2k a year, so i'm not sure if i have a right to be envious.

More to the point, i keep the money scattered around - foreign currencies, gold, crypto, etc, to avoid losing all at once and staying ahead of the inflation. I don't expect to ever become a millionaire, barring a lucky investment or something.

</comment><comment><USER22> absolutely zero, i have very little chance of surviving to retirement age and even if i do i cant imagine id have any desire to not carry on working, its not like im a bricklayer, chances are ill still be able to type and as long as i can do that ill be working

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm too young to consider my savings as retirement, but I created a handy spreadsheet that allows you to estimate how much you'll have by the time you retire.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nV8N16sBFiqDtZqkORlh...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nV8N16sBFiqDtZqkORlhLGgBmVxghohCnXJtPzrmu-A/edit?usp=sharing)

Feel free to point out bugs or copy and add features.

<comment><USER24> > I'm too young to consider my savings as retirement

Why do you say that? I started saving for retirement at 16, and have never considered it anything but.

<comment><USER23> What I meant was that although I have savings, I am undoubtedly going to have unforseen expenses in the near future that I cannot say that my savings are earmarked for retirement

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm 23. I have a goal of $2.4 million dollars by age 60. I currently have $4.3k saved. I'm having trouble meeting my goals because I am having trouble finding work. I live in the third largest city in my state, but it's not a city positively affected by globalization, so unemployment is high and wages are low. I can't move because my wife has a career started here. Such is life.

<comment><USER5> where are you based, and what do you do?

<comment><USER18> Southern Missouri. I'm trying to get a career started in IT with an end goal of becoming a penetration tester. I've got a year and a half of tech support experience, several certifications, and am currently working on a degree. All tech jobs at my level in my area have been outsourced, unemployment is high here, and economic growth is slow. This has made it very tough to get started.

<comment><USER5> could you move out of state?

<comment><USER18> Nope. Like I said in my post, my wife has a career started here, and I am not leaving her just to chase a career that is likely to be outsourced in the next decade.

<comment><USER5> Outsourced is probably not going to happen at a full capacity.

I would consider places where you two could have reasonable careers.

For example, sf is good for tech, but ny might be good for both finance and tech. Now might not be the right time, but after her promo might be a better time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > When you do pay taxes on the money in retirement, your tax rate will likely > be lower.

The only reason it will be lower is if income is lower.

Some people say to not contribute more than the match, because you end up paying more taxes in retirement (taxed as income) than if you just ate the taxes first and paid capital gains on it later.

</comment><comment><USER26> Something to consider: assume you make $100,000 and you max out (~$18,000) your 401K. Are you going to be saving $18,000 a year for retirement when you're retired?

</comment><comment><USER27> Not much, paying loans first. Should be finished with that in two years (age 25).

<comment><USER5> depends on the interest rate on that loan.

if you are working for a large co, consider putting money in 401k first, and get (up to?) 50% match.</comment></comment>


AI Learning How to Play Pong FloydHub and GitHub Links - <AUTHOR> RealTime TensorBoard Stats: https://www.floydlabs.com/tensorboard/MUfRrEmWMLJeoJMS6kvNTN/<p>Code: https://github.com/diegoalejogm/deep-q-learning <comment><AUTHOR> I recommend to soften the curves with a value of 0.9

Here's the link of the FloydHub process: [https://www.floydhub.com/diegoalejogm/projects/atari/29](https://www.floydhub.com/diegoalejogm/projects/atari/29)</comment>


Canada's startup visa program - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2013/01/canadas-start-up-visa-program.html

<comment><USER2> "would-be immigrants would require the support of a Canadian angel investor group or venture capital fund before they can apply to the Start-Up Visa Program."

As the operator of a proudly bootstrapped company, I think this requirement makes the entire law a farce. I hope the US legislature doesn't follow the same example. The provision is especially damning because the Canadian angel/VC community is not particularly large or sufficiently risk-tolerant.</comment>


Top 100 Foods to Eat Before You Die - <AUTHOR> https://foodieadvice.com/top-100-best-foods-to-eat-before-you-die <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback @kappi This list is dynamic and being updated based on community input. You can also change listing by liking foods from your city outside of Mediterranean/European region.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can see full list of cities here [https://foodieadvice.com/](https://foodieadvice.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> maybe the title should have been top 100 Mediterranean/European foods

</comment><comment><USER3> Greek Pita Gyros should be on the top. You forgot to add it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback. You are welcome to suggest food on Athens page [https://foodieadvice.com/athens](https://foodieadvice.com/athens)</comment></comment>


Tesla Model 3 deliveries beat Wall Street targets, shares up 7% - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-model-3-deliveries-beat-201958136.html <comment><USER2> Amazing. The Tesla haters were going to town on them all quarter, claiming bankruptcy was imminent and there was "no demand".

Now they've delivered more cars than any other quarter in their history.

<comment><USER3> Of course they delivered more cars.

The Model 3 is substantially cheaper than the S/X models which means you get more volume with lower margins. And we are seeing quarter by quarter a drop in the ARPU as the S/X models are being cannibalised by the Model 3.

It's amazing that Musk has twisted the narrative to be all about deliveries instead of profitability. But ultimately unless they can dramatically reign in costs it will be their downfall.

<comment><USER4> If you are a typical Tesla hater then you have been making mistaken predictions every quarter for the last ten years.

<comment><USER3> I like how any criticism what so ever of Tesla/Musk results in comments like this.

How about addressing my points. Specifically focusing on profitability and their declining ARPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ive been bearish on the stock since the $7500 credit expired. However, this weekend, the stars aligned, and I pulled the trigger on a Model 3. It's nothing less than amazing (panel gap issues aside). I now understand why Tesla has so many fans. They're light years ahead of the competition.

<comment><USER6> Even bob lutz gave them praise and said there is no panel gap issue

<comment><USER5> I've got a model 3 which has panel gap issues. That's my data point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very curious to learn whether they are cash flow positive this quarter, and whether/how much gross margins went up.

If so, and demand exceeded deliveries, could be sailing into blue skies.

</comment><comment><USER8> My inner cynist asks:

So when a company beats whatever targets set by analysts, the stock goes up. What happens if analysts deliberately set targets that they believe the company would have slim chance of achieving? What if only some (arguably optimistic) analysts set a high target which the pessimists act on?

I think it's likely I have some fundamental misunderstandings on how "targets" work in general, but I can't help but feel that "all Tesla news can and will be interpreted as a weakness"...

<comment><USER9> It's somewhat odd that the stock is benchmarked against conservative analyst estimates, instead of against the predictions of the company's own CEO:

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1098013283372589056](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1098013283372589056)

Any Tesla cheerleaders willing to bet that Tesla will build ~340k cars in 2H2019? Or is this another "LOL, nothing that Musk says matters" moment?

<comment><USER10> He said that Tesla will be able to build 500k cars per year by the end of the year. It absolutely doesn't mean that they will build 500k cars this year. Btw his predictions of ~400k deliveries for the year wouldn't be that far off if they continue to deliver ~100k cars per quarter like in the current quarter.

<comment><USER9> Oh, he has said all sorts of things, e.g. 420k - 600k: [https://www.livemint.com/companies/people/elon-musk-s-new- fo...](https://www.livemint.com/companies/people/elon-musk-s-new-forecast- for-2019-up-to-600-000-cars-1551413855883.html)

YTD, they delivered 160k, so it would take 120k a quarter to get them to 400k cars in 2019, or 130k to get them to 420k cars. I'll take the under.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They're almost certainly still losing money, however.

<comment><USER7> I bought AMZN stock in 1996. Rode it up to $420 ($60 at today's prices), then back down to $14. In 2004, it was around $55. Quarter after quarter, AMZN was reporting massive losses and massive borrowing. Debt climbed to $2BB or thereabouts. I was sitting on a modest profit, and I lost faith and sold.

