Concorde 'B' (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.heritageconcorde.com/concorde-b <comment><USER2> >> This was the aircraft the airlines really needed and the aircraft the manufacturers wanted to build.

This is largely revisionist history. The reality was that logistics of flying the Concorde (routing, timing, airport services) combined with the experience (speed over comfort) made it expensive and just not that desirable. The plane was conceived in the era of big government bankrolled air travel and doesn't have a role in the reality of flying buses we see today.

<comment><USER3> I think you've just illustrated revisionist revisionist history.

The original text is true. The Concorde _was_ what the airlines, aircraft makers, and the public wanted. It was fast. It was expensive. It was a trophy project. All things that appeal to one or more of those segments.

What changed was that fuel got too expensive, deregulated airlines started cutting corners everywhere, and people's priorities changed.

The world went from people wearing their Sunday suits to embark on a flight to people piling into Southwest air buses in their pajamas without bathing.

So the history is correct. It's just that the world has changed.

/Flew on the Concorde in the mid-1990's.

<comment><USER4> Reading [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde), it was partly the world changing, but also budget overruns and the sonic booms. Also, part of "the world changing" was that the 747 appeared, a plane that Concorde couldn't really compete with, economically.

Also, it seems the bill for development of the Concorde was paid for by the governments of Great Britain and France, and wasn't fully accounted for in the unit price.

If so, that made it a much more attractive proposition. I also would think some airlines placed pre-orders in a defensive move (if it had become wildly successful, airlines flying slow planes could get in trouble)

I doubt any manufacturer would have dared to design and build a supersonic plane if they had to have to pay for all development (Boeing had a competing project ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707)), but that, too, seems to have been heavily government sponsored)

<comment><USER5> The Shah flew the Concorde and apparently liked it so much, ordered 3 (Condorde 'B') on the spot. Typically ahead of his time, his vision was for making Iran a major hub along the lines of what Dubai and Qatar have done in the interim.

Interesting to note that China apparently also ordered Concordes.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/29/archives/shah-of-iran- rep...](https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/29/archives/shah-of-iran-reported-to- shift-to-firm-orders-for-concordes.html)

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't use the Shah of Iran's intents as indicator of economical feasibility.

And that's ignoring the possibility that that order was in return for other transactions (for example, they got enriched uranium from France ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France–Iran_relations#Nuclear_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France–Iran_relations#Nuclear_program) says they refused to continue to provide Iran with enriched uranium after the 1979 Islamic revolution, so they must have been delivering it before) and the technology to make it ([https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/12/29/the-shahs-atomic- dreams...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/12/29/the-shahs-atomic-dreams/)) and hundreds of Chieftain tanks from Britain ([https://www.offiziere.ch/?p=33866](https://www.offiziere.ch/?p=33866))

<comment><USER5> The Shah of Iran bailed out France's nuclear industry. _That_ is why Islamic Republic has shares in a French nuclear fuel processing concern.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/26/world/france-and-iran- men...](https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/26/world/france-and-iran-mend-rift- over-loan-granted-by-shah.html)

> I wouldn't use the Shah of Iran's intents as indicator of economical > feasibility.

Or people who post from surface knowledge. Sure.

\-- ps --

In 1975 Sweden's 10 per cent share in Eurodif went to Iran. The French government subsidiary company Cogéma and the Iranian Government established the Sofidif (Société franco–iranienne pour l'enrichissement de l'uranium par diffusion gazeuse) enterprise with 60 and 40 per cent shares, respectively. In turn, Sofidif acquired a 25 per cent share in Eurodif, which gave Iran its 10 per cent share of Eurodif. Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi lent 1 billion dollars (and another 180 million dollars in 1977) for the construction of the Eurodif factory, to have the right of buying 10 per cent of the production of the site.

"President Gerald Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete 'nuclear fuel cycle'."[27] The Ford strategy paper said the "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals."

A 1974 CIA proliferation assessment stated "If [the Shah] is alive in the mid-1980s ... and if other countries [particularly India] have proceeded with weapons development we have no doubt Iran will follow suit."[28]

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Boom is a YC company building a modern, supersonic passenger airliner: [https://boomsupersonic.com/](https://boomsupersonic.com/)

<comment><USER7> The name is both great and awful at the same time.

<comment><USER8> Will it be the passengers or the employees that get referred to as 'Boomers'?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, they should have simply named the company Zoomersonic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the Technical Museum Sinsheim (Germany) you have the Concorde A next to the Tupolev Tu-144 on display. This is quite a spectacular view, and you can enter both and take a look at the inside.

