Ask HN: Thought experiment on how to disrupt public education - <AUTHOR> Ref: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Los-Angeles-Teachers-Strike-Pushed-Back-To-Monday-504167821.html
Teachers Unions are taking schools hostage. This is literally not unlike asking for a ransom. 'Work to rule' and strike threats brewing in Bay Area too.
How can public education be revamped? We have so much technology but nothing has changed in recent times.
(At least in CA. I am not sure about other places) <comment><USER2> How do you disrupt public education? You do what certain political activists have done during the past 70 or so years.

1) You relax the laws that require public education using the rubric that private schools will allow for competition and force improvement. It is no accident that fewer families dependent of public schools weakens support for public schools. It also means that political and religious agendas can be entered into American education where before they were forbidden.

2) You couple that with a long term propaganda campaign about how bad public schools are including portraying teacher union activists in the worst possible light in the news.

3) You starve funding for education to the point where, for example, California goes from the foremost example of excellence in education to one of the worst.

4) When teachers start to rebel at the corruption of American education, you vilify teachers claiming they are taking American education hostage.

The idea that technology offers a solution to a political issue is not realistic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why are unions a good thing? They seem to hold students as hostages and at random.

It's pretty gnarly. CA unfunded pension liabilities may be around $100 trillion

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherburnham/2018/07/30/t...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherburnham/2018/07/30/three- cheers-for-the-los-angeles-times/)

It has made CA into a nanny state. Gov. Newsom now wants to provide pre school education for the first four years. Where is the money for all this?

After school tutoring classes have become a cottage industry in affluent cities. In low income districts, schools are everything from day care to free meals. Meanwhile school funding is highest in low income districts (LAUSD is 17.xxk per student ..OUSD is 14.5k/student) and on the lower scale in affluent areas(Bay Area: 8-9k/student) as property tax and general fund gets redistributed.

Which is fine as society must bear the burden of educating all. But it seems like it's all going for the care and feeding of union backed retired teachers. Unions have become so powerful that in LA, it's a strike. In Fremont, teachers refusing to do more their hours...in Oakland...well. That's a huge can of worms that no one can understand or fix. I don't even know where to start with Oakland's problems.

So clearly throwing money at 'public education' isn't working because there isn't a whole lot of educating going on for that money.

Interestingly there is just one school district that isn't unionized. Clovis Unified School District. It's near Fresno. If you google it, there is some fascinating info there. And yes, they are doing very well.

I am reminded of the 2010 documentary, "Waiting for Superman"

<comment><USER3> _So clearly throwing money at 'public education' isn't working_

I wasn't aware that money was being 'thrown at' public education anywhere. However you define that exactly. But it sounds, the way you describe it, like stopping 'throwing money' is part of the solution? i.e. spending even less on public schools? How much _is_ spent anyway, compared with some other important things the US spends money on, like, say, invading/attacking other countries? Or keeping so many people locked up?

<comment><AUTHOR> California spends between 50-70k per prisoner.(a lot of it goes to pensions for the prison guard union. Google it. Spine tingling. But then there are less of them than students and kids are more reliable on the rolls and increasing every year..and hence only averages to 10k/year) Most of them products of the public school system. That's one way to look at it.

Public education isn't free. Someone is paying for it. But public education isn't accountable to the people paying for it.

Here is an extension of the thought experiment:

If public school education is parent directed/funded and ALL higher education/university/research/vocational studies after passing a very tough high school diploma is absolutely free, how do you think we would all fare as a society? Equal opportunity to all who have cleared their high school exams with flying colours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> \- offer better incentives/pay: Right now in Australia no one who does well in school goes into teaching. The demand is there so universities bring in people who get 20/100 on their high school scores.

\- change the format of education: kids are more anxious than ever (see current HN front page). There's no guarantee that you will be okay financially with the current education system.

<comment><USER2> It appears that the censors have struck again and remove a thoughtful and fair-minded discussion.

I have had enough I will never again contribute to HN.

<comment><USER3> Aw, not sure why you say that. What was removed? I enjoyed reading this page, and particularly what you wrote.

<comment><USER5> I really enjoyed the discussion on this post as I have children and I want the best for their future.

I would like to see more discussion on this topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking about Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. What if every child has a cloned AI in the form of a robot or a tablet etc. it mirrors the child's knowledge base. And depending on the life circumstances of the child, every choice the child has to make, it offers a variety of subjects to learn and master. In the future, there are no 'degrees' ..only skills that are marketable. I find it difficult to believe that we will have a job market as we know it now for the future generations. What is education for then...if we do end up in a post scarcity world..education still has value, yes? OTOH, if we end up with a resource scarce world, survivability would be based on skill sets that are not salary based. Just wool gathering here. What kind of future do you think your kids will have and what kind of education do you think they'd need in their future?

<comment><USER5> I caught one of the Akimbo podcasts a while back where Seth Godin argued that kids will need creativity and leadership as the core skill set for future jobs.

I tend to agree with this, the current form of public education worked well when manufacturing jobs were plentiful post WWII. Those types of jobs have migrated overseas. Trying to bring them back here will not work as many firms have begun using advancements in robotics.

Some form of art, craftsmanship, or apprenticeship will likely be part of the future mix of jobs. If you read books like The End of Jobs by Pearson or The 4 Hour Work Week by Ferris, you get a sense that being an entrepreneur is a possibility. However, I think one has to consider the real odds and survivorship bias.

What I have done with my kids is to try to instill a love of learning. I have taught my 5 year old daughter using a visual programming language. I think it is very important that you make an effort to teach your children skills that are not generally taught in school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Use technology to reduce the size of the teaching groups and tailor the curriculum towards what the kids like and will be happy to learn.

Each group would be about 5-6 kids in size and one of the kids would be the team leader also they would work together throughout the year. The teacher would teach the class but groups would work together to learn the assigned work. The teacher would manage the groups and be available to help. Tech would help reduce the teacher's paperwork and help reinforce the materials thru video.

Why the groups? It would make it easier to manage unruly kids thru peer pressure and identify kids that are falling behind and challenge those that learn faster.

I would also design the curriculum so that kids will have some kind of career skill by the time they graduate high school. Preparing kids for college is not enough. They should have a skill plus they can continue to college if they like. It's shameful that kids can go thru 12years of school yet not be able to earn a living- at the very least learn to give haircuts.

Also, kids should be able to tailor their assigned work towards what they like thru tech.

Example, say I like electronics then part of my day would include a project that applies what I learned in school by doing a big project in electronics.

Schools have become a place to babysit kids while their parents work. I also think that 12 years of school is probably too many years of school. The last three should be used to start learning what they want to be in life.

Also, parents need to be part of the equation. Parents want to blame the schools and the teachers if their kids fall behind but the parents need to figure out what the problem is and get the help the kids need. The parents have the ultimate responsibility for making sure their kids learn. In short, parents will be assigned responsibilities along with the kids.

<comment><USER5> Parents absolutely have to be part of the learning. If both parents work and make no time to contribute to the development of the child's abilities, the outcome is obvious.</comment></comment>


New York Fed Again Upsizes Liquidity Plans for Turn of the Year - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-fed-again-upsizes-liquidity-plans-for-turn-of-the-year-11576187805 <comment><USER2> Url changed from [https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/12/new-york-fed-plans- to...](https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/12/new-york-fed-plans-to- throw-2-93-trillion-at-wall-streets-trading-houses-over-next-month-as-new- york-times-remains-silent/), which points to this.

If you see comments complaining about how misleading the article and headline are, they were probably about that one, not this one.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://archive.md/IxHDK](http://archive.md/IxHDK)

</comment><comment><USER4> > The $2.93 trillion that the New York Fed will funnel to Wall Street over the > next month consists of up to $120 billion each weekday in overnight loans > through January 14 and $440 billion in term loans ranging from 3-days to 32 > days.

We're talking about an _overnight_ loan of $120 billion (that is, a loan that is paid back the next morning, lent again the next night, paid back in the morning, etc. This article is treating it as a _cumulative_ loan - that is, the second day, it's now $240 billion (never mind that the first $120 billion has been paid back by then), and the third day it's $360 billion (never mind that the first $240 billion has been paid back by then).

That's either incredibly stupid, or propaganda. My money is on propaganda.

<comment><AUTHOR> Except it's not all overnight now.

>"The $2.93 trillion that the New York Fed will funnel to Wall Street over the next month consists of up to $120 billion each weekday in overnight loans through January 14 _and $440 billion in term loans ranging from 3-days to 32 days._ "

<comment><USER5> The point, more broadly, is that these are loans with a quick expiry baked in. The money comes into and poofs out of existence on a relatively short timescale (ranging from overnight to a couple of weeks); we aren't going to see an extra ~$3T in circulation. They're providing lubrication in the repo markets, they aren't just shoveling cash into the banks' vaults.

Most people misunderstand this point when discussing repo operations, so it's worth emphasizing.

<comment><USER6> What happens if banks systematically are unable to pay these loans back?

<comment><USER7> > _What happens if banks systematically are unable to pay these loans back?_

And how would that happen exactly?

But if it did, the Fed would extend the loan, or loan more. Not very complicated.

