Apple Open Source Site - <AUTHOR> http://www.opensource.apple.com/

<comment><USER2> Bummed there is no real ability to contribute. Or if there is, I'd love to hear more. I found a bug in an xnu syscall, submitted it and the fix to bugreports.apple.com a year ago and I don't even know if anyone has seen it.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-10101/](http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-10101/)

How much is missing from that list that would be needed for OpenDarwin to work again?

<comment><USER4> [I'm going to apologize in advance for the chaos of this comment; there's a lot of moving parts and - as the expression goes - sorry this is so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter. And holy fuck I wish HN had a markup language with more than 3 modes]

Funny you should mention that, as I just had a scratch at it this weekend. Although OpenDarwin has ceased operations as of 2004 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29#OpenDarwin)), the PureDarwin project has some flickering signs of life but just barely: [http://www.puredarwin.org/](http://www.puredarwin.org/) and [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/puredarwi...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/puredarwin)

While I was roaming around trying to see if anyone was trying to get such a beast to run in modern VirtualBox setups, I discovered that Apple used to publish ISOs of Darwin ([https://opensource.apple.com/static/iso/](https://opensource.apple.com/static/iso/)) but I was not lucky enough to have the CD boot in VBox, and I didn't get very far with qemu, either: [http://althenia.net/notes/darwin](http://althenia.net/notes/darwin)

My interest is almost solely in getting PureDarwin up and running in Vagrant/VBox with _some_ networking support, so making headless OSX build boxes will stop being a ginormous technical and licensing clusterfuck. I have a mild interest in ReactOS for the same end game, but at this moment I will benefit from OSX toys more.

Probably our best shot is to tag along on the coattails of the development that goes into making the hackintoshes run and support crazy hardware.

Separately, Catherine (of opensn0w fame) is porting XNU to ARM [https://github.com/darwin-on-arm/xnu](https://github.com/darwin-on-arm/xnu) and [https://github.com/darwin-on-arm/wiki/wiki/Building- Darwin](https://github.com/darwin-on-arm/wiki/wiki/Building-Darwin) so that should be interesting, too, in a qemu kind of way. If nothing else, at least the kernel is receiving some attention outside of Infinite Loop.

<comment><USER3> That's really really interesting. I'll have some spare time soon, reach out if you need some help/testing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Being famous for its designs, Apple should have redesign this site. I am not good at UI/UX, but this looks ugly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Newest version are available here [https://developer.apple.com/opensource/](https://developer.apple.com/opensource/)

<comment><USER6> > Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a > key part of its software strategy, continues to use and release significant > quantities of open source software.

Uh... what?

<comment><USER7> Exactly my thoughts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So what's the purpose of this site? To attract learners and contributors? To build a better source code browsing system? To build an open-source ecosystem? To promote the spirit of open-source softwares?

The half-assed design of the webpage indicates that Apple is probably not paying attention to it at all. So what's the purpose of this site exactly?

<comment><USER9> Isn't that obvious? To release the modified code used in some of the Free Software packages they use for their devices. It's a requirement.

<comment><USER10> No, most of the source released is not under a virulent license. They are not _required_ to provide it.

Edit: oh wow, downvoted for stating objective facts that take _seconds_ to verify.

<comment><USER11> I didn't downvote you, but the use of "virulent" instead of "copyleft" is annoying and imprecise.

<comment><USER10> Viral licensing is a standard, established, and widely used term, which also has the property of using real words rather than invented neologisms which have imprecise and incorrect definitions (from POV of real-world usage in OSS) in dictionaries: [http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/buzzword/entries/copyl...](http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/buzzword/entries/copyleft.html)

Inventing new words for concepts properly described by old words is what's annoying, and it's really imprecise when people outside the specialized field start to have different opinions about what the neologisms mean than the people inside the field who actually use them.

<comment><USER11> You wrote that Apple would only be forced to distribute code under viral licenses, but licenses like MPL are hardly "viral" (they don't require you to distributed linked code) yet they still require people to distribute the original source. "Viral licenses" lose the nuance of weak copyleft.

That's besides the inherit prejudice in the choice of the word "viral".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> ResearchKit and more [https://developer.apple.com/opensource/](https://developer.apple.com/opensource/)

</comment><comment><USER12> The sources from 10.10.2 to 10.10.4 are missing. Is this somehow a preparation for the upcoming T(T)IP? Is the source still accessible for security firms?

<comment><USER13> Nope. Apple is just extremely tardy in general about releasing source; this has been the case for years.

edit: this even applies to LGPL stuff under the iOS umbrella. The latest version of WebCore available is from iOS 6.1.3; iOS is now on 8.4. I made an explicit request some time ago for the source corresponding to 7.x and 8.0, and after a while got 7.x (apparently they nevertheless haven't bothered to publish it on this site), but IIRC I never got 8.x. Need to check.

<comment> dev-da0 Usually about a month or two. A radar and/or email can help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love Apple's great contribution to Open Source.

</comment><comment><USER15> Still no trace of Swift. Yawn.

</comment><comment><USER16> They just killed every working, apple based program on 10.5.9 I'm stuck. No browser works. Won't update, and all their shit just crashes upon open...

Happened in the span of three days.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is rather interesting, and raises a lot of questions for me: does this site exist for a long time already, or is it some kind of response to Microsoft putting tons of projects on github since last year (IIRC), or what is the reason this is on HN now?

Anyone knows whether the downloads of 'standard' software like git/clang are pathed versions or the original?

Why would they not have used github or similar? Internally they likely do use version control anyway.

<comment><USER18> There's nothing new about this page, other than software updates. It's been around for years. I don't know why it's getting posted.

<comment><USER4> There are plenty of reposts that make it on the front page, and they were expressly ok-ed in the FAQ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) It got posted for the same reason anything gets posted: someone thought it was interesting, and it was upvoted to the front page because _others_ thought it was interesting, too. Plus, Sunday.

IMHO, the community benefits far more from folks weighing in with their opinions or discoveries or complaints in the comments than the actual link itself.</comment></comment></comment>


Tipu's Tiger - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipu%27s_Tiger <comment><USER2> Also featured in Sharpe's Tiger ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Tiger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe's_Tiger))

</comment><comment><USER3> I love the British reaction.</comment>


$90 million in maintenance per year for healthcare.gov - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/01/12/90-million-in-maintenance-per-year-for-healthcare-gov/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if they also fired the government people that insisted that the site had to use a weird proprietary XML database called MarkLogic, which apparently was one of the reasons for the concurrency problems. (As described here [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us/politics/tension-and- wo...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us/politics/tension-and-woes-before- health-website-crash.html))

A SQL server, probably Oracle, should almost always be the answer for a large bureaucratic product like this.

<comment><USER3> I find it difficult to judge the quality of the database given what we've learned, especially since the initial provisioning was entirely inadequate for any database; about when that article was written it was moved off government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) shared VM infrastructure to 12 dedicated servers.

However, there's absolutely no doubt the contractors weren't familiar with it and its paradigm. A SQL RDBMS, which pretty much everyone is familiar with, would have been a much less risky bet. But the CMS had had success with the XML database, and since they arrogated to themselves the roles of general contractor and system integrator (and in fact were "fired" about the time that article was written), the consulting companies had no choice but to use it.

See my other comment where people are suspecting Accenture might just throw away a lot of the current system and replace it with what they did for California.

EDITED: to make more clear the distinction between the unit of the Federal government CMS and CGI Federal, the fired contractor.

<comment><USER4> _since they arrogated to themselves the roles of general contractor and system integrator_

...and also attempted to arrogate to themselves those _future_ roles. Would that there were taxpayer protections against that kind of anti-competitive (on face, at least) strategy.

<comment><USER3> Not entirely sure that's necessary when those who do it fail so hard, i.e. there's at least some feedback in the system. The other exchange example where this happened is Oregon, which isn't even pretending that their site works.

<comment><USER4> Well, I'm sure there are ton of gov't contractors who have locked themselves in successfully. The feedback only factors in negative cases, but it's still harmful in the positive one.

<comment><USER3> I think you may have made a misapprehension based on CMS being a similar acronym to CGI, the fired contractor. The former is the Federal government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and those government bureaucrats are the ones that arrogated to themselves technical management roles they were completely inadequate to handle.

Ditto Oregon, when they hired a new IT person who though they could save something like $32 million by being the prime contractor (as I recall; don't remember what happened with systems integration, except of course it's still totally failing).

We could only wish that government contractors had locked themselves into the prime contractor and systems integrator roles for CMS or HHS; who knows, maybe they would even have had the stones to tell the politicians NO! when the latter continued making requirements changes too late for implementation. Compare to Kentucky, which won by hiring a prime (Deloitte) who maintained a ruthless focus on what we call the MVP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem here isn't with "government," but with the failed ERP-style methodology of development that federal and local governments, along with very large corporations use to develop technology. Hewlett Packard, Hershey, along with a string of other large corporations have lost billions in value from these kinds of integrations. Hershey even missed Halloween one year because of a failed integration.

And while Silicon Valley and the startup community has largely moved away from this methodology, large bureaucracies, ever afraid of risk, seem drawn to them. But as far as I can tell, this idea that "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" is a function of marketing, not of a track record of success (IBM's latest for the feds: [http://sam.gov](http://sam.gov). $171 Million).

What we can do to solve this problem isn't to scoff and laugh at government. While some want larger or smaller government, we all should want it to do what it is doing affordably.

