India heatwave temperatures pass 50 Celsius - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-06-india-heatwave-temperatures-celsius.html <comment><USER3> These temperatures in high humidity can be deadly even to healthy and fit humans as our bodies are left without a way to cool down. Currently, they have humidity around 10-20% so it affects the most vulnerable, but global warming may lead to making parts of the world literally deadly to every human being...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet- bulb_temperature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature)

The wet-bulb temperature (WBT) is the temperature read by a thermometer covered in water-soaked cloth (wet-bulb thermometer) over which air is passed.

Sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F) is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature our bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it.[8] Thus 35 °C (95 °F) is the threshold beyond which the body is no longer able to adequately cool itself. A study by NOAA from 2013 concluded that heat stress will reduce labor capacity considerably under current emissions scenarios.[9]

A 2010 study concluded that under a worst-case scenario for global warming with temperatures 12 °C (22 °F) higher than 2007, the wet-bulb temperature limit for humans could be exceeded around much of the world in future centuries.[10] A 2015 study concluded that parts of the globe could become uninhabitable.[11] An example of the threshold at which the human body is no longer able to cool itself and begins to overheat is a humidity level of 50% and a high heat of 46 °C (115 °F), as this would indicate a wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C (95 °F).

The 2015 Indian heat wave saw wet-bulb temperatures in Andhra Pradesh reach 30 °C (86 °F). A similar wet-bulb temperature was reached during the 1995 Chicago heat wave.

<comment><USER4> > fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan;

This is scary, what's a good way to survive for someone that doesn't have access to a bunker or AC? Immersing oneself in water in a bathtub?

<comment><USER5> A tub will work, sure, as long as it's pulled from a large body of water that hasn't warmed up with the air. Hopping in the local lake is an obvious choice.

But in a detached demographic sense: effectively everyone lives in a city in the modern world, and while their housing might not be air conditioned most of the major buildings are. In an emergency like this everyone would just crowd into office buildings and shopping malls.

That's not to say this wouldn't be horrifying, but it's not the kind of existential social crisis people tend to imagine. Cooling ourselves down in a heat wave, in the modern world, is a solved problem at least as far as keeping ourselves alive goes.

<comment><USER6> Every human is effectively a 100W space heater just from being alive. That means you need at least 30W of air conditioning capacity per human to keep the temperature constant (on top of what you need to counter heat from outside).

Unless these buildings are designed as emergency shelters for heat waves their air conditioning systems won't be able to cope with all the people.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's that simple at all.

The principal human-appreciated effect of AC is the dehumidifying of the air when it's cooled.

The dry interior air allows human perspiration to regulate temperature effectively. The AC doesn't have to cool all the bodies, it just has to keep the air dry enough.

<comment><USER8> Don't ACs dehumidify by condensing the water? If so then it means they need to get rid of the heat of vaporization, the same amount of energy the humans shed by evaporative cooling.

<comment><USER7> In a closed system sure, but I'd expect a larger building to have significant fresh-air return systems.

In a scenario where you've filled the place with people, the interior humidity is going to exceed that of the exterior air and you'd just start dumping the moisture outside exchanging with the fresh, dryer air. It's a comfort regression sure, but not a everyone dies situation.

The survival of the people doesn't come down to the AC heat pump keeping up, it comes down to supplying them enough water to drink and disposing of the humidified air.

My point is just that it's the relative humidity that matters, and the AC system has some options there. I've lived through a desert summer in a small space without any AC at all. I'd just keep the windows closed as deep into the day as possible riding out the night's cooling until the air gets too humid indoors from sweat and respiration for the fan to have any cooling effect. At that point I'd open the windows for relief. The air coming in was usually much hotter than the interior air, since the space was well insulated and nights get cool, but it didn't matter because it's very dry air and perspiration resumes functioning. The situation is easily survived unless you run out of water for your person.

Of course if the outdoor air is something like 100% humidity there's only the heat pump option, but that simply doesn't happen in deserts when it's hot out. It's a desert, not the tropics.

In the desert the relative humidity shoots up when it cools down, the humid nights are the worst. But it's because they cooled down. Again, not a survival problem since it's not _that_ hot, just uncomfortably muggy. One saving grace with deserts is they don't generally have any mosquitoes, so these humid nights can easily be spent outdoors without any annoyance.

<comment><USER6> > In a scenario where you've filled the place with people, the interior > humidity is going to exceed that of the exterior air and you'd just start > dumping the moisture outside exchanging with the fresh, dryer air. It's a > comfort regression sure, but not a everyone dies situation.

That's equivalent to opening a window without the AC doing anything. If that would work we wouldn't be in a "crowd everyone into a shopping center" type situation, the people would be just fine outside in the shade.

> It's a desert, not the tropics.

While half of India is in the tropics, this part indeed isn't. But next month the monsoon will put humidity at approximately 100% [1].

1: [https://en.climate-data.org/asia/india/delhi/new- delhi-30/](https://en.climate-data.org/asia/india/delhi/new-delhi-30/)

<comment><USER7> > That's equivalent to opening a window without the AC doing anything.

Even when the air temperature at your fresh air intake is cooler than the air at your condensor coil? Wouldn't we assume no system would draw its fresh air from near the condensor coil?

You still have a heat pump in the system, and there's a temperature difference between the air inlet and the pump outlet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think humidity is a big problem in a lot of places in India with high temperature. In my village in easter UP in India, summer was intolerable because of high humidity and shortage of electricity. (We used to have 8hours electricity per day, but sometimes outages would happen and would go unrepaired for week to month). It was impossible to do anything but take a hand fan and use it to cool yourself. A lot of the time thus went wasted in doing this completely un productive work.

Now that I live in a place with somewhat better weather and 24x7 electricity, I feel what a privilege it is. It pains me to see a large fraction of humanity has to spend a large portion of their time using a hand fan for survival.

<comment><USER10> Now days, you can get 24x7 electricity in tier 1, 2 & 3 cities. I am not sure about villages. Our country is almost power surplus nation now.

<comment><USER11> That's hard to believe, there are still power cuts (even if for 1-2 hours max) in summers.

<comment><USER12> Depends on the particular states. Some states have the necessary economic resources to buy power at peak hours when necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This has been the case almost every year this decade in India.

Also, it is quite common for the government departments to fudge data and report temperatures > 50 Celsius as 49.x to avoid halting work / paying extra to those working under the Sun because there are regulations concerning this.

Edit: I got to know about this practice being rampant through an activist in the South who is well versed with the labour laws.

<comment><USER14> I am not sure if this is true. This is from my state (which is in South India) this year (March-April) when the temperature was in the 35-40 degrees range. Highest recorded was 42 degrees I think in a border district. I don't think South India crosses 40 most of the time. One place reached 47 in 2016 [3].

>With mercury levels in Kerala rising this summer, the state's Labour Department has issued an order allowing mandatory break time for labourers to avoid sunstroke. All labourers in the state who are exposed to sunlight which could potentially lead to a sunstroke have been ordered to rest indoors between 12 pm and 3 pm during the summer months.

>"Those working in the morning shift will get a break from 12 pm to 3 pm. Their work timings have been fixed at 8 hours from 7 in the morning to 7 in the evening. For the other shifts which begin after morning and post noon will be rescheduled to end before 12 pm and begin after 3 pm," read the order.

>In 2018 too, the State Labour Department had issued a similar order to reschedule the shift timings of labourers during the months of February and April to avoid exposure to heat from 12 pm to 3 pm. [1]

[1] [https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/kerala-govt-orders- man...](https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/kerala-govt-orders-mandatory- break-time-labourers-avoid-sun-stroke-97548)

[2] [https://english.manoramaonline.com/districts/thiruvananthapu...](https://english.manoramaonline.com/districts/thiruvananthapuram/2019/03/28/labour- department-crack-down-hotels-staff-heat-wave.html)

[3] [https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current- affairs...](https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current- affairs/story/hottest-places-in-india-320941-2016-05-19)

<comment><USER15> There are many places in South India where the temperature crosses 40 and above during months of Apr-May. For example see temperatures at these places in Karnataka, and AP. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raichur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raichur) (avg. temperature of 45.0 C in May) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurnool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurnool) (avg. temperature of 46.5 C in May)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The 50 C number was observed in a desert. Death Valley, California, also a desert, spend 5 consecutive days above 54 C in 1913, the year it set the temperature record of 56.7 C.

<comment><USER17> For people that don't know, Death Valley's name is no exaggeration, even in modern times.

Going outside there even for short periods of time is extremely dangerous for some fraction of each year.

They shut the park down when this happens.

A few years ago, some tourists that didn't heed the warning ended up dead after rental van overheated.

I don't see how the populated areas already hitting comparable temperatures will be habitable at all in ten years.

<comment><USER18> I was at NTC (south of Death Valley in the Mohave) one summer when the temp was 125-130F for a week. We were in the box the entire time. We used ice filled camel backs, sucking water all day (and rarely urinating) First sgt would bring out pallets of bagged ice that would be half melted by the time they got to us. As a side note; 125 feels cool after spending all day in, and then climbing out if a M1A1! Really odd thing was shivering at night when the temp dropped to 85-90. And urinating all day when it was only 100, but you were still drinking like it was 130.

<comment><USER19> This is an incredible story. Do they regularly operate out there in these extreme conditions?

How did you keep your electrolytes balanced drinking all that water?