It turns out that the massive losses and debt were because AMZN was building a monster company. Building a monster, capital-intensive company, and bringing it up fast, requires huge debt.

The question at this point in TSLA's life is the growth rate. At the time I sold, AMZN's revenue were also growing at a huge rate, 40-50% annually.

Write TSLA off if you want, but I've seen this movie before and those who invest for the long haul are going to be very well rewarded.

<comment><USER12> That's Amazon's story and thousands of others that failed. Trying to paint a parallel between Tesla and Amazon based solely on they both had losses for a certain period is foolish. You'd need a lot more similarities to make the comparison useful.

<comment><USER13> His argument is not that Tesla is like Amazon because they both had losses.

His argument is that Tesla's losses can be explained by investment in the future, just like Amazon invested in the future while half of wall street was telling them to make a profit.

Tesla is growing revenue 50% YoY for the last decade.

In Q2/2019 they delivered over 2x cars than in Q2/2018.

If you can find a single company in the history of capitalism that grew that fast in a capital heavy manufacturing business then let me know.

Tesla is currently building a giant factory in China (at record-breaking speed). That requires a lot of money.

When they start delivering cars from that factory sometime in Q1/Q2 2020, their profitability will skyrocket because they'll flip from "lots of expenses, zero revenue" to "no expense, lots of revenue".

This has happened 3 times in Tesla's history when Tesla bounced from heavy losses to profit.

First when they scaled production of Model S and before they started investing in design and manufacturing of Model X. Then after they scaled production of Model X and before they started investing in design in manufacturing of Model 3. Then when they scaled production of Model 3 and before they started Model Y / european expansion / china factory.

<comment><USER14> _If you can find a single company in the history of capitalism that grew that fast in a capital heavy manufacturing business then let me know._

Ford and Toyota both grew faster than that...Hyundai too. Also GM (the original one). And Fiat. and Tata Motors... Actually, most of the big names in the automotive world grew faster than Tesla. They just didn't spend a lot of time or money constantly telling people about it because growth is irrelevant if you can't convert the growth into profits. It's easy to grow big losing money. It's much harder to grow big profitability.

Outside of automotive? Apple went from nearly dead to one of the world's biggest companies in about a decade. Back in the day, the railroad and gasoline companies grew at literally exponential rates. During the shale oil boom, some companies became billionaires overnight.

 _When they start delivering cars from that factory sometime in Q1 /Q2 2020, their profitability will skyrocket because they'll flip from "lots of expenses, zero revenue" to "no expense, lots of revenue"._

That's not how finances or accounting work. A big factory costs lots of money to run. You have to pay for the electricity to run everything, the workers, the parts and supplies to make the cars. And you only get the revenue if you can actually _sell_ the cars that you make. That's a big question mark in a Chinese market that has transitioned away from demanding American luxury goods.

 _This has happened 3 times in Tesla 's history when Tesla bounced from heavy losses to profit._

In the financial world, we call this financial engineering. It means that you're pushing expenses or revenue into one financial period to make another financial period look better. Usually, if you know you have a bad quarter, you put as many expenses as you can into that quarter so that you can goose the numbers for your remaining quarters. _Tesla openly acknowledges doing this, especially with regards to car deliveries._ It's one of the reasons why their CFO left and they keep losing executives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Despite heavy discounting, introduction to new markets and introduction of lower cost variants, unit sales declined ~9% from 2018H2 to 2019H1.

</comment><comment><USER16> See what you can do when you're not picking stupid online fights?

</comment><comment> Y-bar A general observation/question related to this style of headline we see here: "[...] beats [analysts] target"

Why do we write like that? Wouldn't it make more sense to write "[analysts] misses [...] target"? It feels to me like writing "Weather rains more and beats meteorologists' expectations" when "Meteorologists underestimates rainfall" would be more true.

<comment><USER17> Because you want the most salient piece of information at the start.

Otherwise, the front page of a financial site would look like this:

      * Analysts miss target regarding Tesla
      * Analysts are optimistic about Q2 returns for Boeing
      * Analysts etc.

<comment><USER18> Nothing wrong with that, but it won't happen when analysts are the ones writing most of the material for those financial sites... of course they're going to claim Tesla "beat expectations" rather than "analysts underestimate Tesla"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> and they lost three VPs in a week's time and the shares slumped correspondingly, this bump is despite that

[edit] my mistake about the slump in share price, I had misread the chart

<comment><USER20> Stock was $224 on June 19th, hit $224 again on the 24th and closed today at $224. Not sure what the slump is you're referring to?

<comment><USER19> ahahah you are absolutely correct I was looking at the wrong zoom level on the chart, my mistake</comment></comment></comment>


Why PyLadies? - <AUTHOR> http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2013/02/23/why-pyladies/ <comment><USER2> This kind of gender segregation makes me sad. So many years fighting for women to have the same rights as men, and now it turns out that IT, the youngest technology of all, suffers from gender discrimination. Thus motivating the creation of these kind of groups.

It's kind of embarrassing.

<comment><USER3> I'm actually being placed on the other side of the fence here, I don't have a clue what "gender discrimination" looks like in the broader tech world, all I know is that in my company, the techies are equal in numbers, male and female (thought not of course by design.)

I find it sad that I often see a great group of people and a group which I would absolutely love being able to join, but that it is exclusively for women, is this really how we want to solve a perceived gender discrimination? By creating another one which leans the other way?

So often politics of gender, race, sexuality, etc. seems to over shadow what these groups should really be about, which is bringing people together to learn and have fun experiences. Men and women can have these fun experiences together, we don't need to invite purely men or women, imagine the backlash if "blokes who code" had a male only tech group.

It's very easy to play the "under-represented" card, but the fact of the matter is this: women in the U.S. ever so slightly out number men. There is absolutely nothing stopping women joining in with the tech industry, there is no law, no patriarchy standing in their way, the only thing stopping a woman from joining the tech industry is herself.

<comment><USER4> > I don't have a clue what "gender discrimination" looks like in the broader > tech world

Here's some reading that might help you get started with educating yourself:

* [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/mar/22/techno...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/mar/22/technology-women-sexism-question)

* [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/business/global/measures-p...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/business/global/measures-promoting-women-in-business-are-working-reding-says.html)

<comment><USER5> This wiki of gender incidents in tech is my go-to link: <http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents>.

<comment><USER6> Interesting read, but some of the articles seem to be hearasy (no sources listed beyond "so and so seems to remember"). Additionally, some of it seems pretty hairtrigger stuff--body image triggering?

Thanks for the link regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for your hard work. I've heard lots of great things about PyLadies. If my friend wasn't graduating in the spring I would try to convince her to organize a student PyLadies group.

See you at PyCon!

<comment><USER4> Thanks!!

It would be so cool to have campus groups. I'll bring that up to the other organizers. There are a handful of students who already come to the Portland group. We should figure out some ways of capturing the imagination of more students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another interesting group is @wwdcgirls for any women who plan on attending Apple's next event.

Please ditch the text-shadow. The text is completely illegible to me, and I can't highlight the text to read the inverted colour scheme due to the text shadow making it look all smugded. :)

Thanks for all your contributions to women in tech and the Python community.

<comment><USER4> :) I removed it, increased the font size and purged the cache.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are transgendered women allowed in PyLadies? Do you need to be post-op?

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the question.

I will bring this up with all PyLadies - but for my part, yes! We don't have a global charter, so I will seek clarification on this and express my opinion.