<comment><USER8> So it's not a loan

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In case like me you wondered "Why would anyone need money overnight? (or just for a second, actually)" EDIT: As the commenter below points out, it is actually over very short periods to even out a 2 week average period, but the mechanic is indeed as explained

AFAIK the "overnight loans" are a vehicle to dodge the reserve requirements for banks. In theory the bank is not allowed to fall below a certain reserve threshold because they would be too fragile towards bank-runs. This is needed because left to their own devices banks would just leverage to the max regardless of their cash position.

The crucial point is that the reserve is only measured at the end of day, so a bank can dip below the safety thresholds as long as they make it up by the evening. Overnight loans allow them to ignore the safeties since they just loan the cash for a brief moment to be in the clear with regulation come the daily measuring, but just return the money straight after the measurement has taken place.

It is an organized method by which the Fed facilitates regulation dodging for the financial sector.

<comment><USER10> Why would the Fed allow this? Who created the regulation saying they needed a threshold and why aren't they putting more teeth into it? It seems silly to me to have a regulation without proper enforcement and it seems insane to me that the Fed is complicit.

<comment><USER11> The banks have assets that are worth money they can post as collateral to borrow the cash to meet reserve requirements.

Or would you rather have banks unloading massive stacks of treasuries at market close daily to meet their cash needs, creating volatility in bond markets?

Repo lending means banks don't have to unwind their positions daily due to a cash shortage, because they have other assets they can post as collateral for cash. It's not a bad thing.

<comment><USER9> Tell me:

Why was the cash reserve regulation introduced? What problem did it address?

Why, if banks are not able to comply with this regulation without "unloading massive stacks of treasuries at market close daily", are they allowed to load up on "massive stacks of treasuries" flaunting the cash reserve regulation in the first place?

<comment><USER12> The cash reserve system was introduced to protect against a 1920's style bank run. The idea being that a bank should have enough liquid assets to cover 10 or 15% of their customers pulling all of their deposited funds out of the bank.

The goal of a bank is to make as much money as it can with it's assets. It's in the banks interest to loan out as much as it safely can while staying above the reserve requirements. If a bank were to dump it's assets to ensure it met reserve requirements it would likely sell at firesale prices which could drive down the price of those assets for the rest of the market. By taking a loan from the Fed and using those assets as collateral that scenario is avoided. It's also worth noting that these loans are not free, the Fed does charge interest.

So the bank avoids dipping below reserve requirements (and flooding the asset market) and the Fed earns a small amount of interest.

<comment><USER10> I guess my question would be then why did the bank originally allow themselves to loan too much out? From what you said, it seems like they loaned too much out and without the Fed they would then have to dip into their assets to meet the regulation. So it still seems like the bank messed up and the Fed is bailing them out (despite with interest). I agree it would be a problem for them to dump the assets but it also seems like a problem they are in this situation to begin with.

<comment><USER12> You're correct in that it means that the bank messed up. The idea is that this is for (relatively) small amounts to cover reserve funds for a short period of time. This may happen because large deposit accounts decided to withdraw unexpectedly or loan repayments stopped coming in. Ideally this is to be used for a day or maybe a week. However, you're correct that there is certainly potential for abuse in the system if a bank is doing this repeatedly every day for months or more. I'm not sure what, if any, measures are in place to prevent that abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I lend my friend $10 every day for lunch and he pays me back the next day and this happens 5 days in a row in what context would it make sense to say I have lent him $50 dollars? The linked discussion about cumulative liquidity seems completely full of FUD and designed to obfuscate rather than illuminate its readers. Less of this and more links to Matt Levine please.

<comment><USER14> >If I lend my friend $10 every day for lunch and he pays me back the next day and this happens 5 days in a row in what context would it make sense to say I have lent him $50 dollars?

In a sense, kind of. If your friend is expected to be able to pay for his own lunch (because it's costly to keep covering for him) and only very sporadically need to borrow from you (because e.g. he forgot his wallet), and suddenly you find yourself doing it every day for several days at a time...

Then yes, it's _worse_ than your friend having to "borrow $10 [once]" from you, even if it's not as bad as him having a $50 shortfall (esp since he does pay you back).

It also means your friend is making a systematic error he's not correcting, and you should probably start charging him more to, in effect, carry his money for him. If you don't, you're enabling his dependence.

Similarly, banks are expected to only very sporadically need liquidity directly from the Fed. If they need it over such long intervals, that's bad, and the daily amount borrowed, by itself, understates the significance. It also feels like the Fed isn't doing its job if the banks aren't paying (and savers aren't receiving) a premium for such an unusually scarce service.

<comment><USER13> > The daily amount borrowed, by itself, understates the significance.

If someone tells me that the NY Fed is looking to significantly (>25%) increase its overnight and short-term liquidity operations and the necessary increases are in the range of tens of billions of dollars then that already sounds pretty important. I don't see how anything you said is an argument that cumulative liquidity is an appropriate measure here. Instead we both seem to agree that if someone had said - the loans are only $150 billion (because that seems to be the one day aggregate limit) then that person would also be misleading.

My point is not that this isn't an important issue but rather that it is an important issue and as such it deserves serious coverage and the linked article is not it.

<comment><USER14> >I don't see how anything you said is an argument that cumulative liquidity is an appropriate measure here.

I agreed that accumulating the entire amount is also the wrong way to account for it (but was pointing out that the daily amount is also an error in the other direction):

>>even if it's not as bad as him having a $50 shortfall (esp since he does pay you back).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here is my admittedly ignorant question about this: is it possible that the institutions borrowing these funds are actually using those funds not for relatively low-risk purposes (e.g., paying taxes), but instead to trade "overnight"? Similar to how a high-net-worth individual can borrow against their assets for a very low rate and then turn around and invest those cheap- interest-rate funds into higher-return (i.e., riskier) investments?

This is wholly unsubstantiated, but a link someone posted on this issue in a previous submission on HN (I can't find it) suggested that hedge funds in particular are the main institutions causing this, that the too-big-to-fail banks (JP, BofA, etc.) are unwilling to lend to them in the repo market because the hedge funds are taking too much risk with those funds, and the hedge funds are in turn forcing the fed's hand by telling them that they either step in with funds or they'll either be forced to sell assets en masse or, worse, fail. I'm probably using the wrong language to describe the mechanics of how this would actually take place (e.g., I'm not suggesting a hedge fund actually calls up and forces the fed's hand).

I have seen multiple people assert there's a reasonable explanation for this and others suggest this is just more QE and that the market, after years of QE, can't function properly without it, and so I'm floating what is likely a conspiracy theory as an attempt at getting an explanation from someone informed. Nearly impossible to believe this is a benign event. The parties (the fed, the big banks, hedge funds) haven't earned that trust so if it is benign then maybe there's a first time for everything.

<comment><USER16> > _is it possible that the institutions borrowing these funds are actually > using those funds not for relatively low-risk purposes (e.g., paying taxes), > but instead to trade "overnight"?_

Yes. That's the purpose. You want banks repo'ing Treasuries so they don't dump them (or their mortgages) to pay taxes (or employees or creditors). Repos finance the asset side of the borrower's balance sheet. Tying fungible dollars to specific liabilities is a losing game.

And if someone wants to repo Treasuries to take a new risk position, that's fine. The cash is still injected into the money market through the acquisition of the position. That's the point of the Fed's repo operations.

Note that hedge funds aren't at the Fed's repo desks. They're at the banks'.

> _this is just more QE_

Repo pre-dates QE. And the Fed supporting money markets goes back to its founding purpose. QE was novel in its scale and the assets it supported, not its act _per se_.

<comment><USER15> Helpful info and I understand repo predates QE, but could you shed some light on why this came about unexpectedly, why you think the funds dried up all of a sudden (and caused the repo rate (rates?) to skyrocket), and why the fed said, when it first started injecting funds, that it was a temporary measure (which is what all the pundits also said when it first started), but now is stretching the definition of temporary?

Believe me I want to believe it's benign, but as I understand it if the fed hadn't stepped in the repo rate would've been high single digits and things would've ground to a halt.

Also, I've heard the too-big-to-fail banks suggest that the funds would be available in the repo market if not for all the regulations around reserves, but I gotta be honest my trust level for what Jaime Dimon et al say is pretty low and in fact if they're saying it it makes it even more suspicious. That's my problem of course, but just looking for a more detailed explanation.

<comment><USER16> > _could you shed some light on why this came about unexpectedly_

There are hypotheses. The involve post-crisis capital-requirement rules making banks more conservative with their cash interacting with unexpected demand for cash from tax payers. (There is another around carry trades [1].)

At the end of the day, this is all speculation. Predicting demand for cash is difficult. It's also the Fed's job. That we can complain about an overnight rate spiking for a few hours is, itself, a luxury.

> _as I understand it if the fed hadn 't stepped in the repo rate would've > been high single digits and things would've ground to a halt_

Probably. Liquidity crises in leveraged markets force selling, which lowers collateral values, which forces selling, _et cetera_.

The Panic of 1907 is one of the clearer cases of an unregulated money market turning a liquidity crisis into a solvency crisis [2]. This is a known market failure for which a lender of last resort is a solution.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21827998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21827998)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So 100bn a night, these figures are about a third higher than what was happening before when it was 75bn (IIRC)?

It's odd to me the overnight market has contracted to the point this extra liquidity is needed.

