The Empire of Edge - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/empire-edge <comment><USER2> _S.A.C. performed background checks on prospective employees, but it is not known whether the firm detected this blemish in Martoma's record. Of course, S.A.C. could have learned of it and hired him anyway; forging a law-school transcript and mailing it to twenty-three federal judges demonstrates impressive comfort with risk._

It sounds as if they got exactly the kind of employee they wanted. Really, though, how did he think he'd get away with that, in the late nineties? By that point in time it was well-known that transcripts are provided by the registrar's office, not by students. Maybe it would have worked in the seventies...

The insider trading seems much the same. The sheer volume of those trades, coming less than a week before significant announcements of previously-secret information, was bound to throw up red flags. Did they have to short the stocks as well?

If this is the sort of thing that gets caught, there are bound to be billions of dollars of slightly subtler insider trading going unpoliced. The only thing I can think of is that possibly the really egregious insider trading crowds out the less aggressive sort. That's a reach though, and unless there's a good reason to believe it's true, why do we even bother policing this?

<comment><USER3> There would have been no profit if it wasn't for the shorts, can't exactly sell $750m worth of shares quickly and without losses.

<comment><USER2> My reading of TFA was that they liquidated their holdings _and_ sold the stocks short. Of course short-selling can hedge a non-liquid position, but that wasn't what was portrayed. After all, they didn't just not-lose; they "won" big.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _In the fall of his second term, he sent applications for judicial clerkships to twenty-three judges. But when a clerk for one of the judges scrutinized Martoma's transcript, something looked off, and the clerk got in touch with the registrar at Harvard. On February 2, 1999, the registrar confronted Martoma. His transcript had apparently been doctored: two B's and a B-plus had all been changed to A's. (A remaining B-plus, an A, and an A-minus were left unchanged.) Martoma initially insisted that "it was all a joke." But the school referred the matter to Harvard's Administrative Board, which recommended expulsion._

 _He fought the decision vociferously, hiring a lawyer and taking two polygraph examinations. There had been a misunderstanding, Martoma explained: he had altered his transcript not for the judges but for his parents. He brought the faked transcript home over winter break, and they were ecstatic. (The panel evaluating his case noted that Martoma was "under extreme parental pressure to excel.") But, after showing his parents the transcript, Martoma continued, he had to leave town abruptly, so he asked one of his younger brothers to compile the clerkship applications that he had left out in his bedroom. Unwittingly, the brother picked up a copy of the forged transcript, and included it in the mailing for the judges. Martoma had discovered the mistake before being confronted by the registrar, he insisted, and had sent e-mails to the secretaries of two professors from whom he had sought recommendations, asking them not to send the letters, "as I am no longer looking for a clerkship._

This sounds like the stories that distant relations who have drug problems make up, right down to a crazy amount of detail on things that aren't really important.

</comment><comment><USER5> >Cohen has announced that he will institute more robust compliance measures to prevent insider trading, and he has hired the Silicon Valley security company Palantir Technologies to monitor his traders.

nice twist. What smells worst, HBGary or Cohen? Does Palantir have the sense of smell?

</comment><comment><USER6> It's my opinion that any active trader (of which hedge fund is a subset) that consistently beats the market is engaged in some form of insider trading.

<comment><USER7> I'd agree with you to a large extent; a better, more precise way to put it would be to say that long/short equity hedge funds have to be engaged in de facto insider trading* in order to consistently generate enough alpha to attract investors. It's just too hard to consistently be smarter than the market on both your long and short bets, especially when it's a larger cap stock whose float has constant inflows and outflows of institutional capital.

That said, there are other asset classes which, ipso facto, do not lend themselves to insider trading, such as commodities and distressed debt. And there are definitely many traders in these spaces who consistently post outsized returns, which is why they get paid so much.

* I include in this definition not just stuff that will get you sent to jail, such as solicitation of MNPI from company employees, but also the more gray-area tactics commonly used by long/short analysts. Chief among these is speaking to "industry consultants" who give traders their "personal perspective" on certain companies, which in other words means paying them to relay the gossip they hear from their loose-lipped friends who work at various publicly traded companies.

<comment><USER8> We had a manager at BP come and present at my University a few years ago on commodity trading.

When he as discussing how BP consistently outperformed the market he didn't call it insider trading directly. If I recall his words were "BP leverages our superior market knowledge to outperform the market". In other words they had significant non-public information due to the fact that BP owns a significant amount of the commodities market. Supposedly the trading branch works at arms reach, but they still have access to production information that isn't available to the public...

One of my favourite university professors invited him to come and speak after the BP Canada Trading Competition: [http://people.ucalgary.ca/~sick](http://people.ucalgary.ca/~sick), [http://haskayne.ucalgary.ca/bp-canada-trading-competition- de...](http://haskayne.ucalgary.ca/bp-canada-trading-competition-details)

<comment><USER9> You do know that insider trading rules don't apply to commodities, right?

Furthermore, BP produces the commodity they sell... They're going to make money no matter what. But of course they're going to sell for the most they can.

<comment><USER8> That isn't completely true, there are some insider trading laws that apply to commodities, in the US anyway. That is besides the point though, the fact that it is legal doesn't mean that it isn't insider trading.

I was commenting on "And there are definitely many traders in these spaces who consistently post outsized returns, which is why they get paid so much."

They outperform the market because they have superior market information...

And of course I realize that BP is going to sell their own commodity for as much as they can. It is just that there are actually pretty strict rules around how much information the trading branch is allowed to receive from the parent company.

<comment><USER9> See here: [http://www.marylandbusinesslitigationlawyerblog.com/2012/09/...](http://www.marylandbusinesslitigationlawyerblog.com/2012/09/insider_trading_in_the_commodi.html) And here: [http://ccrow.com/newsletters/insider-trading-in- commodities-...](http://ccrow.com/newsletters/insider-trading-in-commodities- and-the-eddie-murphy-rule/)

And all the rules are available online. Most of the rules pertaining to commodities are to prevent fraud on the part of brokers, and the few that deal with insider trading deal with government employees that have information concerning subsidies, tariffs, environmental regulations, etc...

> They outperform the market because they have superior market information...

And because of their distribution, economy of scale, storage capacity (so they can wait out the market to get a higher price), refineries, etc...

BP has the advantage of being able to extract oil from the tarsands, store it, transport it, and refine it (their largest US refinery has been repurposed to refine oil sands crude), and their traders expedite the sale of it.

BTW, I happen to be in the same neck of the woods, and have spoken to BP traders here. Not sure what you're trying to read into, but what they do is legal. 100%. Company information is not considered to be 'insider' information for the purpose of commodities trading. Government regulations matter much more to commodities, as do natural events.

<comment><USER8> Hmm, perhaps it is just Canada then. I thought there was stricter regulation around commodities trading in the US as well. In Canada we do have some regulation around this though (at least in some provinces: [http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/english/elaws_stat...](http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/english/elaws_statutes_90c20_e.htm)) The manager from BP was very adamant about the fact that little communication was allowed between the traders and anyone else at BP.

Part of the issue is that BP also sells futures, and they have the ability to influence the futures price. (That is relating to your comment about economies of scale, storage capacity, etc).

I wasn't arguing about whether what BP is doing is legal or not. I was commenting on the initial post which implied that some traders are capable of making commodities trades based on some form of "skill". I was saying that they outperform the market because they have non-public information that gives them an advantage. (i.e. I was trying to dissuade laymen from thinking that they can make a quick buck off of commodities).

Thank you for those articles though. The second one in particular seems very interesting.

<comment><USER7> "Part of the issue is that BP also sells futures, and they have the ability to influence the futures price."

BP is a huge company for sure, but it produces about 4mm bbl/d of oil and world production is 90mm. So they definitely can influence the price, but they don't exactly have the market cornered.

What they can do (and other companies with more of a trading mindset, like Glencore, do really well) is utilize the information they get in real-time from the entire length of their supply chain. This isn't non-public information at all, and it'll make its way to the market within hours or days. And it also pertains only to BP's own order/production/delivery flow, which is tightly correlated to the market on a week-to-week, month-to-month basis but not on an hour-to-hour basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mods, please replace the linkbait title ("Biggest-Ever" "Scandal") that's _nowhere_ on the linked page. The proper title for HN would be the title of the article, "The Empire of Edge."

Other sources about the event covered by the article also don't use "the biggest":

[http://online.wsj.com/articles/judge-allows-sac-capital- insi...](http://online.wsj.com/articles/judge-allows-sac-capital-insider- trading-lawsuit-to-proceed-1408035799)

"Mr. Martoma was found guilty in February of making illegal trades in what prosecutors have called one of the most lucrative insider-trading schemes in history."

Note " _one of_ the most lucrative."

Note that the amount involved is just $276 million:

[http://www.rediff.com/money/report/indian-origin-fund- manage...](http://www.rediff.com/money/report/indian-origin-fund-manager- indicted-in-insider-trading/20121225.htm)

Orders of magnitude less than what Bernie Madoff did:

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

"$64.8 billion"

<comment><USER11> From the article: 'The Department of Justice announced...that Cohen had presided over insider trading "on a scale without known precedent in the hedge-fund industry."'