The wording that I have tried to use is "primarily woman-identified" or "not primarily male-identified". If you have better wording suggestions, please share!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Please use a web-friendly font. Plus, I don't know if using so much pink is a good idea. But then again, I'm not a designer. Or a woman.

Otherwise, keep up the good work!

<comment><USER4> Are you talking about the PyLadies site itself? I'm not a color expert, but it seems to be mostly red and white.

My site's theme is predominantly blue. I hadn't really thought about my color choices until just now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There seems to be some escaped HTML in your header text: <http://i.imgur.com/RG5bBDp.png>

<comment><USER4> Fixed! Thanks.</comment></comment>


Learn Multi Platform 6502 Assembly Programming for Monsters - <AUTHOR> http://www.chibiakumas.com/6502/ <comment><USER2> Pleasingly old-school site. Minimal JavaScript (in fact, _none_ ), maximal content _document_ (not app) that loads quickly. It's on the colourful side, but there's no lack of contrast. Judging by the source, it's probably handwritten HTML too.

Speaking of monsters.... [https://monster6502.com/](https://monster6502.com/) (discussed previously at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17969472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17969472) )

<comment><USER3> css is also a single file, 106 lines, mostly color definitions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was a nice blast from the past! :)

Another great resource on 6502 in my opinion have been David Wheelers write- ups on 6502[0].

[0] [https://dwheeler.com/6502/](https://dwheeler.com/6502/)

Like I recall he says, I think 6502 was one of the last cpus which assembly was designed for being written by humans (in contrast to modern cpus where all the pipelining and other optimizations make it almost pointless to write most things in assembly). This and other things make it a great platform to learn assembly.

<comment><USER5> Essentially all CISC ISA's were designed for "assembly being written by humans". But I'd still choose RISC-V as a first platform to learn assembly for, before anything else. 6502 is particularly crappy in that it only has a 256-byte, non-relocatable stack, which is not really designed for the familiar use (to us) of enabling reentrant subroutines as in C... so even before you take the limitation to a 16-bit address space into account, the most complex thing you're going to be able to "naturally" compile for the platform is some sort of old-school FORTRAN- or BASIC-like language. I can see being interested in the 6502 for the history or the simplicity on the hardware side, but it does have a lot of baggage that's frankly a bit primitive from a modern POV.

<comment><USER6> Compile into 6502? The CPU was designed to be programmed in assembly, by humans. If your first instinct is to reach for a compiler, you're using the wrong CPU.

I think one great reason to learn 6502 assembly is to write your own Nintendo games and play them on real hardware. Admittedly, that's an extremely niche thing to do, yet there's a thriving community [1] dedicated to the hobby.

[1] [https://forums.nesdev.com/](https://forums.nesdev.com/)

<comment><USER2> The 6502 is still used today in cheap embedded devices, where they are often programmed in an HLL (some C subset is common); its architecture is more similar to that of microcontrollers, which are just as if not more "unusual" and constrained (8051, Microchip PIC) --- and for which compilers exist too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "in computers Kilo is 1024, because four bytes is 1024 bytes"

What?

"a small game now takes 8 gigabytes, but that's 'cos modern games are sloppy, inefficient, fat and lazy..."

They include detailed models, high resolution textures and high quality sound effects and music.

"... like the basement dwelling losers who wrote them!!!"

So rarely true any more. It takes teams to create large games these days. Besides, why is a 6502 tutorial calling people who write games fat, lazy losers?

<comment><USER8> > They include detailed models, high resolution textures and high quality > sound effects and music.

That may be true but the original quote isn't necessarily false either. You can't deny that modern games, like modern software in general, tend to use way more resources than they need.

<comment><USER9> Some games are clearly inefficient, but others are just making a more extreme optimization that makes one part relatively bloated. From a game development perspective, the ranking of value goes something like:

frame time > startup/load time > download/install time/space > release build time/space

Different teams have different levels of aggressiveness in pushing operations down this slope, and different projects have different demands as well. If you're not trying to render much in the first place, maybe frame time isn't actually scarce and you don't have much to gain by doing a ton of precalculation at load time. Conversely, if you're working on a AAA shooter that's struggling to hit 60 FPS and you figure out that you can shave a couple milliseconds off frame time by reorganizing the asset files in a way that makes updates 1 GB instead of 100 MB, that's an opportunity you can't afford to pass up.</comment></comment></comment>


Nobody Hates Software More Than Software Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/nobody-hates-software-more-than-software-developers.html

<comment><USER3> This is why I like things like Android -- it allows the hardware people to make hardware, and the software people to make software. Android may not be perfect but it's better than anything hardware manufacturers put on their phones before. (It would be even better if it were GPL3, so that users could actually change the supposedly-free software on their devices.)

<comment><USER4> It's not as good as something one hardware manufacturer (Apple) has put on their phone (iPhone OS). No user (statistically) cares about GPL 1, 2 or 3 or the possibilities some modular design opens for either hardware or software developers. They care about the UI not sucking. At the end of the day, that's the gap Android has to bridge.

<comment><USER5> I've had an iPod Touch and my girlfriend has had first an iPhone 3G, and now 3GS, for about a year; and on Tuesday I got my Nexus One. I think the Nexus One is the better device. There's a lot of polish missing, with too many taps required for some things, not enough finger-swipes etc., but everything else considered - especially background apps - I would not swap it with an unlocked iPhone. (And I have a fair choice of networks, being in the UK.)

The ability to go onto the marketplace and download e.g. a battery monitor app that could display a number on the notification bar rather than the 5-state default was refreshing. I had to jailbreak by iPod Touch to get similar functionality. I similarly had to jailbreak it to disable auto-rotation; that's a default option in the N1. And the sense of freedom in being able to e.g. download Opera and replace the browser is refreshing. This is a device that doesn't necessarily need Google to improve it - competition can play its part too.

<comment><USER4> _There's a lot of polish missing, with too many taps required for some things, not enough finger-swipes etc., but everything else considered - <USER2> background apps_

At this point you are in the far distant percentile of power/advanced/ideologically-inclined users, though. Obviously some people will care a great deal about the precise display of their battery status. But you have to recognize they are far fewer than the number of people who care about being able to do basic things with 3 fewer taps.

<comment><USER5> The effect is more subtle than that, and hard to explain. The iPod Touch seems relatively primitive to me now. The screens are miles apart, while the Apple device has smoother scrolling etc.

The best way I can think of to describe it is like a Mac vs PC, except with the Unix subsystem made completely locked-down on the Mac. PCs are just better and more productive machines for my way of approaching the world. It just feels more industrial-strength, more adult, less toy-like, at an emotional level that's very hard to express concisely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree but from having been doing some recruitment lately I can truthfully answer that the worst code I've seen recently is not my own... It's scary to recruit programers...

</comment><comment> cool-RR I agree with most of the article, but I wish Jeff Atwood would stop telling us what programmers should be like and who we should not hire. He has good observations, but he's talking like a cult leader and that's annoying.

</comment><comment><USER7> I used to really enjoy such posts - ones that celebrated the weirdness and unpredictability of software. The Zen of the argument Jeff Atwood presents is appealing for some reason. However, reading such articles now I cannot help but think they contain too little substance.

As I understand the reasoning it is this: I'm a relatively good programmer and yet I'm incompetent => The world is full of bad programmers => Most software is badly written => I hate software. Perhaps that currently holds. However, to imply that it will _always_ hold is intellectually crippling. To demonstrate this, all we need to do is look at our premise (axiom?) and rephrase it slightly: "Any good programmer is still incompetent". I personally don't see any reason why this should be self-evident and every reason to find ways to change it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, I thought it was just me. In life I'm pretty laid back--it generally takes a lot before I get riled up by another person. But trying to get something done and running into dumb bugs in bad software makes me rage. I don't rage at my own code though, like he suggests--at worst it's just embarrassing. No, I only rage at other people's bugs. And only when I'm not in a position to debug or fix it (proprietary binaries, web apps, etc).