I'm not particularly concerned about Fed's overnight loans since I believe they probably technically make a small amount of money off interest.

What's curious is why the overnight market has become so expensive at the intrabank level?

On one hand it could be a positive result of greater capital requirements due to post 2008 regulations. Alternatively banks could be holding greater amounts of assets in less liquid forms such as properties or perhaps stocks?

Perhaps the high stock market has increased banks asset sheets causing greater liquidity requirements reducing their ability to lend?

I'm very much not particularly well informed here, but if that's the case, this doesn't really feel so much like news as the Fed just performing it's mandates as expected?

</comment><comment><USER18> Ever since this whole repo issue started, we've been told that the ever incresing sums of money that are put into the system are just a "short term" thing, yet no end date is ever announced. Not to mention that the actual cause for the spike in repo rates has never been announced or identified.

<comment><USER16> > _we 've been told that the ever incresing sums of money that are put into > the system are just a "short term" thing, yet no end date is ever announced_

Short-term as in short-term financing, _i.e._ overnight lending.

Nobody expects repo to go away in the same way nobody expects interest paid on excess reserves to go away. It's a tool the Fed uses to manage the money markets. Because the Fed is the Fed, it's almost alway going to be the cheapest counterparty to borrow from.

<comment><USER19> >Because the Fed is the Fed, it's almost alway going to be the cheapest counterparty to borrow from.

Wrong. It used to be this way but they switched it up in 2003.[1]

The Fed is considered the "lender of last resort" and they manipulate the interest rates to keep it that way.

They used to target the Fed Funds rate to be higher than the discount rate. But that didn't make sense if you think about the system the government wanted (for a while it was thought that embarrassment/the risk of increased oversight was enough of a barrier that the lower rate was OK).

1\. [https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/0jhQV/4/](https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/0jhQV/4/)

<comment><USER16> > _Wrong. It used to be this way but they switched it up in 2003_

There was no "switching up". The relationship between the discount [1] and Fed Funds [2] rates is a lever for tightening and loosening monetary policy. Over the Fed's lifespan, the discount rate has typically been higher than the Fed Funds rate, to dissuade the former's use.

And neither is the topic of discussion, which are the repo reference rates [3].

All that said, yes, when the Fed is tightening one may find market rates cheaper than the Fed's.

[1] [https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/discountrate.h...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/discountrate.htm)

[2] [https://www.bankrate.com/rates/interest-rates/federal- funds-...](https://www.bankrate.com/rates/interest-rates/federal-funds- rate.aspx)

[3] [https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/treasury-repo- reference-r...](https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/treasury-repo-reference- rates)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This, from a WSJ article linked in the post, would seem to be important context:

> Fed repo operations take in Treasury, agency and mortgage bonds from > eligible banks in exchange for short-term loans of cash. They are > effectively collateralized loans from the central bank, and they are > designed to ensure the financial system has enough liquidity to keep short- > term rates relatively steady.

> The Fed has used repo operations, as well as purchases of government > securities, for decades to control short-term interest rates, which is key > to its ability to influence the direction of the economy.

> The Fed's response to the financial crisis and its aftermath, however, put > repo operations on the shelf for just over a decade. The Fed started using > them again in mid-September after interest rates in the repo markets, where > firms borrow and lend securities and cash short-term, unexpectedly spiked.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-fed-again-upsizes- liqu...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-fed-again-upsizes-liquidity- plans-for-turn-of-the-year-11576187805)

I think it matters quite a bit whether these operations are an unusual emergency measure, or the Fed is merely resuming common operations that it paused in the wake of the financial crisis.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a good pretty discussion of the issues (podcast) if you are interested. One of the takeaways is that this is an unintended regulatory effect from newer banking regulations

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21827424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21827424)

</comment><comment><USER22> > The New York Fed's repo (repurchase agreement) loan program began on > September 17 when repo loan rates spiked from approximately 2 percent to 10 > percent

Here is some context on the September 2019 bailout (dated September 23), and they actually foreshadow that more intervention would be likely:

[https://fortune.com/2019/09/23/repo-market-big- deal-400-bill...](https://fortune.com/2019/09/23/repo-market-big- deal-400-billion-bailout-unnerving/)

</comment><comment><USER23> This repo operation is YUGE, but the writer of the article is adding his/her numbers up wrong (and perhaps on purpose).

If I lend you $50 overnight, and then you repay. And then I lend you another $50 overnight and you repay, most market folks would consider this $50 in credit/loans, not $100 in credit/loans.

<comment><USER24> The distinction between credit and debt is crucial here.

<comment><USER23> only if you count your numbers in an unconventional manner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It looks like we hugged the server to death. Does anyone have a repost?

</comment><comment><USER26> This stuff is normal. It is not a signal.

I do think there will be a crash similar to 2008, but this is not evidence that it is coming.

<comment><USER27> > I do think there will be a crash similar to 2008, but this is not evidence > that it is coming.

i agree but i lack a specific metric or analysis that supports my thinking. do you have one?

<comment><USER26> I think that there are significant incentives for financial institutions to create financial products (derivatives, etc.) that contain (and magnify) the systemic risk that is part of their inputs.

Systemic risk is very costly to hedge against, and to do so requires keeping capital idle that could otherwise be productive.

Also, esoteric financial instruments are always going to be less liquid than simple securities, yet the incentive of financial firms is to create them and find markets for them. This is analogous to any industrial input (raw materials) and output (finished product).

Complex financial products are desirable for use as underwriting capital because they can have specific characteristics that make them preferable to cash. But in fact the actual desirable characteristic is that their usefulness as a hedge against systemic risk has been sold off, leaving something that is legal as risk capital but ineffective against systemic risk.

Hence, the financial system has an incentive to create complex, entangled, webs of risk capital, none of which is cash, and all of which looks fantastic if you just look at its core (non systemic) risk characteristics.

When there has not been a systemic risk event in a while, such systems appear to be ingenious and clever. Regulators "understand" them well enough to deem them suitable as risk capital in good times (due to their non-systemic risk characteristics) and in bad (due to their lower cost).

The issue in 2008 was that the derivatives had baked in resilience to _some_ systemic risk. If you design it with resilience to any systemic risk, it ceases to be useful.

So the game is simply baking in enough resilience to comply with regulations, collect quarterly bonuses, and repeat.

When you think about it there is really no regulatory framework for minimizing systemic risk exposure except for a handful of limits on firm size and some nuances of underwriting capital, created after the great depression.

<comment><USER27> fascinating, thanks for this post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's the obsession with the NYT specifically, in contrast to other news outlets? It made the post rather irritating to read.

I'm not American, so I feel like I'm missing the significance that might be obvious to everyone else.

<comment><USER29> They're considered one of, if not the, premier newspaper in the US, but have been falling down a lot lately.

"One one side, we have geophysicist Dr. Alicia Gomez to talk about the history of learning about the shape of the earth and its place in the cosmos. On the other side, we have Bob from the internet, who claims it's flat".

 _Edit_ BTW, good follow if you're interested in this sort of asymmetry and how it's playing out in many ways: [https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu](https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why is it that the fed has to do overnight loans? I would think if interest rates rise, anyone would want those short term gains and would sell assets to have enough cash to get at the easy fast money of the repo market.

</comment><comment><USER31> if all you virtual signaling assholes bitching about climate and your self driving cars would focus on this bullshit, the world could actually change, until you do, nothing will.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm a foreigner so maybe someone can answer me; is this money earmarked? Will it be traced? Are the books open and available to everyone?

In short; can we see exactly what this money is used for?

Otherwise it's just a big robbery.

<comment><USER16> > _is this money earmarked? Will it be traced? Are the books open and > available to everyone?_

Yes, it's earmarked. Yes, it's traced.

No, the Fed's books are not "open to everybody". They are, however, open on a delay to a ridiculous level as you can find from their website. (As in, if you want to know how much each institution has borrowed on what terms, you can do that.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Maybe this is where some of the missing Pentagon money has gone?

<comment><USER34> Unlikely, the Fed is fairly independent from the rest of the government and holds reserves or other assets as needed.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin Halving Arrives: Mining Rewards Drop for Third Time in History - <AUTHOR> https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-halving-arrives-mining-rewards-drop-for-third-time-in-history <comment><USER2> Coinbase transaction message in last mined block with 12.5 BTC subsidy: "NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed's Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue"

[https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/629999](https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/629999)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is the lucky halving block: [https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/000000000000000000024be...](https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/000000000000000000024bead8df69990852c202db0e0097c1a12ea637d7e96d)</comment>


How to Talk to the Press - <AUTHOR> http://fortuito.us/2007/05/how_to_talk_to_the_press <comment><USER2> I read somewhere that telling a reporter something is off-the-record is a very bad idea. That completely defies the entire reason they are interviewing you. It was suggested that if something is off-the-record, then switch conversation to get back on track.</comment>


Essential mathematical GIFs that will make mathematics finally make sense - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Alikayaspor/essential-mathematical-gifs-that-will-make-mathematics-finally-make-sense-4873573f5883 <comment><USER2> Well, these gifs cover only a tiny part of elementary math, there are a lot of additional topics, and some of them make no sense :).