[https://sinsheim.technik- museum.de/assets/uploads/images/27/...](https://sinsheim.technik- museum.de/assets/uploads/images/27/tupolev-tu-144-2.jpg)

<comment><USER11> Coincidentally I went there last sunday. I was surprised about the large amount of dials and gauges in the cockpit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wasn't it the ticket price and crowded cabin that killed the Concorde? With even business travelers having to arrive 90+ minutes early to the airport for international travel anyway, the value proposition of being in the air for a shorter time just isn't really there, especially if the longer flight puts you on a lie-flat bed in a widebody.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure at that time it was 90+ minutes. It's not 90+ minutes today if you go business class either

<comment><USER14> I mean, there certainly is a class of travellers who are absolutely willing to pay extra for time, as proven by BA's direct London to New York flight, that is very unusual in that

1) it's serviced directly from London City airport, which is tiny, but also closest you can get to the city centre by air

2) because of how short that airport is, BA ordered special shortened Airbus A318 that is only made in a full business class configuration(only 32 seats) and it only ever flies on that one route. And even then it's actually too far for its range, so it makes a quick stop in Ireland to refuel before crossing the Atlantic first.

I'm reasonably certain that paying extra for this special flight saves you more than 90 minutes compared to taking a conventional one from Heathrow, no matter which class you'd travel.

<comment><USER15> > 2) because of how short that airport is, BA ordered special shortened Airbus > A318 that is only made in a full business class configuration(only 32 seats) > and it only ever flies on that one route. And even then it's actually too > far for its range, so it makes a quick stop in Ireland to refuel before > crossing the Atlantic first.

It's only too far for its range when flying from an airfield _with a runway the length of City_. From Heathrow it could do the flight non-stop: it just can't take off with so heavy from City.

<comment><USER16> I suppose it would raise a few eyebrows to take off from City and do its refueling stop 20 miles west in Heathrow.

Of course Heathrow is also far busier than Shannon and far more likely to have delays.

<comment><USER15> Heathrow also doesn't have US preclearance which it relies on to justify the longer flight time due to the stop. (And it would be an utter waste of a slot at Heathrow: why would you use up one of your slots at Heathrow for a refuelling stop when you could instead fly to an airport which isn't slot limited?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Years ago I saw a nice comparison between optical computing and supersonic flight. The gist of it was that they would both only ever be widely used by the military/government. The specific benefits of both are real, but very costly and thus the use tends to be reserved where you absolutely need it.

For the general public, electronic computing and subsonic flight both work fine, are not tremendously expensive and don't require ongoing complex maintainance and engineering.

I would guess this analysis is still mostly true today.

<comment><USER18> To put it a slightly different way: existing technology is such that it is not profitable for them to be deployed at scale. I expect supersonic travel will eventually supplant our existing infrastructure (at least for long routes), but it's just not going to happen while it's multiple times more expensive to operate and has significant downsides like sonic booms over populated areas.

I believe the sonic boom problem has been at least partially solved, but the economics still don't work out. One day, they will. Likewise with optical computing - either ownership costs will fall to the level that they're acceptable for general use or advancements in parallel fields will make it impractical.

<comment><USER19> Even with all the technology in the world, the laws of thermodynamics hold. Going faster raises friction losses requiring either a smaller plane or a larger amount of fuel. Either way, the price goes up. SST will never supplant subsonic transport on a large scale level, even accounting for the elimination of sonic booms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The addition of the Pacific routes might have helped.

Those are some long flights. LA to Tokyo or Beijing in half the time, with a quick stop in Hawaii.

<comment><USER21> LA to Tokyo would allow for more supersonic flight too. They avoided that over landmass to avoid sonic booms over inhabited areas. Which covers a good chunk of territory if they take the shortest route:

[http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=lhr-jfk](http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=lhr-jfk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems to ignore the fact that on a passenger mile basis the Concorde was one of the most unsafe passenger jets of all time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Something like the Boeing 2707 might have had a better chance of success:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_2707)

Part of the pitch for Concorde was that an SST would have greatly reduced capital costs since it could fly at least twice the number of flights in the same unit of time. It wasn't really fast enough to do this on the routes that it flew, so this benefit wasn't realized.

A Mach 3 airliner (SR-71 class!) is fast enough to realize better capital efficiency, and can do better on fuel consumption than a Mach 2 airliner. Some fuel is spent fighting air resistance, but some is fighting "induced drag" which produces lift. If you spend less time in the air you need less lift, and fuel efficiency improves.

The only problem is that aluminum would melt in a Mach 3 airliner so you need some revolution in materials to make it practical.

<comment><USER24> The "only" problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Would range have mattered as much to make the Concorde more palatable for airlines and travelers? I have always been under the impression the main reason the Concorde didn't see more commercial success was because the cabin was small. It seems like what was really needed was a design that could hold more passengers.