I think that's why I find my Debian system so comforting. Despite things often going wrong I feel secure using it because no matter what goes wrong I can get the source and fix it (well, within reason--I still can't figure out why my %$#@! sata disk drives randomly hang up for multiple seconds at a time).

<comment><USER9> What motherboard and chipset do you have? My brother began experiencing similar random hang-ups when he added a second hard drive to his C2D E8400 system running Vista.

<comment><USER8> I've got an Intel DX58SO (the only core i7 from Intel I could find at the time). Usually Intel motherboard "just work" with Linux...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I bought a business lXnXvX laptop, and guess what? There is a pile of junk waiting for me named as _enhanced experience_ , well thanks it really made my day by continuously bringing up pc diagnosis software at ridiculous times and asking me needless questions. I became a pc doctor now, installing and updating my computer and making sure it stays healthy. That's my primary job anyway, to keep my pc operational and as healthy as possible. If there is time left from that duty, maybe I can use it for other things. The reason I am angry is this is a premium product and I am obliged to pay $2000+ for this.

<comment><USER11> The best bargain got the lXnXvX buyers, who bought vista machines eligible for win7 upgrade - they received pristine win7 oem discs, without any enhanced experience or other garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since I managed to run GNU/Linux properly, I thought that software can also be good. Grewing I started to put my hands in software development, and now I'm aware that everything sucks. I realized this by myself, than I read this article and ...well, I totally agree.

There's no good software out there. There's just software that sucks less.

<comment><USER13> That's a little strong. Of course there is good software out there. There's even great software out there, just not much.

In a field where the barrier to entry is so low it is natural that the average quality will be lower. Compare this to say, aircraft design, where the bar to entry is skyhigh (pun intended) and as such average quality is higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's not true. I don't hate software. In fact, I quite like it. But I do sometimes hate the things which people make software do - such as spyware/malware/DRM, etc. And you only need to fear blue screens if you're running Windows.

Software is never perfect. You can tinker with it endlessly. If you're a perfectionist then software development is probably not the career for you. I look at writing software in the same way that an author might look at writing a novel. At some point you have to publish. There are always alternative plots that you can think of, the characters aren't always as interesting as they could be and sometimes there are regrets and missed opportunities. Also readers will have diverse opinions about what you wrote, which may be quite different from how you imagined the novel would be interpreted.

</comment><comment><USER15> As most of the comments on the post demonstrate, his demand that all software developers hate their own code more than anyone else's code is a little unreasonable. If he's been fortunate enough to always be the least competent on his team and therefore has saved himself the frustration and his co-workers only produced code which he admired, then he is definitely lucky.

That's not to say that most of us are great programmers -- most of us, as you might expect, are average programmers. It's just to say that there's a lot of code out there that's not even written by programmers at all. You get the designer who's been copy/pasting every snippet he could get his hands on until it just made the dumb thing work, you get construction workers and plumbers who were attracted to the glamor of a desk job after throwing out their backs, or whatever.

One of the last codebases I worked on was a website that ran a whole company but didn't have any ID fields anywhere and all joining or other inter-database matching had to be done by text comparison. This system was written by an ex- construction contractor who'd fallen hard on his luck, learned HTML one day, and became this company's de-facto programmer, so it makes sense that it would be like this; the concept of an ID field, after all, is not self-evident to one without training.

Much code out there is "written" by people who have no idea what they're doing. I don't mean that in the self-effacing, most-programmers-are-average- programmers way, but I mean it in the way that "your system was built by someone who was literally just as qualified as your receptionist or janitor" kind of way.

Given these circumstances, I don't think it should be an immediate writeoff if you can do better than the last codebase you were brought in to fix.

<comment><USER16> _If he's been fortunate enough to always be the least competent on his team_

He's Jeff Atwood -- the hand of fortune has no role in his relative incompetency.

<comment><USER3> Ouch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had some serious deja vu when reading the anecdote about a woman and camera software. I was in pretty much the exact same situation, except it involved my Mac... so not only was it about to be tainted with crappy software written by hardware people, but it was also likely that it was crappy software written by hardware people who were used to writing their crappy software for PCs.

</comment><comment><USER18> Random thought spurred by this article: camera and camcorder ads in pregnancy- related pages probably convert pretty well. IME, it's when your firstborn is coming that you realize your phone's camera isn't good enough.

</comment><comment><USER19> I found this somewhat reminiscent of Socrates' paradoxical "All I know is that I know nothing." Or, knowledge of your own incompetence is a sign of competence.

</comment><comment><USER20> His argument points out the benefit of web applications- your software may suck now, but maybe not so much next week.</comment>


Show HN: Please review our new Kubernetes Pipelines Features - <AUTHOR> https://www.distelli.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the Founder at Distelli and we've been helping our customers deploy to VMs for almost a year.

Now we've gotten several requests from folks asking us if we can build pipelines to their Kubernetes Clusters and we're excited to share what we've built.

We're a small group of engineers and we value honest feedback so tell us what you think.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'd be interested in a feature comparison with Wercker if you've got the time. Got something interesting they don't?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wercker will build your docker images but deployments from wercker to k8s require kubectl, which makes it hard to setup pipelines that deploy from dev -> test automatically and then promote to prod manually once test is working fine.

In the scenario above dev and test are assumed to be different namespaces on same or different clusters.

Finally we have a complete cluster management dashboard and UI so you can launch new clusters and administer existing ones right in the UI.

<comment><USER2> Awesome, thanks for getting back to me; sounds good. I'll try take a look sometime this weekend.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out. If you have questions you can contact us at email@example.com or ping me directly at email@example.com.

Happy to help and look forward to your feedback.

<comment><USER2> So before this weekend I'd only setup continuous deployment of a simple Rails app & database to a cluster using CircleCI [0]. This was quite a lot more complicated than I'd have liked and this weekend I thought I'd give wercker and distelli a go (based on seeing this post).

I found the wercker docs a little lacking. The wercker.yml docs in particular felt incomplete [1] - I already know how to write yaml... However, when I looked around a little with the help of Google I found they had some better tutorial style content on their blog and followed this guide [2]. While the guide might be easier to follow basically that was what I needed and I've been able to get one of their sample apps up and running ok on a test cluster.

After this being a little awkward/unclear at times I thought I'd give distelli a go at the same task:

\- Nice being able to take containers from different repos

\- Good to be able to create clusters but I wasn't able to connect to an existing cluster on GKE.

\- Wasn't able to find anything in the documentation [3] (but managed all the same - credit to the UI?)

\- Not clear how I create other Kubernetes artefacts (services etc)

\- I actually quite like the kubernetes yml file system; distelli seems to abstract this away.

[0]: [https://github.com/charlieegan3/kubernetes- examples/blob/mas...](https://github.com/charlieegan3/kubernetes- examples/blob/master/circle.yml) [1]: [http://devcenter.wercker.com/docs/wercker- yml](http://devcenter.wercker.com/docs/wercker-yml) [2]: [http://blog.wercker.com/Deploying-a-Microservice-to-GKE- with...](http://blog.wercker.com/Deploying-a-Microservice-to-GKE-with-GCR) [3]: [http://imgur.com/a/Qdto5](http://imgur.com/a/Qdto5)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback charlie! Based on your feedback we've added 2 new features to distelli this week.

You can now create and manage Kubernetes services in distelli and also use your own K8S deployment yaml.

Checkout the new features at [https://www.distelli.com](https://www.distelli.com) and thanks for the feedback and for helping us build a better product.