Also:

> _They have super power quantum computers and so far they calculated up to > two quadrillion digits [of pi]._

As far as I know there is no algorithm to calculate the digits of pi in a quantum computer. All the methods I know use a classic computer.</comment>


Programming with Punched Cards (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/fisk.pdf <comment><USER2> _" So now I dug out my pad of coding forms and wrote one line on it, this time including the missing comma. I took it back to Maria and asked her to make me a new card."_

The luxuries of a pro ... (although further down the page he is using the spare card punch machine himself.)

I met punched cards for an IBM 360 as a student - besides punching our own cards, in a public room with a dozen machines clattering away, we needed a "credit card" at the head of the deck. This was a pink-colored card (instead of the run-of-the-mill cream) pre-punched with the number of CPU seconds allowed for the job.

</comment><comment><USER3> On sorting dropped decks:

[http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/sorters.html](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/sorters.html)

"You may have heard the story of the operator who dropped a whole box of cards. Wanting to put things right as quickly as possible, he sorted the cards, without consulting the user. As it turned out, that was the worst possible response. Up until that point, the box had contained a sample of random numbers."

(My father used to get his entropy from dead tree random number pools, similar to: [https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html) )

</comment><comment><USER4> At the university I worked at we were still using punched cards (both punched and non-punched) to take written notes. When I left last year there was still a room full of those. Crazy that to think that at some point people took the decision to order huge amounts of these cards - maybe in the hopes that this technology will last for quite a long time.

</comment><comment><USER5> I worked in the 70's as a professional programmer using punched "Hollerith" cards. Some of this article is a bit off. You don't just start programming one day. In those days you would take a two-week course at the vendor or at a University.

You don't discover that you have to compile your program after you have written it. You are taught that in advance.

The keypunch operator knew this was source code, and would never give you an uninterpreted deck. That was only for data.

I maintained a 4,000+ card program. I used two special metal trays, with a tab that pressed and locked in the cards securely. There was no "2,000-card" limitation. The operators were trained to feed thousands of cards in the card reader. Our master file was 40,000 cards, read through twice a day.

We used a binary image technique, allowing us to store 240 4-bit digits (3 x 80) per card.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I control an inkjet's motor? - <AUTHOR>

Just for kicks. Oh and fun and profit of course. <comment><USER2> An inkjet uses a stepper motor. You'll want one of these:

[http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...](http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9402)</comment>


AWS issues, affecting Heroku and others - <AUTHOR> https://status.heroku.com/#2012-10-22 <comment><USER2> Amazon, those masters of tactful understatement, say:

> 10:38 AM PDT -- We are currently investigating degraded performance for a > small number of EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 > Region.

<http://status.aws.amazon.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Not only that - the "information" icon that they use makes it very hard to spot issues quickly. Even on a minor issue it would be useful to have some kind of different icon.

<comment><USER3> AWS cleverly designed a very informative status dashboard: green means "things _might_ work", green with a little speck on it means "nothing is working, the entire datacenter is down".

Effectively, this is exactly how it is.

<comment><USER2> About 33 minutes after they first acknowledged the problem, they've changed one of those indicators to as goldenrod-yellow color. Presumably this indicates that the world is on fire and the sky has gone black with carrion crows:

> 11:11 AM PDT -- We can confirm degraded performance for a small number of > EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region. Instances > using affected EBS volumes will also experience degraded performance.

<comment><USER4> <http://status.aws.amazon.com/images/status0.gif>

<http://status.aws.amazon.com/images/status1.gif>

<http://status.aws.amazon.com/images/status2.gif>

<http://status.aws.amazon.com/images/status3.gif>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I took our Web sites offline (RadioReference.com / Broadcastify.com) so our back end processes (audio archiving, audio serving etc) don't crater.

Our Master MySQL server uses EBS (striped RAID across 4 EBS disks) and it is getting killed due to severely degraded EBS performance. There is definitely a major problem with EBS at this time.

<comment><USER6> We are running our sites across three AZs, all in US-EAST. Our three web servers (one in each AZ) are not even able to load static test pages from their EBS volumes at this time. We also have a Percona MySQL cluster across three AZs and we are seeing very degraded perfomance in the EBS volumes on all three servers as well. It seems like this is impacting more than a single AZ from what I'm seeing.

<comment><USER5> Well, we've gone from "degraded performance" to completely losing our EBS instance store for our master MySQL server. If we don't see resolution shortly we might have to look at promoting one of our slaves and moving forward from there.

<comment><USER5> We ended up promoting a slave to master, and moving forward from there. Our master eventually returned to service, and we'll promote him tomorrow after things settle down.

Interesting to note that we issued a reboot on our Master and it went away and didn't return for over 45 minutes - we thought for sure it would have to be terminated. API calls and console access was severely restricted, so even launching in new AZ's was problematic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note to all the postgres users cursing EBS right now: you can persist your db instances to s3 with <https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E>, which, combined with streaming replication and some redundancy, should let you run off ephemeral disk.

<comment><USER8> I recommend this as well. Performance is way more consistent on the instance/ephemeral storage as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it really hard to hate Heroku with a status page that gorgeous. There is something to be learnt about UX there, I think.

<comment><USER10> I'm not a Heroku customer, but I want to be after just looking at that status page.

<comment><USER11> I found it to be pretty non-sensical to be honest. Not sure what's wrong with having a simple table with title/description/timestamp columns. I'm going to that page to figure out why my site isn't working, not view some designer's portfolio.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yup, my sites are down. I'm sure it's something new and complex, like a ferret or a leprechaun got into the 7th backup power switch which overloaded this and that.. as usual something impressively difficult to plan for, but come on! Virginia you're killing me...

<comment><USER13> That Virginia datacenter has the worst reputation among my peers for any Northeast US datacenter. I highly recommend moving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So the lesson seems to be, if you want to do AWS, don't use US-EAST? Seems like that's always where these big meltdowns are.

<comment><USER15> The lesson is: don't build a system that requires or advertizes high avilability but that runs in a single datacenter. Load balance. Elect leaders. Batch, queue, and distribute. Fail-over. Fail fast. So long as we have earthquakes, lightning, human malice, and human error, single AZs will fail.

<comment><USER16> We're paying 2x for the RDS multi-AZ setup that is supposed to failover in these cases. So far no luck. Think I'll ask for a refund.

<comment><USER17> I gave up on Amazon (and ate the reserved instance fees) 2+ years ago over this. I was paying through the nose for multi-AZ RDS and when EBS failed in one zone, nothing failed over.

<comment><USER18> What did you switch to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How often do these happen? I've been using EC2 for about a week and it was a surprise when my instance ground to a halt before my eyes. Here's the series of events from my perspective: Nginx is no longer able to connect to uwsgi Instance successfully rebooted via EC2 console Celery tasks are not able to reach the RabbitMQ broker Halfway into a dump of Postgresql the session goes dead Green check on EC2 console for the instance still rclick -> stop causes instance to get stuck in a 'stopping' state, which persists to this moment.

<comment><USER10> EC2 seems to be about as reliable as a mid-range host provider. Which is to say that they can do 99% but not really 99.99%.

They also seem to either have no issues is everything goes out all at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well, it did rain today. So obviously AWS is down.

<comment><USER21> Cloud computing indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Also affecting Coursera: <https://twitter.com/coursera>

It's rather annoying as the first assignments for the Alex Aiken's excellent Compilers course are due today.

<comment><USER23> Sorry to hear that. Maybe you can get an extension.

<comment><USER24> Yes they will usually extend it, like they did with the Godaddy outage.

<comment><USER22> Thanks - I've already emailed the lecturer.

For info, Coursera seems to randomize the assignments. Specifically, in the case of multiple choice tests it seems to pick a random subset of answers to each question, and randomize the order. This is obviously a defense against dumb copying.

What it does mean though is that you can't resubmit your own work. I've re- done the assignment twice this evening (the questions change enough that you have to think a lot, even when re-doing the same assignment), only to get 500 errors both times.

Anyhow, I'm sure it'll all work out and these temporary technical problems are but minor hiccups in what is a fantastic course and a fantastic learning system. It's very, very much appreciated.

<comment><USER25> The choices can change between each time you _initiate_ a quiz. However, if you complete part of a quiz, save, then return later, the choices will be the same, but the order will be different.

Not all of the courses are set up with multiple choices though. In addition to varying sets of correct responses, some answers are mathematical. For instance it is defined such that a question might ask ("What is %d plus %d", a, b), then have choices involving the quantities: ("%d", a+1), ("%d", a*b), ("%d", a+b), etc. with a different random quantity for a and b each time you start a quiz.

Interestingly, I saw one course where it had single-choice questions, with more differences than simply right or wrong. For instance one answer gave 100%, another 80%, and another 0% of the points available for that question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You know guys, this always makes me wonder... So many of you experience issues because of cloud, why not got dedicated at hetzner or whatever your baremetal provider is?

<comment><USER27> Ran a remote dedicated server to host apps for several years. While it was an enlightening experience, it was a lot of sleepless nights and high anxiety. Traffic spikes, OS updates, security, and plain old downtime. I've used shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting for apps. They all have their fair share of downtime, but I like shared and cloud hosting the best. It allows me to focus on development, rather than running the server.

<comment><USER28> So far I haven't solved the problem of keeping a non-trivial service without any interventions. How does running your servers and services on a PaaS provider solve the need for OS updates and security? What are your typical architecture and operations like?