The opportunity for smart technologists to take on the idea of working with government _commercially_ is the next step in the Civic Hacking movement. I hope those invited to go to their next hackathon for the city or invited to give their free advice and labor to the city out of a sense of civic duty, begin to ask the question: why are you asking me for stuff for free with one hand, whilst handing out million dollar contracts with the other. How can you fix procurement in a way that allows me to compete for the serious work, so that I can save you from this mess?

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised Philip Greenspun is acting so naive here. "If it works, why will it take $90 million to keep it running?" This from a computer scientist? Software is never "done", and maintenance on existing computer systems is quite often far more expensive than the initial development. Do you want it to keep updated with correct information about the various plans that are available? To keep up with new tweaks to the regulations? To address new bugs that come up when it's annual renewal time? To stay secure over time? All of these things require a lot of work. And how about fixing the bugs that still remain? Or improving the system?

Yes, government projects of this sort are inevitably going to cost far more than a startup company, and mistakes will be made. But $90 million out of the federal budget isn't even worth blinking at. The Defense Department spends that much in about an hour and a half.

But if you really want to save money in this area, you should argue for eliminating the exchanges and healthcare.gov altogether. Just sign everyone up for Medicare. Save a few hundred billion over the next few years give or take.

</comment><comment><USER7> Everytime there's a "government app costs $x million" story, someone always chimes in with "Lol I could build that in PHP for $2."

It seems a fair percentage of HN'ers have not experienced the sheer Khafkaesque deadlock that is a large corp or govt department.

The cost is not in the dev effort, quite often there is actually a very small team of devs doing the "real" work. Outsourcing the dev work is not going to help because it is the massive bureaucratic pyramid which is crushing the devs, and that pyramid can't be outsourced.

This is not a technology problem. It's an enterprise management problem.

<comment><USER8> Worse, it easily enters Mythical Man-Month territory where more staff (especially more managers) are thrown at the problem, which actually makes it worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The really disturbing thing is this is almost certainly _not_ an isolated incident. It's just that this is the first time that a government IT project has received so much scrutiny. Makes you think when politicians insist that taxes and fees need to be raised.

<comment><USER10> well, the healthcare.gov project being the spearhead of the most important policy push by the current President and his party - i'd guess that it is actually the most efficient (less than half a billion) and successful (developed in 2 years, fixed in 3 months) one among myriad of government projects and budget sinks, most of which isn't auditable and hasn't been in years (for example, see Pentagon budget audit (i.e. lack of it))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes I think about creating an organization that's sole purpose would be to enter bids in on government tech contracts with upper and lower cost estimates. It wouldn't actually _do_ any of the work (to maintain neutrality), but at least put in a reasonable set of figures for how much a project _should_ cost. Or maybe just a company that reviews proposals for local/state/federal government agencies to ensure they aren't being ripped off.

Frankly, tech contracts aren't the only thing that goes wrong. Civil engineering contracts are just as awful with people underbidding and then having massive cost overruns because there was no expert there to say, hey... this isn't reasonable.

<comment><USER10> >Sometimes I think about creating an organization that's sole purpose would be to enter bids in on government tech contracts with upper and lower cost estimates. It wouldn't actually do any of the work (to maintain neutrality), but at least put in a reasonable set of figures for how much a project should cost. Or maybe just a company that reviews proposals for local/state/federal government agencies to ensure they aren't being ripped off.

so one more consulting participant and review layer to dig teeth into government money without actually delivering on the project? And with the best intentions like everybody else :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Misleading title. The $90m cost is a 12 month contract with a new company, not the amount it might cost each year indefinitely.

<comment><USER3> Bingo.

Given how bad the system still is (e.g. 5% error rate in sending info to insurers [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/09/a...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/09/a-health- industry-expert-on-the-fundamental-problem-with-obamacare/) and also see his very high signal to noise ratio blog: [http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/](http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/)), and how much of it is left to be done (paying insurers, change in status updates, etc. etc. etc.) this is not just cheap, but some are suspecting that when Accenture fully takes over, right at the end of the spring enrollment period, they'll just throw much or most of the existing system away and start with what they did for California, which isn't hardly as bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I once worked on a project for the American government. The company I was working for was the 4th and last in a line of companies. We were the ones actually writing the software and it was still 5 times more money than I thought was reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have zero technical skills and I would do this for a mere 85 million.

I'm pretty sure for 85 million, I could assemble a crack team of devs to knock this out as a more competitive price.

<comment><USER15> nope.

this is highly sensitive data, you can't treat it like a private business does, say like Target.

this needs to survive countless audits, from code, to docs, to various accessiblity and other norms.

a large number of data interfaces in the background to byzantine and opaque systems.

etc etc etc.

COMPLIANCE is the cost driver. and not necessarily for a bad reason.

<comment><USER16> _this is highly sensitive data, you can 't treat it like a private business does, say like Target._

You're joking, right? Because the lack of care that was put into security is WIDELY documented. They couldn't even get _internal_ signoffs on security and decided to launch anyway.

It's simple, really: the government doesn't care if they break their own laws. The laws are for everyone else.

<comment><USER15> that's launch, in a rushed way. political decision. but as you see, highly visible.

some new business site/app does not fall under the same public and governmental scrutiny. the ones that do with the same scope as this site - cost as much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's the same story everywhere. Heard this anecdote about installation of ERP in one of India's major ports. The programmers were paid in gold to delay project just so old ways of funnelling money remains intact.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hn readers might be interested to read about some of the UK government IT projects. I'm sure some of them went well, but many had huge budgets and were then scrapped because they were useless.

[http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public- sector/2013/05/pu...](http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public- sector/2013/05/pull-out-and-keepyour-guide-to.html)

Connecting for health cost £11bn - billion - and is in various states of abandoned.

</comment><comment><USER19> Politics, bureaucracy, mismanagement-- this policy has been a failure.

Time to join the 21st century and push for universal healthcare.

<comment><USER20> > Time to join the 21st century and push for universal healthcare.

No it's not. Source: I'm a Finn.

Compare two scenarios:

      A) Healthcare is run with money that's just taken from people.
      B) Healthcare is run as a business, with people paying for it voluntarily.

Which one do you think will be better quality? Suppose you're running a car repair shop, but your "customers" are just forced to come to you and pay for your services. Are you motivated to: 1) provide them with good service, 2) keep your costs low, 3) maintain high standards?

The obvious answers are: No, No, and No, and that's exactly what happens with _everything_ that's run by any government, because it's always with someone else's money and the "customers" aren't actually customers - they have no choice.

It's rather unsurprising, then, that Finland's public healthcare system is of poor quality, and that we have to wait for weeks or months for an appointment.

<comment><USER21> I live in Australia, our healthcare is universally free and of very high quality. I don't have a problem walking into any clinic in my area and getting free, prompt medical service. Just because yours sucks doesn't mean it's a bad idea to begin with.

<comment><USER20> > Just because yours sucks doesn't mean it's a bad idea to begin with.

I didn't say it's a bad idea because ours sucks. I said it's a bad idea because if you're using money that's just _taken from other people_ , you're not motivated to provide them with good service, and so on.

The factors I listed cannot be escaped. You can rest assured that your system is slowly turning to shit too.

<comment><USER21> If you're going to have that attitude you'd better not be using our roads, parks, public transport or indeed any other government services that have "stolen" money from you. I think you'd be a lot worse off if you decided not to pay tax and go without everything being a taxpayer entitles you to.

<comment><USER22> Hm, that's not a very good argument.

If a slave takes a meal from his master, it doesn't mean he must condone slavery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That may be a lot of money, but it's way cheaper than Nest.

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57617153-76/google-to- buy-...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57617153-76/google-to-buy-nest- for-$3.2-billion/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Without knowing what lies beneath the mess.. isn't $90m in maintenance fees extremely excessive? Or have they factored in a full rewrite? What are the typical gov tech maintenance fees?

</comment><comment><USER25> why anyone believed the government could sell a product is beyond me. It's as if all the tech professionals have a blind faith untested by reality.</comment>


Asset Managers: The tide turns - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21695552-consumers-are-finally-revolting-against-outdated-industry-tide-turns <comment><USER2> Active management is an overpriced, tough to beat affair, but if enough people invest passively, active management will regain the upper hand.

Indexers herd, they reduce liquidity, they push up prices of stocks in the index, they increase volatility, initially smaller/less liquid stocks have prices pushed around irrationally, then bigger stocks. It starts to pay to do private equity, buy out cheap stocks, IPO them, get them back into the index universe, and sell them back to the indexers.

Indexing is not a silver bullet, it's one strategy in a Nash-like equilibrium. Too much active investing, passive can match them at a lower cost and win...too much passive investing, mispricing arises and active investors can exploit passive investors.

[https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2016/02/02/active- in...](https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2016/02/02/active-investing- really-the-losers-game/)

<comment><USER3> First question - "they reduce liquidity" \- how?

Second, I don't think anyone is arguing that active investing can beat potentially beat passive investing.

The problems with active management vs. passive are: \- Most active manager will continue to underperform (this year I believe it was north of 90%) \- That it is just about impossible to predict which funds will be leaders \- That the fees active managers require are too high relative to the lack of any real value

The point of the article isn't that active management can't ever beat passive - it's that the fees on investing are coming down because most active management provides little value.

So if active management is going to win, the fees may be compressed and that may change the industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hedge fund guy here.

There's an implicit assumption that return profile is what matters to the investor. It very often isn't. Quite often it's a simple cover-your-ass requirement. Gotta put my money somewhere, so anyone who isn't going to embarrass me is fine. Thus status quo.