<comment><USER10> It's still not the biggest ever scandal.

And the title on HN is still against the HN guidelines:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

"use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

The current title here "Inside the Biggest-Ever Hedge-Fund Scandal" is not the original content title (even if it is inside of the title tag in the HTML, as karkarlawawa noted) and _is_ as linkbait as linkbait can be.

<comment><USER12> I don't quite agree; the document title is a legit option for "original title" and gets used all the time on HN. This title also isn't the worst linkbait we've seen (or even seen today). But you're right that it is hyperbolic and—uncharacteristically for the New Yorker—a bit breathy, and also not something whose accuracy we're in position to verify, so we'll adopt your suggestion. Hopefully that will not lead to another big off-topic discussion the other way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HealthCare.gov's glitches prompt Obama to call in expert troubleshooters - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/experts-working-to-fix-healthcaregov-insurance-marketplace-officials-say/2013/10/20/1e1a35ce-39b4-11e3-a94f-b58017bfee6c_story.html?hpid=z1 <comment><USER2> I live about three hours away from D.C. and the suburbs where much of the government contracting takes place, and I'm going to make an offer that doesn't throw more of the tax-payer's money into the fire.

I will, at my own expense drive to D.C. and spend two days of my vacation evaluating the architecture of the failing system, and spot check the source code quality. Additionally, I'll add the project to my Sonar source code quality analyzer so that there's a focus on what code isn't up to industry standards and which sections should be addressed first.

It's still astounding to me that we spent $700M on such a pathetic _LITTLE_ system ... there simply isn't that much code to write. If there are others who'd like to show the government how it should be done, I'd be happy to start an open-source project to rewrite the whole project, as well as a CI/CT/CD/CM system to make sure that the code is maintainable, that changes are delivered in a reasonable amount of time and that servers are constructed and clustered in a consistent way.

This really isn't rocket science (and it's a good thing ... there would have been deaths).

EDIT: If someone in the government a) reads my offer and b) is willing to let "the industry" voluntarily help, you can contact me via the e-mail address on my profile page.

<comment><USER3> Nobody spent $700M on a website. Over 3 years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) spent $394 million in total to establish and operate the Federally Facilitated Exchanges. That includes building and staffing call centers, media outreach programs, consumer complaint tracking systems, tech support, employer support programs, all the integration and portals for the health insurance industry, integration with a dozen departments of the federal government, administrative staff, etc.

The "Federally-facilitated Exchanges IT" contract awarded to CGI Federal Inc, which is the one that includes building the Healthcare.gov website among other services, was $55 million. The numbers are directly from the Government Accountability Office's report:

[http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/655291.pdf](http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/655291.pdf)

That's still a big number, but it's over an order of magnitude less than yours. It should also be noted that not all of this money is coming from taxpayers. The GAO estimates that in fiscal year 2014, $450 million in fees will be collected from the insurance companies participating in the exchanges, and this money is directly credited to the account used to manage the FFE program.

<comment><USER4> > It should also be noted that not all of this money is coming from taxpayers > [...] $450 million in fees will be collected from the insurance companies > participating in the exchanges

The ACA was upheld in the Supreme Court on the basis that it was a tax. Unlike other taxes, which are paid to the government, you will be paying the tax to an insurance provider. They, in turn, will be using the money to partially fund the exchanges. So technically you're correct, but it's just a redirection of tax dollars.

<comment><USER5> Insurance companies are not required to participate in the exchanges (and many don't). And while people are required to buy insurance, they aren't required to buy it from the exchanges (many will still get insurance via their employers, for example).

Both sides are choosing to use the exchanges rather than one of their alternatives, so the fees paid are user fees, not disguised taxes (unless you consider all user fees disguised taxes, which is a separate philosophical discussion).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Politics were allowed to trump project management.

"One highly unusual decision, reached early in the project, proved critical: the Medicare and Medicaid agency assumed the role of project quarterback, responsible for making sure each separately designed database and piece of software worked with the others, instead of assigning that task to a lead contractor.

Some people intimately involved in the project seriously doubted that the agency had the in-house capability to handle such a mammoth technical task of software engineering while simultaneously supervising 55 contractors. An internal government progress report in September 2011 identified a lack of employees 'to manage the multiple activities and contractors happening concurrently' as a 'major risk' to the whole project" [1].

It is speculated that "facing intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said" [2].

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the- start...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/politics/from-the-start-signs- of-trouble-at-health-portal.html?hpw&pagewanted=all&_r=0)

[2] [http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/obamacare-aca- website-...](http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/obamacare-aca-website- broken-98412_Page2.html#ixzz2iL0ClGKC)

<comment><USER4> [2] doesn't make sense to me.

> "Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the > technical details"

Aren't the 55 contractors outsiders? This sounds like typical DC finger pointing, blame game, and the-buck- _doesn 't_-stop-here tactics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like a standard run-of-the-mill Government contract job to me. It's a known fact getting a Government contract is like winning the lottery for a lot of businesses. Ramp up your usual price by 1000%, take twice as long as you should and when SHTH proclaim the problem is a lot more complex and bigger than you thought and all is forgiven. Having said that, not all contractors deliberately waste money and drag out projects, but it is a known aspect of contract work. Whether or not that is the reason in this instance has not been proven and probably never will be.

The Obama Care fiasco continues, almost like it was deliberately on purpose in a way.

</comment><comment><USER8> So, the fiasco continues.

A cynical person might think first contractor failed on purpose, so that the second bunch of "experts" could be brought in to fix it. One system for the price of two (or more, "expert troublshooters" don't come cheap). I'd really like to see a transparent accounting of who is getting paid, and how much, to implement this so-called website.

<comment><USER9> I'm perpetually puzzled that people in tech keep seeing nefarious purposes behind this failure when it sounds like every failed project we've heard of. Moving targets (how many states, how many users), feature creep, managers with no understanding of the undertaking, too many managers, and no time for testing and debugging.

It's not evil, it's just incompetent and embarrassing.

<comment><USER10> all the states. all the citizens. how is that not obvious? these are known knowns.

<comment><USER11> No it's not.

All states were supposed to have their own exchanges. 14 ended up doing it. New York after all sorts of political machinations agreed to run their own exchange at the 11th hour. (Supposedly "unprecedented" traffic also screwed up the NY exchange, which was also built by some big government contracting firm -- CSC)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone have more information about what exactly is going wrong with this site? Apparently Development Seed (the company behind [http://mapbox.com](http://mapbox.com)) was (one of?) the contractors behind the project[0] and they've always seemed (at least judging from their product offerings) quite competent.

0\. [http://developmentseed.org/blog/2013/06/25/healthcare- launch...](http://developmentseed.org/blog/2013/06/25/healthcare-launches-in- the-open/)

<comment><USER13> Dev Seed did the user-information/knowledge-base component, which has worked fine. They didn't work on the healthcare exchange, which is what has been broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> IIRC, the site was handed out to 55 (!) contractors to create?

Maybe #56 is the charm.

I take no pleasure in watching this train wreck. It could, however, be a teaching moment for the country on what's wrong with Federal IT. Probably won't be, but it could be. So the story is worth following.

<comment><USER15> I think 3 really good programmers, 2 sys admins, 1 non-clueless PM, and 1 person to arrange their travel would have gotten this done faster.

<comment><USER16> No - they'd by now have read through about 20% of the regulations the system needs to fulfill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What a pile of BS.

They're so moronic that they built the thing such that registration of the userbase would take more than a hundred years.

Stop coddling the state, they're not going to do it right, they don't welcome the debate, they don't care, they won't present a balanced budget, the debt default is constitutionally prohibited, the war on drugs is a war on people, their wars are so obviously wrong that there are more soldier suicides than deaths in combat, the military burns more oil than the entire population of india, socialism doesn't suddenly work when the current regime tries it.... Oh never mind, go ahead and keep wasting your time listening to sociopaths and participating in silly, futile politics; I'll just make a greasemonkey script to filter out all stories with "Obama" in them, and be on my merry way.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why are there no consequences for this epic failure? Someone should go to jail for lying about the costs and the schedule. Many more should get fired and no longer permitted to work on government projects.

<comment><USER19> _Why are there no consequences for this epic failure?_

Because government. They get paid the same, by you and me, whether it works or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What is the point of healthcare.gov anyways? You can go and buy an ACA compliant plan on a comparison shop website like ehealthinsurance.com that works pretty well why did the government need to create it's own?