<comment><USER18> Irrc they did give us stuff to mix with the water; MREs generally have something as well. A lot of us didn't use it due to fouling your camel back and canteens. I used to eat the salt packet for example (salt and pepper condiment pack). And yes they did this all the time; all through summer and winter; weather is not a deterrent; train how you fight, fight how you train is how the motto goes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This sounds shocking to a lot of people, but it's not new or unexpected, and it's not even that uncomfortable if you have shade and water. I don't mean to downplay the risk to those who don't have shade or water, or who have to work exposed, but it's not as scary as you might think.

I lived in Tempe, AZ for years, and summer temperatures would regularly be over 45C/113F. I walked or biked four miles to work in that. There were a few days when it hit 50C/122F, and while you didn't want to be exposed to the sun for long, it was tolerable. Low humidity makes a huge difference in what you can put up with.

<comment><USER21> You're missing the effect of humidity.

Our bodies rely on evaporative cooling to reduce heat, which is why we sweat and why you need water.

When humidity is above 50% evaporative cooling stops working, so temperatures slightly above our body temperature become lethal.

<comment><USER20> Rajasthan is a desert. The city mentioned in the article, Churu, currently has a humidity of 11%. I mentioned Tempe because it's nearly an identical climate. I've spent time in Ajmer, India, which is pretty close to Churu. It was only about 45C/113F when I was there.

Obviously this is all anecdotal, but my anecdote here isn't off base.

<comment><USER22> Its absolutely not localized to Rajasthan. Almost the whole of north india is under a heat wave. And we recorded 37% humidity today in Delhi (The capital) with 47 C temprature and hot winds.

<comment><USER20> I went back to the article and realized I lazily skimmed after the beginning. Delhi and other areas are much more oppressively humid. Mumbai is stifling even when it's "only" 35C. Most of Rajastan is pretty comfortable even well into the 40s though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In dry climates with such hot temperatures, staying hydrated and sweating will keep you cool (or rather, keep you cool enough to not die).

What happens when temperatures like these are reached in high humidity zones where sweat just sticks? Will we simply have entire communities that lack air conditioning dying off?

<comment><USER24> They will turn into refugees. That's part of why we expect hundreds of millions of climate refugees in the coming decades.

<comment><USER25> Yep I think mass migration is inevitable.

Given the absolute mess migration was out of Syria into Europe (and that was comparatively minor) I think it's going to be unpleasant.

Once it starts it'll snowball as well instead of an orderly evacuation it'll be pell-mell.

Sometimes think it would be nice to have a single rational world government so that we could deal with these things on a species level.

Of course if we had a single rational world government for any length of time we wouldn't be _in_ this mess.

<comment><USER26> Can anyone guess where will the first wave of climate change refugees will be from and where they'll be heading too?

<comment><USER17> Climate change refugees are already common.

For instance, climate change played some role in the current Venezuelan refugee crisis (the one that has Trump separating families and housing people in camps under overpasses, or bussing them to sanctuary cities).

Today, the main problem is that their government started to collapse in 2017, so they are unable to supply food to their population.

Why did the government start to collapse? Well, they have seen lower crop yields in recent years, which means more food imports, which means they are more vulnerable to embargoes, etc.

It only has data to 2016, but this site shows across the board agricultural production collapses in 2015 and 2016.

[https://www.ceicdata.com/en/venezuela/agricultural- productio...](https://www.ceicdata.com/en/venezuela/agricultural-production- and-consumption)

The government went into disarray in 2017.

In 2018 (and maybe earlier; tldr) US sanctions cut off oil revenue. The sanctions are due to terrorism, corruption, human trafficking, and human rights violations, which are, again symptoms of a collapsing government:

[https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF10715.pdf](https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF10715.pdf)

You may also remember tortilla riots a few years back when the price of corn spiked. That probably led to some migration.

Arguably, and famines that led to refugees in the last 10-20 years are due to climate change.

The issue is that we're at a tipping point where they will become more common.

<comment><USER25> Not sure why you got downvote for an argument made with data sources but I gave you an upvote anyway.

Spirited debate is the best thing about this place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well before you guys start doomsday predictions, let me tell you that Churu is in Rajasthan which is in Thar desert. Temperatures like this, even though very high and uncomfortable, are not unheard of.

We are in midst of a very hot summer but it is not something out of ordinary and yearly cycle (we don't love our summers). We are eagerly awaiting monsoon to arrive in India (early june is when it hits our shores). After rains arrive, we expect our dams to fill and possible water scarcity to end

<comment><USER6> > We are in midst of a very hot summer

That's the problem. No matter what you think about climate change, summers are undeniably getting hotter. This might not be a doomsday, but it's something that will become more common and eventually will affect more populated areas.

<comment><USER27> That I agree with you.

And I believe that climate change is real. Definitely summers are getting hotter, and winters are getting colder and extreme weather events more frequent. Just that it is not yet a doomsday scenario

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> That's 122 F in americanese.

<comment><USER29> And 323.15 Kelvin, and 581.67 Rankine.

<comment><USER30> Why did nobody add the Vulkan or Klingon measurements yet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Imagine the ever-growing demand for ACs and the ever-decreasing amount of water.

Luckily for India, it has a long shoreline.

</comment><comment><USER32> Iran can top this easily:

"the temperature was 53.7 degrees Celsius, which is 128.7 degrees Fahrenheit"

[https://eu.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/06/29/129-degrees...](https://eu.usatoday.com/story/weather/2017/06/29/129-degrees- iran-earths-hottest-temperature-ever-recorded/440644001/)

The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index), which also takes humidity into account, hit an incredible 142 degrees.

</comment><comment><USER33> A slightly redacted version of my earlier post.

Dear HN crowd, it might not feel like it but we are quite influential. We are rich and therefore have a non-negligible command over economy. Silicon Valley is cool and people look up to us (do they? I don't really know, but wasn't Steve Jobs a national hero?) and may follow our example.

Please, take the lead. Here are a few things an hornorable member of the HN community can do

\- Stop flying to conferences. Go to a local meetup. It's fun. And cheaper. If you really need to get out of town, take a train. Don't think about it as not flying for the rest of your life. Rather, can we declare a moratorium on conferences for like three years? Let's hope by then Prometheus will give us carbon-neutral jet fuel [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240)

\- Shift your investments from fossil to green. If you can't find enough worthy greens, shift it to anything else. Some say it won't impact your returns [http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/the-mythical- per...](http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/the-mythical-per..). Move your deposits and savings to a more sustainable bank. This might be one of the most underappreciated yet simple and powerful tools [https://fairfinanceguide.org](https://fairfinanceguide.org)

\- Work less. Work part time, and part of that part time remotely. Reduce your commute. If your boss won't let you, find a job that will. In the current job market you can negotiate almost anything, and remote work must be the easiest thing to negotiate. [http://cepr.net/documents/publications/climate-change- worksh...](http://cepr.net/documents/publications/climate-change-worksh..). A firm lets its employees work four days a week while being paid for five. Everyone is happy, lower electricity bills, fewer cars on the road [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day- workw...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workw..).

\- Reduce your meat consumption as much as you can. I noticed that this one is quite controversial but I am mentioning it anyway. It's fine to not go fully vegan, but make meat a special treat, something you are looking forward to, not an everyday snack. They say these new vega burgers are not too bad. [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climat...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climat..).

<comment><USER34> India has population of over 1.2 billion people. And major part of this population is vegetarian (at least in the sense that they don't eat meat on daily basis twice a day).

What if India were meat consuming nation just like US?

<comment><USER35> India is the country with biggest population density in the planet (barring some micro nation), why does everyone keep giving India a pass for having absolutely no regard for sustainability and keep exploding their population by having way more children than those they could actually provide with a good life (if not environmentaly, at least economically) ?

Should we really expect the same level of life for the children of couples that had 2 children and were able to properly provide for then, and for children of couples that had 6 children when they couldn't even provide properly for 2?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just recovered from a stroke in my own locality. Drink water every 15 minutes guys. It is very painful if you don't and a dreadful time.

</comment><comment><USER36> It is normal?

<comment><USER37> Yes

<comment><USER38> If this is normal, then you imply that the article linked by inflatableDodo is wrong?

Btw, I was kind of impressed, when visiting India and speaking to a few locals, that they don't see climate change to be a real thing, or at least to be such a big problem, and much overrated. The claim was basically that it was always very warm, and it is just normal that way, and they don't expect it to become much warmer. I'm not sure if that is just anecdotal or if that is the major opinion by locals.

<comment><USER39> It is just anecdotal as opinions in India change every few kilometres.

However, the Indian Government has made its stance clear on Climate Change: [https://www.undp.org/content/dam/india/docs/undp_climate_cha...](https://www.undp.org/content/dam/india/docs/undp_climate_change.pdf)

and: [https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and- natio...](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/view- will-modi-spur-global-inaction-into-action-on-climate- change/articleshow/69609716.cms)

> The claim was basically that it was always very warm, and it is just normal > that way, and they don't expect it to become much warmer

I think they might have misunderstood you. They might have thought you are talking about weather and not climate change. Human body may not notice slight changes in temperature but the ecosystem does. For instance, those locals you spoke to may not have personally experienced any change but if you had instead asked them about droughts, drying of wells or yield of crops they would have definitely given you a totally different reply.

<comment><USER40> >It is just anecdotal as opinions in India change every few kilometres.