I personally think that OS updates and security fixes/hardening are crucial in all cases if you're running any production site (and even for the dev environment). Granted, some of the colocation providers don't offer services like AWS VPC (and the associated SecurityGroups and ACLs) but that's pretty rare nowadays. In all cases, and Ops or a Sysadmin person is quite important for the stability of your business.

The only big advantage I see about using PaaS is the rapid and flexible provisioning of new instances in case you need them. That's why the best solution to me, so far, has been running a combination of bare-metal servers with optional provisioning of additional cloud instances if you need them. The price difference can go to orders of magnitude (even if you factor in the costs of paying somebody to be a system administrator and take care of your servers).

 _Edit: added the last paragraph_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "11:03 AM PDT We are currently experiencing connectivity issues and degraded performance for a small number of RDS DB Instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region."

Given that my sites are deployed using Multi-AZ RDS instances and yet they're still down, this takes the cake a little.

<comment><USER30> Are you also on Heroku? Our RDS is also multi-az and is actually up, but heroku bit the bullet so it doesn't matter.

<comment><USER29> No, just straight up EC2 and RDS. It seems not all the RDS instances are affected, but it's just frustrating that they all haven't failed over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> As an AWS user since 2009, I can only imagine the tremendous difficulties of running such a service but given the stability of my long-running instances in US West vs East, I really do sometimes wonder if Mr Bean is on staff in Virginia.

<comment><USER32> I wonder if US East just has a LOT more customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just a friendly reminder that AMZN now runs a large chunk of the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER34> And this is why my new venture will be going pinboard.in's route and hosting everything on our own machines. More work for me but vastly cheaper and hopefully a lot more reliable.

<comment><USER8> Just don't use EBS. Most everything else is pretty stable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even then, there seems to be issues with ELB currently.

<comment><USER35> ELBs unfortunately use EBS so they are always affected in these cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I checked out the AWS status page, it says EBS is busted in NoVA, yet the status is still green. I think someone needs to fix their UI problem statte...

<comment><USER37> All they had was a little information icon by the green circle with a hover message letting you know what the problem was. They need to make that circle red!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I know it's been said, but the Heroku status page is the easiest to use. Very effective use of a timeline.

</comment><comment><USER39> Reddit is down as well

<comment><USER40> was down, somehow they recover pretty quickly

<comment><USER41> Still down for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is bullshit, so many critical sites offline.

Talk about having all your eggs in one basket.

</comment><comment><USER19> The wikipedia page for EC2 lists a couple similar incidents at the Northern Virginia datacenter. Victims of the previous NVa outages included Reddit, Quora, SpringPad, FourSquare, Netflix, etc...

Many of those companies are down right now... why didn't they learn? FourSquare seems to be up - although slow. I can load Quora but didn't try to log in. Netflix, Reddit, SpringPad, seem to be down for me. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud#Is...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud#Issues)

<comment><USER17> Learning doesn't magically triple your hosting budget or your ops team headcount. Sometimes 99.9% availability is all you can afford... or all that makes sense to do the work for. Netflix didn't go down, though; I've been watching TV on it throughout this incident.

<comment><USER19> True, and learning on a monday morning is certainly easier than learning during peak hours for some of these companies. It does lead one to reexamine the value of another 9, however. Out of curiosity, does it often cost triple to shift half of the instances/LB's/etc... to another datacenter and implement the proper consistency mechanisms?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> While it's more frustrating to have no control over the reliability, I suspect that most companies could not achieve the level of reliability from AWS by self-hosting, at anywhere close to the cost (inc. stafftime). Nothing is 100%, and getting as close to 100% as you can gets exponentially more expensive the closer you get.

Of course, this could change if AWS's reliability trends downward. But it's never going to be 100%, and neither is anything you do yourself.

<comment><USER17> I don't think this is true. US-East's incident history over the past 3 years is terrible. If you had a completely non-redundant set of rented servers sitting in Softlayer or Rackspace's data center over the same period, even factoring in expected hardware failures over the time period (replacing a hard drive or two, probably), you'd have been available more than even a multi-AZ deployment with failover in AWS US-East.

I've got heavily used servers at Softlayer that haven't had more than a few minutes of downtime in 4+ years, and have never been rebooted. During that same time, I ran a site out of US-East for two years (EC2 + EBS + Multi-AZ RDS + ELB), and had more downtime and spent more admin time working around significant issues with Amazon. Amazon neither saved me time nor money, nor did it provide better availability.

<comment><USER32> wonder if anyone's been keeping and publishing statistics on exactly how often AWS US East has been down. Perhaps it's more than I thought. Of course, most failures haven't been effecting _all_ of US East, so maybe what would be interesting to look at is just _some_ customer's data on exactly how much downtime they had in the past 3 years or whatever. Without knowing what the uptime/downtime was, hard to say how terrible it was, or how it compares to other options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Been getting crap loads of alerts stemming from their North Virginia data centre. Got 9 of these yesterday ...

"You are receiving this email because your Amazon CloudWatch Alarm "awsec2-WM- Live1-i-8747ece1-High-CPU-Utilization" in the US - N. Virginia region has entered the ALARM state, because "Threshold Crossed: 1 datapoint (93.13) was greater than or equal to the threshold (85.0)." at ."

Maybe their data centre was over run by mutants ?

</comment><comment><USER44> -_- I'm really beginning to hate you ec2/ebs.

</comment><comment><USER45> I was planning to launch our startup in a few hours. Oh well.

<comment><USER46> Pivot to a PaaS with a focus on uptime?

<comment><USER47> Or build your application with the characteristics of the underlying platform in mind. Nobody would run a DB server on a single spindle drive since occasionally they fail. Accordingly, nobody should deploy non-multi-az AWS applications because occasionally they fail.

<comment><USER45> as a matter of fact, our app is using multi-zones not just for instances but also for RDS. As of now, I can't reach anything including the loadbalancer.

<comment><USER47> All I've ever heard and seen in practice is that RDS should generally be avoided for production usage. Its opaque reliance on EBS is its downfall.

<comment><USER45> Possibly but there are bigger companies using RDS in production – also, the multi-az feature had worked out better than my own custom setup. Unfortunately lack of resources prevent me from rolling out my own setup on bare metal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Anyone calculated how many 9's Heroku is down to this year?

<comment><USER49> We do not post a yearly number right now, but the previous 1 & 3 months are prominently displayed on our status site: <https://status.heroku.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Interesting. My Heroku-hosted site seems to be doing fine: <http://www.cocoacontrols.com>

<comment><USER51> Heroku has implemented AWS services correctly, most websites can't afford to do that.

<comment><USER52> Well clearly they have a lot of work still to do:

<https://status.heroku.com/>

Complete outage of an AZ shouldn't ever take services offline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> 12:32 PM PDT We are working on recovering the impacted EBS volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.

Hopefully recovering in the next hour.

</comment><comment><USER54> Not even able to ssh to aws instance. AWS console shows normal. Are others able to ssh?

<comment><USER55> SSH issues are isolated to instances that are EBS backed. Instance storage backed is working OK for SSH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Amazon hosts so many big sites that when it goes down its a huge disaster.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yeah, we've had failovers on RDS and Heroku is having trouble as well.

</comment><comment><USER57> Affecting PHPFog/Appfog too - I think their MySQL services.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm having issues trying accessing the AWS web console...

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm affected. Site is down, no servers are accessible.

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm also having trouble accessing RedisToGo.

</comment><comment><USER60> Us too. RDS bit the bullet for us.

</comment><comment><USER61> At least Netflix is still up.

</comment><comment><USER62> I now regret using EBS boot.

</comment><comment><USER46> Skynet is coming online.</comment>


Show HN: A little web app for playing around with colors - <AUTHOR> https://color.clss.hk/ <comment><USER2> Very playful and focused. The only issue I have is with the preview image.

The image shows islands of colors isolated by big white space. Most color combinations look good in this context. When two colored shapes touch each others, then things get tricky. Eyes can pick out subtle lightning clues, like darker colors moving toward purplish hues.

Maybe add another image that shows overlapping colored shapes?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's really a good point. The graphic now can't really reflects how well do the colors go together.

Apart from graphics, I am thinking maybe adding some sample UI/charts too...

Thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While I acept the significance of complementary colors, the significance of triadic, split complementary, analogous and split complementary is open to debate. One issue is that almost all discussion of co called Colour harmony is around hue. Yet no hue exists without a lightness and saturation value, which have their own impact upon the aesthetic design.

More broadly, Colour harmony is something of a bogus science, with its roots in the very beginnings of Colour science. Newton himself added an seventh Colour to his hue wheel just So that Colour would be anagous to musical scale. It didn't stop there... Goethe, Itten and Kandinsky all followed suite. All claimed that Colour could be subject to high-order 'good contrast' known as harmony. As an art student, this bogus thinking was nothing but damaging, and took me years to shake off.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks pretty cool!

I was delighted to see that the page loaded almost instantly, and the transitions, spring animations, all work super smoothly ! I'm usually frustrated with Material Design components because they « feel » slow for some reason, but this implementation works perfectly.