<comment><USER2> So sorry for not responding sooner - I really do appreciate you following up like this. I've finally had a bit of time to look into this again & while I didn't get quite as far as I'd have hoped, I do have a new comments / questions.

* I have a project [https://www.distelli.com/charlieegan3/projects/%20charlieega...](https://www.distelli.com/charlieegan3/projects/%20charlieegan-gke-demo) that seems to have a space in the name. I'm sure this was my mistake originally but I can't seem to remove the project now! :)

* If I click the notifications tab; there's a link to [https://www.distelli.com/charlieegan3/integrations](https://www.distelli.com/charlieegan3/integrations) this doesn't seem to work for me.

* All the docs seem to revolve around the VM dashboard (screen shots etc) - is there a separate page/site for the k8s dashboard?

Perhaps it might be useful if I explain what I'd like to do and maybe you could point me to the relevant documentation.

I'd like to have an application with a series of services in subfolders, something that I might bring up locally in docker compose. Here's an example: [https://github.com/charlieegan3/standpoint/blob/master/docke...](https://github.com/charlieegan3/standpoint/blob/master/docker- compose.yml)

I'd like to push this to github; then have a CI service pick it up; run the tests for each service; build all the separate images; push these to GCR; and trigger a kubectl apply.

So far the closest I've been to getting this working is with Wercker. However, their I've found it hard to get into their no-dockerfile system and have found the `wercker dev --expose 3000` workflow to be frustratingly slow. I'd rather not have dockerfiles for development and then have wercker build them in a different way for production.

I forked [https://github.com/doct15/example-node- docker](https://github.com/doct15/example-node-docker) but couldn't see how something like the above might work in from this template.

Hope that all makes sense; if you've got the time to explain how this might work on distelli or point me in the direction of a relevant guide that'd be awesome. If not, I hope the comments are helpful.

Thanks again for keeping in touch & sorry for taking so long to review your changes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

We have recently written a series of tutorials that I believe addresses your use case.

The tutorials go over taking a simple application composed of 2 services that can be brought up together locally using docker-compose and using distelli to facilitate the following workflow:

1\. Commit to GitHub to trigger builds of both services that run tests and on completion push both images separately to GCR image repositories.

2\. Set up pipelines that apply the new images to an existing kubernetes deployment specification and deploy to 1 or multiple deployment destinations (a combination of a cluster/namespace/name)

3\. Receive notifications once actions are complete for builds, deployments etc. and monitor the status of deployed containers, including logs etc.

Here are the tutorials. Each is pretty short on it's own: [http://www.blog.distelli.com/single- post/2016/12/11/Docker-C...](http://www.blog.distelli.com/single- post/2016/12/11/Docker-Compose-to-Kubernetes-Part-1) [http://www.blog.distelli.com/single- post/2016/12/11/Docker-C...](http://www.blog.distelli.com/single- post/2016/12/11/Docker-Compose-to-Kubernetes-Part-2) [http://www.blog.distelli.com/single- post/2016/12/12/Docker-C...](http://www.blog.distelli.com/single- post/2016/12/12/Docker-Compose-to-Kubernetes-Part-3) [http://www.blog.distelli.com/single- post/2016/12/12/Docker-C...](http://www.blog.distelli.com/single- post/2016/12/12/Docker-Compose-to-Kubernetes-Part-4)

I hope you take a look and let us know if these were helpful to you. Have a great day!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elasticsearch 6.0.0 GA released - <AUTHOR> https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-6-0-0-released <comment><USER2> The new sequence IDs are the most interesting things in this release I think. Having an officially supported cross datacenter replication strategy would be real nice.

Lots of folks will be mad, but removing multiple mapping types is a nice change too. It was a feature that never really made sense. Index-per-type was always the better strategy, even going back to the 0.23 days.

As others in this thread will no doubt point out though - the ES folks are moving awfully fast. I still support 1.7.5 clusters that will take heroic efforts to update. I'd love to use the new features on those clusters, but there simply isn't a valid business case to take on the risk. This isn't like small NPM packages that you can update on a whim - some of these systems require terabytes of re-indexing to upgrade :/

<comment><USER3> Cross data center replication is really a much needed feature.

The way Elasticsearch is going though looks promising. With sorted indices, single mapping type and the other changes we might give it another try after switching to Algolia.

Is there a safe way now to query Elasticsearch directly without the need to go via proxy scripts on the server? This just adds so much overhead to the queries compared to Algolia.

<comment><USER4> Jason from Elastic here. We are actively developing cross datacenter replication (internally we are calling it "cross cluster replication" so you will likely see it referred to this in the future but of course this is subject to change).

I can not give a timeframe, but it is one of the top features on the ES roadmap. :)

Source: I am an engineer working on this feature.

<comment><USER5> Maybe you could be inspired by my async-to-async database: [https://github.com/tinspin/rupy/wiki/Storage](https://github.com/tinspin/rupy/wiki/Storage)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My biggest gripe with the 6.0.0 GA is the removal of multiple mapping types per index. This creates a significant breaking change that will hurt the community tools adoption to 6.0. Their initial plan was to deprecate it and only remove it v7 onwards, which imho would've been a better balance.

<comment><USER7> The removal of mapping types really kicks the bottom out of the app we're making; it's some serious docker-style "break all the things" behaviour. Seriously losing trust on this one.

Are there any good alternatives to ES? Has Solr moved?

<comment><USER8> Can you not use a separate index for each mapping type and just combine the indexes by aliasing them all to one "virtual" index? I think that would effectively be the same but I may be forgetting something.

<comment><USER9> I believe single document updates fail if alias refers to multiple indices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm excited about the official Docker images now being available (again?) in an OSS flavor without X-Pack. Quote from [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.0/...](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.0/docker.html) :

> The images are available in three different configurations or "flavors". The > basic flavor, which is the default, ships with X-Pack Basic features pre- > installed and automatically activated with a free licence. The platinum > flavor features all X-Pack functionally under a 30-day trial licence. The > oss flavor does not include X-Pack, and contains only open-source > Elasticsearch.

<comment><USER11> The pre-installed X-Pack basic license sounds great as well: this at least allows one to use features like monitoring, dev tools and the upgrade assistant out of the box, without the 30-day trial kicking in as was the case for the 5.x Docker images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really wish they'd included the ElasticSearch SQL in 6.0, but I guess that feature still isn't fully baked.

Even if it didn't have the full power of the Elastic JSON Queries, for simple SELECT COUNT() ..GROUP BY, it would have been a nice addition...oh well, back to counting open and closed brackets...

<comment><USER13> We're just in the process of looking into ElasticSearch for an analytics use case, most of the queries we will be doing are simple group by aggregations with count/sums etc

A SQL interface would help a lot, even better if it came with a JDBC driver

<comment><USER14> There is some ES integration in the Apache Calcite. And it has JDBC driver...

P.S. Writing this level of SQL for ES that you describe isn't very difficult - in my project we got working in implementation in 2-3 weeks. Take Calcite. (Recommended but complex, imho), Facebook's Presto SQL parser (not recommended, but simpler)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In a large internal project we still make heavy use of Groovy for scripting. All scripting languages besides the new Painless language were deprecated in version 5, and now in version 6 they are removed. This hampers us in our migration efforts from 5 to 6. Does anyone know if it is still possible to use Groovy through a separate (third party) plugin? I played around a bit with Painless, but can't say that I really like it. Documentation was/is kind of poor, and it seemed to me it somewhat assumed familiarity with Java and it's framework/APIs.

<comment><USER8> Might be worth trying the Groovy plugin that was needed prior to ES integrating it:

[https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-lang- groovy](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-lang-groovy)

<comment><USER15> Thx. I already came across that repo, and seems very outdated. I might have to check out creating my own plugin, and use this as a start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very much appreciate the improvements to handling docs with sparse fields!