And every ten meters, when asking for directions, ha ha :)

And the best part is that some of them, if asked "where is so-and-so place" (hotel / restaurant / bus station / etc.), will dramatically raise their arm, point "that-a-way", and say "tum XYZ chowk ko cross karke seeeedddddhaaaayyy jao" (you cross XYZ square and go sttttrrrraaaiiiiggggghhhhhhhtttt) - <USER2> mentioning in which direction to straight from the square ...

Always good for a few giggles (apart from the frustration).

Indian here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> flagged for lack of cookie policy

why is it bad to state the reason for flagging something? alright, then I don't explain it in the future. np.</comment>


After a Stroke at 33 a Writer Relies on Journals to Piece Together Her Own Story - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/02/11/514559596/after-a-stroke-at-33-a-writer-relies-on-journals-to-piece-together-her-own-story <comment><AUTHOR> Reminds me of an old Kim Stanley Robinson SF novel called _Icehenge_ , which as I remember it revolves around life extension without corresponding memory preservation, so that history becomes a way of understanding your own past. I think it did interesting things with the unreliable-narrator trope and the idea of historical revisionism.

Definitely recommended, and I'm feeling a strong urge to dig it out and reread it; it's been decades. It'd be pleasingly appropriate to discover that I'm misremembering or have a drastically different response to it this time.

<comment><USER2> You might also like 'Soldier in the Mist' by Gene Wolfe, about a greek soldier who loses his short term memory from an injury. He starts each day by reading the journal he finds beside his bed..

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried that not long after reading _Icehenge_ , but didn't really get on with it. Again, that was decades ago, so maybe I should give it another look. Gene Wolfe does tend to reward older readers; I'm pretty sure most of his Urth books whooshed right over my head as a teenager.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I started keeping a physical journal a few months ago. For some reason having the physical journal with me as a constant reminder helps me keep up with it.

Anyway, I've gone back and reread the beginning of that and I've gone "Oh yeah, I forgot about that," several times already. I can't imagine completely losing my memory and needing to refer to my journals for memory. But at least if I ever did go through this, I'll have these to refer to.

<comment><USER4> Physical journal? As in paper and pen?

I was listening to the Twit podcast once and Jerry Pournelle was on. He talked about his life log. Basically it was a journal in which he recorded everything - meetings, meals, phone calls, weather, along with the more usual thoughts and ideas. I tried to do that for a while and it was a lot of work.

What do you track in your journal?

<comment><USER3> Yes, paper and pen.

First of all, it is a lot of work. I sometimes stay up for an hour and a half some nights just catching up on 3-4 days of activity. I've almost filled up the first one, though, and seeing the physical artifact and being able to look back on it and know that a lot less of what I consume and think about every day is slipping through the cracks into nothingness makes it worth it, though.

I'm a game designer by hobby (and to an extent by trade, especially in my past), so in reality the focus of the journal is more on design. If I come up with a new concept for a game, a new design for how cards or boards or levels should look (I just draw a rough sketch right there in the journal), or playtest a game and want to report feedback I received and ideas to change things, or report what I worked on in a given day, I put it in there.

I also add some life events, though, to put what I'm doing in context, explain why I was more or less active at times, and also as a gentle reminder what happened and when for events in my life. I put anything I do consume in there that might be considered an influencer and what I liked about them (board and video games, movies and tv shows mostly).

Finally, if I listen to or watch a lecture or read an article about something that could pertain to design, I write notes down separately, and then distill and flesh out the important (to me) notes into the journal later. The reason I do this is I can't really decide what's important or not while I'm in the middle of it, and I also write notes to lectures too quickly and without as much context, and I need to add that because the journal is intended for an audience other than just myself to read it (although perhaps not for a long time afterwards).

I don't record what I consider more trivial things like meetings, meals, phone calls, or weather, though, for the most part. Maybe if I we tried a new unconventional recipe and it turned out awesome, but probably nothing else.

As for structure, I just write the date, a hyphen, and keep writing until I'm done for that day. Then a blank line, and the next entry. Some days only require a paragraph, some days require 6 or more pages, so I don't try to limit or pad it or line it up with pages. I also put a few "Concept for 'game name'" in the top margins for a page if I have to find something again, but honestly if I just make sure I add more drawings of things, that's usually enough to identify where the concepts are at a glance. I've almost finished my first one and it will cover about 4 months of my life when I'm done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It struck me as odd, or at least made me stop, think and now write about it. Why the doctors recommended maintaining a "Moleskine" journal. Why "Moleskine"? Why can't it be a plain journal!!

</comment><comment><USER6> Imagine a capacity sensor around the artery and a capsule of blood thinner.. This could be historic instead of gone history.

<comment><USER7> The headline made me sad but this comment made me laugh. If only all life's problems could be handled with simple engineering. With all the machinery you'd have to stuff everywhere, there'd be a lot more problems.

<comment><USER8> > With all the machinery you'd have to stuff everywhere, there'd be a lot more > problems.

Oh, machinery like pacemakers, knee implants, cochlear implants? Seems to me we have far too little of such machinery, rather than too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can you completely recover after a stroke like this, or is the brain permanently damaged?

What causes these to happen? There's a photo of the author in the article, and she appears visibly healthy. How can you reduce one's risk of having a stroke?

Strokes are scary. Aneurysms seem even more terrifying.

<comment><USER10> It depends. I had a very mild stroke at the end of last year.

I was extremely lucky. The only lasting damage is occasional slight facial tingling and a hint of numbness in one arm. For a few months I had unusual bouts of extreme fatigue, but those seem to be fading now.

Otherwise I'm fully functional. Memory, speech, and mobility all seem fine.

I'm definitely much much luckier than some of the people I saw on my very brief stay on the stroke ward. One person had been on the ward for literally a year. A stay of a few months for regular rehabilitation sessions isn't unusual. (I got pretty angry that strokes happen at all. They can be _so_ damaging that it seems unusually cruel for humans to live in a reality where that kind of handicap/illness is even possible.)

Practically, strokes are somewhat random. There are some risk factors - cholesterol, heart arrhythmias, smoking, alcohol, stress, high blood pressure - but you can be low risk and still suffer the effects of a loose clot.

In fact you can have a series of very minor ischaemic events and not even notice. They'll show up on an MRI, but you may not have any obvious symptoms at all.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for your response. I'm glad you were able to make an almost complete recovery.

That's terrifying about strokes being essentially random outside of the obvious risk factors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Days later, she learned she'd had a stroke

Don't you have to get to the ER within hours when you have a stroke?

<comment><USER12> One might. And its not inconsistent with the sentence. There could be several days of disorientation prior to being able to form the memory that they had a stroke a few days ago.

Tangentially related, [https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_strok...](https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight) is about a brain scientist who had a massive stroke and she talks of both the shutting down of the brain along with the starting it up again.</comment></comment>


Startups: Your Users' Behavior Is Not A Random Variable - <AUTHOR> http://shoptalkapp.com/blog/2009/11/5/your-users-behavior-is-not-random

<comment><USER2> Excellent post!

And if you follow the latest online copywriting best practices, you'll know that creating 3-5 persona types for your website navigation is all that is required. Almost every one will follow one of those 3-5 pathways.

Sidenote about the test the article runs - re: adding text to a graphic tab...

In 1985, after finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple Computer Human Interface Group adopted the motto, "A word is worth a thousand pictures," And a descriptive word or phrase was added beneath all Macintosh icons.

</comment><comment><USER3> So... I don't own a startup, have never done user interface testing and am generally unqualified to talk about how to design these things.

However, I'm not bad at statistics and logic, and I'm sorry, but the logic here is pretty bad.

The author is comparing a user (edit: really user behavior on a feature/icon that no one gets) to a _fair_ coin. The conclusion he comes to...? They are not the same! Not exactly a lot of insight.

A much more fair comparison, in the example given, is comparing the user to a _heavily biased_ coin. In this case, a coin that (almost) always comes up heads. With this coin, the convergence is _much_ faster.

The (almost) fair coin is a better comparison to a feature that (almost) half of your users do/don't get.

So, if you try with 30 users, 14 like something and 16 don't, you need more data! But, if you try with 30 users, and 29 like it and 1 doesn't, you can stopy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great post, really wonder what the author's thoughts on A/B and Split Testing. Do you think it adds value?</comment>


OS X Mavericks GM is out – how to make a bootable installation USB - <AUTHOR> http://povolotski.me/2013/10/12/osx-mavericks-gm-out-bootable-installation-usb/ The golden master for OSX Mavericks is out! For all you guys who wanna try it out, but need to install it via a USB, here's a super simple way to do so. <comment><USER2> Does anyone know if the memory swap issues[1], which plague Lion and Mountain Lion, have been fixed?

[1] You could have 20GB of hard disk space free, but use XCode, Firefox and a few other apps, and soon you're down to 10MB and you get the dreaded "Your Mac is running out of disk space" dialog and you have to force quit all your apps, and type "purge" into a Terminal in a desperate attempt to get the swap released...

<comment><USER3> I run several virtual machines on my 8 GB MBP and I have never seen swap issues. Are you sure your problems are actually caused by swap?

"purge" doesn't touch swap, it discards disk cache. Its use (according to the man page) is to simulate cold boot disk performance. The command has no use for memory management, because disk cache is automatically discarded when free memory runs out.

<comment><USER2> Fairly sure, I've been suffering with this on 10.7 and 10.8 on different machines. Some more info here:

[http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is- de...](http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-deeply- broken-in-os-x-memory-management)

<comment> __--__ I second this. It's a big enough issue for me that if Mavericks doesn't fix it, I'll be switching back to Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Been on Mavericks for about a good week now. Was pretty much a painless move, the only problem I had was that at this moment After Effects CC is unsupported.