Second, strategies do exist that barely lose money ever. I've a friend who runs a strategy that has had 4 losing months out of 100. Certified by a fund administrator. Sounds too good to be true, so the fund stays small. Everyone's heard of negative skew so they stay away.

There's also strategies that print money so regularly they don't need outside investment. You would be amazed at how simple it is. But I've actually reproduced this myself. You need some good execution to do it, but once it's up you don't need or want investors. If you get a bond like income stream, you might as well finance it like a bond. It's only stuff with low Sharpe where you need to share the risk.

So what do you see then? A bunch of traditional managers doing their stock picking where the result doesn't matter too much, and some funds with some alpha that isn't stable.

<comment><USER5> There are strategies that rarely lose money and have a great risk-adjusted profile. But they are generally at least one of

a) Not scalable (e.g. most intraday market-making or scalping strategies)

b) Only available at a very high fee (think north of 3/30)

c) Not available at any price (e.g. Renaissance Medallion, which has been closed to outside investors for 20+ years)

So I'm not sure that it's particularly relevant to this discussion, which is about fee pressure on traditional, long-only asset managers.

<comment><USER6> > Renaissance Medallion

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies#Medal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies#Medallion_Fund)

> "From 2001 through 2013, the fund's worst year was a 21 percent gain, after > subtracting fees. Medallion reaped a 98.2 percent gain in 2008, the year the > Standard & Poor's 500 Index lost 38.5 percent."

Holy cow, that thing is kinda crazy. There has to be a catch, right? (Or everybody would be doing it.) Or is their algorithm genuinely so clever that nobody else has ever figured it out?

<comment><USER7> They were (one of?) the first serious quant fund, started by James Simon who before that was a math professor at Stony Brook. Along with the NSA they are one of the most aggressive non-academic would be employers of top notch math Phds. They also hire Phds in physics and statistics. The big draw isn't so much the salary as the ability to invest in Medallion.

If you take some of the smartest people in the world and have them intensely focus on making money via trading you get Renaissance. Everyone can't do it because there are only so many some of the smartest people in the world intensely interested in making money via trading to go around.

<comment><USER8> A side-note on the smart people: Nick Patterson, a cold-war cryptologist who had worked at Renaissance for a few years, talked a little about how they had employed some very smart people doing some very basic things like simple regression, and that the people needed to be smart to know how to apply these tools properly, and ensure the data they were applying it on was good.

[http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/2016/2/26/ai- safety-a...](http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/2016/2/26/ai-safety-and- the-legacy-of-bletchley-park)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article is describing something that Eugene Fama (winner of the prize for economics in the memory of Alfred Nobel,) described in a paper a few years ago (2010).[1] Fama and his co-author French found that there is no evidence that any active managers of mutual funds (or any other portfolio of exchange-traded equities) have above-average skill; as a result, some will perform better than the market, and others will perform worse, but none will predictably or reliably outperform the average, and they each take some fee. What this means is that since they all have about the same expected return, and have an expected outcome of under-performing the market by the amount of their fees (as those are subtracted from their expected average returns), you should simply invest in a portfolio with low transaction costs and low holding costs.

[1] [https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/teaching/3515...](https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/teaching/35150_advanced_investments/Luck%20versus%20Skilll%20in%20the%20Cross%20Section%20of%20Mutual%20Fund%20Returns.pdf)

<comment><USER10> _> > Fama and his co-author French found that there is no evidence of active fund managers who perform better than average..._

The paper you linked by Fama and French doesn't support this assertion. In fact, it's incorrect, and the paper admits that there are outliers (however few) with consistent superior performance.

From 1994 to 2014, Renaissance Technologies averaged a 71% return. From 1982 to 2012, Baupost averaged a 19% return. In the same time period the S&P 500 returned 7-8%. Even after fees, these managers easily beat the average for their clients.

It's tempting to claim that there is no such thing as beating the market, especially if that belief aligns well with a corresponding set of political beliefs about Wall St. But it is inarguable that funds and managers like these exist, it's just a matter of admitting that it's extraordinarily difficult instead of impossible.

<comment><USER11> No, it's not "inarguable". What the paper says is that some funds in the extreme right tail are able to demonstrate a modicum of skill, meaning they do better than pure randomness would suggest. However, they do not do sufficiently better to consistently generate four-factor alpha net of fees. In other words, they do not do sufficiently better that you could invest in one and have a higher expected return than you would get investing in a passive fund with similar factor exposure.

The bare fact that certain funds or managers have averaged 20%+ over whatever time period is irrelevant, as that is absolutely expected due to randomness alone. It has no predictive power over the ability of those funds to generate future alpha, regardless of what intuition suggests. Again, in other words, investing in a fund that has consistently outperformed _in the past_ does not increase your expectation of outperforming in the future. In fact, it is more likely than not that you will still underperform a low-cost passive fund with the same factor exposure.

<comment><USER12> > _Again, in other words, investing in a fund that has consistently > outperformed in the past does not increase your expectation of outperforming > in the future._

So…you're saying that Bayesian updating in this case does not apply? _No_ amount of positive results should alter the probabilities…ever?

(I'm not challenging your assertion by the way, just trying to confirm for myself.)

<comment><USER11> Sorry, no, I'm saying that historical returns have not demonstrated an ability by anyone to consistently generate alpha net of fees. Even the longest running market-beaters thus far do not fall far outside the expected range. Some have demonstrated statistically significant alpha, just not enough to account for their fees. In one sense it is certainly possible to imagine a string of returns that would do so, but it hasn't happened yet. (Also if you believe in (relatively) efficient markets, it seems unlikely to happen in the future either, at least in a fashion that could be identified ex ante, and thus profited from. But that's tangential to the point I was making above.)

The paper demonstrates this by comparing the actual distribution of returns to many sets of simulated returns over the same period. When the simulations are built assuming that fund managers have just enough skill to generate zero net alpha, the actual distribution has consistently lower returns across the board than the majority of the simulated distributions. It gets closer in the very extreme right tail (the 98th to 100th percentiles), but still not enough to generate positive four-factor alpha net of fees.

<comment><USER12> Thanks, that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard (mentioned in the article) wrote a book called "The battle for the soul of capitalism" [1] where he describes his motivation to found Vanguard. In summary he sees that funds managers add little value but extract too much money from risk takers (=investors) and thereby turn capitalism up side down. Sounds like his thesis is winning.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Soul-Capitalism-John- Bogle/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Soul-Capitalism-John- Bogle/dp/0300119712)

<comment><USER14> Neither mutual funds nor hedge funds as a whole can match a low fee index like Vanguard. Of course there are individual outliers that outperform, but predicting which funds will win in the future is no easier than picking individual securities that will win in the future.

It's becoming pretty clear that Buffett will win his 10-year bet that the Vanguard would beat what Protege Partners thought were the five best hedge funds.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/16/warren-buffett-slips-but- stil...](http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/16/warren-buffett-slips-but-still- winning-epic-hedge-fund-bet.html)

How many hundreds of millions will those five funds have earned for themselves while not beating the market?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article describes the paradox. The average fund manager will perform as well as the market, but they charge fees so the net return is less.

If you think you are able to pick out better fund managers, then you should be picking stocks instead. If you're unable to pick stocks, what makes you think you're able to pick managers when you are working off opaque trades and even less information?

<comment><USER16> I'm not defending asset managers but your argument sounds specious: you only need to pick an asset manager once, whereas you need to pick stocks every day or several times a day.

I can't fix my car but I can pick a garage based on reviews, etc.

<comment><USER17> You only need to pick a stock once too. Or at most, once per several years. If you're trading stocks every day you're doing it wrong.

And you have a lot more information available about stocks than you do about fund managers.

<comment><USER18> Are you serious? You need a PORTFOLIO of stocks. It is an ONGOING effort.

<comment><USER17> You need an _information advantage_ to pick stocks. You need to have some reason to believe you have information that the rest of the market does not (or that the rest of the market is ignoring), which lets you better estimate the future profits of the company. And then you compare that against the market price, and if the market is being irrational, trade.

If you have this, you can get by with a very small portfolio, often just a handful of stocks. And the only ongoing effort is to periodically re-evaluate whether the market has caught on to the information advantage that you're trading on. You do need to continue to keep informed, but daily trading is ridiculous.

If you do not have this, you will lose your shirt regardless of how much you diversify.

<comment><USER18> >You need an information advantage

Yeah, exactly my point. You need to spend >20 hours to research a single company and will chose to invest in 1 out of 10. Those are the optimistic numbers.

So 5 stocks is 1000 hours. How many hours to learn how to do your due diligence? How many hours per month, every month to keep an eye on what is going on and optimize if necessary?

<comment><USER19> The information advantage is when you know something that's true that most people haven't yet realized to be true, often accredited to Peter Thiel. Examples from the past:

\- Smartphones > dumb phones (invest in AAPL)

\- more dollars spent with online ads than TV and Print (invest in GOOG)

\- cloud computing is better than managing your own servers (invest in AMZN)

\- eating Chipotle is a better option than McDonalds (invest in CMG)

These information advantages are not necessarily gained by spending many hours of research, but a side effect from every day living and working. Will a research analyst realize the impact of a scalable computing API more than engineers that relies on it for their careers?

A future example: If you're a programmer using Github for every job in the past 10 years, maybe buying Github stock if it IPO's wouldn't be so bad.