<comment><USER26> I don't think that the cabin size per se really made that much difference. Supersonic flight is always going to cost a lot more than subsonic, so you're targeting the segment that wants the speed/prestige of going Mach 2 and is willing to pay. There aren't that many of these people, and they tend to be sensitive to schedule, so you have to run the service fairly often. That means that you either run a small airplane or give away a lot of seats (even with 100 seats, at least towards the end, British Airways was giving free upgrades to Concorde for a large fraction of the seats).

I think that today the supersonic airliner market is still quite tough, because first class has gotten so good. For transatlantic, you only save four hours, and you can spend that sleeping fairly comfortably or using your computer with provided power and pretty good Wi-Fi.

Where there is more legitimate value is transpacific, where supersonic might shave 10 hours. However, due to the higher fuel burn, there's almost no way to avoid stopping for gas, which erodes the advantage both in time and comfort.

<comment><USER27> Exactly. Even with modern first/business seating, subsonic trans-Pacific is still a _long_ flight even from the West Coast even if the seating is comfortable and the food is good. But as I recall you need something like 2x the range of the Concorde even to fly a route like SFO-NRT. And, as you say, if you need to fuel up in Anchorage say, you lose a lot of the time advantage.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, and the problem is that there is a range death spiral, so you can't just scale up the plane. More range needs more fuel, which is more weight, so the efficiency goes down, so you need more fuel... I don't think that supersonic transpacific is really solvable with current technology. You either have to refuel mid-air or go suborbital or use a different fuel.

<comment><USER27> And at some point, if you can make 20 or 24 hours of flying comfortable enough and maybe have good enough communication systems, who cares? (OK, there are a few people who want to go back and forth to Japan in the least time possible. But, let's get real. Air Force One isn't a supersonic jet.)

It's mostly a case of dialing in the space and price per passenger for the market. Given enough space and entertainment options--hey, live performances in the lounge!, celebrity chefs--very few of us really care that much about getting to a destination 12 hours faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Based on the trends in at least the US passenger industry, airlines seem to be moving more towards smaller planes and shorter hops. I don't think a new Concorde would have had any impact on that at all. If the airlines wanted a long-range, faster plane, a manufacturer would have come along and built it by now. But like the computer industry, air travel is driven to low-price commodity service, and luxury high performance air travel doesn't fit in that business model.

<comment><USER27> >more towards smaller planes and shorter hops

Probably more precisely, they're moving towards more direct routes rather than routing almost everything through some specific hubs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm always sad when I think about the Concorde. It was such a great plane ahead of its time when it came out. I wish I had the chance to fly on it once.

</comment><comment><USER30> Gosh, from Wikipedia's section on Concorde design there is this set:

\- Concorde

\- Mini Cooper

\- Miniskirt

\- Spitfire

\- Tube Map

\- Jaguar E-Type

What could be added to this list to induce total industrial design hysteria? InterCity 125? Instamatic? Mellor traffic lights?

<comment><USER31> Belisha Beacon

Bowler Hat

Wellington Bomber (geodesics)

Sinclair Calculator

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The only person I ever met who'd flown on the Concorde was the executive secretary for a startup CEO who had _important_ meetings in Paris. Yes, this was a Dot Com.

<comment><USER33> I worked for a company that did those sort of things. It was bought by three crooks who then spent a ton of VC money on themselves. Porsches in the carpark and flights to New York on Concorde. Needless to say it didn't last long.

The only other person I know who flew on it was my wife (before we were married).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If curious see also

2018 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17012995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17012995)

</comment><comment><USER35> [http://archive.is/E4QT8](http://archive.is/E4QT8)

</comment><comment><USER36> How different are the fuel efficiencies per passenger-km for the Concordes (A and B) and modern aircraft?

<comment><USER37> The concorde was woefully less efficient than modern aircraft but this wasn't because it flew supersonically but instead because it used turbojets. Modern aircraft use turbofans which are far more efficient. The concorde was actually designed to save fuel as supercruise is more efficient than transonic flight for a given engine. Unfortunately turbofans for supersonic flight weren't developed until the late 80s, by which point there was little demand for a new SST.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> interesting that the routes they were listing halfway through the article had none that went over the arctic circle like they do today for flights from NYC -> Beijing

</comment><comment><USER39> The background to this website is amazing!

</comment><comment><USER40> is the site down?

<comment><USER41> Looks like a page with fluffy clouds and nothing else over here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I had to stop reading before getting to the end because the cloud animation was too distracting.

Web site designers please take note: just because you can doesn't mean you should. Animated backgrounds are the <blink> tag of the 21st century.