<comment><USER21> The idea was to attack fragmentation, which is a huge cost center in the health industry. A smaller individual insurance plan

* Has to pay more for drugs (less bargaining power vs a big plan)

* Has more statistical risk (# people goes with N, stdev in # people with a given illness goes with sqrt(N), so risk/person goes with sqrt(N)/N and larger plans have less risk)

* Has larger legal/consulting overhead

* Forces doctors to incur overhead with nonstandard forms

* Is vulnerable to the bandwagon effect (if, by accident, it happens to favor X group of costly individuals, the costly individuals proceed to pile on and sink the plan)

* Has the ability to discriminate based on fine-grained geographical knowledge and other factors

* Has an under-leveraged customer base (if the plan is "secretly evil" and dumps people who need expensive treatment and 1% of people require expensive treatment, a 100 person plan will have 0 or maybe 1 person being screwed at any given time, while a 10000 person plan will have ~100 people being screwed who are much more able to band together and fight a legal/PR battle)

Previously, small plans were able to flourish because of #6 and #7, incurring #1-5 as costs of doing business. This was bad for everyone except insurance companies. The best way to turn a profit in the insurance industry is to sell insurance priced for a medium-risk person to a low-risk individual(or hi-risk price to a medium-risk person). If you look closely, this kind of "innovation" is actually just restoring the pre-insurance reality of charging sick people a lot and healthy people very little. It defeats the purpose of insurance while increasing costs (#1-5) and letting the people in charge of the purpose- defeating process pocket a hefty cut of the proceeds by fooling people into buying overpriced coverage.

Exchanges are designed to put an end to the tragedy of the commons. The savings from #1-5 can be recouped at the expense of eliminating #6 and #7, which were perverse incentives anyway.

Even if you disagree with my explanations, it is objectively true that employer plans are much more efficient than individual plans (E(payout)/E(cost) is larger). You can then see the ACA exchanges as an attempt to reform individual plans to emulate employer plans. Of course, it remains "cargo cult economics" unless you can figure out why you expect the emulation to close the gap in value, which is what I was doing with the list in the first place. In other words: I have provided 7 possible explanations that I think make sense but there are even more out there which I don't agree with and haven't listed.

<comment><USER5> You forgot one of the biggest reasons for the exchanges: they're the mechanism through which the government provides premium subsidies to people who qualify.

I think there are a variety of reasons for that (e.g. keeping better tabs on the large amount of money spent on subsidies, easier administration of the subsidy tax credit), but the bottom line is the law says people only get the subsidies if they go through an exchange, so...

<comment><USER21> The government has many mechanisms through which it distributes subsidies, and while I'm sure the centralized exchange is going to be one of the most efficient and convenient, I'm not nearly so certain that the difference will be larger than the effects it has on the market.

Let me be concrete. According to [1] (which gets its numbers from the CBO), individual plans have 29% administrative overhead as opposed to 12% for employer plans. If the exchanges successfully emulate employer plans, they save 17%*$300b = $51b per year in health care costs. Unless the exchange program is 10,000% more efficient than its alternatives (tax subsidy, payments to companies, etc) then the effects I listed dominate.

In any case, the exchanges were designed with the explicit intent of making the individual insurance market more efficient, not merely making subsidy disbursement more efficient.

[http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/healthcare/repo...](http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/healthcare/report/2009/03/23/5802/the- inefficient-individual-health-insurance-market/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What I am more worried about than any other HealthCare.Gov glitch, is if this website was so badly designed, that the data it holds, the functions it does would also be extremely badly designed and secured. Yet NO ONE is talking about this angle.

Thats what keeps me up at night.

</comment><comment><USER23> What did anyone really expect? Sounds like a typical government contract.

I can only imagine how these conversations go...

"We need more QA! STAT! It's going to take at least $50 million to test this system... it's awfully broken!" _chuckle_

 _face /palm_

That said, I think there should be a lot more concern about the security of this site if there's been such a mishandling of the basic functions and operational flow.

Seems only reasonable to suspect this will be leading to a horrible leak of many people's private records at some near point in the future.

<comment><USER24> This one doesn't even seem that bad yet. I mean its not like the new bay bridge which was a decade late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Obama didn't read The Mythical Man-Month.

<comment><USER26> (Chuckle) Well seeing as how half the tech managers I talk to at private companies haven't ever heard of it, I think he should be given a little bit of a break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The solution was built in 2/3rds by Accidenture, who got awared a $400m contract (out of the total of $600m awarded) with the bulk of the remainder going to IBM and the 50 other contractors.

If I know one thing, and I say this from firsthand experience, it's that Accidenture is absolutely the worst choice for any kind of contract.

Accidenture isn't an "outsourcing" company. They're an oversized roleplaying project, where the overlords (controllers) have the power and whim to kill projects and just pay the termination penalty, and where everybody strives to become a partner because it's up or out. Any problem inside Accidenture is seen as a nail, and every solution is a hammer, meaning a combination of ISS, MSSQL, Sharepoint, Windows Server and copious application of ridiculously overpriced "consultants".

</comment><comment><USER28> The magic quote:

        One major problem slowing repairs, people close
        to the program say, is that the Centers for Medicare
        and Medicaid Services, the federal agency in charge
        of the exchange, is responsible for making sure that
        the separately designed databases and pieces of
        software from 55 contractors work together.

We're talking about integrating a slew of both legacy (think decades old) and new (think untested) systems, many of which don't have half-decent APIs to work with (I'd be willing to bet there's at least one "database" in there somewhere that consisted of an Excel workbook on a shared drive, perhaps with an "API" of a paper form and a fax number), and many of which almost certainly weren't built to scale to consumer web traffic. Steve Yegge's platforms rant comes to mind here, and from talking with some of my federal employee friends about the challenges they face, get to root of the problem. Building protocol- centric services from the beginning goes a long way towards fostering interoperability.

More broadly (and apologies for the non-HN bent to this), the project serves as an example for the utter shitshow that is the United States healthcare system. The exchange is intended to serve as an abstraction for the process of figuring out what public and private options are available to you. The motivation for building the exchange was "Hey! Figuring out what options exist for healthcare is complicated!". Of course, building such a system doesn't make the complexity go away - it just makes it someone else's job. Perhaps that this determination is so complicated that it requires a ridiculous system is an indication that we're "doing it wrong".

<comment><USER29> I've seen this "ancient systems" idea go by a few times. Honest question: If these platforms are so old, they likely aren't terribly complex, from the perspective of what's now computationally cheap. So, how hard would it be to drop a computer on their local network and just dumb-clone the whole thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> They could learn a lot from how UK.gov ([http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/](http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/)) operates these days. It's a true agile shop, that's been ridiculously productive and forward-thinking for at least the last 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER31> So in order to reduce health care costs the government declares itself as all knowing in the medical industry, inserts itself into the system with all the beauracracy. Sounds to me like adding more middle men just raises costs and also happens to kick open the door for typical government graft, corruption and embezzlement. Better yet the government sets itself up to decide who gets treatment, and data mining by the NSA and IRS can help identify polical opponents or non supporters to determine on the fly available coverages and rates.

Perfect for any tyranical statist type.

Does anyone really believe the whole website thingy wasn't full of graft, corruption, kickbacks and paybacks? Come on, seriously.

</comment><comment><USER32> All I know is that they need to start making decisions like minimizing their css and js scripts and fetching jquery from Google before I start taking them serious when they say the best engineers in the fed are working on it.

<script src='//assets.healthcare.gov/global/js/lib/jquery-1.8.2.js'></script>

[https://www.healthcare.gov/css/all.css](https://www.healthcare.gov/css/all.css) [https://www.healthcare.gov/js/all.js](https://www.healthcare.gov/js/all.js)

</comment><comment><USER33> This type of integration project is always challenging regardless whether it is government/private sector. Then add tons of required-by-law requirements and you are talking about massive tasks to get things right.

Their main problem is the hard deadline for October 1st launch. Things should have been rolled out state by state - but I am not sure whether this is in the law or just a political decision.

</comment><comment><USER34> Shouldn't they have been called in a year ago? Six months ago? A month ago?

$95 Million apparently buys everything but new management and proper coders.

</comment><comment><USER35> Now what? Another $600 million down the drain to fix the problems of the first $600 million?

</comment><comment><USER36> What kind of computer programmers did the government hire to oversee the progress? I am going to question this person's ability. While I am just a senior in college, I probably can hammer a lot more practical issues before its launch. I am sure half of the HNers can do that too.

 _sigh_

<comment><USER36> Thanks for downvoting me, _government employees_.

<comment><USER37> If you're lucky, you'll learn this lesson early in your career: when you think "oh, that's easy, those people must be idiots" it's a sign that you don't understand the problem.

People are not idiots. Large problems are never easy. Politics, management, and salesmanship are genuine parts of the problem, not useless distractions from technical stuff.

I'm not saying that improvement is impossible, I'm saying that improvement is hard. The healthcare.gov system could have gone live, and been functional, on October 1 - if you could hire better technical people. Can you hire a top- notch team of techies in this environment? Ever tried it? It could be working if the political appointees had nailed down the requirements earlier. Have you ever tried getting hundreds of legally-mandated decisions pushed through the federal bureaucracy? Many of those decisions were pushed back for political reasons, which sucks - but could you made the unpopular decisions early, then won enough elections to keep Republicans from dismantling the entire thing? The system could be working if the law made more sense in a dozen different ways, but all of those compromises were necessary to get the law passed in the first place. Have you ever tried to write legislation, and get it through congress?