It's a real tangible performance boost though. Feels extremely snappy on my Retina Macbook Pro. Scrolling is faster and I went from 2,5 hours of battery life to 4,5 !

<comment><USER5> you get only 2.5 hours on MBP Retina !?!?

<comment><USER6> Maybe he's using Xcode

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Usual caveats apply about making sure the software you depend on is compatible before updating. Notably, Adobe products are having a lot of issues (Photoshop: Save As is broken, keyboard shortcuts break if you have a non-US keyboard, and I've heard the Creative Cloud installer doesn't work at all).

<comment><USER8> Thank you so much, we have Adobe suite running on our machines and I was tempted to upgrade! Thanks so much :)

<comment><USER9> For what it's worth, I've been running Adobe CC throughout the beta period (and currently on the GM) without issue.

<comment><USER10> I had problems with Save As in Photoshop CS6 in early betas, but it's been fine for a while now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Activity Monitor has been significantly enhanced and includes a page that tells you what software is using the most energy. That should help people get more battery life out of their systems as well.

<comment><USER12> And put pressure on app developers not to be on that list without reason. _glances with annoyance at the Twitter app_

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady When I upgraded Windows machines I always went with a complete fresh install. Since switching to MAc I've always just run the upgrade.

What do people on HN recommend? Using this technique to do a complete reinstall, or upgrading?

<comment><USER13> Upgrading generally works great with OS X; generally the upgrade process blows away the system/OS files and leaves your stuff untouched. In the normal case, "your stuff" is well compartmentalized away from system files so stuff works nicely.

With that said, as a developer sometimes it can be handy to do a clean install. For example, if you have any custom kernel modules, these will certainly be blown away in an upgrade. Additionally, developer tools installed in /usr/ can be interfered with, and in general the probability that something will be incompatible/broken is a bit higher.

<comment><USER14> I seem to remember a story some OSX version ago about a user who lost her RSS feeds in mail though. There were still there somewhere hidden in her home settings but there were no more accessible through Mail because the features was removed.

So be careful anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Those running Mavericks and experiencing significantly improved average battery life: what machines are you using and how old are they?

<comment><USER16> I'm not experiencing any real change in battery life on my specced out 15" retina. Got ~5 hours before 10.9, get ~5 hours on 10.9. Makes me kind of wish I'd gone for the base CPU and saved money and battery life.

<comment><USER17> Is there a difference in battery life? The CPUs all rate the same maximum wattage (it's the same chip after all!) and CPUs are pretty good about not using power when idle.

<comment><USER18> Not to mention that a faster clocked processor has to stay active for less time to achieve the same task. A similar logic explains why LTE battery life is often better than 3G/UMTS too.

<comment><USER16> Unless I'm mistaken, isn't something like 75% of a CPU's power consumption just in pushing the clock signal around? I just assumed that a faster clock would consume more power (as a general rule).

Wikipedia seems to agree with me: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation)

<comment><USER19> Yes a faster clock will do that, but as mentioned by quellhorst, you won't always be running at the fastest speed. There's also another important trick Clock Gating[1] that will reduce the power even more. That's one of the places that Intel has been working on in order to get the power usage down as much as possible to make the CPU have to dissipate less heat too. With a multi-core system it's just about absolutely necessary in order to be able to avoid overheating the die.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_gating](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_gating)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone happen to know whether Mavericks installs or can run Apple Java 6? For a variety of reasons, I don't want to go to 7 just yet (and Oracle doesn't ship a 6 JDK for MacOS).

<comment><USER11> It does. It auto installed when I ran IntelliJ.

<comment><USER12> Same here: when I first launched Eclipse, it asked if I wanted to install JRE 6. Was kind of surprised it didn't ask if I wanted to install JRE 7, not sure why it's still set to 6.

<comment><USER13> JRE 6 is the last JRE that Apple distributes itself via Software Update. JRE 7 comes direct from Oracle for the time being.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know if it's related to their improvements on battery life but when my Mac mini goes to sleep it breaks my ssh sessions in my iTerm2 terminal it's annoying. I'm wondering if there is a way to maintain my connections alive?

<comment><USER22> You want OSX to keep network connections active while asleep? It seems to me that going to sleep means not actively doing anything.

The most common solution to this problem is to use tmux or screen, or just disable sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know when the public release (Mac App Store) will be available?

<comment> matthew-wegner The next Apple press event is October 22nd. iPad-centric, but also expected to include Mac Pro pricing/availability, so probably Mavericks release as well...

<comment> X-Istence I hope to hear some news about updated MacBook Pro's as well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm looking at their App Nap functionality and I am wondering how it will affect applications that do background work. It looks to be on by default unless expressly turned off by the app. Does it apply to all processes or what is their definition of an app? I wouldn't want just anything to be suspended when I don't have it on my screen (any work that I started and am expecting to continue in the background basically).

<comment><USER25> I'd suspect it is limited to Cocoa stuff, so GUI only. It should be controllable via a setting anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've updated to Mavericks about a week ago, just before attending a conference, and I've had a fair share of problems, though it seems that (based on Google Searches) I'm in the minority with the main issue: I can't use tethering with my iPhone anymore. Wireless or wired tethering will setup just fine, and I can even ping hosts on the internet, but domain name resolution fails. I've tried all kinds of things (like adding the 126.96.36.199 server, or running Linux in a VM to see if it works fine in there) but somehow as soon as I am tethered, my Macbook Air can't resolve domain names anymore and using the internet is effectively useless. The other issue that I've had is that the system froze when I connected it via thunderbolt to a beamer.

However, apart from that I'm getting longer battery life (from ~3 hours up to ~4.5 hours) and I like the OS. I guess bugs as the above are normal with OSX point releases. I still remember the pain when I ran Leopard.

<comment><USER20> It may be worth explicitly restricting the tether connection to IPv4 only; have seen similar things where an ISP has something that looks like a working IPv6 setup but isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This article is unnecessary for most users.

Open the .dmg, drag the install .app into /Applications and run it from there. The upgrade works fine.

</comment><comment><USER27> What is the difference between the GM version and the App store released one?

<comment><USER28> You have to fresh install developer releases while you can just upgrade to public release.

<comment><USER27> Oh, wow. I just did a clean install of Mountain Lion on my early 2011 MacBook Pro to "freshen" up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> can't believe modern OSes can't run properly with 2GB of RAM. In the 90s we certainly didn't have the same standard.

<comment><USER30> I totally agree with you but folks from the 80s said similar things about computing in the 90s. :) I can only imagine what the folks from the 70s would say. Like another poster said, it's not ALL bloat- there are lots of memory- hungry things going on in the background for user convenience that would have been unacceptable tradeoffs 10-20 years ago (in terms of how much system resources are consumed vs. the utility and convenience provided to the user), but on modern hardware those tradeoffs are less meaningful, and things that might have seemed wasteful 10 years ago become practical to do. I think a lot of it also from more and more graphics resources needed per app (high resolution images for UIs can consume an absurd amount of memory), as well as many apps being much more aggressive about caching stuff in memory for snappier response times (web browsers, or any kind of media-centric application). It seems inevitable that as memory gets cheaper, the average machine has more memory, and as the average memory of the average machine goes up, the perceived cost of memory consumption goes down, leading application (and OS) developers to figure out more and more ways to use all of that memory. It's a vicious circle (or a virtuous one, or both).

<comment><USER29> Well programmers should offer different version of their apps, or allow to disable those memory hungry features.

And honestly I'm not really sure that a feature that is memory hungry is really useful anyways, especially at that scale. At that point I feel it's all about the planned obsolescence, they just make algorithms that require to buy more hardware.

In that case software performance would only apply because of bigger hardware, not better programming. I'm sorry but with the computers of today, I really doubt programmers can invent resource hungry features that are really useful, maybe they can just do sloppy programming that requires more memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can anyone with an iMac (and not a notebook) comment on how Mavericks performs there?

I've got a 2008 iMac 2.8 dual-core that I thought was getting pretty long in the tooth, but I'm thinking it's just the 4GB ram that's holding it back now. I can't add any more RAM and Mountain Lion just draaaggggss on it.

<comment><USER32> Actually, unofficially, the older iMacs support 6 GB (4+2) since the first aluminium iMac (mid 2007, I think)

I bought a 4 GB DDR2 DIMM for my Dad's mid 2007 iMac, installed it together with a 2 GB DIMM and it has been running non-stop for almost a year now, without any problems. DDR2 is now a bit expensive, due to being old, the 4 GB DIMM cost me around 50$ on eBay.

<comment><USER31> I've seen that unofficial fact but never heard from anyone that actually had it done. Thanks.

If I go to 10.9 I'll definitely up the RAM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone notice how _slow_ the iOS simulator is when running apps on the 6.1 simulator?

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow, such a one-week-late news.</comment>


Security Advisory for the Standard Library - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/05/13/Security-advisory.html <comment><USER2> Note that the likelihood of this being an _actual_ security issue is extremely low. Rust just takes memory safety very seriously.

<comment><USER3> Imagine if there were a CVE number for every API in the C++ standard library that could segfault if blatantly misused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This just looks like it allows to bypass safety checks without marking the code as unsafe. But so do most of the bugs listed in [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/labels/I-unsound%20%F0%9F%...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/labels/I-unsound%20%F0%9F%92%A5)? What makes this different that it's a security issue now?