</comment><comment><USER17> Does Lucene 7.0 have a better story around G1 GC? ES has always warned against it, would love to see if that had changed

<comment><USER18> We revisit the G1GC recommendation every once it a while. In fact, I am doing benchmarks and testing for G1GC versus CMS with Elasticsearch 6.0.0 right now, so that we have a better idea of where we stand.

Disclaimer: I'm an Elasticsearch dev employed by Elastic.

<comment><USER17> Cool, I've a pretty big cluster with some GC issues (p90 - 15s, p99 - 60s) during node failures, and would be super interested in those results! If there's anything a user can do to help, my email is on my user page :D

<comment><USER9> We observed in past that long GC is the cause of node failures. When long GC happens node doesn't respond, master node decides that this node had left the cluster :\

<comment><USER17> Ya, we often see a node die of natural causes, and then the garbage produced from recovering the node and relocating the data ends up bringing down the rest of the cluster via long GC pauses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Off topic but how do you guys Unit Test Elastic Search queries? Do you start a full node and dump test data in it?

In case of SQL I can start an in memory sqllite and run my tests (Symfony PHP).

<comment><USER20> We've had good results using docker-compose to run ES test suites. Run the app in one container and an ES instance in another.

Test data can be loaded from fixtures or captured/snapshotted using `docker commit` to create specific test images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not as exciting as Solr 7 release.

<comment><USER22> I've been using solr since 1.3 and found trying to use elastic is pretty crazy annoying. I'd love to swap the ELK stack for a solar-based setup.

<comment><USER23> lucidworks made banana, a kibana port to solr, but never take off like kibana. I dont find the diferences between solr and elasticsearch so big, and always prefered the solr way of configurating things instead of the json api of elasticsearch. The solr data-import-handler has been also a big timesaver.</comment></comment></comment>


Comment on Any Page of the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ocommentsorg-comments-on/eamanhclbmdjhndmidbhnfgpepofgjdf <comment><AUTHOR> "oComments (a.k.a Open Comments) is a layer on top of the web that lets you comment on any page of the internet with no risk of your voice being muffled."

</comment><comment><USER2> I haven't looked at this particular implementation, but I think we really need something like this. As for the "no risk of your voice being muffled" part... You can't guarantee such a thing in any country, and it's not exactly a desirable attribute for such a commenting system either (in my opinion!).

Note: I've often thought about creating a system like this, and I recall having seen similar things in the past. In my opinion, to make such a system useful for a large number of people:

\- You need moderation (upvote/downvote _might_ be enough) \- Who wants to use a system that is full of troll comments? \- Who wants to use a system that is full of comments advocating genocide? \- Who wants to use a system that is full of spam and scammers? \- It would be really cool if you could attach comments to a specific part of the page \- You probably need a bunch of useful comments in easy-to-see places to make people want to use this system \- In order to make people want to use this, it would obviously be best to have this integrated in browsers right from the start, but that's an obviously impossible goal at first (though you could maybe get deals with some of the really small browsers) \- An API that allows websites to display the comments attached to the current page (and add new comments) would be very useful \- If this system takes off, it has to be pretty scalable

</comment><comment><USER3> So, Dissenter.</comment>


Hello JIT World: The Joy of Simple JITs (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reverberate.org/2012/12/hello-jit-world-joy-of-simple-jits.html <comment><USER2> Author here -- I'm happy to see the continued interest in this article. I had a lot of fun writing it. DynASM is some great work and doesn't have a lot of documentation, so I was hoping to bridge this gap with an introductory tutoral. And Brainfuck provided just the right problem for writing a short and sweet program that does something interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> I made a very fast BF JIT based on this post: [https://github.com/rmmh/beefit](https://github.com/rmmh/beefit)

I implemented a fair number of optimizations, but there aren't many large benchmarks to really crunch down on. An experimental register allocation pass was awkward (DynASM doesn't really support run-time register selection) and didn't improve performance much.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for linking to this!

I've been building a toy language by mutating the excellent Lua 5.2 runtime, it's one of my silly side projects aimed at taking me out of my coding comfort zone.

Looking into the LuaJIT code to figure out how they did it has been on my list for a few days now, and this introduction to DynASM provides an nice starting point (LuaJIT itself is based on Lua 5.1 and unlikely to be updated).

</comment><comment><USER5> I would have appreciated if you would also had described the downsides of using DynASM compared to other jitters.

E.g. In lightning you don't care too much about the target architecture, as you jit to an abstract RISC machine. So the jit library is portable (not in DynASM), does handle the calling conventions for you (not in DynASM), and does register optimizations automatically (max 6 with lightning), again not in DynASM).

The real trick you seem to like is the syntax abstraction, using | as prefix. But normal C can do the same with __asm(string) and it's easier to use C macros for portable ASM, and LISP jit libraries have long done the same, with the advantage in LISP that the JIT macros in lisp are part of the normal language. No need to deal with restricted C macros.

<comment><USER2> > I would have appreciated if you would also had described the downsides of > using DynASM compared to other jitters.

The article wasn't meant to be a comparative evaluation of DynASM vs other dynamic code generation engines. If I was comparing it against engines like LLVM and Lightning that have their own IR and optimizers I would have also mentioned DynASM's advantages compared to them, such as:

\- DynASM is _much_ smaller: DynASM's runtime is something like 2k of object code. Lightning is more like 150k and LLVM is many times bigger than that.

\- DynASM is faster: I haven't benchmarked against lightning but LLVM is known not to be very fast at JITting, and just the fact that Lightning is performing its own optimizations means that DynASM is probably faster (note that I'm talking specifically about the speed of doing the code generation itself).

\- DynASM gives greater control: you have full control over what instructions are emitted. If you want to play a little fast and loose with calling conventions for speed, you can (I do this in my JIT). If you want to use SSE/AVX/etc. or other very specialized instructions like x86's parsing instructions, you can.

Basically, if you already have your own IR and optimizer and you just want a code generator, and want control over what specific processor instructions you are emitting, then DynASM is a great choice. If you don't have your own optimized IR, or you don't want to write a separate code generator per platform, and you don't mind the size/speed overhead of other engines, then other projects might be a better choice.

> The real trick you seem to like is the syntax abstraction, using | as > prefix. But normal C can do the same with __asm(string)

If you think __asm(string) is the same as DynASM, then you missed the point of the article.

__asm(string) is great if you just want to write some static ASM that is fully known at compile time. But how are you going to use __asm(string) to do this?

        void emit_mov(int immediate) {
          // This won't work, you can't substitute a variable
          // into an __asm() expression.
          __asm("mov eax, immediate");
        }

Sure you could pass the immediate to the ASM via a register, but that's not what we're trying to do, we're trying to build code at runtime. __asm() won't help us with that.

> and it's easier to use C macros for portable ASM

Not sure what you mean by this. If you're talking about a BPF-like approach like I discussed in my article, that's not portable and not very readable IMO.

<comment><USER3> DynASM isn't quite a _full_ code generator, since you can't easily select registers dynamically.

<comment><USER2> x86 supports this, though none of the other architectures do: [http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/runtime-variable- regist...](http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/runtime-variable-register-in- dynasm,2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very well-written bite-sized intro. I've always wondered how well JITs would do if they had access to a scratchpad RAM (kind of like many GPUs). It's a very different problem than with a register allocator but I feel it'd be more useful for a JIT since it probably knows more about the program structure than whatever LRU variant the cache algorithm is using.