Don't get me wrong - the healthcare.gov system is a clusterfuck, and there are easily identifiable reasons for that - in retrospect. And hopefully we can learn from the failures and move forward. But laying it all at the feet of some nebulous government employee is completely unhelpful.</comment></comment></comment>


WebAuthn (Web Authentication) Is a Web Standard by the W3C - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAuthn <comment><USER2> no. it's not. it's by Google. then joined by Duo. then rushed to get a w3c stamp in the last second with almost no time for review or comments.</comment>


Patent Nonsense - some  problems with the current Patent Copyright and IP system - <AUTHOR> http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/06/patent-nonsense-some-problems-with.html <comment><USER2> You might say... It's "patently" absurd. Get it?</comment>


ask: My internal startup tool is more successful than my product - <AUTHOR>

I'm an early staged startup. I've built a beautiful social playlist that can be embedded into every web platform (wordpress, website, facebook, etc.).
It's gaining its first users very slowly.
As part of my attempts to understand my user's needs I also built a dashboard where I share my internal analytics, tasks, bugs, features, income & expenses, communications with other companies and users. I share this dashboard with my power users (altogether something like 10 people).
The responses of the power users are overwhelming. They seem to be really enjoying this honesty and feel as if they there are taking an active part in my startup's life. I think this internal tool I've developed has greater potential than my original social playlist application.
I am thinking of giving this internal tool a chance, but I don't know if it's worth it. Making this internal tool into a standalone product will take a couple of months.
What do you think? Would you use such a product (both as a startup and as a power user)? Have you heard of startups pivoting and making their internal side tools into their main business? <comment><USER2> I would suggest you to do some more research. Maybe put up a landing page for your dashboard product and see with web analytics how many people are actually clicking on the "buy" button for the unfinished product. Compare that with the traction you get for your social playlist. In addition, look at the market and competition in both fields.

Many companies do pivots like that but the hardest part is always to make an educated decision and not to pivot around in circles.

<comment><AUTHOR> The tough thing is attracting people to a simple landing page. Google adsense won't even let you advertise a plain landing page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think you just may have a great possible opportunity staring you in the face. At the minimum, don't just wash it off.

> Have you heard of startups pivoting and making their internal side tools > into their main business?

Even if it may not have happened before, it doesn't mean it can't happen. After all, there's a first time for everything. :)

All the best moving forward.

</comment><comment><USER4> Basecamp (37signals) was created as an internal tool and ended up being so useful they developed it into a product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't 37signals start off as a consulting business, building applications for customers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do yo mind showing us your dashboard?

</comment><comment><USER6> Twitter started as a side-project while the founders were busy working on odeo.com. Which one have you heard of?

</comment><comment><USER7> Can you show it to us?

<comment><USER8> Perhaps you've learned a vital viral startup method: Passion and no pay goes a long way making something that is meant to be free and useful.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you introduce yourself to inteviewers? - <AUTHOR>

It's my first interview tomorrow (I'm applying for college), and I've been practicing questions with my parents and teachers. I can answer the "Why do you want to go here?" questions pretty well, but I get tripped up on the more personal "Tell me about yourself" ones. I'm sure you all have had some experience with this sort of thing, and I'd appreciate it if you could share it with me. <comment><USER2> When I ask someone the "Tell me about yourself" type questions, I am looking to see what excites them about the field. Since I interview programmers, I look for passion about the industry, I want to know if they are keeping up with various trends on their free time, and I want to know about personal accomplishments that they were proud of.

It may not be what other people are looking for when they ask that question, but that is what it means to me.

Good luck, and just act relaxed and confident :)

<comment><USER3> Submitter: Bookmark this answer and read it when you're applying for a job.

What elliottcarlson says is great advice for job interviews, but not for college admissions. An employer wants to know if you'll be able to do good work for them; a college wants to know if they can mold you into a better person.

<comment><USER2> Though now I feel extremely foolish for not realizing (and obviously not reading correctly) that submitter was interviewing for college admissions - thanks though ;)

<comment><USER3> It's still great advice, even if you gave it to the wrong person. And if he takes my advice and bookmarks it, he might come back and read it at the right time. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Tell me about yourself_

My answer: _I'm not good at dealing with people. When I'm talking about mathematics or computer science, I'll argue with people without giving a moment's thought to who I might antagonize, because at that point I'm dealing with the subject and not with the people. In social contexts, by contrast, I can't avoid the human factor, and I back away from anything which could potentially result in a confrontation. I think holding my ground when I know I'm right is a good thing; but I'm working on being less of a wimp in social situations._

It really doesn't matter what you say here, as long as you say something coherent. The point of the question isn't to find out your opinions of yourself; rather, it's to determine your level of self-awareness. Saying "I have problems X, Y, and Z" shows far more self-awareness and will win you more points than reciting a list of your accomplishments.

<comment><USER4> I don't believe this is correct. I'd suggest you stay away from this kind of answer. The last thing you want it someone to reject you because they think you can be argumentative. Never talk about weaknesses, but if you have to, make it as inconsequential as you can -- don't mention how you can be argumentative and not be aware of your surroundings.

Rather, stroke the ego of the person you're talking to. _I grew up always knowing I wanted to do <whatever>. In high school I started learning as much as I could from the library and it really started to grow my interest as I read more and more. This school is particularly high on my list because I know you have some of the best professors and a culture that focuses on the students in a way that bigger universities cant._

That is assuming you're going to a small school. I imagine big schools don't have time to interview every single student that wants to apply.

This answer talks about you, your interest in whatever you're going to study, and why you think the school is awesome.

<comment><USER3> _Rather, stroke the ego of the person you're talking to..._

Admissions people interview hundreds of students, and they're not idiots. They'll see through this in an instant.

<comment><USER4> If that was the case ego stroking would never work. It does. It is the easiest way to get persuade people. Everyone deals with hundreds of people per day and ego stroking works on most people (maybe not to the extent that gets you what you want, but it works).

People like to be complimented on their work/skills/whatever. Context for receiving the compliment is irrelevant.

<comment><USER3> _Everyone deals with hundreds of people per day_

Well, no -- I don't, for one -- but even leaving that aside, some people are more cynical than others. And the admissions people I know are some of the most cynical I know... probably only second to the scholarship people I know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From an interviewees standpoint, the point of the an interview is to introduce a narrative about your self. So, first decide how you want your self to be portrayed and work backwards. Are you a rags to riches golden boy, are you Mr. Accomplishment. Are you Mr. I bring Diversity. Once you know what you're going to sell them on, then the "Tell me about your self" point gets easier. Tell them a narrative that highlights whatever your story is. Also, throughout the interview reflect back on the narrative you're telling.

At the end of the "Tell me about your self" question don't say, "That's all" or something lame like that. Say, "Does that answer your question?"

</comment><comment><USER6> People remember good stories. They shouldn't be "I'm awesome stories". They shouldn't be "I'm exactly what you are looking for" stories.

They should be novel and descriptive.

Describe what you do in your spare time. Everyone has the usual School/extracurriculars/etc. If you are a programmer, describe something you built, from concept to completion. Maybe a simple weekend project that you launched as a website. Or a lawn mowing business you ran instead of getting a job. Something unique enough to be memorable.

<comment><USER3> _Something unique enough to be memorable._

If you have something _unique_ to mention, then absolutely do it. But be realistic about how exceptional your accomplishments are -- in my experience there's little a candidate can do which is more irritating than being the 20th person in a row to talk about a few hours of volunteering at the local hospital as if it qualifies them for sainthood.

<comment><USER7> >there's little a candidate can do which is more irritating than being the 20th person in a row to talk about a few hours of volunteering at the local hospital as if it qualifies them for sainthood.

What field are you interviewing in? I've never met anyone that told me they volunteered at a hospital (but I know plenty of volunteers as it happens).

If you don't want them to tell you about themselves - eg what volunteer work they do - then perhaps ask a different question?

<comment><USER3> _What field are you interviewing in?_

We're discussions college admissions here, not job interviews. :-)

<comment><USER7> Yes, so what sort of college, a nursing college?

<comment><USER3> I'm affiliated with a Canadian university; we cover pretty much every field except medical and legal.

I think the students who wax lyrical about their volunteerism are usually in the liberal arts, though.

<comment><USER7> Do you find that most applicants have volunteer experience, is it very common in Canada to volunteer in hospitals? I'm really curious about this, it seems quite strange to me that this should be prevalent and also that you'd find it detrimental particularly (even if they're a bit full of themselves). At the normal Uni entry age most in my country wouldn't have done any volunteering not least in a hospital.

<comment><USER3> Volunteer experience is very common here. In BC there was recently discussion of making some number of hours of "volunteer" activity a requirement for high school graduation.

I don't think such activities are detrimental in the slightest; but they're not at all exceptional here. (Also, it's a very common "resume-building" tactic, so there's always the question of whether a student performed the activity because they wanted to help the community or because they thought it would pay off in scholarships.)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for your continued response, your last bit of info being vital to understanding the situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When you say the question trips you up do you mean because you don't know what they're asking? Or because you know what they want to know but don't know what to say in response? Or because you know what information you want to proffer in return but not how to couch it?</comment>


A Web Developer's Personal Projects - <AUTHOR> http://snook.ca/archives/opinion/web-dev-personal-projects/

<comment><USER2> I think we all experiment with a password management app too, don't we?</comment>


Show HN: wute.vc - Venture Capital Lectures at Washington U. in St. Louis - <AUTHOR> http://wute.vc/2012/09/press-release-wute-vc-student-group-launching-venture-capital-lecture-series-at-wustl/

<comment><AUTHOR> There has been a big push for entrepreneurship at our university, from department heads, organizations, and alumni. My project for the semester is bringing VC experiences to campus. We have secured our first speaker from Silicon Valley, and will be announcing the event as soon as the date is finalized with the speaker.