<comment><USER2> I can't speak for the team, but I'm guessing that it's considered more severe of an issue because it affects backwards compatibility.

<comment><USER5> This sounds right to me. Rust takes its compatibility promise seriously, but reserves the right to break it when there's a security issue. This looks like it's one of those times.</comment></comment></comment>


The Stock Market Is Shrinking - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/business/shrinking-stock-market.html <comment><USER3> One of the main drivers IMHO, and not mentioned in the article, is quantitative easing or the ZIRP.

Money is cheap and easily available (to select few) which has helped players in private equity to borrow and spend. Consequence of this is that companies can stay private longer as there is more capital available in private funding rounds.

Take for example the case of Uber which has managed to raise $21.7B [0], something that in past would have only resulted from an IPO.

[0] [https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...](https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organizations/funding_total/uber)

_Edit_

Was off by an order of magnitude on the amount Uber raised.

<comment><USER4> Quick note about secondary financings. Not targeted at you per-se as much as the large quantity of HN comments that seem to not understand the nuance.

You can't include primary and secondary financings in the same total, because you would be double-counting. That would be like measuring a public stock on its total volume traded, not its market cap.

For example:

\- Investor A invests £100M into Uber for 1M shares

\- Investor B buys those 1M shares from Investor A for $400M

\- Investor C buys those 1M shares from Investor B for $500M

There has been "$1B in fundraising" but: (a) only $100M went to Uber and; (b) the market cap of those shares is $500M

<comment><USER5> I don't think anyone would say that there was 1B in fundraising. They'd say there was 100MM in fundraising. The market cap of those shares is indeed price * shares outstanding. But that's not enterprise value either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is much easier now to invest and have access to the stock market. A few decades ago, not only did you have to have a human broker you would call on the phone to make a trade, the costs were vastly higher, so small trades were much cheaper.

The problem is small companies aren't going public because of the much larger regulatory burden or cost, or they are being acquired before they go public, or they are staying private longer because of access to private capital.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/historical-trading- commissio...](https://www.businessinsider.com/historical-trading- commissions-2014-3)

<comment><USER7> I think that's what the grandparent commenter meant. Early startups with large growth opportunity used to be abundant on the stock market. But now the burden is too great, so only larger companies can IPO. I even hear phases like "dump it on the public market" \- the public market is where you go today after you have milked most of the major opportunity out already.

<comment><USER8> This. The public mkt used be the source of capital for companies like Facebook. Now it's all private until most of the growth juice is squeezed out and now the public mkt is a liquidity event for the private investors. If/when they want to...

<comment><USER9> Facebook is up almost 500% from its IPO price, so even the very smart private equity and venture folks can misjudge when an opportunity has been completely milked.

<comment><USER10> Another reason to go public is because the SEC forces companies with 2000 stock owners (used to be 500 pre-2012) to file public disclosure documents similar to being public, so companies typically go public at that point. I've heard that some work around this limit by issuing IOUs indexed to the stock price.

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder- thresho...](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder- threshold.asp)

<comment><USER11> You also can give RSUs, which don't actually become owned by the recipient until the company is acquired or become public. No fancy IOUs required. This IOU is denominated in stock units instead of a cash price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having worked at several public companies, one of the biggest reasons companies don't go public... is the incredible workload and productivity loss of _being a public company._ Audits by the Big 4 accounting firms, Quarterly Filings, constant revenue and EPS projections.

With the rise of private equity funds, there has been a legitimate alternative to going public. PE certainly has its own bevy of issues, but I'm not sure it's not worthwhile...

<comment><USER13> Dell took the namesake company private some years back because he felt that being public didn't allow the company to make long term plans.

<comment><USER14> Bezos doesn't seem to have that problem.

<comment><USER15> He holds the largest shareholding by a wide margin: 3x as much as Vanguard, the next largest, who will generally not interfere.

More to the point, people have accepted Amazon as a growth company. So long as Wall St likes the story, the price goes up, everyone is happy.

On the other hand, AMZN is trading at ~230x earnings and ~4.6x revenue. For comparison WMT (Walmart) is trading at ~30x and ~0.5x respectively. Amazon is growing much faster, but there are no guarantees that it will do so forever. To reach ratios like Walmart's it will need to take in ~$3.8Tn of revenue.

<comment><USER16> Small correction: to have a ratio of 0.5x revenue with their current market cap they would need annual revenues of $1.8T (obviously, still a very large number).

For comparison, their revenue in 2017 was $178 billion, and in 2013 it was $74 billion.

<comment><USER17> This is a great way to think about it. Amazon is priced the same as a $1.8T company, so the assumption is that they will grow that big.

It's not entirely unreasonable as Walmart's total revenue today is $0.5B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Two things:

1: The article is cherry-picking for a headline. In 1980, there were 71 IPOs [1]. In 1990, there were 110. In 1996, the year that this article points to, there were 677, _the highest number since 1980_. This was the center of the ".COM" bubble when many if not most companies had no business going public. To put a finer point on it, From 1981-1990, there were 2,153 IPOs. From 1991-2000, there were 4,361.

2: It was the backlash of A. 'shit equity' that was produced in the .com bubble, B. two recessions, and C. _common sense_ , that led to fewer and fewer IPOs since 2000. Just consider YC itself. How many $100+ Million companies are in it's portfolio (25?)? How many are public (a: 1)? In the 2001-2010 decade, due to a., b., c., there were _1009_ IPOs. Since 2011, 726.

The low number of public companies is due to market dynamics and the sentiments of founders that have ensued since the .COM bubble. Author cherry picked the peak IPO year.

[1] [https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/2017/03/IPOs201...](https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/2017/03/IPOs2016Statistics_Mar29_2017.pdf)

<comment><USER19> So, the number of IPOs between 2001-2010 was less than half that of 1981-1990?

<comment><USER18> Yes, due to the .COM bubble bursting (2001-2003) and the sub-prime mortgage crisis (2008-2009). Take a look at page 3 in [1].

<comment><USER20> And it's on track to be half of the 1981-1990 number again in 2011-2020?

<comment><USER18> Yes. Reason being that companies are waiting much longer to IPO. Take a look at Table 12b on page 34 [1]. In the 1980s, the average number of companies that offered an IPO with sales >$1BB was under 5%. In the 2010s, it averages about 15%. (in 2005 $)

Still contending that this move towards quality is the legacy of .COM mania and the ensuing Sarbanes-Oxley burden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This trend, imo, is connected up with the deeper issue of ever-widening rift between the (shrinking) middle class and the calcifying wealth of the upper classes -- there isn't a lot of opportunity for folks in the middle class to invest in quality 'fast-rising upstart' stocks (like the article talks about) today relative to, say, a couple decades ago -- the barrier of entry has become unbelievably steep.

One (unsurprising) solution might be to fuse decentralized technologies in to today's stock market architecture [0]. Countries like Malta are doing that already with technologies like the Neufund/Binance platform. [1][2]

[0] [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/decentralizedmarket.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/decentralizedmarket.asp)

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/19/malta-paves-the-way- for-a-...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/19/malta-paves-the-way-for-a- decentralized-stock-exchange/)

[2] [https://cryptoslate.com/binance-and-neufund-to-build- first-d...](https://cryptoslate.com/binance-and-neufund-to-build-first- decentralized-stock-exchange/)

<comment><USER22> > \-- there isn't a lot of opportunity for folks in the middle class to invest > in quality stocks today relative to, say, a couple decades ago -- the > barrier of entry has become unbelievably steep.

Just what barrier to investing in the stock market is there, besides for having money to invest? It's easy to setup an IRA or 401K or just setup your own brokerage account.

<comment><USER23> It's not investing in the currently public companies that's the issue...it's all the private companies that never go public...or go public so much later than they would have in the past that all the value has already been extracted by VCs.

<comment><USER24> I think what has changed is the shocking amount of money that recent start ups are burning. Snap burns more in a year (~$1 billion) than Facebook did in it's entire life. Uber has burned ~$10 billion during its existence. It's hard for me to picture a company raising that amount of money on the stock market.

<comment><USER25> Tesla has lost several billion dollars since its IPO in 2010, and that hasn't seemed to have slowed the stock down at all.

<comment><USER24> Tesla only raised $270 million in their IPO. They've subsequently raised more, but their initial a pretty far cry from the billions Snap/Uber needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ironically, one of the core reasons for less IPOs is Sarbanes-Oxley, which was meant to protect retail investors but instead has had the second order effect of reducing the number of IPOs and limiting the available higher growth / higher risk opportunities these same investors.

<comment><USER27> This is very accurate. It is extremely costly for companies to have an IPO. The regulatory burden is very high for publicly traded companies.

A history of financial laws designed to protect consumers has actually reduced the number of investment opportunities except for ultra-rich people.

Look up the definition of 'qualified investor' from the Securities Act of 1933. It prevents people below a threshold of wealth from being able to invest in certain things.

Similarly, based on my own experience having worked with proprietary trading outfits in the past, the FATCA laws just caused European banks to no longer want to do business with Americans which reduced the number of available investment opportunities again.

<comment><USER28> For young people especially, the investment opportunities are an absolute bore. It makes a lot more sense to take big risks when you are young, and by implementing the 'qualified investor' requirements, many young people will never have a chance to invest in the exact companies which interest them the most.

A 25 year old who loses a $10K investment in Myspace, or Digg can easily bounce back. It's well worth the chance of investing early in a company like Snapchat or Facebook which could give them a shot at a 10-100X return.