</comment><comment><USER7> Related: [https://github.com/sanjoy/bfjit](https://github.com/sanjoy/bfjit) (a brainfuck interpreter with a tracing JIT for hot loops).</comment>


Show HN: No parties during Corona? GO BEERCRAWL - <AUTHOR> https://gobeercrawl.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys,

in current times, in most of the world clubs are closed, parties and festivals are cancelled. And bars and other places generally discourage any kind of party, if they're even open. I totally get it. But I'm very disappointed at the total lack of (relatively safe) alternatives. We're basically told to stay home and social life has taken a backseat and remains to do so for a very long time to come. Specifically meeting new people IRL in a relaxed and fun setting has more or less disappeared (apart from one to one Tinder meetups maybe?).

BEERCRAWL (gobeercrawl.com) aims to bring back partying and casually meeting new people in a comparably safe way, by meeting in a smaller group, outside (abiding by all laws of course, like masks and social distancing) and have drinks, conversation, a laugh and generally a good time. Like a pubcrawl, the group follows a certain route, visiting several places to refill beverages.

I'm curious to hear your feedback!

I understand that this might be controversial for some. We've seen protests and gatherings of thousands of people. Compared to that, in a beercrawl one will usually talk to only a handful of people face to face. So it is rather insignificant.

</comment><comment><USER2> First of, nice looking website! I think you could add some pictures so people can get a better image on what is a beercrawl.

What's your go-to market strategy? Do you intend to start beercrawl around Europe major cities?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Would love to add pictures of the stops, but that'll be a lot of google api calls. And as this is a passion project right now, I'm trying to avoid all extra costs. Same goes for go-to market strategy. I'm just putting this thing out there. People who like the idea and have a social following can create their crawl and share it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks nice, I'll try it this weekend!

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know how it went :)</comment></comment>


CO₂ and Other Greenhouse Gas Emissions - <AUTHOR> https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions <comment><USER2> It is always interesting to see graphs like this, I am curious how much something like a new green deal would move the 2100 temperature line. A common argument against it is that everything depends on China and India. I don't suspect this is true. The USA is one of the highest per capita emitters, it doesn't seem right that we would get to live like that while we take away resources from these other countries who are not as capable of switching over. At least we should get to a point where we all have equal per capita emitters, preferably we should be investing in the technology that would allow them to never have to use carbon-emitting technologies and even potentially profit off them.

<comment><USER3> I think Otherlab's analyses talk about this a little:

The Green New Deal: The enormous opportunity in shooting for the moon. [https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and- gnd-b8d...](https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and- gnd-b8ddd569de16) (electrifying everything with clean generation will reduce energy needs by half even without any changes in lifestyle)

How do we decarbonize? [https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we- decarbonize-7fc2f...](https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we- decarbonize-7fc2fa84e887) (A fairly balanced take on how realistic various solutions are, from engineering, policy, and economic perspectives)

<comment><USER2> I'm really a fan of the new green deal, I am afraid that them trying to couple it with a jobs guarantee and universal healthcare will make it easy for the Republicans to make it look like a power grab. I am a fan of both a jobs guarantee and universal healthcare, but those items are not nearly as important as decarbonizing as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER4> Seems like if part of the political resistance is people losing jobs in dirty indstries (and since healthcare and employment are bizarrely conjoined) then addressing all three together makes perfect sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are fantastic charts.

The problem is that most people will look at them, quickly find "another" large source of CO2 emissions (be it another country, another industry), point fingers and say "it's them!" without doing anything else. Which in the long term (as in, our children and grandchildren will suffer) will destroy our planet.

<comment><USER6> A thought I had the other day, that sort of fits in the context of what you're saying, but probably not completely:

It's interesting to step back and consider how the current Climate Change narrative is similar to the universal theme of "We offended God, so now he is punishing us."

Not really sure what the implications of that are, but seems like something that could be harnessed either for good or ill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's super depressing to see the acceleration of coal energy in 2000. Despite the rise of renewables, they haven't even been able to keep up with the rise of coal!

And the vast majority of it comes from energy production! Electric cars don't solve the problem if we are switching from high-efficiency gas engines to coal-fired electric.

<comment><USER8> It's even worse. Fossil investments are still growing in 2018 [https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-iea-energy-investment- idU...](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-iea-energy-investment- idUKKCN1SJ2F8)

<comment><USER9> "Molecules of freedom"! [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/29/politics/doe- freedom-gas-...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/29/politics/doe-freedom-gas- natural-gas/index.html)

Beyond parody.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What happened in 1600 that made CO2 levels drop? Natural reforestation after European germs wiped out agricultural civilizations in the Americas?

<comment><USER11> Carbon dioxide and temperature are linked. 1650 was the height of the Little Ice Age [0]. Lots of interesting theories and research, e.g. [1], for the specific carbon dioxide drop.

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

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2769](https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2769)

<comment><USER10> The link from CO2 to temperature is well discussed. But carbon does not randomly disappear from the atmosphere, so either the trigger must have been something on the ground/at sea or there's also a reverse causal link from temperature to CO2 (so it could be triggered by something sun activity), which would imply a terribly unstable system. A very interesting topic indeed. Could variations in the amount of living biomass (which temporarily binds carbon to be released after death unless buried into isolation) make that much of a dent in atmospheric carbon concentration? My gut feeling says atmospheric carbon far outweighs biologically bound (and is in turn dwarfed by geologically bound, until we have dug it all up), but that's really just a guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> OurWorldInData is one of my favorite resources now for finding out about the world

</comment><comment><USER13> Utterly depressing to see how much damage we can cause in 30-40 years, basically only since older "millennials" were born.

</comment><comment><USER14> > 1.5°C consistent: there are a range of emissions pathways that would be > compatible with limiting average warming to 1.5°C by 2100. However, all > would require a very urgent and rapid reduction in global greenhouse gas > emissions.

Is this polite data analyst-speak for "We're fucked"?

<comment><USER15> Seeing as how the 1.5C pathways require global emissions to go zero of negative within our lifetimes, yes: [https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/04/Greenhouse-gas- em...](https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/04/Greenhouse-gas-emission- scenarios-01.png).

<comment><USER2> What I don't understand about this is, that we were flat for about three years, and then we went up a little bit. This to me signals that we are close to if not at peak emissions and we should be able to start seeing the downturn at any time. But the chart you are showing has emissions increasing for the next 20 years. Am I oversimplifying or being naive?

<comment><USER15> We are nowhere near peak emissions. There may be dips here and there (e.g. due to recession). But look what happened to China starting in 2000: [https://images.app.goo.gl/F4m9zThoK7Yr9jC66](https://images.app.goo.gl/F4m9zThoK7Yr9jC66). It added more CO2 than the total output of the US. That's going to happen to India and Africa over the next few decades as those places develop into middle class economies.

<comment><USER16> In other words authorities in China, India and Africa pay lip service to what one might call the 'Greta Prediction' while their actions show they simply do not believe it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Climate aside, doesn't the increase of CO2 from 280PPM to 400PPM not have a substantial impact on the respiration of trees and animals? 42% increase of poison to animals has no meaningful impact?

<comment> village-idiot I'm not sure about other animals, but 400ppm is a long way away from toxic for humanity. Poorly ventilated indoor environments can easily hit 1200-1500ppm. You've got to hit 70,000 to 100,000 ppm before you start running the risk of coma and death.

Interestingly some studies indicate that 1200ppm and higher might confer some mild cognitive impairment, even if it's a long way away from fatal. This has been used glibly to explain the poor decisions made in office rooms, but one does wonder what happens to humanity if global emissions make us slightly dumber.