<comment><USER20> > _often accredited to Peter Thiel_

Only in Silicon Valley would people give Peter Thiel credit for an concept that's been around for 150 years of investing.

> _maybe buying Github stock if it IPO 's wouldn't be so bad._

Maybe? That doesn't sound very certain, and demonstrates how difficult it is to pick these things _in advance_. Do you know, or not?

I mean, it's all well and good to look back at some ideas that were good investments, in hindsight. Do you not think armies of people are trying to find "good" ideas that no one knows about? How many good ideas went nowhere?

<comment><USER21> "Maybe? That doesn't sound very certain, and demonstrates how difficult it is to pick these things in advance. Do you know, or not?"

Without a hypothetical IPO price, that question is unanswerable.

I honestly still agree with your general point, but that's not specifically a valid argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Historically, consumer staples have much better risk-adjusted returns than any other sector. Buying and holding these stocks will beat active management and the S&P 500.

Active management, despite their access to expensive Bloomberg terminals and other financial resources, by in large, are just as clueless as retail investors, but they have more money and make up the difference in fees.

What does this prove? The fact that billionaires and hedge fund mangers – who have access unlimited data, who can buyout seats on the board of directors, and can even influence the news – are unable to beat the market but instead underperform it substantially, douses cold water on the popular belief that the markets are rigged, inefficient, or a scam. The biggest scam are these firms charging high fees for poor performance, but the market itself is not broken.

Instead, the market has become more efficient than ever, benefiting index buyers and hurting those who think the are the next Warren Buffet.

<comment><USER23> Your points are contradictory. If consumer staples regularly outperform other market sectors, markets can't possibly be efficient. If they were, there would no signal to extract from the noise.

The whole idea that markets are "efficient" is specious nonsense anyway. If they were, they'd simply be a perfect random number generator.

In fact billionaires do regularly outperform the market. Bill Gates has made far more money from investing than he did from Microsoft.

<comment><USER22> and some billionaire fortunes have been lost; in the end, you get the overall market performance. Maybe there is some excess. It would be interesting if there were a study about if stocks of companies by Forbes 400 members outperform stocks which don't have members.

I said more efficient than ever. That doesn't mean 100% efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> >>> Technology also means that the strategies of active managers can be replicated at much lower cost. Take value managers, who claim to be able to beat the market by picking cheap shares. A computer program can comb the market for stocks that look cheap relative to their profits, asset values, or dividends; investors have no need to worry that the active manager might lose focus or change style. When it comes to choosing between asset markets, robo- advisers, using computer models, can help investors manage their wealth for a very low fee. Earlier this month Goldman Sachs, a big bank, became the latest big financial firm to buy one. <<<

There is absolutely no doubt that an algorithm can outperform most asset managers using traditional strategies quite well, but their implied thesis is wrong. It is extremely unlikely that any system short of an AGI, no matter how sophisticated, will be able to displace _all_ active managers.

The reason behind that is that the best active managers try to build up positions by creating an informational edge. The very best ones are willing to do whatever it takes. Some have specialists analysing satellite imagery. Others are willing to snap up equity in private competitors of a company to check out their orderbook to predict the reality of the market before it can be reflected by the market. Or fund studies and do their own work. Whatever it takes.

A really great example of this trend is the rise of activist hedge funds which work by shorting the market and exposing malfeasance at companies. Last year an activist hedge fund manager, Whitney Tilson, found out that the products of Lumber Liquidators was laced with a carcinogen. He had lab tests conducted, shorted the stock, announced his results publicly, and created a media campaign around it resulting in a tumble. [http://seekingalpha.com/article/3019166-lumber- liquidators-i...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/3019166-lumber-liquidators- is-evil)

It is extremely unlikely that any system could have replicated Tilson's work, because none of this data was online or existed somewhere that could be easily queried. At best these systems can trade far more effectively humans can with existing strategies, but that does not mean they can produce great returns, as they're operating upon the information the market already knows, as opposed to seeking out what isn't known.

There are similar examples within commodities - there are firms that specialise in using satellite imagery to predict if OPEC has increased production or what the global yield of rice / wheat is going to be. (case in point [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-08/satellite-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-08/satellite- images-show-economies-growing-and-shrinking-in-real-time) ) There is an arms race going on right now to know what the state of any economy will be before anyone else knows it. They will continue to specialise along this route by funding remote sensing companies, putting money into internet analytics to predict future usage patterns, and everything else they can think of before anyone else.

Machines just can't compete - at least, for now.

<comment><USER25> Really cool point.

I'd argue that the investment strategies you're describing are actually creating value. Getting information about carcinogens out into the world is a plus for sure. Another instance of this is Herbalife which is looking more and more like a Ponzi scheme thanks to an activist investor.

Welcome to the era of regulation through speculation.

<comment><USER26> Just FYI your Herbalife info is out of date, as it has experienced a massive rally as of late.

Imo I believe John Hempton's take on Herbalife, which is that what they sell is not the supplement but a "sense of community" that the participants strongly desire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article's basic assumptions are wrong. Money is flowing out of private investment, so they just assume it's flowing into index funds. However ... Index funds doesn't seem to be where it's going.

SPY lost 15% or more in Feb, and then recovered to only be down 5.5%. Before that a similar thing happened around new year. The trend appears to be down (in the sense that the second massive drop fell to a lower level than the first, and doesn't appear to be recovering the level the first recovered to), and a lot of banks are saying that people should sell the recovery. And if you prefer non-technical arguments : stocks in the S&P 500 are trading at a GAAP EPS multiple of ~21. Whilst that is actually a bit of a drop from before, that's still a >98% percentile for the multiple. "Normal" multiple is 16, which would have the S&P 500 trading at ~1550, and generally if you believe in mean reversal you'd expect it to drop below that before improving. Additionally the fed is raising rates, and that has always resulted in stock market drops. And all of this is assuming there isn't something more serious happening (global shipping has dropped double digit percentages since last year, which would seem to indicate a very serious issue, especially in Asia).

I'm thinking there is a general outflow out of the stock market entirely. Index funds and everything. I would even bet that private investments are dropping, partly because quite a bit of investment advisors are telling people to get out of the market.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you have a consumer facing service and you charge on a commission basis, the tide is turning for you.

Asset managers can just get added to a list that already includes positions like real estate agents, insurance agents, car salespersons, etc.

The problem is the inability for these people to continue to provide value against alternatives that justifies taking a commission.

I don't think there's a line in the sand for when these jobs become obsolete but the slow crawl towards it has been happening for a while.

<comment><USER29> Two important factors you're leaving out:

(1) Does the intermediary add value? Sometimes they do, by facilitating better market functioning. If I sell a house and a real estate agent has access to a better buyer pool than I do -- likely, as they've been doing it for a while -- then I benefit with a higher selling price and the agent gets a commission. The loser is the "deal hunter" buyer who sits at the low end of the market, looking for a "deal" due to something being mispriced.

In some markets, e.g. public market trading and low-end insurance, it's easy to get the same benefits with a computer. On the higher end, however, like with complex business insurance, I'd gladly pay a middleman a few % to help me get through the complexity of picking out the right package, coverage, helping me think through the risks, etc.

(2) Are people afraid of doing it themselves? When dealing with a large enough proportion of wealth, some people will demand assistance, even if very expensive. I see this dynamic all the time in real estate. Most people don't want the hassle of selling a house themselves and would rather, somewhat lazily, just have someone else deal with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The return profile is not the end-all-be-all for an investment. There's different strategies for tax avoidance, income generation, and for handling inheritance situations.

Most folks here are clever enough to work these out on their own, but the question is whether or not it's worth it for them to do so if a small portion of that money can pay someone to do it for them.

</comment><comment><USER31> Great podcast on this recently:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/04/469247400/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/04/469247400/episode-688-brilliant- vs-boring)

</comment><comment><USER32> This may be a dumb question; but as I am looking for my next project, what is so hard about setting up a robo-adviser firm?

Algorithm A : put $AGE % of funds into treasury bonds, put 85-$AGE % into index firm / ETF

Algorithm B: err?

<comment><USER5> The difficult part is getting regulated, and raising money.

Robo-advisers are subject to the same regulation as traditional asset managers - a regulatory burden which is only likely to increase over time. The legal fees associated with regulation are not cheap.

Compounding the problem, a competitive robo-adviser needs to offer lower fees than a traditional asset manager. Probably they need to be in the 0.25-0.5% range, which means that for each $1m under management they are picking up $5,000 of revenue. Out of that they need to pay salaries, infrastructure costs, legal costs, rent, taxes etc. Let's be conservative and say that these costs are $2.5m per year. That means that a robo-advisor needs about $0.5bn under management before it begins to turn a profit.

I don't think it's really suitable as a side project.

<comment><USER33> You could just start with a free open source product. Far more disruptive. You could launch it offshore and unregulated if you want to cut costs.

<comment><USER34> It depends on whether you want to "disrupt" or to earn a living yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> and to add insult to injury, investment managers are expected to pursue advanced designations such as the CFA, which takes years of hard work -- hundreds of hours of intense study and preparation

perhaps the standards settings bodies such as the CFA Institute should share some of the responsibility

</comment><comment><USER36> All you have to do to make tons of money is buy UPRO (s&p 500 leveraged 3x) and sell it when the economy is at high risk of recession. If you chart it out historically since 60 years back it would make a fortune.

<comment><USER37> All you have to do to make tons of money is buy whatever stock that will rise by the most next week, and short sell stock that will tank the most next week.