There's a reason so many people poured money into Bitcoin and crypto. Most of the projects are pointless, but young people have very little interest in earning 5-10% in stocks, since they don't have a ton of capital to invest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The obvious but unpopular solution would be to make it easier for companies to go public.

The trade off is that Theranos would be public, but so would, for example, Stripe and Slack.

<comment><USER30> Sarbox screwed up perhaps more than it helped.

<comment><USER8> Yes - we punished 1,000's of good honest companies for the deliberate misdeeds of a few bad apples. Terrible policy.

<comment><USER31> Those "few bad apples" caused the worst global recession since the Depression. Let's not minimize the circumstances that led to Sarbox.

Edit: This is wrong, see below.

<comment><USER32> I thought SOX came out of Enron and WorldCom which didn't have much to do with the 2008 recession?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is my personal opinion: The stock market system is obsolete and needs to be revamped for the online world where the world's population is always on, and connected.

I have been looking for other ways to invest than putting my money in the stock market. Luckily today there are new ways to invest that were not available 20 years ago. I think way too many stocks' prices are disconnected from their actual value (or even future value). To some extent, the stock market has become a legal gambling platform. Also the market is biased towards the professional traders and it's not serving the average person that worked hard for their small money and it's way too easy to loose a big chunk of your $$$.

Also, i would have loved to see the article talk about the increase in private investments (ie VCs and Angels) Elon Musk said it himself: he tried his hardest to keep Tesla private but he just couldn't, he had to let go and IPO. He swore to not make that mistake again with SpaceX (more here: [https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Elon-Musk-make-Tesla-go-IPO- bu...](https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Elon-Musk-make-Tesla-go-IPO-but-not- SpaceX))

<comment><USER34> How do you imagine smart scale investors to participate then? The rich getting even richer by keeping all successful startups private? I don't wanna live in that world

<comment><USER33> I never said i had a solution to any financial markets problems. I just pointed out things that irritated me. Maybe someone here has a better picture and could start Stock Market 2.0 for the digital age

<comment><USER35> The digital age allows for actual ubiquitous information. A new start at a stock market could require public companies to operate completely in the open - zero asymmetric information. It's a radical idea I just had, so it's not a fully formed idea. But information does concentrate power and thus wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a big problem. There are fewer promising, early-stage investments available to retail investors than ever. More and more, private VC money captures all the value created by promising upstarts. Buying $1000 Microsoft stock in 1986, you'd have seen a more than 1000x return in that amount of time. Today, tech giants like Facebook IPO at $100B market cap, leaving very little room for big returns.

This is in part because private VC funding has matured...but also because there's all sorts of regulations about raising money that completely exclude non-accredited investors from early-stage investments.

No wonder the rich get richer...

<comment><USER36> The only way to get big returns is secrets, just like always. Insider trading has given way to insider investing or insider hiring, which is insidery just like always. The problem with the stock market is that it is too easy for people to invest in, relative to other options (private companies) where you are still welcome to (encouraged?) to learn about secrets. So people blindly buy indexes (past returns = future results somehow, even though by definition people are overvaluing whatever is in the bucket) instead of finding secrets.

<comment><USER37> > even though by definition people are overvaluing whatever is in the bucket

By that do you mean that etfs which people might buy are overvalued compared to the stocks which compose the etf? Or that overinvesting in the etf results in the stocks getting overvalued?

Because as somebody that works on etf market-making, no liquid etf is trading outside of a reasonable fair-value spread based on the underlying components, unless you count situations where markets for the underlyings are closed so there's no exact fair value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The reasoning:

"■ The companies on the market today are, on average, much larger than the public corporations of decades ago. Fast-rising upstarts are harder to find."

"■ Profits are increasingly concentrated in the cluster of giants — with Apple at the forefront — that dominate the market."

<comment><USER39> Better reasoning: increased regulation, both in terms of legislation, regulation, and regulatory action; plus greater concentration of wealth and greater pool of private investments / private equity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This article is complaining about the dearth of small companies and blames... big companies and R&D, ignoring that the biggest issue for most companies is the increased regulation requirements that make it uneconomical to be publicly traded until you're so big that you need to follow most of those regulations for internal purposes anyway.

<comment><USER41> This make no sense. The regulatory threshold under Dodd-Frank is $75M in annual revenue. So it should be no harder now than it was 20 years ago for smaller companies to go public. And the SEC is changing this to $100M I think, so we should see a pop in public filings if there is some pent-up demand in midcap companies going public but for muh paperwork.

<comment><USER40> It's not really just Dodd-Frank that is the cause of this, it's also the SEC slowly tightening the screws for the last 15 years since the .com bubble. Nobody wants another bubble but instead of trying to get at the root cause they've just pushed it out of the public eye, now a bunch of PE investors are gonna lose money once it pops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ugh, please. At least use the right terminology. It's not "shrinking", it's "consolidating". It's also true that it's not only harder for smaller companies to list (with greater compliance) but it's also less necessary. The article mentions this. With the rise of venture capital, private equity, crowdfunding and even ICOs there just isn't as much need for a company to raise funds by going public.

Consolidation is also not unprecedented. Standard Oil? AT&T? The Sherman Act [1], which established antitrust, was passed in 1890.

As for not having much visibility into what a company is doing, well that was always true. Why do you think so much importance is placed on the reputation of executives? I would argue that it's far easier to find out what a company is doing today that at any previous time.

Take Apple, a now $1T company. Does anyone really not know what Apple is doing? Really?

If you want to talk about consolidation or transparency or compliance costs of publicly listing then sure, go ahead. Those are all topics worthy of discussion. But "shrinking" is not only inaccurate, it's arguably clickbait.

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

<comment><USER43> I agree without all the smugness. The stockmarket isn't shrinking (or consolidating) because there are less American companies; it's shrinking because it's easier for companies to receive funding while staying private.

<comment><USER44> The latter may also be for the better. Publicly traded companies are notorious for their being short-sighted and only caring for the next quarter results. Maximizing profit, or at least stock price, right now is the fiduciary duty of executives; long-term strategies are harder to implement.

(Being VC-funded has its own skewed incentives, of course, like financially unsustainable growth.)

<comment><USER45> Shortsightedness has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with incentives (options) and liability. Strong regulations for disclosure with protection from liability seems like a good idea.

<comment><USER44> Disclosure is indeed good!

Doing more for the stock to rise by the end of the current quarter, and less to make company successful in longer term, is not so good. But this is known to happen, is it not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think the real trend here is that small, fast-growing companies "cash out" not by having an IPO, which might get you an annoying "activist shareholder" lawsuit in a year or two as soon as you do something they don't like, but rather by selling to an existing, large company (Apple or Facebook or Google or whoever). Then, in many cases, the founders of the original company go out and start another one, using the money (and experience) they got from founding the first one. I'd say the real issue here is the amount of headaches involved in doing an IPO and being a publicly traded company.

</comment><comment><USER47> I remember learning of the Fama French model saying small cap companies deliver outsized returns due to being higher risk and deciding that probably won't hold in a world where companies can be deemed too big to fail and propped up by the govt. Why invest in companies that can fail when the large cap stocks have the backing of the federal government?

Add to that the fact that promising tech startups stay private it is irrational to invest in anything else as a public investor.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's interesting how there used to be publicly traded _apartment buildings,_ and now it's more the place the financiers go to cash out once the real money has been made. The exchanges delist low cap and low price stocks, and the idea of starting a company with a public offering is now considered absurd.

<comment><USER49> Yeah I think this is key. The entire concept of what the public market is for has changed significantly. Historically the stock market had a kickstarter like function, which meant that there were opportunities for people to bet on neat new ideas and recognize enormous gains - but also a lot of chances to lose the entire value of a bad bet.

These days we have Kickstarter instead and investors get swag instead of equity. Really good deal for getting a little project to go, but sometimes too bad since it means willing investors can't participate in long-term gains from the successful business launches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> 1\. Increase competitive opportunity and capital at the bottom (give easier chances for small upstarts to compete and win)

2\. Relax the barrier to entries that only allow big players to compete and win at the top (IPO)

3\. Incentivize more people to participate by broadening investor classification.

4\. Decrease capital gains taxes.

5\. Break up monopolies.

<comment><USER51> _Increase competitive opportunity and capital at the bottom (give easier chances for small upstarts to compete and win)._

How much capital would it take for "small upstarts" to effectively compete with any of the FAANG companies? A small upstart may be able to go viral and overtake Facebook, but the rest of the companies are much more capital intensive.

<comment><USER50> Providing more liquidity for people to start with, coupled with making it more difficult for big companies to participate in anti-competitive practices, might make for a new renaissance in growth and perhaps even produce more middle class opportunity again.

<comment><USER51> That didn't answer the question. Apple and Amazon in particular are able to be successful because they both have businesses that require a large capital outlay up front.

<comment><USER50> These companies were successful small businesses before they were large businesses. They were able to compete in new industries because they had access to capital, talent, and identified areas that were important and aggressively maintained innovation in those areas by way of investor capital or profits.

Why is there a need for small companies to take those large companies head-on? Maybe slow the ability for the large companies to impede competition in tangential areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> One big issue is debt payments are counted as an expense. So on the margin it's economically better for companies to have more debt. This leads to more debt than equity for public investors and more debt fueled LBOs. This is all fine and good until the companies get in trouble.

On the bigger picture - is investing in high growth startups a right everyone should have? Value stocks outperform growth over the long haul.