<comment><USER34> " _Please don 't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful._"

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

<comment><USER42> Heh. TIL. Sorry about that.

<comment><USER34> It's a new guideline actually - I meant to mention that.

<comment><USER42> Ah. :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Subversion Raodmap - WANdisco report - <AUTHOR> http://subversion.wandisco.com/component/content/article/1/60.html One of the most frequent questions people ask me is "when will (insert favorite feature here) be included in Subversion?"  Many times, that feature is already part of Subversion, but just the questioner just doesn't know how to access it.  Other times, the proposed feature is something which would be better served as a local customization to Subversion, such as hook scripts.  But occasionally, my inquisitor has pointed out a bone fide deficiency in Subversion, and I've often stumbled to answer the question of "when will it be done?"<p>Until now. <comment><AUTHOR> One of the most frequent questions people ask me is "when will (insert favorite feature here) be included in Subversion?" Many times, that feature is already part of Subversion, but just the questioner just doesn't know how to access it. Other times, the proposed feature is something which would be better served as a local customization to Subversion, such as hook scripts. But occasionally, my inquisitor has pointed out a bone fide deficiency in Subversion, and I've often stumbled to answer the question of "when will it be done?"

Until now.</comment>


Julia: A Modern Language for Modern ML [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/presentations/julia-ml?utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=videos_homepage&utm_campaign=videos_row1 <comment><USER2> I've been using R for years. A month ago I tried to port a program we use that takes 20MB CSV files and finds trends. In R, it would take around 5 second to read the file and give me my data. In Julia it took 30 seconds.

Is this a common occurrence?

<comment><USER3> How did you load it? CSV.jl and TextParse.jl are the go-to fast ways to load CSV data. They used to be trying to catch up with Pandas which was the fastest CSV parser, but now I think they're in a friendly arms race with each other, having passed Pandas CSV parsing half a year ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Julia is a good language for computational simulation experiments but in a world that's heading towards heterogeneous compute enabled by GPUs, TPUs and intermediate representation languages/frameworks like ONNX, TVM [1] and Tensor Flow its difficult to take claim of "Language for Modern ML" seriously.

If you disagree please show me how many ML researchers/labs/companies use Julia over Python/C++. Its cool to claim "Modern", "Deep", "ML", but I don't see any evidence.

[1] [http://tvmlang.org/2017/08/17/tvm-release- announcement.html](http://tvmlang.org/2017/08/17/tvm-release- announcement.html)

<comment><USER5> Julia is growing a really good GPU support ecosystem.

Thus, the advantage is to have all your codebase in a single language vs a 2-language solution (e.g. Python && C++).

<comment><USER4> We live in an age of libraries like cudnn which are vendor provided/optimized, for 99.9% of ML applications you won't need to write custom CUDA code. Further as I mentioned earlier with Intermediate Representation languages like TVM you are guaranteed to get the best underlying constructs across different computing architectures.

Julia might still be good enough MATLAB replacement for Computational Simulation style tasks, but its clearly not suited for Machine learning.

<comment><USER6> Neither is Python, but people still use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a lot of articles about Julia being the language of everything. I gave it a try but did not like the syntax. Why would anyone prefer it over other languages?

<comment><USER8> It's like Matlab or SciPy in terms of how easy it is to set up a quick script, but far more performant.

The syntax is fairly similar to Matlab, which makes it familiar for engineers like me.

And then there's the speedup. For one benchmark I wrote when evaluating the language, it had a 60x speedup over Octave, but I'll have to see what happens when I finish porting over all of my code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sorry for offtopic question.

I have no idea what machine learning/deep learning/AI is. Is now a do or die situation for me careerwise?

<comment><USER10> I studied this at university and have not yet had any use for it. I work with systems doing computer visualization but almost never write graphics code. Most programming is more about integrating specialized stuff made by experts in a field.

<comment><USER11> I also studied this at university. It turned out I graduated ten years too early, nobody had data or willingness to use it, and now that things have changed my resume is full of Java crap.</comment></comment></comment>


Saint Louis Blues (Song) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Louis_Blues_(song) <comment><USER2> Louis Armstrong playing W.C. Handy is a particularly strong album.</comment>


Kubernetes Config Connector: Provision GCP Infrastructure Using Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/k8s-config-connector <comment><USER2> AWS started building something similar but momentum seems to have stopped once the developer left: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/aws-service- operator...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/aws-service-operator- kubernetes-available/)

It is too bad because declarative specifications and control loops to have state converge to what it should be is a nice pattern.

Keeping up with all of AWS's surface area though is hard if their heart isn't in it.

<comment><USER3> We thought about this pattern for a while and ultimately decided we didn't want app compute to directly provision supporting infrastructure.