<comment><USER5> It's using Animate.css by Daniel Eden: [https://daneden.github.io/animate.css/](https://daneden.github.io/animate.css/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I also used a react library called Pose: [https://popmotion.io/pose/](https://popmotion.io/pose/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting idea @longsangstan--I played around with it for a while and liked how the colors would change on reload or palette click. I often muck around with colors using the Chrome debug tools, but it would be interesting to have something like this pop up as a dev plug-in with assignable sections/classes/ids so I could tweak things on the fly and o/p CSS--if that doesn't exist already.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually at the beginning I was thinking whether to make a webapp or a chrome extension...

A chrome extension is more suitable as a dev tool while a webapp is more easily sharable...

Thanks for your suggestion!

<comment><USER6> Agreed--though much of the core code is shareable between both targets.

When I first discovered the prototyping capabilities for colors/themes/samples in the Chrome dev tools, my mind was blown away b/c of how fast I could iterate. A plug-in might take that to the next level. It's hard to say without me surveying more of what's out there and in use--I get the sense that at a certain level, teams rely more on tools like Sketch, inVision studio, Framer etc. for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately if the window height is much less than about 900px, or if I zoom in, the controls overlap the gradient-wrapper (and some of the image).

</comment><comment><USER8> This gave me immediate nostalgia for the NES game "Color a Dinosaur" \-- thanks for the little trip down memory lane!

</comment><comment><USER9> Look like it doesn't work on Safari (or at least Safari Version 13.0 (15608.1.37) on Catalina). The buttons are below the viewport and I can't scroll to them. It worked fine in Chrome.

<comment><USER6> Confirmed on Safari 12.1.1--albeit different than you mention. Things work fine if I'm fullscreen on a 15", but if I reduce the window size, I see the color palette & buttons cover the image with no option to minimize or move them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another cool webapp is Coolors [https://coolors.co/app](https://coolors.co/app)

I use it a lot when I need to pick colors for a project.

<comment><USER11> that app really spam the back button history (in Firefox, at least)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fun, but I couldn't figure out how to select a color (left-most bottom-menu icon) and have it transfer over to the play area (middle icon).

<comment><AUTHOR> It is indeed a problem. I am still thinking how to make these two pages work together.. maybe merge the first page into the color picker in second page.

Thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What does it mean when a public github project has no LICENSE file _?

Am I only legally allowed to _view* the source code, but can't download and run it locally? Or can I run it locally, but not publish it publicly?

* The source for the app doesn't have a License file as of dae0f0f: [https://github.com/longsangstan/color-app](https://github.com/longsangstan/color-app)

<comment><USER14> [https://help.github.com/articles/open-source- licensing/#what...](https://help.github.com/articles/open-source- licensing/#what-happens-if-i-dont-choose-a-license)

> You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, > the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your > source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works > from your work. If you're creating an open source project, we strongly > encourage you to include an open source license. The Open Source Guide > provides additional guidance on choosing the correct license for your > project.

Looks like you probably can pull it down but not redistribute it or use it to create other programs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Feels like I am 5 years old again!

</comment><comment><USER16> This is hosted on a hk domain. Is this definitively not a coded message of some sort ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha no. It just reflects that I am from HK. Anyway, please support HK:)

<comment><USER16> I do and I am sure several others support HK as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Pretty</comment>


Change I'd Like To See - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/08/change-id-like.html <comment><USER2> for the love of god leave this shit on reddit

<comment><USER3> Agreed! I really don't want HN losing its niche as a non-sensationalistic news site for hackers, founders, entrepreneurs, and all-around technical folks.</comment></comment>


Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese - <AUTHOR> https://legendsoflocalization.com/games-with-famous-bad-translations-into-japanese/ <comment><USER3> There's a more elusive issue in translating English into Japanese that's often overlooked: the two languages have very different "axes" of freedom. One of such examples is honorifics. Japanese has a massive variety of words in different politeness, and it's very common for Japanese novels to exploit its freedom. But English has little varity in it, so this freedom is often not utilized in a translated Japanese. Another type of freedom is the creative use of Chinese characters. On the other hand, Japanese has almost no concept of rhymes (because its phonetics is not based on syllables), so it's very hard to convey the feel of rhyming in Japanese text (as a native Japanese guy, I still don't quite get it either). I don't think these "axes" are comparable in one way or another, and it probably adds another layer of difficulty.

<comment><USER4> This is very strange to me. Isn't Japanese supposedly to be very easy to rhyme due to its very simple phonetics?

<comment><USER5> This is correct. In Japanese it's so easy to rhyme things that rhymes just aren't interesting or unusual.

<comment><USER6> Japanese rap tries to make the rhymes more interested by rhyming multiple syllables instead of just one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Translation is always difficult, but especially so when the translator does not know the overall context and intended use of the text. If one is translating a novel, most of the context necessary to understand, say, a line of dialogue is right on the page. According to a talk I heard about twenty years ago by a game translator working between Japanese and English, however, at that time all translators usually had to work with were isolated bits of text in Excel files. No wonder so many mistakes have crept into localized video games.

In her talk, she stressed the importance of actually playing through the game while translating, but said that the finished game often wasn't available and that deadlines or low translation rates could make that unfeasible.

I was a freelance translator myself at the time, mostly doing business-related texts, and her talk did not make me want to go into video game translation.

<comment><USER8> One great example of that was how in some later Sims game (2 or 3), one of the actions possible on a bonsai tree in the Swedish version is "Katrinplommon", translated from "prune" \- unfortunately, prune as in a dried plum, not the pruning of plants.

<comment><USER9> Ah, nice! I guess all languages have legions of these. In Norway, dell sold computers with "brannkabel", or "burn cable" [1].

[1] IEEE 1394 — FireWire.

<comment><USER10> Considering the eventual hackability of Firewire, maybe the translation was prescient... you're gonna get burnt by that cable!

<comment><USER11> That makes no sense in context of Norwegian as "get burnt by" is an English idiom.

Closest Norwegian equivalent to getting burnt I can think of is "å få lang nese" which translates into "to get a long nose", e.g. you get a long nose when someone tricks you. So in that case the cable should be called IEEE 1394 — LongNose.

Translation is difficult..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've seen Let's Plays of the Japanese translation of Portal and felt that it misses the sardonic notes of GLaDOS' script, and as a result falls completely flat. In my opinion, this aspect is essential to the Portal experience. It's not that I couldn't think of how to express certain lines in Japanese, rather it just seemed that the translation team didn't get the jokes at all.

That said, translating jokes can be very, very difficult. Sometimes you're lucky and there's a low hanging fruit to grab, a pun that works in both source and target languages, or a similar idiom that's recognizable if you switch out a word with another one in the same category. All too often with language pairs as distant as English and Japanese, you just end up writing your own joke.

Having grown up with "spoony bard", "this guy are sick" and many other memorable zingers, it is somehow ironic, somehow comforting, to know that bad translations aren't a one-way street.

<comment><USER13> I'm not entirely sure you meant it that way, but "spoony bard" is _not_ a bad translation, as evidenced by its inclusion in every official translation of FF4 since Woolsey's. The bard is indeed spoony[0], and it is the kind of archaic language you might expect from an old man like Tellah.

[0][https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spoony](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/spoony)

<comment><USER14> It's a correct translation, but funny because of its stilted language.

It would have been merely old-timey in Japanese, but in English it's rendered as centuries-old vernacular. "Spoony" ceased to be common language in the 19th century. "Bard" in the _18th_ , except in limited senses referencing archaic usage. No one is that old!

It's not _wrong_ , just a little _too far._

<comment><USER13> You'll note that in the fantasy genre, such archaic words as _bard_ are actually quite common, so I don't think 'spoony' is ridiculous at all. It is not uncommon for media to use completely made up words, why is pulling a single instance of an archaic one "too far"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of an interview I read with the guy who did the Japanese localization of Overwatch (a game that I imagine this article would mention if it was updated).

The interviewer asks what the localizer thought about all the weird Japanese dialog and copy in the English version of the game, and he answers to the effect that: a lot of the text would definitely be out of place in a Japanese title, but on the other hand it kind of fit with the game's off-kilter style. He likened it to the way Hollywood movies often indiscriminately mix Asian cultures together, saying he was fond of the effect, and that "fixing" everything in localization might break the humor. So when Blizzard asked him for input he says his answer was "Frankly the Japanese is pretty messed up but let's go with it".

source (JP): [https://www.gamespark.jp/article/2017/03/17/72229.html](https://www.gamespark.jp/article/2017/03/17/72229.html)

<comment><USER16> the two japanese characters in overwatch were more "blizzard" than japanese. one of them, before doing some special skill, would shout "taste my blade" in japanese. unsurprisingly, this phrase also appeared in the warcraft series as part of the blademasters voice lines. the other yells something like "dragon devour my enemies".

it's all a bit odd of course, because in typical japanese fighting games (or even chinese wuxia films) the characters normally yell the name of the skill before doing their special skill, like "wave fist" or "dragon subduing 18 palms", rather than yelling something the hero intends to achieve. they'll never say something like "die!" because that's just not heroic.

the game is nice, but those two characters just feel very not-japanese, even with all japanese work for them.

<comment><USER15> The "shout the name of the move" thing is neither here nor there, I think. Overwatch isn't a fighting game, and voice lines like that aren't common in shooters (Japanese or otherwise).