<comment><USER53> > One big issue is debt payments are counted as an expense

The interest portion only, not principal. This deduction was also limited substantially in the recent tax reform. See:

[https://rsmus.com/what-we-do/services/tax/lead-tax/broad- new...](https://rsmus.com/what-we-do/services/tax/lead-tax/broad-new- limitation-on-business-interest-deductions.html)

<comment><USER52> Yes - just the interest, and they can perpetually roll the principal. So the cost of debt becomes tax deductible versus dividends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Increased regulatory burden in combination with rise of significant alternative sources for raising capital prob. played a role too.

</comment><comment><USER55> Not sure if this is addressed in original paper: The cost of regulatory compliance has massively increased. This is not a judgement of whether those regulations are good or bad for society, just a simple fact that regulations increase the cost to run a business, and large corporations are better able to distribute and manage those costs - sometimes lobbying for additional regulations which become barriers for small companies.

<comment><USER56> > The cost of regulatory compliance has massively increased

Many people in this discussion repeat this claim, but what I would love is citation of evidence. We know that regulation has been politicized, with one party trying to eliminate regulations as much as possible. That kind of situation leads to claims that gain currency through repetition - <USER2> talking points - not evidence.

I'd love to see the actual research and data (from non-partisan sources, not the AEI or Cato, for example). Particularly, we need evidence of the costs, of their relative size compared to (when? increased since when?), and of their impact. For example, according to the article the market was much larger and had more small participants in the 1970s, when the U.S. government in general (I don't know about the stock market) regulated business much more.

<comment><USER57> This is not evidence regarding the claim, I simply want to know more about subject. I searched the literature and found the following paper (synopsis below). I still need to find the full paper elsewhere but it looks like it provides a good overview of the impact of SOX. This only concerns SOX though and there might be other regulatory burden (although I can't recall anything significant). Moreover, regulatory burden (if it exists) is only one of many reasons why companies don't go public (which I believe the abundance of private equity played the biggest role).

"SOX after Ten Years: A Multidisciplinary Review" by John C. Coates and Suraj Srinivasan [http://www.aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/acch-50759?code=a...](http://www.aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/acch-50759?code=aaan- site)

> We review and assess research findings from more than 120 papers in > accounting, finance, and law to evaluate the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley > Act. We describe significant developments in how the Act was implemented and > find that despite severe criticism, the Act and institutions it created have > survived almost intact since enactment. We report survey findings from > informed parties that suggest that the Act has produced financial reporting > benefits. While the direct costs of the Act were substantial and fell > disproportionately on smaller companies, costs have fallen over time and in > response to changes in its implementation. Research about indirect costs > such as loss of risk taking in the U.S. is inconclusive. The evidence for > and social welfare implications of claimed effects such as fewer IPOs or > loss of foreign listings are unclear. Financial reporting quality appears to > have gone up after SOX but research on causal attribution is weak. On > balance, research on the Act's net social welfare remains inconclusive. We > end by outlining challenges facing research in this area, and propose an > agenda for better modeling costs and benefits of financial regulation.

<comment><USER56> Hey - thanks! That's what HN is great for. And I like the nuance of the report (or the abstract) - of course reality is never simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Note[1]:

        The decrease in the number of listed firms is a recent
        phenomenon. Figure 1 shows the evolution of the number
        of listed firms since 1975.1 The number of listed firms
        follows an inverted U-shape: It increased by 54 percent
        from 1975 to the listing peak in 1997 and decreased
        strongly since then.

Somehow, both the NYT piece and this paper manage not to mention at all the increase in regulations since the late 90s.

[1]: [https://www.nber.org/reporter/2018number2/stulz.html](https://www.nber.org/reporter/2018number2/stulz.html)

</comment><comment><USER59> Before reaching any conclusions I might ask:

Looks like the data set is only NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ...

A. have those exchanges strengthened their listing criteria, making it harder to list

B. Has the number of firms listed on alternative exchanges taken up the slack?

C. Are companies deciding to list in other jurisdictions because of inversions or regulatory concerns

D. Looks like they exclude certain types of securities - what are the securities excluded? ADRs, MLP, REITs, etc could also be part of the story

E. What about the semi-private 144a market? How does one factor that in?

F. How has the elmination of regional stock exchanges played a role?

</comment><comment><USER60> The summary of the Stulz's article that is the source of this article[1] left me with a new insight into one factor why, in the current system, the companies with the highest growth potential (tech) don't IPO early. Sommer's article tries to leave me worrying about the decline of democracy. Unfortunately this worry is constantly repeated and is nothing new or useful for me.

[1][http://www.nber.org/reporter/2018number2/stulz.html](http://www.nber.org/reporter/2018number2/stulz.html)

Making Sense of the Changes

The changes in public firms likely hold the key to understanding why the number of public firms has fallen so much. Participating in public markets is not as beneficial for firms that invest in intangibles as it is for firms that invest in fixed assets, especially when these firms are small and young. If a firm builds a recognizable product and requires capital to expand its production, it is relatively straightforward for it to explain to potential investors how their money will be put to use. As the firm explains its needs, it does not endanger its ownership of its assets. It is rather difficult to steal a firm's plants. If a firm invests in intangibles, it is much more difficult for its management to convince investors that it will make good use of its money. If the firms give too much detail, which they could be forced to do by disclosure laws if public, their competitors can use the information. If they give too little detail, investors will pay little for their shares. It is not surprising, therefore, that for such firms, participation in public markets with their disclosure requirements is likely to be onerous. It is much easier for such firms to provide detailed information to a handful of private equity investors who have specialized knowledge that enables them to assess a firm's investments in intangibles. This evolution of firms and of markets has many implications. Many of these implications have yet to be investigated.

</comment><comment><USER45> There is also a factor where investors, individual and institutional, invest more through funds and ETFs rather then individual securities. Investors in funds sometimes get exposure to growth sectors through investment in VC funds.

A great example of this is the lack of splits. It used to be that companies would split their stock if the price got above $100 a share or so. The idea was you wanted an individual investor to be able to trade even lots (100 shares) of your stock. Now individual investors hold your stock through a fund or ETF so stocks like Google, Alphabet etc. are expensive per share, but no one cares.

</comment><comment><USER61> Top 10 Online Brokers is India's leading Online Discount Broker which offers Best Brokerage Charges on Online Stock Trading Account in India with operating more than 10 years with an expert team. Start Online Trading now at Zero brokerage charges. <a href="[https://top10onlinebrokers.com/">Best](https://top10onlinebrokers.com/">Best) Discount Stock Broker in India</a>

</comment><comment><USER62> Maybe smaller companies just don't need to go public as early as before because they are able to get funding through private investors. Also, if they show potential, they might just us easily get bought out.

There are two ways to look at this. The article paints a negative light on these statistics. But as a small firm, it would be nicer and less troublesome to just get funding through private firms than having to jump through hoops of going to the exchange. It might be more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER63> To quote an oft-mentioned study:

Americans in the top 10% (approximately people over a networth of 350K per person) own about 85% of the stock (includes pension plans, 401K, etc).

Ref:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/economy/stocks-e...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/economy/stocks- economy.html)

[http://wealthometer.org/](http://wealthometer.org/)

</comment><comment><USER64> Isn't this mainly a reflection of increasing monopolization? Even if merely as a description of what's so?

With the various mechanisms and influences just helping to drive that?

</comment><comment><USER65> One would expect that a limited number of small offerings in the public markets would mean that a small company could offer itself slowly, at a small premium, to main-street investors.

In addition, when the private-equity holders begin to see their returns fade, they will begin to sell their holdings to the public markets. So long as the markets remain at elevated P/E ratios, the markets will pay a premium for reasonable businesses.

</comment><comment><USER66> I wonder if ratio of (#of public companies on the markets to the population) is directly correlated with Gini coefficient.

<comment><USER44> It may as well be anti-correlated in certain parts of the spectrum. Take a socialist / communist government redistributing wealth and thus dis- incentivizing most people to run anything larger than a food truck, and nationalizing a few large key companies, like transport, mining, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> This is one reason I invest more in emerging markets. I also weight my investments more international.

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm kind of a doubter on this. Because there are less companies does it mean it's actually shrinking or just that the number of companies nationally in shrinking as consolidation and buy outs are rampant. I would like to see this as a percentage of GDP.

</comment><comment><USER69> What will prevent the mega-corps from trample democracy? Do we have to trust the wealthiest 1% to be ethical? Or should we tax the 1% percent until it becomes, say, 5% - "decentralized" enough to keep democracy in the safe zone?

<comment><USER51> Between worrying about private companies trampling democracy and the politicians themselves - gerrymandering, voter suppression, insecure voting machines, etc., I'm much more worried about the politicians.

<comment><USER70> The two problems are one and the same. Massive disparities of wealth create massive disparities of political power. Concentrated wealth then funds political efforts to keep their bought-and-paid-for politicians in office.

<comment><USER51> Consolidating of political power through gerrymandering has way more to do with ideology.

Republicans can cater to business interests and throw a few bones at the populists and "the moral majority".

Democrats - especially Black politicians - also like gerrymandering because while it dilutes the power of minorities in the overall federal government by putting all of thier votes in one district, it keeps the politicians that are elected by the big cities in power. (Before anyone replies about me being racist - I'm Black.)

<comment><USER70> Regardless of ideology, our representatives are reliant on campaign contributions. (Obama was famously friendly to Big Finance.) Especially after Citizens United, concentrated wealth disproportionately impacts governance.