How to find out which stock will rise or tank next week is left as an exercise for the reader.</comment></comment>


Computer chemists win Nobel prize - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24458534 <comment><USER3> Wow. I'm floored that computational structural biology work is getting a Nobel. I spent a lot of time reading their papers in grad school...they're totally foundational for the field, but the field is still really young:

Martin Karplus' group is behind CHARMM ([http://www.charmm.org](http://www.charmm.org)), which was the first(?) molecular dynamics package (you can think of it as a precursor to folding@home, though it's still under active development, so that isn't a totally fair statement).

Michael Levitt has done a bunch of things, with no one big software package, but he was one of the earliest people trying to do _ab initio_ protein structure prediction. He was also one of the first people to really start categorizing protein structure in a way that allowed for computational modeling -- back in the 70s and early 80s.

Arieh Warshel is probably best known for bridging the gap between quantum mechanics and the (relatively quick-and-dirty) molecular mechanics work. He's done a whole bunch of work modeling enzymatic reactions, coming up with better electrostatic models, and other things where quantum mechanics does a good job, but is way too slow to be used on giant molecules like proteins.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but I am also not surprised given this is pretty fundamental work, even if it hasn't quite hit the sort of revolutionary goals many of us hoped for. If Peter Kollman had been alive, I suspect he would have shared this Nobel.

This Nobel is hits very close to home. Much of my PhD work was done in CHARMM and I come from the Karplus lineage, and at one point in time I had pretty much read every paper Levitt and Warshel had ever written.

<comment><USER5> Why no Harold Scheraga? Seriously...

<comment><USER3> I thought the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is so cool! This is the kind of research I do: molecular dynamics and quantum mechanical simulation. I'm not nearly as good at it as the winners of this prize though haha.

I'm glad to see computational research is becoming more popular and accepted. There's a (quickly diminishing) subset of scientists who think computational work is too theoretical, inaccurate, and inapplicable to real-life. This was the case when the field was developed, but it is no longer true.

The exponentially increasing computational power is allowing discoveries that simply _can not_ be performed experimentally because laboratory technology just isn't advanced or capable enough. Who needs to actually study reality if you can just simulate what you need -- and the end result is the same?

I'm not sure many people know this, but our understanding of the laws of physics is advanced enough nowadays to describe almost perfectly everything we observe in everyday life. (Exceptions include things like quantum gravity which don't really matter [ducks to avoid physicists]).

The problem is that if you want to simulate these laws, it requires a _lot_ of computational power. Brute-force approaches are simply ineffective and so simplifications and clever techniques must be developed to reduce the computational effort while giving increasingly accurate results. I think it's the combination of improving computational resources and improving simulation algorithms that are really driving this field.

<comment><USER7> hey Xcelerate - I'm looking for someone to do some delta-Hf calculations on some "theoretical molecules" for me. By theoretical molecules, I mean, molecules that are very likely able to be made, but needs an assessment of "whether or not it's worth it". Is that something you can do, and would be interested in putting on ArXiV?

<comment><USER8> What data do you have? Do you know the mechanisms?

We calculated heats of formation in our chemical thermodynamics course, but we were always given ample data, and we knew what we were trying to calculate.

<comment><USER9> He means ab initio from the electrons and nuclei, not from heats of reaction and elemental entropies.

<comment><USER8> Can this be explained simply? I took physical chemistry and it sounds related to calculating energy changes for ionization or electrons moving between orbitals.

<comment><USER7> you are using references for already measured energies and orbital systems. For example, if you take the measured energy change for, say, but-1-ene and the estimated heat of formation difference for a C-H vs. C-C and hydrogen, you will get a good estimate for {alpha,omega} octadiene.

If you think you can do the same thing for ethene -> butadiene, you'll find yourself to be horribly wrong, because of extended conjugation networks.

So while for some cases it works, it is not always simple to go from known empiricial results to more complex structures using tables and addition and subraction. And in the case of the molecules I care about, there is pretty good reason to believe that the simple linear methods will fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm somewhat surprised that Warshel was included instead of Berni Alder, as a more self-consistent group of scientists from a field point of view, and given Alder is largely seen as the father of MD.

<comment><USER9> Well then why not Ceperley too, as they helped straighten out some problems at the core of LDA? I think the Nobel committee wanted to keep the focus on biochem.

<comment><USER10> Agreed - that's the conclusion I came to too after posting. Still, I'd imagine Harold Scheraga and Andy McCammon are (justifiably) a little sore this morning...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get it. Aren't simulations of chemical reactions based on things you already KNOW about those reactions? How are they being used to find out new things about the reactions?

<comment><USER12> You are thinking about reactions as written out in a chemistry textbook. Those representations tell you about the reactants, products and maybe a few other details like catalysts, solvents and temperature. However, none of it explains the mechanism at the quantum or atomic level. Simulating the reaction with specialized software enables you to 'calculate' additional data points, such as, free energy, enthalpy and entropy among others, using 'molecular dynamics' (which 'solves' Classical and Quantum Mechanics equations for a given system and is extremely essential to understand movement of different parts of a molecule and their interaction with surrounding atoms to build a more complete picture of 'how' a reaction proceeds).

Today is a great day for computational chemistry. It is good to see the detailed Nobel announcement acknowledge other stalwarts of the field like Peter Kollman (who created AMBER, a package similar to CHARMm by Karplus et al). I have no doubt that Kollman would have received this prize had he been alive today.

<comment><USER13> Exactly

Chemistry is applied physics. Chemistry answers that H2 and O2 can be joined to form water under certain conditions, but doesn't answer the "Whys"

Physics answers that. And the answer goes around orbitals, energy states, electrons, etc.

<comment><USER14> "Chemistry answers that H2 and O2 can be joined to form water under certain conditions, but doesn't answer the whys".

Chemistry does answer the whys beyond product yields, why certain elements react is vastly covered throughout organic, inorganic & physical chemistry . It is the basis of these sub-fields, and how this is determined is looking at orbitals, energy states etc...

<comment><USER13> Yes, there's an overlap of knowledge

So, Pauli's exclusion principle is Physics or Chemistry? I'd say it's "both".

<comment><USER11> Physical Chemistry. (its a real thing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> health sector has more scope now to update their process and techniques. I think they should totally rethink their existing methodologies with the power of computation

<comment><USER5> They are.

But the previous generation of scientists came of age when Molecular Dynamics was a disappointing tool because of limitations in the Newtonian models and the lack of computational firepower to do sufficient sampling. The latter has been addressed by a combination of Moore's Law and the ongoing migration of molecular dynamics codebases to GPUs, but the former issue remains - <USER2> Newtonian approximation to quantum chemistry.

What's surprising is how much one can get out of these simple models despite these limitations, something that was echoed back in 1976 by one of Michael Levitt's papers that led to today's Nobel Prize:

[http://csb.stanford.edu/levitt/Levitt_JMB76_Simplified_repre...](http://csb.stanford.edu/levitt/Levitt_JMB76_Simplified_representation.pdf)

<comment><USER9> There are very deep reasons for this - the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, a central simplifying assumption, imposes some constraints on the system that make it easier to model with (semi)classical dynamics, even when you marry it with modern techniques such as DFT.

Kieron Burke has a nice take on the matter.

[http://www.tddft.org/TDDFT2008/talks/KB.pdf](http://www.tddft.org/TDDFT2008/talks/KB.pdf)

see also [http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~joye/simon2006.pdf](http://www- fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~joye/simon2006.pdf), esp. its ref. 93

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> this is pretty awesome. in grad school in the 90s i was exploring a lot of this very early on, very few people around me were there to help and that's ultimately how i got involved using Linux and other FLOSS, then sysadmin, security work and now what i do in computer security research. very glad to see this prize granted for this line of work as it truly was a leap forward for the study of chemistry.

</comment><comment><USER17> I initialy read it as "Chemistry Nobel Prize awarded to chemist's computer"... Makes me wonder if that will ever happen.

</comment><comment><USER18> lol @ title</comment>


Penny Arcade on Gamergate: "they've broken your banner, you helped them do it" - <AUTHOR> http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/10/15/star-gourds

<comment><USER2> Context: [http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/10/another-woman-in-gaming- fle...](http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/10/another-woman-in-gaming-flees-home- following-death-threats/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > "they've broken your banner, you helped them do it"

Heh, no, _you_ helped them do it. Are helping them do it, by continuing to perpetuate links without any evidence.

<comment><USER4> rational story, bro.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Using Wikipedia as a dictionary - <AUTHOR> http://wikitranslateitfor.me

<comment><AUTHOR> Whenever I wanted to see how an English titled movie was called in another language I would look it up on Wikipedia, scroll down and click the corresponding language that I wanted on the left hand side. Well this little app does exactly that. The query inputted does not have to be a movie title, it can be anything that you want translated from English to another language. If a specific language is selected, you get to see a side by side comparison of Wikipedia translation and dictionary translation (powered by Yandex). This app is not perfect, but it has the basics needed to work. As of right now the app just picks the first Wikipedia article that it finds for the given query. In the future I plan to allow a user to pick from many related titles that Wikipedia returns. If you follow the link, on there you will find a link to the source on Github. Let me know what you think!

<comment><USER2> Nice work :)

Although I think you should emphasize that the input should be in English. When I tried it out, I did not know it and hence put in an article name in some other language hoping to see its English name. (maybe you can do the reverse of what has been done too :) )

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point! I'll try to emphasize that more. And yes the plan at one point is to do the reverse as well, or dictionary of any language to any language :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> java-man I had a project to use wikipedia as a sort of universal translation memory for scientific/technical terms. Thought of possibly making it into a service, even though it's just as easy to look things up on wikipedia.