You end up in this weird place where your compute nodes can, at any time, assume super powerful roles that can change nacls, security groups, completely destroy database clusters or what have you.

It feels like running your app as root and database admin, but _more_. I guess if you completely trust your kube control plane?

Like everything I'm sure it has a use somewhere.

<comment><USER4> We're trying it out in a dev-cluster/dev-account setup to let teams provision their own buckets/SQS and some supporting infrastructure easily without AWS access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Why doesn't GCP use AWS's feature announcement style and have a little blog written that walks the developer through how to use it?

So much better to get an immediate feel for a service.

<comment><USER5> The getting started guide may be what you are looking for: [https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/how- to/gettin...](https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/how-to/getting- started)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Spin up a k8s cluster to manage your other resources that will be used by your... other k8s clusters. Is kubernetes just one big snake eating its own tail now?

<comment><USER7> Kubernetes Gardener uses a main cluster to provision and maintain child clusters.

[https://gardener.cloud/](https://gardener.cloud/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> K8s is in one sense a convergence engine, bringing container resources across a cluster into line with a given desired state.

So why not cloud resources too?

Having to run a cluster to do so doesn't feel quite right, however. But then if you're using Terraform - which is the most popular "cloud convergence engine" \- you've probably provisioned compute resources with which to run Terraform. So not that strange.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am really interested in using this GCP Operator and the corresponding ones from AWS and Azure to replace functionality from Open Service Brokers with a more Kubernetes-native experience.

Even better, this model uses the RBAC, namespaces, quotas and tools that developers are already using.

</comment><comment><USER10> Definitely cool... although AWS is really entrenched and Azure's getting there too for a lot of orgs. Especially historically MS oriented shops and those with some apps tethered to windows where others can be containerized.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if the k8s style infrastructure definition becomes the norm, what's going to be the future like for tools like Terraform

<comment><USER3> Provisioning cloud stuff ends up being about the _relationships_ between all the things. Plus a bunch of dirty domain knowledge about retries and resource schemas.

It's very difficult to delete infra in AWS without a resource graph once you have enough things that refer to each other.

You can only get so far with a bunch of isolated yaml manifests for single resources.

So the MVP of anything that can solve the general case basically ends up doing the exact same things as terraform... and might as well actually be terraform.

<comment><USER2> Can't the operator that expresses the state of cloud resources take into account ordering and dirty tricks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just gotta say, this looks much friendlier then Google CFT or Deployment Manager tools that they were pushing before.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sounds similar in concept to Crossplane ([https://crossplane.io/](https://crossplane.io/)) except that Crossplane is trying to be cloud-agnostic?

<comment><USER14> I wonder if Crossplane will use this behind the scenes.</comment></comment>


Twitter Bias: When Men Talk Tech and Women Talk Diversity - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/09/08/twitter-bias-we-listen-when-men-talk-tech-and-women-talk-diversity/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this really about branding yourself on twitter? If you talk more about diversity and gain a following based on that wouldn't your followers pay more attention that? Also we have no idea of how much overlap there is between those who are mostly interested in Technology and those that seek out Tweets about Social Justice and in/equality.

Are these two groups the same people? If not, what do her followers gain from her technical expertise?

They may have the same number followers but I doubt they have the same followers. I think the mistake here is the idea that Twitter is a single minded person and not a large collection of different people with various backgrounds and classes.

To recap:

Men tweet more often and more often about Tech. Men seem to have their tweets on tech re-tweeted more often than their tweets on diversity.

Women Tweet less often and more often about Social/Diversity issues. Women are engaged more about Social/Diversity topics.

How much do followers/re-tweeters of these two groups overlap?

\</comment><comment>--

I wonder if what this really says is that people prefer to talk about subjects they are comfortable with and enjoy sharing their thoughts with people who share a predominant interest in those subjects.

(If there is very little or no overlap) I wonder if the majority of tech followers feel they have little to say or add to the talk of diversity and maybe even feel as though it isn't their place to be involved. I wonder if the Diversity followers have very little interest or knowledge about technology to engage with the author (and others) on tech topics.

Also I'm not sure this says much about the industry. How sure are we that the random people chosen by the author are representative of the industry? How would this be measured? I'm not sure this tells me anything.</comment>


The Rise of the Platform Economy - <AUTHOR> http://issues.org/32-3/the-rise-of-the-platform-economy/ <comment><USER2> Why do academics write in such an unreadable, handwavy manner?