For the rest, I'd guess it's a simple matter of Blizzard not having anybody in house who can check content. They've never done JP versions for any of their games, and the mistakes they make tend to be of the "copy/pasted from Google translate" variety. Also the 3rd-party localizer in the interview mentioned Blizzard asking him to check their Japanese, even though that would have been pretty late in the process.

(One also suspects that the JP voice lines may largely be the work of the voice actors. That would explain why Genji (voiced by a native speaker) has tons of Japanese voice lines, while Hanzo speaks only English outside of his ult.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A friend of mine did some freelance Japanese-to-English translation for a video game you've heard of some time ago. Her source material consisted, in entirety, of an Excel spreadsheet with one column called "Japanese" (filled) and another called "English" (empty). That's it: she never even saw the game in question, and wasn't familiar with the series in general either. And then we wonder why the translations are bad...

<comment><USER5> This is maddeningly common, even these days.

Unfortunately, many mono-lingual people don't realise that language does not map perfectly from one word/phrase to another.

When I used to translate people in the office would come up and ask me "What's xxxxx in English?". I would reply "Well, what situation is this?". More often than not they would switch off at this point.

<comment><USER18> I'm more or less bilingual (Portuguese/English), and it annoys me to no end how often I have the exact word I want, but it's in the "wrong" language. Often, the alternatives in the "right" language just lack the appropriate connotation/subtext.

<comment><USER19> I feel this about language in general. Sometimes it takes way too many words or sentences to convey what I mean.

I think it's time we develop some cool telepathy tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I enjoyed plugging these into translate.google.com to see what machine translation made of poor applications of Japanese.

The best one was the "Brutality Bonus," which after re-translation from the developer's Japanese, came back as something like "Allowance for Atrocities." Not _wrong_ , but hilariously off-kilter. It still makes complete sense, but it utterly fails to convey the original tone.

I can see, at some remove, why this stuff is funny!

</comment><comment><USER20> Opposite direction, but Super Mario RPG's localization team apparently didn't get half of the pop-culture and cross-game references of Mallow's "psychopath" ability and the net result is that English "psychopath" text is hilariously non-sensical.

For example, if you use "psychopath" on Magikoopa, the English translation is "That's... my child?" which makes zero sense. A better localization would have been "You're that baby from that one time!?" \- a reference to Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.

There's also a Donkey Kong-looking enemy named "Guerilla" whose psychopath text is "Don't confuse me with someone else!" In Japanese though, the enemy's name is more like "Dankey Kang" and his psychopath text is "This character has no relation to any persons, living or dead. Any resemblance is purely coincidental." (apparently this particular case was more due to memory constraints than the localization team "not getting it" though)

You can read more here: [https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-pop-culture- obsessed-m...](https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-pop-culture-obsessed- monsters-in-japanese-super-mario-rpg/)

</comment><comment><USER21> On a related note, I'd like to highlight two localizations that completely parodied their source material:

from English -> Japanese, there's Transformers: Beast wars

I can't find subtitled clips of them, so I'll just link to discussions on what changed.

[https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Beast_Wars:_Transformers_(cartoon)#J...](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Beast_Wars:_Transformers_\(cartoon\)#Japan)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/transformers/comments/8zqixk/why_is...](https://www.reddit.com/r/transformers/comments/8zqixk/why_is_it_that_when_a_western_transformer_show_is/)

In the other direction, you have Ghost Stories. I'll let this clip compilation do the talking

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0w6EffYfY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0w6EffYfY)

</comment><comment><USER22> Going the other way. When I lived in Japan I would collect Japanese products with unfortunate English names or ad copy. And there were so many. "Angel Relief" cookies ("Relieve the Relief!"). Dunk Beer. Grape and Lemon "Skat" drink. Creep. But easily my favorite were boxes of Kleenex which showed up regularly at my local 7-11. They were festooned with cute pictures of puppies or kittens. But on the outside they said simply "Tissues of Puppy" or "Tissues of Kitten".

Japanese friends would ask why this was so horrifying sounding. I gave up explaining what "tissues" meant beyond Kleenex. So I eventually asked them to consider how you might get a "tissue of puppy", perhaps by freezing the puppy and then slicing very thinly. They got the idea.

<comment><USER23> There's an obscure island somewhere in Japan where they force the native Pocari to do hard labor and then they get wrung out like wet laundry for their sweet Pocari Sweat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> All your base are belong to us!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQE66WA2s-A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQE66WA2s-A)

Growing up in the 80s I remember thinking that this was just a quirky aspect of vidja games. I mean I understood it and it was weird. but it didn't register as bad English until I was older.

a winner is you!

</comment><comment><USER25> When I first played Modern Warfare years ago I thought "no Russian" meant don't kill any Russians. I guess I'm not smart.

</comment><comment><USER26> This person (Clyde Mandelin aka Tomato) did the fan translation/localization of Mother 3 into English. That game profoundly affected my life and I'm so thankful to him for making it possible for me to experience it

</comment><comment><USER27> The odd thing about the "all your base" line is that it communicates the correct meaning in a way that is obviously incorrect and that is why it is so funny and memorable. When the language is technically correct but mistranslates the meaning it is easier for a mistranslation to go unnoticed or to be subjected to over-analysis in order to justify the poor translation, as detailed in the article.

Translation and interpretation belong to a nuanced inter-lingual skillset. One cannot expect anyone who speaks two languages fluently to correctly translate text between the two.

<comment><USER28> That's usually why translators are called interpreters.

<comment><USER29> Interpreters are a type of translator. The reverse is not true, generally speaking.

There is also _localization_ , which is what Clyde (the article author) does, and it incorporates both translation and cultural understanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When the Olympics were in Beijing a few years back, a fast food vendor hung a large banner behind his establishment that read "404 Not Found".

He'd evidently typed his food offerings into a translator, and printed the result on his banner.

</comment><comment><USER31> Russian had its fair share of funny bad translations. In a pirate version of Starcraft (I think), 'Overmind' was translated as 'надмозг', which is pretty much 'above-brain'. So for most of the 2000s, 'надмозг' was slang for bad _translators_.

</comment><comment><USER32> Random comments

* Translation is hard. If you needed something translated to Japanese how would you know it was well done? Maybe you personally have a bunch of Japanese friends or colleagues but most people don't. And so it is going the other way.

* Especially for games/movies/books translation is not enough. The content needs to be localized. For example jokes need to be funny in the target language. Subtle innuendo in the original language needs to be translated into subtle innuendo in the target language. Cultural references need to be translated into relevant cultural references in the target culture, etc. One company that specializes in game localization (not just translation) is 8-4.jp. They handle not just translation and localization of text but even managing voice work etc...

* I've always wished RockStar would make GTA Tokyo (they'd need a ton of local input or a local team). I bring up GTA because so much of those games, at least for me, are full of things that have not been localized and would be nearly impossible to localize unless the game itself took place in the target country. The hardest part is probably the radio stations. Driving around in GTA3 (and the sequels) brought back for me some uncanny feeling of actually driving with the radio on. The DJs, the ads, the different channels from talk channels to the various music genres. You'd need local DJs making local sounding comments about locally popular songs or parodies of those songs, local talk radio, local public service announcements, etc, etc, etc... Also the posters, signs, store names, around the city would all need to be localized so they evoke the same feeling of being in on the joke. And of course hearing local actors voice the characters vs just subtitles. Subtitles for characters dialog is the only thing that's been localized in any GTA game so Japan has never actually experienced one. I'm not even sure the random NPCs get translations but all of that would need to be made into something locals would get. I have no idea if a full localization would be a hit, especially now given console/PC games in Japan are mostly dead, but I've been disappointed that I could never share that experience with my Japanese gamer friends.

<comment><USER33> There is Sleeping Dogs. Not quite the same, but interesting to experience GTA- like mechanics in Hong Kong. And at night with rain it looks very cyberpunk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "The bizarre, true story of Metal Gear Solid's English translation - <USER2> by the man who did it" is quite a fun behind-the-scenes story about Japanese- to-English translation. Apparently the original creators did not appreciate creative translation that improve flow, and preferred to go with more nonsensical but "accurate" (word-by-word) translations for the sequels.

[https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/18/20696081/metal-gear- solid-...](https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/18/20696081/metal-gear-solid- translation-japanese-english-jeremy-blaustein)

</comment><comment><USER35> The biggest revelation for me for me here was on Metroid after clicking through to [https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-problem-with-l-r- and-o...](https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-problem-with-l-r-and-other- letters-in-japanese-translation/) (and by extension [https://legendsoflocalization.com/a-look-at-the-metroid- seri...](https://legendsoflocalization.com/a-look-at-the-metroid-series-varia- suit/))

</comment><comment><USER36> "Translation server error" is the best translation I have seen.

<comment><USER17> This deserves the picture: [https://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese- restaurant-c.html](https://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese- restaurant-c.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I asked my Japanese colleagues for what the correct way to say 'koin ikko ireru' would be, but none of them thought it sounded funny.

</comment><comment><USER38> There isn't anything wrong with saying "koin o ireru" in this context in Japanese. The phrase is correct. "Koin ikko ireru" is weird, but not because of the lack of verb conjugation. The problem is that the sentence structure is grammatically incorrect and the counter is wrong in this context. It should be "koin o hitotsu ireru."