For all of us bi- and multi-linguals it would be nice to have a setting in wikipedia to present languages we comprehend and filter all other.</comment>


Texatar - Texual Avatar - <AUTHOR> http://texatar.jabwire.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> A server that generates images with text to replace default gravatar image.

The problem we face is not everyone has a gravatar image linkes to their email address. When we show images in place of names, they all look the same and there is no way to differentiate between people. Texatar will generate an image based on text for the user. The color scheme is equally important and is based on a hash of the user's email.

<comment><USER2> You don't address why this is better than the gravatar options of a random image based on email hash:

identicon: a geometric pattern based on an email hash

monsterid: a generated 'monster' with different colors, faces, etc

wavatar: generated faces with differing features and backgrounds

retro: awesome generated, 8-bit arcade-style pixelated faces

from: <http://www.gravatar.com/site/implement/images/>

I can see why extra options are good, I'm just confused why you wouldn't compare it against this similar idea that people might be familiar with.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. The primary motivation was to use the user's initials to one could identify the person. The images made available by Gravatar were too hard to associate with a person.

2\. I didn't feel the Gravatar options had the design look I was looking for.

Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


FPGA Programming for the Masses - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2443836 <comment><USER3> I think the last paragraph is key:

> We also need to revisit the approach of compiling a high-level language to > VHDL/Verilog and then using vendor-specific synthesis tools to generate > bitstreams. If FPGA vendors open up FPGA architecture details, third parties > could develop new tools that compile a high-level description directly to a > bitstream without going through the intermediate step of generating > VHDL/Verilog. This is attractive because current synthesis times are too > long to be acceptable in the mainstream.

This is both an ideological as well as a practical matter. Until the whole process INCLUDING bitstream generation is open, I don't see FPGAs as a viable alternative to general purpose processors.

<comment><USER4> I can't up vote this enough. I keep gearing up to try using an FPGA, but ever time I do, I am prevented from continuing by my revulsion of closed source tools.

<comment><USER5> DrDreams: it looks like a comment you made 41 days ago resulted in your account being disabled (see <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=DrDreams>). I'm quoting this sibling comment here for readability by those who do not enable showdead, as it is relevant to the FPGA discussion.

 _DrDreams 29 minutes ago | link [dead]

Speaking as an embedded developer, I see a number of other embedded devs hobbying around with FPGAs. However, I very rarely see convincing use cases for FGPAs. This article seems to lean toward the belief many of my colleagues have, that FPGAs are right around the corner in terms of general usefulness. However, I disagree strongly. I find that they are highly-specialized devices.

Before reading the rest of my writing, consider that at this time, brilliant hardware designers are putting similar amounts of work into both general purpose CPUs and into FPGAs. However, CPUS are comprised of dense blocks of special-purpose silicon for common purposes, such as floating-point math. FPGAs always have to match that dense silicon through configurable silicon, which is less dense. Furthermore, the routing in CPUs is a known entity at manufacturing time. On FPGAs, the routing is highly variable and must be re- negotiated at nearly every compile cycle. That's a huge time sink, both in terms of build time and in predicting performance. Especially since those short routes that you get at the beginning of a project, typically end up being longer by the end of it. Nowadays, we are seeing more FPGAs with dedicated, pre-made hardware blocks inside of them, such as FPUs and even CPU cores. These have more of a chance of catching on for general purpose computing. Notice however, that on these devices, it's the general-purpose CPU dominating, leaving the FPGA as a configurable peripheral, subordinate to the dense, pre-designed silicon.

Although one may be able to match GPU performance with an FPGA, it's usually just not worth it. It will take dozens of hours of FPGA coding and simulation. Compiling and fitting and the rest of the FPGA dev chain is very time- consuming and resource-intensive, compared to the speed and elegance of gcc. Speaking of standard development practices, FPGA code is not nearly as portable as C. It often has special optimizations done for the sake of the device implemented. <http://opencores.org> has a number of more generic modules available, but still, FPGA code does not scale as well as C code. There are add-on packages that help write FPGA synthesis code - <USER2> synthesizers, but they make matters especially complicated. The syntax of Verilog and VHDL is not well-designed for scaling. Speaking of these languages, if you are used to languages written to be parsed easily, such as lisp, python, or even C and Java to some extent, you will be very appalled at the structure of Verilog and VHDL. There are many redundant entities, lots of excess verbiage and all kinds of special cases. It really has evolved very little since the days of the Programmed Array of Logic (PAL).

Another problem with FPGAs is the additional hardware on board needed to configure them. It's one more component or interface that is not needed when using CPUs. It's an additional software image to maintain, revision, store in source control, etc. FPGAs also often require more power supplies and better power supply conditioning than a regular CPU and often a separate clock crystal. They are high-maintenance.

FPGAs do shine though in a few specific instances: 1. When there is a particular, uncommon high-speed bus protocol you need to communicate with and can not buy pre-designed silicon for. This does not mean, e.g. USB. It means something like a non-standard digital camera interface or embedded graphic display. 2. Software Radio. 3. Obscure, but computationally-intensive algorithms like Bitcoin.

I hope my words have convinced some people to cool their lust for FPGAs, because I feel they're a bit of a dead-end or distraction for many who are attracted to the idea of "executing their algorithm extremely fast" or "becoming a chip designer." I have seen many students and professionals burn up hours and hours of their time getting something to run on an FPGA which could just as easily have been CPU-based. For example, one student implemented a large number of PWM oscillators on an FPGA where it would have been much simpler to use the debugged, verified, PWM peripherals on microcontrollers. Another guy I work with is intent on running CPU cores on FPGAs. This is an especially perverse use of the FPGA. Unless you've got some subset of the CPU which adds incredible value to the process, you're exchanging the the density of the VLSI/ASIC version of the chip for the flexible, less dense version on FPGA. This may be useful in rare situations, such as adding an out-of-order address generator to an existing core for speeding up an FFT, but it suffers an incredible performance and developer time hit to get to this point._

<comment><USER4> nitrogen: Thank you for reposting.

DrDreams:

 _Furthermore, the routing in CPUs is a known entity at manufacturing time._

The 'routing' of a CPU is much more variable than the routing of an FPGA. Data moves around a CPU based on the program that is executing. The control logic of a CPU is the equivalent of the routing logic of an FPGA.

 _On FPGAs, the routing is highly variable and must be re-negotiated at nearly every compile cycle._

The 'routing' of a CPU is the same. The compiler has to perform register allocation afresh on every compilation. There's obviously a tradeoff between fast compilation vs most efficient use of resources. Both problems are NP- complete I believe.

 _Nowadays, we are seeing more FPGAs with dedicated, pre-made hardware blocks inside of them, such as FPUs and even CPU cores._

You just contradicted yourself. Previously, you said "FPGAs always have to match that dense silicon through configurable silicon".

Your next paragraph talks about toolchain issues. This is hardly an insurmountable problem. Someone just needs to design a high level language that can be synthesised; something akin to a python of the FPGA world if you will.

 _Another problem with FPGAs is the additional hardware on board needed to configure them._

I don't quite understand, do you mean the hardware that reads the bitstream, etc or the hardware that is required in order for the FPGA to be configurable, like routing, LUTs, etc.

 _Another guy I work with is intent on running CPU cores on FPGAs._

I do agree with you here, this is a weird perversion if the purpose is not eventually to create an ASIC.

I also don't believe that future processors will be FPGAs, but I do believe they will be a lot closer to FPGAs than CPUs.

<comment><USER6> _Someone just needs to design a high level language that can be synthesised; something akin to a python of the FPGA world if you will._

The advantage of FPGAs is that they allow nontrivial parallelism. On a CPU with 4 cores, you can run 4 instructions at a time (ignoring the pipelining). On the FPGA, you can run any number of operations at the same time, as long as the FPGA is big enough. The problem is not the low-level nature of hardware description languages, the problem is that we still don't have a smart compiler that can release us from the difficulty of writing nontrivial massively-parallel code.

<comment><USER7> "The advantage of FPGAs is that they allow nontrivial parallelism."

Want a system on a chip with 2 cores leaving plenty of space for an ethernet accelerator, or 3 cores without space for the ethernet accelerator? Its only an include and some minor configuration away.

"the problem is that we still don't have a smart compiler that can release us from the difficulty"

Still don't have smart programmer... its hard to spec. Erlang looking elegant, doesn't magically make it easy to map non-technical description of requirements to Erlang.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article missed a VERY important modern FPGA design technique which is using raw VHDL/Verilog like a "PC programmer" would use hand optimized assembly. In other words, most of the time, not very much.

So the "inner loop" which needs optimizing is a crazy deep complicated DSP pipeline, obviously you implement that in FGPA "hardware" directly in a HDL. On the other hand, you'd be crazy to implement your UI or a generic protocol like TCP/IP in hardware (unless you're building a router or switch...). Something like I2C is right about on the cusp where you're better off writing it in plain ole C or implement it as a "hardware" peripheral in the FPGA.

Peripheral ... of what you ask? Well, depending on your license requirements and personal feelings there are a zillion options like microblaze/picoblaze from the FPGA mfgr, or visit the opencores website and download a Z80 or a 6502 or a PDP-10 or whatever floats your boat for the high level. Yes, a full PDP-10 will fit easily in one of the bigger hobby size Spartan FPGAs. Its not 1995 anymore, you've got enough space to put dozens (hundreds?) of picoblaze cores on a single FPGA if you want now a days.