We are also fortunate to have Cultivation Capital as a founding sponsor - <USER2> have access to their partners and portfolio companies for events.

If you know of anybody interested in speaking, please shoot me an email at email@example.com.</comment>


With a Second Repeating Radio Burst, Astronomers Close in on an Explanation - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/astronomers-now-think-they-can-explain-fast-radio-bursts-20190228/ <comment><USER2> The closer we are to discovering what causes radio bursts, the closer we come to doom.

"We've figured out what causes them!" he spoke to the bored conference audience. They sat up quickly. He continued, "It happens whenever any advanced civilization builds one of these." He takes a strangely shaped device from his pocket. There is a murmur from the crowd. "During the building of this prototype, we have--" and his tentacle fumbled for a moment, and it dropped onto the floor.

4 MILLION YEARS LATER

Astronomers have detected their third fast radio burst, and have almost gathered enough data to discover what causes them.

<comment><USER3> Uh, actually it is _repeating_ radio bursts that are very rare. We've seen quite a few of the one-shot ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's no one explanation for fast radio bursts. They are a class of things defined by their transient nature but from one to another their spectral appearance can be drastically different. Even from the ones discovered so far it's obvious they're not all one thing.

What remains the same is that they're from really far away and they're short. They can tell they're from far away because the broadband pulse has dispersed relative to frequency and the charges along the line of sight from us to it retard the progress of the longer wavelengths more. So it comes in like a 'swoop' of decreasing frequency on on the spectrum vs. time when reality it was more like a broad pulse.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have to say it, but I am quite disappointed it's not intergalactic weapons fire.

Or rather, I am quite disappointed that _if_ there is anyone out there, they are not leaving big enough forensics.

(but well done to Occam's razor and the hard working scientists who support it)

<comment><USER6> We sort of assume without proof that every civilization optimizes for continuation of its own existence. What if it's false and civilizations just detach from the utility function of evolution and choose not to exist anymore?

<comment><USER7> What we seem to assume is that every civilization optimizes for technological progress and territorial expansion.

That a species would be capable of interstellar travel and not spend millions of years aggressively exploring and colonizing the galaxy as a first priority just seems _too_ alien.

<comment><USER8> Based on the excellent documentary series "Star Trek" I think it's safe to assume there are species that would colonize the galaxy.

But on a more serious note. You make an interesting point. Our entire history has been a fight for survival against a merciless environment (and other species). It's a core part of our DNA to colonize, grow, and thrive.

But assuming that is representative of what all life would go through may not be safe. It's hard for me to imagine how evolution would create life without the threat of killing off bad mutations, but that doesn't make it impossible. Definitely good to keep an open mind.

<comment><USER7> Our history has been a fight to survive and thrive where it's been possible to survive and thrive within the environment of our own ecosystem. Despite some exploration, we haven't exactly built cities in Antarctica or the ocean floor, because we can't thrive there. Whatever drive to colonize and grow that might exist in our DNA doesn't extend into space. There's no natural evolutionary path into space - it's unimaginably vast, it costs a ludicrous amount of effort and energy expenditure just to reach orbit, and once you're there literally every aspect of it is hostile to life, and every step is exponentially more expensive and deadly.

I can imagine a species with the same drives as ours, but which doesn't advance beyond colonizing its own solar system, or sending probes to nearby stars, because I can imagine that happening with _us._ I suspect that, as far as space exploration (much less long term colonization) goes, politics, economics and culture matter far more than our innate drive to find whatever's over the next mountain. We had the capability for manned lunar landings, but didn't follow up with moon-bases or a colony on Mars because that initial drive was fueled by competition and fear between superpowers. We gave up that capability because there was nothing interesting on the moon, and the public stopped caring, and anything but probes started to seem like a boondoggle.

And we're lucky enough to have a moon and a couple of nearby planets to keep us curious. How many technologically advanced but "landlocked" civilizations might there be, who don't venture into space because there's nothing to even theoretically colonize for hundreds, if not thousands, of light years?

Of course, if we had warp drives, things would be different. But the Fermi Paradox suggests that such things are either not possible, or somehow not reliable over the long term, possibly due to energy requirements or something.

<comment><USER8> Very interesting indeed, and that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if the Elon Musk style reasons would kick in (such as Earth is no longer hospitable to us because AI has completely taken over), which would definitely change the fact that Earth is a thriving environment for us. But short of that, I could definitely see you being right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what these would sound like if they were slowed down to be audible to human hearing.

<comment><USER7> "Thunder" by Imagine Dragons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had been hoping to some degree that this and Oumuamua were stronger pieces of hard to answer bits that said maybe, just maybe, these could not be easily explained away as "not from other intelligence". I guess I am just left with long, weirdly spinning, rock thing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Spoiler alert: Not aliens

<comment><USER12> darn</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rate name for our startup or propose your variant! - <AUTHOR>

We want to bring web tasks automation to everyone.
* You will create your first script in 15 minutes using drag and drop right in the browser.
* There is absolutely no requirement to know how web works!
* Afterwards, you can schedule the script to be run on our server or you can try it from your browser.
* You also can share scripts with your friends on our market place!
Technically, we target web2.0 Internet with heavy use of JavaScript (as in Gmail for example) and pay strong attention to make things intuitive and easy (using clever programming and ML)
Think of us as Needlebase combined with Mozenda without annoying need to install programs; cute interactive web2.0 UI for complete dummies ;-) and cheap price tag!
With that in mind what do you think about name antsurfor.me for our product? :-)
Edit. Please, see description in comment below.
Also, feel free to propose a cool name. If we decide to take it, your name will be credited on our main page forever! :-) <comment><USER2> Sounds very cool. I could really use something like this as infrastructure for a project I've got in mind. Not sure if you're planning an API or to open source any components.

Regarding the name, both surfscrape.com and clickgrabgo.com are available. Those were just the first couple things that came to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are planning to let you compile/publish/"download as" your script to standalone Google App, Ruby on Rails application, whatever. We have not come up with specific backends to support. This feature is under discussion at the moment. ;-)

geekfactor, please contact me so I can shape this to fit your needs better

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Product sounds really awesome. I'm slightly confused by the name though. antsurfor.me - what is it meant to mean? I don't see any connection between the name and your description of the product.

<comment><AUTHOR> In specialist's circles such software is known as web scrapers, ants, web spiders and crawlers.

I took an ant and made an anology with the turtle Logo graphics.

Imagine an ant which surfs the web for you given you provided the ant with the script of where actually to go and which data to harvest there

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> task.io expires later this month. maybe send an email to the current owner or backorder it?

</comment><comment><USER5> browsergamescheat.com?

</comment><comment><USER6> Scrapinator!</comment>


FitLab ultimate app for progressive coaches - <AUTHOR> https://thefitlab.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Today, we have launched a platform for online fitness coaches. We are working hard to bring digital transformation into the online coaching business. We have a bunch of core functionality that will be free forever like client management, internal workouts library, chat system and program builder, and much more. As well we will add premium functionality down of the road. Please click [http://thefitlab.io/](http://thefitlab.io/) to check it out.

Any feedback highly appreciated. Stay tune! FitLab Team.

<comment><USER2> Shortened link goes to [https://thefitlab.io/?utm_source=hackernews_product_launch&u...](https://thefitlab.io/?utm_source=hackernews_product_launch&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=launch)

<comment><AUTHOR> Changed it to [http://thefitlab.io/](http://thefitlab.io/) to not confuse people Thanks for point it out.</comment></comment></comment>


New version of Transport Tycoon coming from Chris Sawyer - <AUTHOR> http://www.transporttycoon.com/

<comment><USER2> Looks like it's iOS / Android only - will be interesting to see how easy this type of game is to play on a smaller screen.</comment>


Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247402 <comment><USER2> This seems overly optimistic, supposedly we were also supposed to have woolly mammoths by now. I think these articles are more a fundraising attempt, biotech is incredibly expensive and I don't see a clear path to monetization even if it was feasible. Article: [https://singularityhub.com/2016/08/17/scientists-hoped-to- ha...](https://singularityhub.com/2016/08/17/scientists-hoped-to-have-cloned- a-living-woolly-mammoth-by-now-why-havent-we/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Note 1: The article is dated "June 16, 2015"

Note 2: Inside the article the quote says "5 or 10 years"

Note 3: The idea is not to make a Jurassic Park like reconstruction, but to modify a current bird to try to reverse most of the changes, so it looks somewhat like a ancient dinosaur.</comment>


N-Queen Problem: Python 2.6.5 vs PyPy 1.5.0 - <AUTHOR> http://aminsblog.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/n-queen-problem-python-2-6-5-vs-pypy-1-5-0/

<comment><USER2> "...all N-Queen problem comes to mere 8 lines of code"

If you are optimizing in LOC, it can come down to basically a single expression; of course that's not a reason to write it as a one-liner:

        def n_queen(n):
            return (p for p in itertools.permutations(xrange(n))
                    if all(j-i != abs(p[i] - p[j])
                           for i in xrange(n - 1)
                           for j in xrange(i + 1, n)))

<comment><USER3> If you are optimizing for LOC, use a suitable language:

from <http://nsl.com/papers/qn.htm> , the code that computes the solution is

      qn:{[n],/{:[n=#*x;,*x;,/_f'f x,\:/:(!n)_dvl,/x]}'(f:0 -1 1+/:)@!n}

And it uses backtracking, which makes it infinitely faster.