> IT-enabled services transformation, as our colleagues Stuart Feldman, Kenji > Kushida, Jonathan Murray, and Niels Christian Nielsen have argued in other > venues, was based on the application of an array of computable algorithms to > myriad activities, from consumption and leisure to services and > manufacturing. The movement of these algorithms to the cloud, where they can > be easily accessed, created the infrastructure on which, and out of which, > entire platform-based markets and ecosystems operate. Platforms and the > cloud, an essential part of what has been called the "third globalization," > reconfigure globalization itself.

<comment><USER3> I'm going to disagree with the other comments here. It's not because they're paid by the word, or because they've never been taught how to write effectively. It's mandatory to be taken seriously in the circles the author cares about. You have to demonstrate that you know the "stylistic lingo" to get your ideas taken seriously, so that lingo is used.

Simply put, you are not the intended audience for the paper or it would have been written in the style you prefer. See: Malcolm Gladwell.

<comment><USER4> > Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between science and > pseudoscience. In physics, though, that 'demarcation problem' is a non- > problem, solved by the pragmatic observation that we can reliably tell an > outsider when we see one. During a decade of education, we physicists learn > more than the tools of the trade; we also learn the walk and talk of the > community, shared through countless seminars and conferences, meetings, > lectures and papers. After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you're > one of us. You can't fake our community slang any more than you can fake a > local accent in a foreign country.

 _from a recent HN story, "What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12268362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12268362) _

<comment><USER5> I agree with the idea (as has been revealed in a number of fake yet published articles) that you can fairly easily scam non-scientific journals with fake papers. But there are still fake or non-successful scientist papers too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> By platform economies, they really mean walled gardens. Instead of setting up an e-commerce website (which can actually be pretty challenging with security and PCI and administration), people are using other peoples' engines to sell shit.

Even New Egg is a resellers shop now, similar to Amazon and eBay.

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with other commenters on verbosity. But there are some interesting viewpoints hidden in the wall of text, like when they say that while software used to be embedded in hardware now hardware is being embedded in software.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not sure i see the difference by this platform economy vs the one that has sustained Microsoft all these years.

</comment><comment><USER9> Next : the rise of the blogging of new economies economy</comment>


Why is there a screen that says "It is now safe to turn off your computer"? - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160419-00/?p=93315 <comment><USER2> This might be alarming to some, but I have been hard-crashing all of my personal Linux boxes (and some of the Linux boxes under my professional care) for quite a few years.

That is, if a physical power button (often a toggle switch on the power supply) is close, I'll toggle it off.

Most of the time, I'll hold the reset/power/whatever button down until the device clicks off.

Linux and its filesystems have made this a (generally) safe thing to do for many years. I started doing it after I read a lwn.net article, ages ago, about how ext3's crash recovery path was discovered to be a bit faster than its normal, clean mount path. If I recall, that happened because so much more of the focus was put into that 'bad' path that it ended up more efficient than the 'good' path.

Full disclosure: if I wish to do the crash thing immediately after a bunch of relevant file writes, I will type 'sync' on one of my many terminals first. (:

<comment><USER3> You're placing a lot of trust in you presumably consumer-level disks. Even if the filesystem is perfectly crash-tolerant under some specific model of disk behavior, the disk could always behave outside of that model, especially upon sudden loss of power.

Story: some time ago, I tried to hook up an SATA hard disk into a desktop PC which had an SSD connected, while the machine was running. When I did so, I got errors in dmesg about the SSD failing and being reset automatically. I rebooted and grub took ~30s to load the kernel then the boot hanged in the middle. Luckily after some power cycling the issue was gone but I honestly taught I lost the SSD. Apparently disks don't like losing power. Possibly this was even worse because it was just a temporary voltage drop (the disks were connected to the same supply cable).

<comment><USER4> Is SATA designed to allow hot plugin of a hard drive? That would surprise me.

<comment><USER3> As far as I know, it is an optional feature that both the controller and the drive have to support, to use reliably.

<comment><USER5> And it then needs to be explicitly requested which usually means bypassing the cache to avoid any delayed writes.

But even then hotswap was never meant to ensure data consistency it just allows the controller to reinitialize new disks without a full reset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found this mildly interesting: the "screenshots" in this article are made out of HTML elements.

<comment><USER7> And using a Windows only font for the "moon and stars" dialog. At least the supposed moon comes up as a "missing character" in Firefox on Linux.

<comment><USER8> Unicode U+1F319 "crescent moon", it exists on OS X but it significantly different from the Windows version (yellow and orange shading vs solid white silhouette).

Since the visual appearance matters here more than being searchable by "", drawing the shape in CSS would be more consistent: [http://aamirshahzad.net/moon-with-css3/](http://aamirshahzad.net/moon-with- css3/)

EDIT: Pretend there's a moon in those quotes. HN strips some Unicode characters, including that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ahh, those transitions from the days where you could just turn off you DOS, until the computer could "turn off" by itself (I know, not that hard off, just a soft button off)

<comment><USER7> We seem to be heading back towards those days.