There's no point in hand optimized HDL to output "hello world" just like there's no point in the antique technique of software driven "bit banged" serial ports just "include" an off the shelf opencore UART to simplify your UI code.

I've been in this game a long time and this is the future of microcontrollers and possibly general purpose computing. The engineering "skill" of searching a feature matrix to find which PIC microcontroller has 3 I2C hardware and 7 timers and 2 UARTS in your favorite core family is going to be dead, you'll just "include uart.h" and instantiate it 2 times and you pick your favorite core, be it a Z80 or a microblaze or an ARM or a SPARC.

In the future I think very few people "programming" FPGAs are going to be writing anything other than a bunch of includes and then doing everything in the embedded synthesized Z80. The "old timers" who actually write in HDLs are going to look down on the noob FPGA progs much like the old assembly coders used to look down on the visual basic noobs, etc.

<comment><USER8> If the focus of your work is to replace discrete embedded processor blocks with FPGA's, sure, copy, paste and include might get you pretty far. That is not the case for all applications, not by a longshot. For example, I had to build a DDR memory controller from scratch in order to squeeze the last clock cycle of performance out of the device. Off the shelf cores are often very --very-- general purpose, badly written and poorly documented. The same can be true of real time image processing constructs where something like a hand- coded polyphase FIR filter can easily run twice as fast as plug-and-play modules floating about.

Then there's the element of surprise. If, for example, I was developing an FPGA-based board for a drone or a medical device, I would, more than likely, require that 100% of the design be done in house (or crazy extensive testing be done to outside modules).

Anyone in software has had the experience of using some open-source module to save time only to end-up paying for it dearly when something doesn't work correctly and help isn't forthcoming. If the software you are working on is for a life support device it is very likely that taking this approach is actually prohibited, and for good reason.

While I fully understand your point of view, this is one that reduces software and hardware development to simply wiring together a bunch of includes. In my experience this isn't even reality in the most trivial of non-trivial real- world projects.

FPGA's are not software.

I see these "FPGA's for the masses" articles pop-up every so often. Here's what's interesting to me. If you are an engineer schooled in digital circuit design, developing with FPGA's is a piece of cake. There's nothing difficult about it at all, particularly when compared to the old days of wire-wrapping prototypes out of discrete chips. Sure, there can be a bit of tedium and repetition here and there. At the same time, one person can be fully responsible for a ten million logic element design...which was impossible just a couple of decades ago.

If you don't understand logic circuits, FPGA's are voodoo. Guess what? A carburetor is voodoo too if you don't understand it.

Let's invert the roles: Ask a seasoned FPGA engineer without (or with superficial) web coding experience to code a website --server and client side-- using JS, JQuery, HTML5, CSS3, PHP, Zend and MySQL. Right.

Then let's write an article about how difficult web programming is and how it ought to be available to the masses. Then let's further suggest that you can do nearly everything in web development via freely available includes.

I happen to be equally at home with hardware and software (web, embedded, system, whatever) and I can't see that scenario (development-by-includes) playing out in any of these domains.

<comment><USER6> At the moment, I am writing some computer vision code in VHDL. A part of the circuit will perform connected component labeling (CCL) on incoming images, because I want to extract some features from some object in the images. And CCL is actually a union find algorithm. The algorithm can be written in a normal programming language like Racket or even Java in a couple of hours. However, the same algorithm will take me weeks to work out and test in VHDL! I have done some nontrivial work with FPGAs, and every single time it was hard, because every low-level detail has to be considered. Maybe it is so hard because on FPGAs you are forced to optimize right from the start, whereas when using programming languages, you can develop a prototype quickly and then improve upon it? How is your experience with developing stuff on FPGAs?

<comment><USER7> I would talk to these guys (unless you are one of them) working on extending their results

[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6412129)

The wikipedia entry also has a link to a parallelizable algo from 20+ years ago for CCL. FPGAs certainly parallel pretty easily. I wonder if your simplified optimum solution is to calculate one cell and replicate into 20x20 matrix or whatever you can fit on your FPGA and then have a higher level CPU sling work units and stitch overlapping parts together.

More practically I'd suggest your quick prototype would be slap a SoC on a FPGA that does it in your favorite low-ish level code, since it only takes hours, then very methodically and smoothly create an acceleration peripheral that begins to do the grunt-iest of the grunt work one little step at a time.

So lets start with just are there any connections at all? That seems a blindingly simple optimization. Well thats a bitwise comparison, so replace that in your code with a hardware detection and flag. Next thing you know you've got a counter that automatically in hardware skips past all blank space into the first possible pixel... But thats an optimization, maybe not the best place to start.

Next I suppose if you're doing 4-connected you have some kind of inner loop that looks a lot like the wikipedia list of 4 possible conditions. Now rather than having the on FPGA cpu compare if you're in the same region one direction at a time, do all 4 dirs at once in parallel in VHDL and output the result in hardware to your code, and your code reads it all in and decides which step (if any) was the lowest/first success.

The next step is obviously move the "whats the first step to succeed?" question outta the software and into the VHDL, so the embedded proc thinks, OK just read one register to see if its connected and if so in which direction.

Then you start feeding in a stream and setting up a (probably painful) pipeline.

This is a solid bottom up approach. One painful low level detail at a time, only one at a time, never more than one at a time. Often this is a method to find a local maximum, its never going to improve the algo (although it'll make it faster...)

"because on FPGAs you are forced to optimize right from the start" Don't do that. Emulate something that works from the start, then create an acceleration peripheral to simplify your SoC code. Eventually remove your onboard FPGA cpu if you're going to interface externally to something big, once the "accelerator" is accelerating enough.

Imagine building your own floating point mult instead of using an off the shelf one ... you don't write the control blocks and control code in VHDL and do the adders later... your first step should be writing a fast adder only later replacing control code and simulated pipelining with VHDL code. You write the full adder first, not the fast carry, or whatever.

<comment><USER6> No, I am not one of them :) Thanks for the reference! I am drawing my inspiration from Bailey, and more recently Ma et al. They label an image line by line and merge the labels during the blanking period. If you start merging labels while the image is processed then data might get lost if the merged label occurs after the merge.

The paper that you reference divides the image into regions, so that the merging can start earlier, because labels used in one region are independent of the other regions. If it starts earlier, it also ends earlier, so that new data can be processed.

In my case, there is no need for such high performance, just a real time requirement of 100fps for 640x480 images, where CCL is used for feature extraction. The work by Bailey and his group is good enough, and the reference can be done in the future, if there is need for more throughput!

My workflow is a lot different from the one that you describe. I don't use any soft cores, and write everything in VHDL! I have used soft cores before, but they were kind of not to my liking. I miss the short feedback loop (my PC is a Mac and the synthesis tools run in a VM).

After trying out a couple of environments, I ended up using open source tools ---GHDL for VHDL->C++ compilation and simulation, and GTKwave for waveform inspection.

Usually, I start with a testbench a testbench that instantiates my empty design under test. The testbench reads some test image that I draw in photoshop. It prints some debugging values, and the wave inspection helps to figure out what's going on.

If it works in the simulator, it usually works on the FPGA! But the biggest advantage is that it takes just some seconds to do all that.

I will give the softcore approach another chance once my deadline is over!

<comment><USER8> One quick note. Sometimes in image processing you can gain advantages by frame-buffering (to external SDR or DDR memory, not internal resources) and then operating on the data at many times the native video clock rate.

If your data is coming in at 13.5MHz and you can run your internal evaluation core at 500MHz there's a lot you can do that, all of a sudden, appears "magical".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I am not an expert on FPGA design, I believe Figures 1 and 2 are slightly exaggerated. The C program is very ad-hoc (returning a double from main is actually illegal and will lead to interesting results) and avoids all I/O, whereas the Verilog program seems to be quite complicated (in particular with the use of ready flags and clocks). Please correct me if I am wrong, but couldn't the authors just have used a continuous assignment (or maybe a simple clock) for their conversion? Also, don't newer verilogs support specifying IEEE floating point numbers in their natural form, as opposed to having to manually convert them to hex? This seems a little like catching attention and potentially trying to make the alternative products (SystemVerilog, etc.) look nicer.

</comment><comment><USER10> The code in Figure 1 should be for Figure 2 and vice-versa.

<comment><USER11> Yea that was a tad confusing. I had to readread to make sure i hadn't missed something

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's been a while since I worked with FPGAs but my experience was that using drop-in CPU cores and peripherals is pure joy, drag and drop what you need, build your bits and you're good to go. Replacing an I2C with SPI or supporting a wide range of daughterboards is trivially easy.

On the other hand, it only takes a day of writing low-level Verilog to realize that the problem of correctly and efficiently parallelizing algorithms is a hard one. We were using a very early C to Verilog (C2H) compiler from Altera and it worked but was very inefficient in terms of logic element use. I'm sure there's a lot of R&D going on in that space because without significant progress general purpose CPUs or at least cores will remain dominant for some time.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have been working on this problem as well, by writing a system that allows you to compile Clojure to FPGAs. I'll be giving a talk on it at Clojure West: <http://clojurewest.org/sessions#greenberg>

</shamelessplug>

<comment><USER4> I've also been working on a HDL DSL. I've been using Idris; the type of a circuit ensures that it implements the correct behaviour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having worked with Lime hands-on, it is certainly going to make splashes. It's a fabulous idea and deserves much more attention than it's getting.</comment>


Editorial: Waiter, there's a Nazi theme in my Android Market - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/13/editorial-waiter-theres-a-nazi-theme-in-my-android-market/

<comment><USER2> The difference between the App Store and the Android Market is that the latter is not as actively policed. The Android Market has a fairly restrictive content policy, which (among other things) prohibits "promotions of hate or incitement of violence". While it's easier to slip prohibited content into the Android Market, it's not supposed to be there and will likely be removed.