But armin isn't optimizing LOC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is actually a rather poor way to solve n-queens. Consider those boards that have a queen in the first space of the first row and the second space of the second row. These two queens can attack each other, so no such board is a solution. However, this method will still go through every such board. On the other hand, a backtracking style solution, which builds up the board row by row, will backtrack after the second queen, thus skipping all these boards.

<comment><USER5> True, it's inefficient, but it's good for profiling Python interpreters, since it does a lot of work.

It's also fast enough for low n (up to 8). Why write more code when you can get your result with less? Maybe the time he's saved with this approach can now be used writing a deduplicator (to cull out mirrored and rotated solutions).

Maybe the point of the article was not only to show how fast PyPy is, but how convenient itertools.permutation() is. You can't show the convenience of itertools by not using it.

However... You know what? When I was asked to write a n-queens solver recently, I also wrote a backtracker. It just doesn't mean I did it better than this guy.

<comment><USER4> I know the point of this article is not to give the fastest n-queens algorithm. But what the heck; here is an iterative backtracking solution. On my machine, this code finds all solutions for the 10x10 board in about 1.2 sec, while the code from the article takes just under 18 sec. Using CPy 2.6.5, just like the article. Have not tried PyPy. Output is essentially the same format, except that my generator spits out lists instead of tuples.

Yes, it's twice as long and harder to read. Improvements, anyone?

      def hit_last(p):
          x = p[-1]
          i = len(p)-1
          for j in range(i):
              y = p[j]
              if x == y or i - j == abs(x - y):
                  return True
          return False

      def n_queen(n):
          p = [0]
          while True:  # Begin iter w/ board good, except maybe last Q
              full = len(p) == n
              hit = hit_last(p)
              if full or hit:  # Will we backtrack?
                  if not hit:  # Found solution?
                      yield p
                  while len(p) > 0 and p[-1] == n-1:
                      p.pop()
                  if len(p) == 0:
                      return
                  p[-1] += 1
              else:
                  p.append(0)

<comment><USER6> Don't worry, PyPy beasts this as well, at ``n_queens(12)`` on my machine:

        alex@alex-gaynor-laptop:/tmp$ time python queens.py

        real    0m16.837s
        user    0m16.820s
        sys 0m0.000s
        alex@alex-gaynor-laptop:/tmp$ time pypy queens.py

        real    0m2.548s
        user    0m2.530s
        sys 0m0.010s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pypy is very fast, but to me what's way more significant about pypy is that more than being just interpreter, it's a toolchain for writing other interpreters that automatically generates a JIT compiler for you. I'd really be interested to see what sort of performance you could get writing interpreters for other languages in RPython.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this is an example where C++ really shines. The code is not much longer (44 vs 33 lines, although the output in python version is much nicer) than the python code and on my computer it is about 140x faster than python 2.7.1.

<comment><USER2> Using a library for computing the permutations I guess? I haven't touched C++ for years but I'd be surprised if the 44 lines include a permutations implementation.

<comment><USER8> next_permutation is in standard library (header algorithm).

<comment><USER9> For the curious, STL <algorithm> is one of those things that you wish you knew ages ago. Usually my code is much cleaner after I run through it and replace relevant parts of it with STL stuff.

<http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/algorithm/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most interesting observation from my point of view is that the author sped up PyPy with a simple manual optimization. This means that PyPy still has even more potential for optimization.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why is there so much CPU time being spent in system? And why is the rest divided between User and Nice in a single-threaded process?</comment>


Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on? - <AUTHOR> Imagine Jeff Bezos offered you 100 of his top people (engineers, designers, product ...) for 100 days and told you that you could work on whatever you wanted.
The only condition is that at the end of the 100 days you need to start paying salaries in order to retain these people.<p>What would you work on? <comment><USER2> A portable personal Internet server that runs as a turnkey no-user-maintenance image on AWS, Digital Ocean, and OpenStack. It hosts your email, federated social networking and chat, file sharing and ad-blocking web proxy. The user experience is pure Internet with no ads, surveillance or vendor lock-in, all for $6/mo (hosting + DNS).

<comment><USER3> This is an idea I've been toying with several times, but it never gets beyond the thinking stage because of the obstacles interacting with the rest of the world: getting at least two cloud provider accounts (one for regular operations and one for secure off-site backups, ideally with a different provider), estimating costs (because good luck actually calculating them), buying a domain and transferring it to the cloud provider, the intricacies of configuring email to not be black-holed immediately by other providers (something I only know from rumours), and I'm sure a host of others. Even an effort to make some of these things slightly easier would be most welcome, but I don't think 10,000 work days is enough to get something like this to a "turnkey" level. It would be absolutely the best to be proven wrong, though!

<comment><USER2> Maybe we could get it "mostly" turnkey just for email, and charge $10/mo to fund 2-3 full-time devops to maintain and extend it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Instead of worrying about the practicality of this, I'll answer your question directly.

I would aim to create as many blueprints as possible for tools that can help more people live and work remotely and sustainably.

There is no greater threat to human health, human happiness, and human productivity, than there is in meaningless desk work and commuting.

<comment><USER5> You think the ability to work remotely is a more significant health-benefit than tackling water-shortages, obesity, drugs, and climate change?

It is OK to have a niche, and to use hyperbole, but when it comes to human health and happiness I'm certain there are more significant issues which are real, and growing, than where somebody works (if they can, must, or even do have a job).

<comment><USER4> The problems you have listed would immediately cease if US and Chinese corporations had any ethics whatsoever.

Obesity is caused by stress eating, cheap junk food, marketing, and a sedentary lifestyle due to a desk job. 2 billion people in South/East/SouthEast Asia live long lives because they are outside the influence of the Western diet.

When you say drugs, I dont know if you mean medicine or heroin. Most medicine is cheap. Pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies hold a cartel over its pricing. As for illegal drugs, decriminalize it like portugal and your problems will cease.

Climate change should be obvious. If everyone stopped consuming the wasteful products US corps market as disposable (gas, cars, meat, etc), we would cut our greenhouse emissions overnight.

All of these problems would end if corporations were somehow forced to stop. I doubt anyone will ever acquire the political momentum to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would have them train 2 people (each) in their field to be as good (if not better) than they are. At the end of 100 days, I'll have 200 people trained by Jeff Bezo's top people. These 200 people will be tasked with building a learning system / school that teaches these skills to underprivileged communities for free. Each school would be named after each of the original 100 top people.

I'll keep tabs on each of the 100 top people and ask them for donations every year to keep their schools alive. If they don't (and we ran out of money), we'll close down the schools.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ask all 100 of them the same question, but they get 4 people instead of 100, collect the top 20 best results, give those 20 folks leadership over a team of 4 people, making a total of 20 teams of 5.

Statistically at least one or two of those teams is likely to come up with a highly profitable idea.

<comment><USER8> I see only one flaw. Who choses these top 20 results? Maybe he cannot imaging how something could be profitable. I'm kidding but it's an interesting thought. Thanks for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> First off, I'm crossing my fingers it was actually a drunk Jeff Bezos who posted this :D

I hit on a new general scheme for structuring programming tools and languages that doesn't use parsing, and I'd love to try building a language and editor on it. I've seen other people working on these syntax-free, no parsing schemes, but I've yet to see one whose fundamental structure is simple enough to be captured by a simple diagram, or just a few sentences; and that's what I'm lookin' at here, which leaves me endlessly curious about the potential significance of this thing (including the potential for its significance to be nothing!)—but I haven't had a chance yet to give it a real test.

So if I had the resources I'd do a bunch of iterations on it—likely with ~10 teams working on parallel iterations if I had 100 people. Actually, I'd start with just one team of 10 working on it, and if it continued looking promising after the first iteration, and add more teams in proportion to the perceived promise. Meanwhile, I've got plenty other (over)ambitious projects I'd like to have help with :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Auction the team as a resource to the highest bidder. I'm not positioned to deploy this resource effectively, so I'm likely to benefit most by trading it to a buyer who can't convert money into talent fast enough.

The team is much more valuable to someone who can afford to pay long-term salaries and needs this talent resource quickly on an up-front basis (Tesla, Uber, a startup trying to crush their competitor, etc.)

<comment><USER11> It seems selfish on the surface, but to me this is one of the best answers to the question.

Why waste valuable resources, when someone more capable could utilize them.

<comment><USER10> Let someone else waste the valuable resource :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The people, by themselves, wouldn't be enough. Let's assume we have the people AND the kind of resources 100 people working at Amazon would have.