The property that made this possible was that DOS had little "state" to save before going bye bye.

And these days you get much the same with ChromeOS.

Heck, was there not someone in the -sec community arguing that state was to be considered bad?

<comment><USER10> There was a very funny video where the main character's Chrome book gets destroyed every few minutes and a new one is delivered and he just keeps on working.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm- Vnx58UYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-Vnx58UYo)

Seeing that original browser only UI makes me nostalgic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of [http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/startupshutdown/shu...](http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/startupshutdown/shutdowncomplete/macos42.png), and the time I patched the Mac OS System Error Handler.

The patch I made tried to speak the text of the error message. It turned out that worked fine, if you opened a SpeechChannel before the crash (we had one open, anyways, and patched a zillion calls, so it worked first time round) and you were lucky (the System Error Handler was the part of the OS that was designed to show system errors, making as few assumptions as possible on what part of the OS was still functional; without memory protection, a crash could, for instance, mean that the memory manager data structures got corrupted, or that font data got overwritten, so there was no way to guarantee that the MacinTalk voice data wasn't corrupted)

The day our beta tester excitedly reported that the test Mac SE (one of the few Macs at the time that couldn't switch itself off in software) spoke the text of that alert when you selected "Shut Down" in the Finder, I learnt that that alert was a system error alert.

([http://www.guidebookgallery.org/index](http://www.guidebookgallery.org/index) is a nice site for the nostalgic, by the way)

</comment><comment><USER12> Because of the ancient hell that is FAT32.

And yet you own at least one device which is FAT32 to this day. You nearly have no choice.

Two class-action lawsuits I'd like to see: Open NTFS. ext4 support on all versions of Windows.

<comment><USER13> What would be the grounds for a lawsuit about either of those things?

<comment><USER7> Microsoft, being the single biggest supplier of desktop operating systems, are holding back interoperability by not supporting file systems that are freely implementable on other platforms.

Supposedly one reason Google do not have SD slots on their Nexus devices is to avoid getting into a patent quarrel with Microsoft regarding FAT.

<comment><USER13> I can't imagine even the best lawyers finding grounds to sue someone to force them to support a technology.

And as for patents...again, the way to deal with that would be to wait for Microsoft to sue for patent infringement.

Lawsuits aren't some magical tool you can use to shape reality in your image.

<comment><USER12> Oh, I understand completely. But just wait 'til you have to face a borked FAT32 file system in a customer system. It's unpleasant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ah, bad old days, when you command the computer to shut down and it cleans a little and stays on, suggesting to restart it, what else would you want to do anyway?

I remember the orange bitmapped letters of 95, that color and the jagged letters stayed in my mind.

I've used Windows NT, various versions, but somehow suppressed the memory of the final screen. Anybody knows which version(s) of Windows NT offered "Restart" after the shutdown?

<comment><USER15> [http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/shutdowncomplete](http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/shutdowncomplete)

NT 3 and 4 did, and you always saw them since it didn't support soft power-off (although I vaguely remember there was a registry key to enable it but didn't work for me).

Win2000 removed the button (and looks like it was just showing a bitmap, rather than keeping the window system running)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It wouldn't have hurt to keep the Restart button, just like RISCOS. The problem was the message, not the button.

[http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/startupshutdown/shu...](http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/startupshutdown/shutdowncomplete/riscos37.png)

<comment><USER17> You assume people don't blindly click on things until the desired affect takes place.

My brother went to a website that had a link to a pdf he wanted to read but adjacent to that link was an "install acrobat reader" button that looked more inviting. He kept on clicking and installing acrobat reader assuming that it would eventually go to the link he wanted. He eventually complained to me that his computer didn't have acrobat reader and no matter how many times he tried he couldn't install it. It was only after I went to the website that I realized what the problem is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it possible to have a modern desktop computer that doesn't support power management? Do modern windows operating systems still have the safe to shutdown dialog for that scenario?

</comment><comment><USER19> Yup. The thing to do was to have an autoexec.bat that had

win.com mode co80

that way "shut down" windows would put you back at the dos prompt (if not you could just type "mode co80" and start using dos)</comment>


Can We Stop Drawing Trees on Top of Skyscrapers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.archdaily.com/346374/can-we-please-stop-drawing-trees-on-top-of-skyscrapers/#.UU-2q9uRnOI.facebook <comment><USER3> We have an incredible 4000sq ft olive grove at the top of the 48 storey Beetham Tower in rainy Manchester. The architect turned the top two floors into his own penthouse, complete with enclosed olive trees.