<comment><USER8> That's why they are called "poorly ventilated" and you are not supposed to stay in them 24/7\. Indeed, adverse effects begin before coma and death.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Is Building a Big, Mysterious Radio Transmitter in the Desert - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a19750/google-is-building-a-big-mysterious-radio-transmitter-in-the-desert/ <comment><USER2> Originally found by hackaday[0] from the FCC[1]

[0]: [http://hackaday.com/2016/03/02/google-is-building-a-100kw- ra...](http://hackaday.com/2016/03/02/google-is-building-a-100kw-radio- transmitter-at-a-spaceport-and-no-one-knows-why/)

[1]:[https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=173188&x=](https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=173188&x=)

</comment><comment><USER3> The ERP numbers are misleading. I've read elsewhere that the transmitter's output at the antenna connector is on the order of a half watt.

</comment><comment><USER4> KiloWatts _and_ GigaHertz? Ummm... just wow. Other than big mother military radars, that much power at that high a frequency is.... unusual.

<comment><USER5> It's suspicious. Because at gigahertz you definitely cannot go above the radio horizon even at very high powers. So it must be trying to either do non- communications tasks, or point upwards into space, so it can do comms with things in orbit.</comment></comment>


Apple increased R&D spending by $1 billion in 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/11/apple-increased-rd-spending-by-1-billion-in-2012/ <comment><USER2> Some perspective:

Apple is now spending roughly a third as much as Microsoft does on research despite generating roughly 50% more revenue. Apple spends roughly one half of what Google spends on research, despite having almost three times the revenue!

Microsoft is a bit of a sleeping giant when it comes to innovation. They do a _lot_ of research and a much of it is of a very fundamental nature that is decades from being commercializable. Of course, they've been doing this for long enough that they currently employ the leading experts in some of the stuff that fit that description ten years ago. Corporate politics under Ballmer (e.g. stack ranking) and a strong aversion to disruptive changes in existing products have really reigned MS's innovation in. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years as MS software settles into new form-factors for the first time in ages (that goes double if Ballmer is shown the door).

Apple is much more focused than Microsoft on immediately commercializable products. In terms of product-bang for research-buck, Apple probably does a lot better than Microsoft. Still all MS needs to do to rock Apple's tree is shake up it's stodgy corporate structure a bit and become more adventurous.

Google, of course, is a huge innovator, but they do tend to be more like Apple in terms of their focus (i.e. More short term than MS). This focus combined with double the research budget does suggest that Google is the most likely company to out-innovate Apple in the short-term. Indeed, we've started to see this as Android has been gradually getting further ahead of iOS in terms of features even if it has not yet caught up in polish.

Apple is like a solid work-horse running down a race-track. Google is more of a thoroughbred, but got stuck in the gate. Now that Google is threatening for the lead, Apple is applying the whip more generously. MS is like a cheetah laying by the side of the track. It could come out of nowhere and change everything or it could just sit their licking its paws.

<comment><USER3> You can't compare the generated revenue like this. Apple is selling a lot of hardware. Microsoft as well as Google are selling very little hardware.

Thats a bit like comparing the revenue of a real estate agent with the revenue of a developer selling apps on the app store. A developer of a simple app making 200k revenue / year has probably a higher profit than a real estate agent with the same amount of revenue. Selling one house to a client costs you 200k and you get 3% of that… Does this make sense?

<comment><USER4> Revenue is Vanity, Profit is Sanity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it. \-- Steve Jobs, Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998

<comment><USER6> Most of Apple's innovations are not publishable as science papers. In contrast, IBMs innovations are routinely of publishable kind. Microsoft, HP, and Google also do a lot of "hard" computer science or engineering work.

Apple's UI and integration innovations not nearly in the same class as those of the others. That's not to say Apple doesn't help society, or that it's not creative. But it's certainly not doing the same type of work as the others. In fact, many of the technologies that Apple has purchased, such as Siri, would not exist without lots of funding into solving the harder problems.

<comment><USER7> _In fact, many of the technologies that Apple has purchased, such as Siri, would not exist without lots of funding into solving the harder problems._

That doesn't mean they wouldn't like to take all the credit for it ;)

<comment><USER8> You can do better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > spending on research and development has grown significantly > to $3.4 > billion—an increase of $1 billion over 2011

This can be construed as either a positive or a negative. It's positive if the R&D has a particularly focused scope, resulting in coherent products/technologies that actually hit the market. Often when there's a lack of vision a company (Microsoft is a great example) will produce a plethora of solutions in search of a problem and patent the shit out of everything along the way.

Hopefully this isn't a case of lack of vision where Apple is throwing crap at the wall until they find something that sticks and packing IP in the piggy bank for future lawsuits. Big R&D budgets can be a sign of this. We'll see.

<comment><USER10> > Often when there's a lack of vision a company (Microsoft is a great example) > will produce a plethora of solutions in search of a problem and patent the > shit out of everything along the way.

What sort of patents has MS exercised in this fashion? They've shown some amazing tech demos over the past 4-5 years and a lot of them have materialized in to actual products. Even perhaps the biggest 'demo noshow' has been used: Surface (i.e., the surface of 4 years ago).

<comment><USER11> Nathan Myrvhold's patent troll firm that has some ties so MS is probably what was being referred to.

<comment><USER12> Nathan Myrvhold did not build a patent portfolio out of Microsoft's R&D budget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What kind of R&D is happening at Apple? I did a search with the keyword "research" on their job board and not much interesting turned up except for a few "Data scientist" positions.

<comment><USER14> As Apple increasingly moves to their own chips (A4, A5, A5X, A6, A6x), I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of this additional spending were going to SoC design. Keeping pace with Intel's ~6.5B R&D budget can't be cheap.

In any case, this isn't really news, or even good reporting. Look at the rest of the financial statements: SG&A and R&D expenses have actually decreased as a percentage of net sales over the last two years. Apple is big, so the absolute numbers are impressive: but percentage-wise, this isn't even a blip. TFA is cherry-picking numbers and sensationalizing for page views.

See: [http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/2149923444x0x444...](http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/2149923444x0x444195/E7A8FE5F-8835-46AB- ACC2-6FA28DFB546D/Three_Yr_Financial_History.pdf)

<comment><USER6> This move genuinely surprised me. One can certainly argue that Apple's previous focus on the PowerPC was very detrimental in the long run. As you point out, they could not even keep up with IBM let alone Intel. I can't help but wonder if we'll see a repeat performance this time around with ARM and others outpacing the Ax chip line's development speed.

<comment><USER15> For the volumes in which PowerPC Macs were shipping, it wasn't worth it for IBM or Motorola to devote serious engineering resources. And at the time Apple wasn't the cash fountain it is today.

In terms of units shipped, the iPhone and iPad vastly outstrip the Mac. And those devices repay investment in chip technology by establishing a marketing point of differentiation.

So actually, given the amount of free cashflow Apple has, it makes sense to spend up to a billion on embedded chips but not on desktops, where Intel has a far bigger lead on design and process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder by how much their lawyer budget increased over the past years.

<comment><USER17> Worthless Apple bashing over subjects that have been beaten in to the ground, as late as today, have little use here and only drag down the conversation

<comment><USER18> The article and Apple's filing mention the legal costs of litigation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We need to understand companies do two kind of R&D , one is where company try to enhance their current offering to ensure that they remain on the cutting edge of the current lot (Maps, Search, UI based R&D in apple are examples of it), while other side of R&D explore other opportunities in CS and try to break new grounds. These R&D require more budget and are of experimental nature. In result , the first kind of R&D produce better results in terms of money spend but provide a narrow path of innovation while the later kind provide more wider path of innovation but produce less fruite in terms of money spent.

</comment><comment><USER20> R&D is how we get new ideas from techies, that's good! However Apple should spend 10 times that, MS for instance spent 9billions in R&D just in 2012. You can like the company or not, but reasearch is one way to progress :)

</comment><comment><USER21> Search?

<comment><USER22> I think their recent foray into Maps may give them pause.</comment></comment>