<comment><USER51> No matter how much financial backing Obama got, he was never going to convince people in the rural south to vote for "an America hating, secret Muslim, that was trying to bring Sharia Law to the United States" (please note sarcasm). As the last Presidential Election proved, not only was Trunp outspent by Clinton, he was also outspent by his Republican primary opponents. But he won anyway. The country is so idealogically divided, once the general election happens, really the only thing that matters is turnout and which side is angrier.

<comment><USER70> PAC money can be spent on ground game, which feeds turnout.

I agree that there is a deep cultural canyon dividing the country right now. However, the need for funding to keep up with the competition limits what representatives can achieve. It is in this context that the lobbying of the finance industry (for example, but many others) finds receptive congress critters from both parties.

For instance, there were a handful of Senate Democrats who voted in favor of a bill to weaken Dodd-Frank back in March.

[https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2018/03/07/elizabeth- wa...](https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2018/03/07/elizabeth-warren- democrats-crapo-bank-deregulation-bill)

I suspect that Obama would have preferred to do more to rein in Big Finance, but felt he could not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> This is a really well written article using simple language.

One other reason for companies not willing to go public could be regulations like Sarbanes Oaxley that increase costs and responsibility for the company. I am all for good regulation.

</comment><comment><USER72> Having spent 12 years helping to build and operate stock exchanges, one of the first things I learned to do each morning was to determine whether anything new was going to be traded that day. This required a unique skill of being able to decipher the simple but cryptic daily announcements distributed by the primary listing exchanges. Over the years, patterns began to emerge which spawned many questions. What are ETFs and why are there so many? It was then that I noticed that there were as many removals as there were additions but the removals were companies and the additions were ETFs. Why is that? What did it mean?

I joined LTSE to learn to understand these questions and many others. I believe we can create a new stock market with listing standards designed to let companies focus on the long term.

</comment><comment><USER52> Overall this should t be a huge surprise. What's shrinking is the # of public companies, not the combined market cap of public companies.

If you make it harder to be a public company (Sarbanes-Oxley) then you have fewer of them, and the benefits to being public accrue to fewer firms. This is an unintended consequence of a well meaning attempt to root out fraud. (Similar to rent controls having the unintended consequence of reducing the housing stock)

I don't buy the "Woe into us who can't invest in Uber and Theranos" argument. The amount of venture backed companies waiting to go public pales in comparison to the total market size. In addition, value stocks overpeform growth stocks over long time horizons.

<comment><USER73> It's hard to imagine that Sarbanes-Oxley alone is a reason why a company wouldn't go public. You just throw a bit of money and time at lawyers...

<comment><USER52> It's one reason of many. Putting personal liability on the CFO and CEO makes them a little more likely to stay private longer or accept a buyout. There are other things happening too: tax favorability of debt, plenty of private money, execs not wanting to deal with activist investors.

I don't think the net outcome is the calamity that NY Times concludes. If companies are still getting founded, we are in good shape. I'm more concerned about Financial Services. Very few new banks came up post-crisis, and that's a sign of a calcified industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Being a publicly-traded company sucks. I wouldn't want to take my company public either, unless I had given up wanting to do interesting things with it, and just wanted out.

</comment><comment><USER75> Recently apple reached 1tn val. Are the globalized giants eating the rest? Is humanity going to be better off in the long run in oligopoly like in the Cyberpunk dystopia?

<comment><USER76> Or can you say that it's inevitable due to population growth and inflation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Imagine if Larry Ellison had convinced Jobs on his takeover effort of Apple and taken it private in the 90's.

</comment><comment><USER78> Maybe it's not shrinking, but just a bit cold. No need to judge.

</comment><comment><USER79> This may be yet another paradoxic, self defeating aspect of capitalism. Capital seeks higher investment returns, and finds private, "alternative" investments like venture capital. This creates a positive feedback cycle where the higher returns from private/alternative investments like venture capital in turn lower the returns of traditional investments like the stock market, which leads to more capital seeking higher return elsewhere, rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER80> I don't understand this cycle you propose.

Are you talking about a cycle of improvement/innovation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Consolidation before the new era of company stocks being traded as digital assets.

</comment><comment><USER82> How are ICOs absorbing a considerable share of this 'consolidation'?

</comment><comment><USER70> It may be unfortunate, but it makes sense. Crony capitalism and faux- deregulation don't produce enduring marketplace competition -- they bring us back towards the state of nature: winner-take-all monopolies.

</comment><comment><USER83> Time for some 21st century trustbusting.

</comment><comment><USER84> Nowadays it's harder for companies to go public. Either they stay in the seed stage or get bought out, unlike the 80's and 90's when it was easier to raise enough money to go public.

<comment><USER85> I don't think it's harder, there's just less incentive to do so. I was shocked when I realized that dropbox was the first and only yc company to go public.

Now it's only the giant tech companies that want big liquidity events who'll go public. You almost never see tech startups younger than a decade old go public.</comment></comment>


Assembler for DCPU16 written in C++ - <AUTHOR> http://onlinehut.org/2012/04/assembler-for-dcpu16/

<comment><USER2> Next up: Assembler for DCPU16 written in DCPU16 Assembly

Seriously the combined programming effort with regards to this "game" is probably already more than notch has put into it.

<comment><AUTHOR> And that is the best part. It's the same as with Minecraft. You are given a vast world and the freedom to manipulate blocks in it. The basics are pretty simple, but look at the things people create there. Some dude even managed to create a graphing scientific calculator. I'm pretty sure by the time the game is out if beta there will be OS-es, programming languages, tools and other interesting stuff floating around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm still waiting for someone to write an LLVM backend for it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If had problems compiling or running it, please post the code you were testing against, a stack trace in case of a crash would also be helpful!

<comment><USER3> It'd be helpful if you put a copyright notice and license on this. Code isn't useful without those.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't all the source code published in public github repos GPL by default?

<comment><USER3> No. You must explicitly state what the license is. Otherwise, in most countries no one but the author and authorized parties have the right to redistribute it or use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't really understand how this game isn't going to be broken immediately and only programmers will be able to play it.

Like day 1 some programmer is just gonna roll in with a large automated fleet of ships running on these computers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll tell you even more, Notch said in one of his tweets he's going to add network capabilities so that these computers are able to talk to each other. So that fleet can potentially form a hivemind of sorts. Also, hacking others' ships, viruses, coordinated attacks and all that. Isn't that awesome?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone should try a Boost.Spirit implementation!

<comment><AUTHOR> The syntax of the assembly language is so simple that using Spirit would be an overkill (I was pondering to go with Haskell/Parsec but didn't, for that exact reason).

<comment><USER5> Spirit is extremely concise. In what way do you think it's overkill?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just don't think it's necessary to bring in such powerful libraries for something that can be easily accomplished with simpler tools. After all, it makes your code easier to understand for people who are not familiar with boost.

<comment><USER5> It is true it adds an external dependency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Internet down? Generate your own Hacker News front page for the next few days offline!

        parts = ['emulator', 'assembler', 'compiler', 'disassembler', 'debugger']
        languages = tiobe.read().split('\n')
        for i in range(31):
            print "{} for DCPU16 written in {}".format(random.choice(parts).title(), random.choice(languages))

<comment><USER7> Excellent use of ANSI COBOL2000 there. Very readable langauge.</comment></comment>


Tech's Gender Gap: Real or Silicon (Valley) Made - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebekah-iliff/techs-gender-gap-real-or-_b_1930736.html

<comment><USER2> Brilliant article! It's so important to highlight the multifarious roles played by women throughout the tech sector.

Although I'll temper that by noting there's work to be done in addressing the gender balance in engineering and encouraging the next generation of women developers - there's a Charlie Rose interview with Sheryl Sandberg and Marc Andreessen, where Sheryl noted that at a recent programming camp for kids there were very few girls.

<comment><AUTHOR> No question about it we need more women in each of the roles Rebekah mentioned. Do you have the link to that interview? I'd love to listen to / watch it!

<comment><USER2> Here you go :) It's long but insightful, so I recommend watching the whole thing: [https://www.facebook.com/FacebookStudio?sk=app_2522064914642...](https://www.facebook.com/FacebookStudio?sk=app_252206491464232)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> While all of those are important and often-undervalued roles, attributing them to gender seems far-fetched. Suggesting that there isn't a problem with gender in tech because related professions have women is purposefully obtuse (especially when the ratio among entrepreneurs is even worse than among coders.)</comment>


What #1 on Hacker News Does For Your Stats - <AUTHOR> http://danzambonini.com/what-1-on-hacker-news-does-for-your-stats/ <comment><USER2> Last month, I got on the HN frontpage with <http://floating-point-gui.de/> \- this generated about 17k visits on that day, 1.3k on the next, followed by 500, 400, 300.

This month, I made the slashdot frontpage, which resulted in about 44k visits, then 4k, 3k, 2k, 1.5k

<comment><USER3> Did traffic return to the pre-spike baseline eventually, or have you seen a sustained increase?

<comment><USER2> It hasn't been long enough to say for sure, but after nearly a month it looks like a sustained increase of 200-300 visits/day.

Of course, it's a slightly atypical case, as it's a static site meant to be a reference, i.e. likely to be bookmarked and linked to, but not subscribed to or visited regularly.

An interesting observation: the gradual decrease of visits once the the site is off the HN/slashdot frontpage seems to be mainly the result of aggregators or content scrapers, i.e. sites that display infrequently updated snapshots or digests of these pages (or people's twitter timeline).</comment></comment></comment>