<comment><USER39> The counter for coins is mai or ko. Ikko is thus correct. Only wo is missing for perfect grammar, but in informal spoken japanese, it's often omitted. So overall the sentence is correct... except for the conjugation. Because ireru doesn't really invite to insert a coin.

<comment><USER38> No, it is not correct in this context. If you are speaking with your friends, then it is OK to say "ikko." However, in an instructional setting, which this is, "hitotsu" is the correct phrasing. "Ko" is used in casual situations. I have been localizing software, manuals, marketing materials, training documents, scientific papers, etc. for over two decades with native Japanese speakers. I'm also married to one. Trust me on this.

<comment><USER40> Well, this is an arcade machine, and the setting is much more casual, so ikko is just as acceptable. The problem is, as GP pointed out, with ireru. I can think of some alternatives

1\. koin wo ikko irete kudasai 2\. koin wo ikko ireru no da! 3\. koin ikko irete! 4\. koin ikko ireru no! 5\. koin ikko irenai? 6\. koin ikko irenai ka? 7\. koin wo ikko ireru to purei dekiru

<comment><USER38> Of course, there are other correct alternatives in Japanese. That is not my point. The article makes two statements that are not correct:

1\. "koin ikko ireru" is wrong because of the verb conjugation. The reason it is wrong is that "ikko" is something kids say to each other, or that parents say to their kids, and is weird/incorrect to say in a context where teens and adults are involved. It is also missing the "o" (or "wo," if you prefer).

2\. "koin o ireru" is incorrect, again because of verb conjugation. There is nothing wrong with this phrase.

Of course, you could say コインを入れてください, コインを一つ入れる, コインを一枚入れる, コインを入れる, Insert Coin, and other variations on that theme. My only point is that the two asserts above are incorrect in the article.

<comment><USER41> I also didn't feel that anything was wrong with using 入れる instead of 入れてください. If it's already clear a process or instruction is being explained, sometimes you don't use a grammatical command - I've seen it before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Are coins normally counted with ko (個)? I'm as bad with counters as the next guy, but I'd expected something a little more flat-sounding. A cursory google check seems that indicate that the internet agree that it should be mai (枚)

</comment><comment><USER43> Does anyone know the history behind the Pokemon green translation (or maybe pocket monster green). I remember that there were some roms with pretty funny translations. Was that the unofficial English port before Pokemon Blue was released?

</comment><comment><USER44> Why does "It enters the coin" remind me of The Silence of the Lambs?

</comment><comment><USER45> Sometimes I wonder if the mistranslations are left as-is just to make a joke?

</comment><comment><USER46> I wish Translation Party was still around, where it translated English into Japanese and then back to English 30 times so you can see how unintelligible it becomes

I do this when I am using google translate even if I am familiar with a language

<comment><USER47> You mean this?

[https://www.translationparty.com/](https://www.translationparty.com/)

<comment><USER46> Yes, they had a disruption in api they used a long time ago Glad they found a solution

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Nice a Mahoujin Guru Guru reference, its is definitely worth a watch if you can find it

I think its English name was "Magic Circle Guru Guru" or Magic people Guru Guru</comment>


Why Linux is not attracting young developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.jfplayhouse.com/2010/04/why-linux-is-not-attracting-young.html <comment><USER2> The author (and his commenters) have clearly never worked on any open source project. There is plenty of ego to be had for things like webcam drivers. Plus, if you have that webcam, it goes from non-working to working, and you can share that with everyone else in the world. Pretty fun.

Thinking about all the software I use regularly, I know pretty much all the authors. Some of them I have even met in person, and they have gotten free beer as a result.

I guess if you are outside the community, it doesn't seem very exciting, but if you are in the community, it is exciting. Kind of the opposite of high school cliques...

<comment><USER3> Can't agree with you more (except I can't buy people beer in the US...). Open source is fun! I've made tons of friends through it, participate in a podcast, and every conference I have awesome people to hang out with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Linux is not attracting young developers because most young developers don't have problems that need solving in the kernel.

The amount of change an individual developer can effect on a project is inversely proportional to the amount of code already written.

<comment><USER5> The age of a project matters too, I think. If you got into Linux kernel development in 1995, you had no experience, but not many other people did either. If you start becoming active in 2010, you're 15 years behind, and there's no possible way to catch up to someone like Alan Cox or Andrew Morton in influence.

<comment><USER6> You know both will, someday, retire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It sounds like the author is reacting to the flood of ooh-shiny iPhone app kiddies that have captured a lot of media attention lately, but I don't think these are the people who would have been attracted to Linux anyway. And I don't think it's fair to lump all this together into an amorphous concept of "Linux" when the problem is a bit more nuanced.

Linux, as a kernel and as a platform, has matured, but there's still plenty of opportunity for new people to explore new territory. Some of it may be extending the existing "boring" infrastructure, which the author seems to blame for turning developers away, but nobody should feel restricted to working on those things. There's still a lot of exciting application development to be done, and as an added bonus, if the platform needs improvements to support your application, you're encouraged to contribute those as well.

Also, if you want a counterpoint, the Arch Linux developers page certainly makes me feel old already: <http://www.archlinux.org/developers/>

<comment><USER8> >Also, if you want a counterpoint, the Arch Linux developers page certainly makes me feel old already: <http://www.archlinux.org/developers/>

Thanks for making me feel young at 30.

<comment><USER9> The same list made me feel old at 40. :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As the person alleged to having made the initial remark: nobody at the Collaboration Summit panel said that Linux is not attracting younger developers. Every three-month cycle gets contributions from over 1000 developers, many of whom are new to the process. Attracting developers is not the problem.

The thing I was concerned about was the ageing of the core group of subsystem maintainers - who have been doing the same thing for a long time - and whether there was room at the upper levels for up-and-coming hackers. A real concern (though not a huge problem, yet), but a different one.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is the iPhone to kernel developer comparison really sensible? It's two very, very different skill-sets we are talking about.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think it is because the learning curve for a kernel is so steep that you will have to spend a lot of time and energy learning the kernel before you can do any significant development. It would have been more meaningful if the author had compared linux attraction to that of any bsd clones. Comparing to iphone is kind of misleading.

</comment><comment><USER12> At least for KDE it feels like they are on the 3rd or 4th generation of developers. I am not sure how many of the developers from 10 years ago are still around.

<comment><USER13> Visible, and amusing example of this: last time I went to FOSDEM, a couple years back, they tried to sell me a KDE t-shirt at the booth. (For those outside of the community, icefox and I think both showed up on the KDE radar about a decade ago.)

Though, with the graph that papachito it got me wondering what "active" means. I've done 9 commits in the last year (whereas I used to do several hundred) and suspect I thusly get counted as "active". It might be more interesting to see things computed as something like people above one standard deviation below the mean...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Writing drivers is a less appealing than writing small apps regardless of platform.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've wanted to get involved sometimes, but I always hear only the best developers get actual commits, and I know I am not an amazing programmer so I haven't bothered :(

<comment><USER2> Your conception is largely false. I can't think of any project I work on regularly that won't give a commit bit to anyone who asks.

But keep in mind, for best success, the order of operations is "step 1. write code. Step 2. ask for commit bit". Sometimes it works the other way, but not as often.

<comment><USER15> Of course. It's not that commit access is my goal, it's that I'd want my work to stand a chance of being integrated into the kernel instead of rejected out of hand, and I've never been sure just how much that happens w/ no-names. If it's horrible code, then yes reject it, but besides esoteric drivers it's always seemed like a bit of an old-boys-club to this outsider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm surprised no one here has mentioned what I see as pretty obvious.

Startups are __perceived __as the quick way to fame and fortune.

There are not a lot of apparent Startup opportunities in the kernel space.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't checkout Linux source because I don't have the skills to ...ooo look at that shiny app.

</comment><comment><USER18> He's comparing KDE and Gnome core components (window management) and the linux kernel with developing iPhone apps. That's a bad comparaison in my opinion. Hacking on an operating system kernel or a window manager requires great skills that most kids (and adult devs) do not have.

A fair comparison would be iPhone apps Vs KDE or Gnome apps. And here KDE and Gnome get tons of new contributers each months, check how active is <http://kde-apps.org> for example, or the Ubuntu developer activities. Tasks that require less skills will always attract more developers or cooks or whatever in all professions.

Here's a Graph of KDE contributers [http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth- metrics-kde-contributor...](http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth-metrics-kde- contributors) up to July 2009. As a KDE dev that follows the mailing list, I can tell you the list of contributers is still groing well. Not to mention all the people that build KDE apps without being official KDE devs.

<comment><USER19> Bingo — to me the stereotypical KDE app developer is a 15-year-old boy from somewhere in Europe.

<comment><USER20> Well that would explain some things...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Without reading the article i can say that the following reasons are not attractive for young developers:

1\. They have to read tons of documentation and cant use a 2 lines tutorial 2\. They have to know byte compiled languages 3\. They have to know lot of internal stuff to use linux the good way

The point is, everything which is hard to understand and cant be learned within 8 hours sucks... thats the way most younger people think about developement because they have no motivation at all to be a part of a long growing environment.

Hate me now ;)</comment>