Then I would have them work on a multi-pronged project to get a higher percent of people in the US voting.

One team would be campaigning in all states against laws that make it hard to vote.

Another team would be finding the most cost-effective ways to register voters, educate voters accurately about what each candidate represents and has done, and get them to the polls.

<comment><USER13> Of course there are going to be folks who claim that it's too political. There is one party that seems to benefit from preventing voting participation and fairness...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would have them prototype a new computer language + ide for it

This language would have usability in mind as well as throwing out established assumptions. For example, that source code should be ascii text. Or that anyone should decide between tabs/spaces.

<comment><USER15> Not enough people. Languages are hard as well as bad for making money. 100 days is too few.

<comment><USER16> There's the possibility that money isn't his top priority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh, that's easy.

Develop a non profit program to bring tech skills to disadvantaged communities so they can get basic remote work jobs and put food on the table. Key word: 'bring'.

It wouldn't make any money at all, but it might change some lives.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd let them go. Keep the best 5. Or have a contest where you narrow the field down to 5.

100 people fresh for 100 days is a disaster. If you're lucky they'd all ignore one another, group into small teams, and find their own way to do cool stuff.

3-people teams can grow into 100-people teams that do some awesome things. 100-people teams dropped in from the sky are trouble. I've seen it done. It's rarely productive.

<comment><USER19> It's all a question of management. As someone said: build 20 teams of 5.

<comment><USER18> Yes, it might work great as 20 teams of 5. No, not probably the way most people would do it.

It's not a matter of management, it's a matter of self-organization. People are not fungible like money. They are also not robots. So you just can't "manage" them or slice them into various groups and expect it to work well. You also can't take one giant problem and create 20 teams and expect them all to decompose it and solve it optimally without a lot of guidance. The things that work are counter-intuitive and the things that seem like they should work actually create a lot of friction and waste.

Put differently, there are a ton of startups that never made the leap from a 5-person team to a 100-person small dev shop. There are really good reasons for that -- and those are people who have been working together for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Create a full replacement for Javascript based on Scheme and integrate it into Firefox.

<comment><USER21> What do you think about WebAssembly?

<comment><USER20> The last time I looked at it, support for Lisp was questionable: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11269736](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11269736) I need to check again.

<comment><USER19> [https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm- langs#scheme](https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs#scheme)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a theoretical experiment it's interesting. But it would never ever work. You'd literally spend a year or more trying to prepare for that 100 days and I'm still not convinced you'd get anything out of it.

Now, if you were going to give me 6 people that would be a different story. With 6 people I have a number of startup ideas that I would love to work on and I think I could get a working mvp out of in 100 days.

As of today it would be around health care billing for small to medium sized US based medical practices encompassing ehr, billing, office management, and cash flow management. Not exciting but it's what I'd be doing.

<comment><USER23> You could make 16 teams of 6 and give each one a different startup idea. You could then create some metric for success and then choose to continue to work on the one with the most success.

<comment><USER22> I could. I've run very large development groups. It takes a lot of time and effort to get it right and with 16 groups of 6 it would be the same overhead, if not more. It just wouldn't be for me, that's all. I think I'd be much more successful with one strategic team of 6. If you can manage 16 teams working on projects for 100 days, by all means go for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd probably have them work on finding as many zero-day vulnerabilities as possible - after the 100 days I'd probably keep the top 5-10 performers on salary if I was able to make enough money from the research.

</comment><comment><USER25> I would take them away from what they have known and done for years and years. I would finally take their skill and ambition seriously. They will work on a goal that is beyond what they could even imagine when they learned and studied and improved their knowledge while others partied and explored sex and drugs .

Bacause for me, they would be figuring out how to have more people click on my ads.

<comment><USER26> Subtleties are lost in the unwashed masses, too funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> An Amazon competitor. Either in a few underserved niche markets, or in an area where Amazon is not very present.

</comment><comment><USER26> Post the question on reddit and HN, wade thru 99% bad humor theads, and borrow the best idea

</comment><comment><USER28> Build an app that would remind you about things to do when you are in the vicinity.

Rational: there are plenty of things in my live I should do that are not time based, but location based. Post a package to a friend: when close to a postoffice. Buy shaving foam, when close to a supermarket. Buy these earrings, when close to that jewelry shop where she pointed them out to you. Buy flowers, when close to a flower shop. See that exhibition, when walking by. Visit a friend, when close.

Include the option for businesses to send you sweet deals when close and you'd be making money to pay the salaries.

</comment><comment><USER29> I would make them read everything there is to know on superconductivity (esp. high temperature superconductivity) and make them brainstorm ideas on how to get us closer to room temperature superconductors.

</comment><comment><USER30> 100 people @ 100 days / 6 hours per day is 6,000 person-hours at best.

30% of that time or more would be spent on consensus building and chatter.

10% on LaCroix & Coffee runs.

5% on bio-breaks.

I'm left with about 60% of the original time, which I would have to spend on the problem of preserving the original allocation.

Certainly some software product would be the result, negating all the ritualized product management activities we hold dear.

It would require ego death for all involved, as well as the willingness to cast aside "reason" for the sake of gain.

<comment><USER31> 60,000 person-hours _

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'd probably work on a mobile phone, based on some sort of SBC like rPI Zero or the Chip Computer.

But I'd work more on the hardware than on the software: I want a physical keyboard like the one the Nokia N900 has and I want a physical kill-switch for the GSM/UMTS/whatever radio.

As for OS an apps, i always thought that some GNU/Linux distro with some small-device-optimized wm and good selinux per-app policies could work very very well.

</comment><comment><USER33> A decentralized ecosystem for government and finances. It would be a good fit as the domain is B2B, working and partnering with governments and banking institutions (with a focus towards developing/third-world countries to jumpstart their standards of living). The ICO would ensure their salaries later.

</comment><comment><USER34> \- Schedule a Hackathone of a single person for First 2 days on 10 different domains that not exists.

\- We will have 100 MVP / POC after that (10 per domain)

\- Create 2 teams in each domain to develop 2 product for each domain out of all best thing from MVP

\- We will have 20 product in which 10 will surely market leader

</comment><comment><USER35> I recently watched a video of Kevin Horton discussing creation of the Super NT, SNES on an FPGA. He mentions doing the same for the N64 would be extremely difficult. It's not gonna change the world, but it would be a fun challenge to throw some resources at.

<comment><USER30> Youre entitled to your own wishes, but really? Out of anything at all, you'd put 100 (talented) people to work for 100 days to implement an obsolete console in FPGA?

Think big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Have them turn on my youtube engineering vlog and work on something interesting. Self organize onto teams using a compatible approach. I've just a few months of lectures recorded, but I'd have them give me enough money to keep supplying them with vision.

</comment><comment><USER37> Figure out what to do with people with IQ less than 90 that doesn't involve turning them into landfill. Seriously. We have plenty of people who aren't that academic and the world is increasingly leaving them behind. How do we usefully deploy them?

<comment><USER31> We turn them into artificial artificial intelligence.

<comment><USER38> Exactly. There's an article on HN today describing some AI startups secretly using mechanical turk etc rather than actual AI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Real life Battle Royale match broadcast on pay per view. Solves the salary problem nicely.

</comment><comment><USER40> Build educational tools. Bring the cost of learning as low as possible.

</comment><comment><USER41> Figure out how to convince Jeff Bezos to use his money on endeavors that improve the lives of people on this planet rather than billionaire vanity projects like space rockets or newspapers.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'd split them into 20 five-person teams have them each come up with a different prototype based on whatever best idea they can come up with as a group.

</comment><comment><USER43> Probably something (or things) along the lines with helping out with the issues that low income families face, and more specifically the children and their education.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'd tell these 100 Amazon employees to finally go on vacation... and for a 100 days :) Let's not burn these "resources" out.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'd fix kicad.

</comment><comment><USER46> I would fix the sad state of non-profit/charity management; which is currently inefficient and expensive.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'd have them try to build a tool that allows finding the consensus answer to this question.

</comment><comment><USER48> I would split them into small teams and call it a consultancy.

</comment><comment><USER49> Affordable fresh meal kits in urban food deserts that other retailers can franchise from from Amazon/Wholefoods.

</comment><comment><USER50> Gerrymandering

</comment><comment><USER51> tw2002 mmo

</comment><comment><USER52> I would train them on liberal arts, philosophy & politics so that we have 100 techno-humanists able to connect more dots while thinking of the future of mankind.

</comment><comment><USER53> Assuming everyone knows each other and is ready to work, I would introduce myself and my idea: A dating social network that uses genetics data as one of the criteria for matching people.

I will select the top managers in the group, assign each a responsibility, and then have them go into the crowd and build out their team to help accomplish that. I would have the best pitchmen go out and try to raise money from investors.

Everyone goes to work while I sit back in my chair and tent my fingers.

<comment><USER24> Are you actually working on that? Sounds cool.

<comment><USER54> Sounds like eugenics

<comment><USER55> Setting aside the fact that more diverse genes generally result in healthier offspring...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Chapel Parallel Programming Language - <AUTHOR> https://chapel-lang.org/ <comment><USER2> I've worked with Chapel a lot. It's an insanely powerful language that will challenge your ideas (at least for me) about many language constructs in the spirit of HPC. I went to it around 2014 for doing distributed arm projects and implemented several projects. Here's a simple search engine. My github had a number of chapel projects.