<http://www.android.com/us/developer-content-policy.html>

The freedom of the Android platform is that you can put what you want on your device. The same freedom does not apply to the Market -- if you want Market- prohibited content, you need to find another way to get it. This renders most of the article moot.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can choose between censorship and freedom of speech. You can't have it both ways.

Offensive speech is the small price you pay for your freedom. Enjoy it.

And, BTW, I live in a country where I am not given the luxury of being able to express some impopular points of view without risking being arrested.

<comment><USER4> Where are you from? As far as I know this particular theme would probably be illegal in Germany.

<comment><USER5> Yes it would be illegal in Germany, but here in the US we do have freedom of speech. From flag burning, to KKK rallys and in this case Nazi insignia are all examples of free speech, and protected by the Constitution.

Google can censor this but that would also be sacrificing free speech.

I think its a disgusting theme but I don't think it should be censored, maybe they should get their keywords sorted so it doesn't show up when looking up "Jewish".

<comment><USER6> "Yes it would be illegal in Germany, but here in the US we do have freedom of speech. From flag burning, to KKK rallys and in this case Nazi insignia are all examples of free speech, and protected by the Constitution."

The 1st amendment is about Congress, not about what retailers allow into their stores for sale.

<comment><USER3> > The 1st amendment is about Congress,

Which only means Google cannot be forced _by law_ to remove the offensive material.

<comment><USER7> And they can probably not be forced to keep it, either.

<comment><USER3> No, but removing it is a statement they will not go to great lengths to protect free speech from the government, if it comes to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "turns up skins which are disgustingly, hatefully pro-Nazism and pro-Hitler. That's a problem, no matter how you look at this."

"hard look at what censorship really means, and what kind of role it can (and clearly should) play in the new frontier of app marketplaces"

That's a seriously fucked up view on censorship right there. I hope it's just a troll and author really doesn't believe that censorship is ok, and censoring what they don't like is fine and dandy.

Also maybe the reason author thinks "Jewish" and "Hitler" are unrelated search terms is because the only history they have read had all the "hate filled" parts censored.

<comment><USER9> I think the author believes that censorship is desirable for privately-run marketplaces such as the Android Market and Apple App Store.

I don't have a problem with the idea of Google censoring its market to some degree. Unlike Apple, Google has provided users with the ability to install software from any source, significantly mitigating the impact of any censorship. If Google doesn't want to censor hate speech, I'm ok with that too. Ultimately, it's their store, and it's up to them to decide what's sold in it.

I do, however believe that this is an example of poor search results. Someone searching for "Jewish" probably doesn't want this theme, even though it's relevant to the search term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This link is from when a similar thing showed up in the main Google search results:

<http://www.google.com/explanation.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> Even if you accept that it should be illegal to publish certain things, it doesn't follow that everything has to be piped through a censorship authority. Punishing offenders should be enough.

Otherwise, where to stop? It is illegal to kill somebody, therefore we need a watchdog to approve our every moves, in case it is a killing move?

</comment><comment><USER12> The article describes the apps as themes and pictures, but then says they "spread hate." While actually agreeing with the policies of the Third Reich is hideous, making your phone have a swastika on it (for a costume party, perhaps?) seems innocuous. Were there apps that actually spread hate in some way?

</comment><comment><USER13> _Think of it this way: app stores are kind of like privately owned bookstores. The owner of the bookstore doesn't have to carry the art book of nudes or the pro-Nazi thesis._

I would be very unhappy with a general bookstore openly refusing to carry a book solely because of its political content.

<comment><USER14> Bookstores don't carry every book ever made; they're "curated". They have no obligation to carry every book you might want... if your tastes are significantly outside of the mainstream, you're going to sometimes have to order from a specialty seller or directly from the author/publisher.

<comment><USER13> Of course they don't. But not carrying every book ever printed is different from refusing to carry a class of books because of their political content.

And I did mention general bookstores. Let's take Glenn Beck books as an example. Personally, I find them rage-inducingly offensive. But I'd still expect the local bookstores, even here in liberal Seattle, to carry them, and, if they didn't have a copy on their shelves, to order it for me. Should I, say, have some sort of psychotic breakdown and decide that I wanted a copy.</comment></comment></comment>


RAD Lab is Creating a Datacenter Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/rad-lab-creating-datacenter-operating-system

<comment><USER2> I can't tell... is this a joke?

<comment><USER3> The RAD Lab is not a joke, but this post is a little thick with hyperbole.</comment></comment>


History Uncut: Bill Gates unveils Microsoft Excel (1987) - <AUTHOR> http://www.history.com/videos/history-uncut-bill-gates-unveils-microsoft-excel-1987 <comment><USER2> Excel, still Microsoft's best product?

<comment><USER3> undoubtedly. of course it came after visicalc, but by now it is not hyperbole to say that a large part of the world economy runs through excel spreadsheets.

and it is _really_ hard to displace. the optimisations in that tool are amazing, you don't realize it's performance until you try the alternatives.

some argue it is the OS of finance. definitely shares its spot with SAP FI/CO. a controller will give up any tool before letting go of MS Excel.

it is the number one reason of companies being reluctant to using iPads. how will i edit my spreadsheets? what about macros? i need this to capture expenses, forecasts, etc.

if MS releases MS Office/Excel for iOS, Surface is dead.

<comment><USER4> Lets reverse your last point: when MS releases Office for Surface, iOS is dead in business.

If they hit that mythical $199 price point which is rumored (unlikely) and it ships with Office RT, then there is no better tablet proposition out there.

<comment><USER5> There are a _ton_ of people out there who used to think they _needed_ office, and have been using iOS happily without it. Microsoft made a huge mistake not releasing Office for iOS as soon as they could -- these people would all have bought it and remained convinced it was indispensable.

Now, most of them won't care (and probably figured out that Office wasn't actually very good at its core functionality, like word-processing and creating presentations, compared to cheaper, easier-to-use alternatives). In any event, the strangehold MS had over the enterprise where even people who didn't want Windows were forced to use it, is broken.

So... dream on.

<comment><USER4> I get the feeling you've never used Office for anything serious?

<comment><USER6> I think the parent commenter was merely stating that a large portion of Office users realize that what they're doing isn't "serious" - despite it being critical to _their_ uses, it's something that doesn't require the full power of a desktop Office suite (and thus can be done without Microsoft).

Fact is, even Surface won't be as mobile as something that fits in your pocket - and I seriously doubt Microsoft can or even wants to make (perhaps a stripped down) Office into a $10 smartphone app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Correct link: [http://www.history.com/videos/history-uncut-bill-gates- unvei...](http://www.history.com/videos/history-uncut-bill-gates-unveils- microsoft-excel-1987??cmpid=PaidMedia_Taboola_Video_HIST_TOPICVIDEO#history- uncut-bill-gates-unveils-microsoft-excel-1987)

</comment><comment><USER8> Was this their first product in office suite?

Out of curiosity, why didn't IBM ever release office suite? They had such a strong hold on enterprise market and yet all they did was to buy lotus notes that too in mid nineties (quite late).

<comment><USER9> I'm a little young to know for sure, but did IBM make any significant software (other than the OS) before the purchase of Lotus? At the time when Excel was announced they were still running OS/2 as a joint venture with Microsoft.

(Incidentally, IBM does now have an office suite. A quite nice version of OpenOffice: <http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home>)

<comment><USER10> They made DB2 in the early 80's. DB2 has always seemed like the quiet giant in the database world. They even have a free Express edition [1], but I never hear anyone talking about it.

[http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/download.htm...](http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/download.html?S_TACT=wikien&S_CMP=ecddww01)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://spreadsheet-day.com/blog/spreadsheet- history/visicalc...](http://spreadsheet-day.com/blog/spreadsheet- history/visicalc/)

</comment><comment><USER12> With all the talk about linux desktops recently, I think one of reasons for lack of adoption is right here. In the business world, excel reigns supreme, and there isn't a viable linux equivalent. Give me excel for linux and I could be rid of windows for good.

<comment><USER13> I'm always interested in this - what are the specific features that LibreOffice Calc and the like lack that you use?

<comment><USER12> (1)compatibility at a formula and function level for some of the excel functions (eg. matrix functions). (2) VB macros

<comment><USER13> It sounds like your definition of "viable" differs from mine then.

LibreOffice Calc does "matrix formulae" and whilst it doesn't do VB macros you can write macros in some common scripts/languages including javascript and python (see eg <http://webodf.org/blog/2012-04-13.html>).

It's certainly not a drop in replacement and certainly not right for everyone but one often hears "we couldn't use $x" when in fact what is meant is there is no impetus to use a replacement and that the users don't want to adapt entrenched behaviours.

That's fine but is quite different as an objection to "the software can't do what we need".

<comment><USER12> that's fair - Calc can do everything you need, so the objection is more clearly stated as it not being compatible with excel. You can't share files with excel users (like you can with Word and AbiWord or Writer).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone else notice the Warren Buffett cameo at :14?</comment>