Once you get the hang of Chapel you will find it changes how you think about parallel computing. For more advanced concepts the learning curve is steep and not something you can get in a hello world example, but totally worth the effort.

[https://github.com/briangu/chearch](https://github.com/briangu/chearch)

<comment><USER3> For us non-HPC developers, does it make any sense to dig deeper? I get the feeling there could be some interesting thread/core usage maximisation ideas, or some such, but I've not delved before so I have no frame of reference.

<comment><USER4> Depends where your main interests in computing are are, if you are into programming languages, it is always worth having a look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Chapel was one of the three language chosen by DARPA in early 2010s (late 2000s?) to be the potential future of HPC (the other two being Fortress and X10).

I think the idea was to fund these languages, allow the developers to throw them at the supercomputers, have a multi-year shoot out, and pick the one that wins out.

I'm not sure what happened to the findings/results (feel free to chime in).

What I do know is that I've been in the HPC application side for almost 15 years and not one of the big projects I'm involved with use any of these, or any other "new" HPC languages.

The go-to languages/frameworks are the same: C/C++/Fortran, combined with OpenMP/MPI (MPI includes networking, but use of separate networking frameworks is also an option), and Cuda for GPUs (maybe very occasional OpenCL), with python being the massive success as the glue between all the system-level languages/frameworks. And now with the advent of tensor computing, the paradigm appears to be shifting once more (maybe not a shift, but one more item in the laundray list of heterogenous hardware).

Go read the overview, new features, whatever on the linked Chapel website: not a single mention of GPU. That's cz Chapel/Fortress/X10 were conceived/developed around the time GPGPU was just taking off. Nobody saw GPGPU coming and it has taken the HPC world by storm. And yet, after more than a decade, the "new HPC language" website has zero mention of GPUs. What a shame.

I'm not saying the new HPC languages are overrated. But I do believe the promise of an HPC language hasn't panned out, and yet at the same time new computer-architecture/hardware paradigms keep emerging which the "new" HPC languages {were never designed for, never foresaw}.

<comment><USER6> Same opinion here. Parallel first language, and no GPU support??

<comment><USER4> Many HPC worloads are MPI first, and then something else later.

Still there is ongoing GPU support work, see sibling comment.

<comment><USER7> Right, GPU support is very important to us and we expect to make something satisfying. We just havn't been able to prioritize it yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related from 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11747709)

2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951706)

A bit from 2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047197)

A bit from 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11257792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11257792)

Various mentions over the years: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=cray%20chapel&sort=byDate&type=comment)

</comment><comment><USER9> Chapel has great syntax and ergonomics as others have mentioned. What it doesn't currently have is great performance, e.g. [1]. That said, it appears to be heading in the right direction [2]. I last checked about 5 years ago and the story was much worse.

[1]: [https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/10879/pdf/OASI...](https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/10879/pdf/OASIcs- SLATE-2019-12.pdf)

[2]: [https://chapel-lang.org/perf/chapcs/](https://chapel- lang.org/perf/chapcs/)

<comment><USER10> Wow, never thought I'd see my paper[1] on HN :)

Even though getting the right performance was tricky, I was more frustrated with the lack of tooling, sometimes cryptic compiler messages and long compilation times for even mid-sized programs. Most of the issues were mitigated by the great community around Chapel. They are usually very responsive and helpful in their Gitter channel.

In regards to actual parallel programming, Chapel was a breeze. Documentation is solid and most of the parallel concepts were easy to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> These HPC programming languages (there are others too) would be good candidates for GPU programming, hopefully GPU world will at some point emerge from the C++ dark ages despite all the hinderances (proprietary fragmented SW stacks).

<comment><USER2> There was GPU support in a branch a long time ago. I think they missed the boat on that and it would have been a great way to get distributed GPU systems even 5yrs ago

<comment><USER7> GPU support is still really important. We don't see major issues with providing native Chapel -> GPU code generation and hope to work on it soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> really love the syntax of this language and how they are repurposing existing programming language primitives for parallelism.

but i also just spent quite some time looking for a substantial example of usage and had to give up. the only thing close to that are the unit tests. and the language has been in development since late 2011.

that's somehow dispiriting.

that, in a nutshell, is the unfortunate situation with some of these interesting modern programming languages.

<comment><USER13> I never understand why people go to all this work of developing and even marketing major libraries or languages if you aren't going to at least give some doc examples. Jeez, just copy and paste some unit tests and put some prose explanation in. It doesn't take long.

<comment><USER3> You missed the "HPC" acronym.

If you're not in the market to run supercomuting projects, you'll likely never use this language.

If you are, there's a very high chance you know about it already.

Sharp divide between those sides.

<comment><USER14> And yet, in the presentation slides linked to from their homepage, they brag that it aims to be "programmable as Python, fast as Fortran, scalable as MPI, SHMEM, or UPC, portable as C, flexible as C++, fun as [your favorite programming language]". It's not even supercomputer-specific: they say it runs on "a Mac laptop".

If even half of those are true, why _wouldn 't_ I want to use it for every program I write?

(Easy answer: it looks like most of those are still simply "aims", and not actually that close to being true.)

<comment><USER15> I think it's plausible you would want to use Chapel for every program you write. I definitely want to use it for every program I write, but I'm also biased.

The main disincentive to doing so today is that Chapel is not nearly as broadly adopted or well-supported as the languages you probably do use in practice today. The Chapel team is trying to get it to that point, but it's a modest-sized team taking on large challenges (both technical and social, as this thread indicates). To date, we haven't made a significant effort to draw in a massive/mainstream audience because we know we're not ready for it yet, either in terms of the language's maturity or our ability to support a large group of users. But we hope and intend to get there.

That said, I think we're already achieving the aims in the slide you quote—far more than your easy answer suggests—though there's obviously room for differences of opinion (e.g., what does it really mean to be "as programmable as Python?"). If you're interested in pointers to supporting details, let me know.

<comment><USER3> I forget that many of the people and projects that get mentioned here are here as well. Thanks for a deeper viewpoint!

I'll definitely put Chapel on my curious list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why do so few of these small programming language projects have a "why x?" section? How do they expect to gain marketshare if they aren't frontloading their value? This is a fairly old project and yet they've never taken the time to put a sales pitch on their website. In the past 12 years they've added 15 links to their press page [0]. This is a fairly mature project and I have no idea why I should investigate it. I guess it's fine if they never want users, but as someone who's worked in the startup world this sort of thing really gets under my skin.

[0] [https://chapel-lang.org/press.html](https://chapel-lang.org/press.html)

<comment><USER3> > Why do so few of these small programming language projects have a "why x?" > section?

They do... you missed the Cray name in the logo, and the 'runs on HPC systems".

> How do they expect to gain marketshare if they aren't frontloading their > value?

I'm guessing their marketshare is already well defined, there aren't a ton of supercomputing clusters in the world.

> This is a fairly old project and yet they've never taken the time to put a > sales pitch on their website.

See above. They only have to sell to a small fraction of people compared to your startup 'eatt the world' mentality.

> In the past 12 years they've added 15 links to their press page [0].

And?

> This is a fairly mature project and I have no idea why I should investigate > it.

Never needed to run code on big iron, gotcha.

> I guess it's fine if they never want users, but as someone who's worked in > the startup world this sort of thing really gets under my skin.

As this is not a language for startups, I don't think they care if you're annoyed. They are likely dealing more with multi-million dollar single project runs that could take months to complete.

At least look up the meaning of things like HPC before you just shove the concept through your narrow filter of expectations.

I don't expect to ever run high performance code like this, and I'm curious to see what the design could tell me just in passing.

<comment><USER16> I send jobs to HPC systems on a daily basis at work. This website fails miserably to capture me as a potential customer. The cray name has plenty of baggage, but that doesn't give this language value. I do not currently work in the startup space, but having done it, I get annoyed when people put so little effort into selling their projects. I'm sure that a lot of time was spent building this (it's been around for over a decade), but they've put essentially nothing into marketing it.

I run high performance multi node code at work, typically 1-2k cores continuously. I have several contracts with HPE. Am I not part of the target audience for this language?

<comment><USER3> None of that detail came across in the post i replied to. Yes, given that extra information, i would rescind about 95 percent of my snark.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it important to know backpropogation when studying ML/ Deep Learning? - <AUTHOR> I could understand how in an earlier age, knowing backprop was quite important. But is there any real world use for this now that most of these aspects have been hidden from a practitioners view via tools and frameworks like Tensorflow, Fast.ai etc <comment><USER2> As any subject to learn, you don't have to if you don't want to.

More seriously, as in programmation, many new languages manage memory with a garbage collector or other mechanisms, but if you want to be a good developer, you need to know how all this is done underneath.

To drive a car, you don't need to know how an engine works, but to create one...

And for the particular subject, you have to understand the principles under your tools to know how to change parameters and understand why the tools can be biased with bad parameters (or not enough data).

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it would be more important to have a broader understanding of neuroscience</comment>