Picture: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2009/04/27/...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2009/04/27/270409_beetham_simpson_feature.shtml)

Trees at the top of a skyscraper convey both extravagance and eco credentials. Helipads are no longer credit-crunch-friendly.

Video (Skip to 1:16 for the trees)

[http://karmacrew.tv/our-work/architect-profile-ian- simpson-b...](http://karmacrew.tv/our-work/architect-profile-ian-simpson- beetham-tower/)

<comment><USER4> Well that certainly skewers the claim in the article that it will "never" happen :-). I note that these trees are effectively indoors as opposed to many of the architectural conceptions of being out doors (and the primary objection of the author).

That said my biologist friend says that trees are a lot hardier than the author gives them credit for, in particular many evergreens are adapted to living in pretty harsh climates and their needles are better able to deal with high winds and temperature extremes. His question was "where are the roots" since a 25' tall tree might have a 10' root 'ball' holding it in place. So if you don't mind having a floor of 'dirt' and then the tree on the next floor up, and you don't mind your tree being an evergreen, you can probably do something sustainable.

<comment><USER5> Your comment made me think of the trees down by the shore near Mori Point. The trees are radically bent away from the ocean by the sea breeze.

<http://goo.gl/maps/S0BSd>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Toronto requires green roofs for new building projects. Grasses and shrubs are typically grown, and they survive just fine with minimal care. I suspect the only reason that large trees are not typically used is that there's fear that tree roots will damage the roof of the building. Oh, and the weight of the soil required for larger plants is an issue.

Yep, looking at the bylaw, the growing medium - soil - is only required to be four inches deep. Weight of soil and drainage starts to be a problem - <USER2> have to figure that the soil may be 100% soaked...

It's going to be tough to grow trees in four inches of soil.

So, nutshell, tree survivability not a problem, but engineering a roof to hold enough soil (and therefore water) to grow a large tree is expensive, and root damage is a problem, and therefore - no large trees on skyscrapers. Still, there's nothing magic about it, just engineering problems. I could easily imagine a high-end residential tower with a forest on the roof.

<comment><USER7> Can you provide any reference/elaboration for your claim that tree survivability is not a problem? It's directly counter to the arguments made in the article. Grasses and shrubs are a lot more hardy than trees, as anybody who's even been on a mountain can attest to.

Your other points are well taken and they are sort of addressed in the article in the form of the infrastructure issues. I think the author also would agree that it's sort of feasible in theory, but extremely expensive and impractical.

<comment><USER6> There are lots and lots of very hardy trees in the world.

<http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/garden/07423.html>

But you need a meter of soil, two meters would be better. This is 10-20x as much soil as is currently available on most green roofs (or mountainsides).

There are already pictures in this thread of buildings with trees on top, so... the idea that somehow trees are subject to instant death when lifted off the ground is silly. The conditions are not any harsher than trees living in an asphalt jungle in the city are subjected to every day.

[http://www.bergoiata.org/fe/trees/Single%20Pine%20Tree%20Ato...](http://www.bergoiata.org/fe/trees/Single%20Pine%20Tree%20Atop%20Sandstone%20Formation,%20Zion%20National%20Park,%20Utah.jpg)

^^ Honey badger don't care

<comment><USER8> It called my attention that in South Finland there are pine trees which apparently are able to grow with their roots barely covered with soil. Some sit directly on hard rock with all their roots visible. I took two photos of this on 2006: [http://pix.hamoid.com/finland2006/nature_is_a_huge_canvas.jp...](http://pix.hamoid.com/finland2006/nature_is_a_huge_canvas.jpg) <http://pix.hamoid.com/finland2006/going_back_to_my_roots.jpg> Those trees survive winter winds at -22F (-30C) with very little sunlight, although sometimes winds knock them down making a vertical wall out of the exposed roots.

<comment><USER9> Well, just because you can see roots, doesn't mean there aren't other deeper roots. Redwoods and Giant sequoias also have shallow root systems.

<comment><USER8> You are right, if one sees roots it doesn't mean there aren't other roots.

I think the difference is, South Finland was compressed by 1 km of ice during the last ice age, and the ground is pure granite that is blown up using explosives whenever a new building or road is built.

In those places I talk about, the dirt layer is extremely thin or often nonexistent. The photos I linked don't show that, but many trees are clearly sitting on pure red granite rock with just a little bit of dirt and moss surrounding the roots, in the middle of pale rock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can grow trees on skyscrapers. But the author captured why it is unlikely to happen: trees need care & maintenance. Care & maintenance == $.

For the types of people who build and run skyscrapers, facility operations is a cost center, and regulating authorities don't really care about greenscape. Nobody wants to pay for a staff of gardeners.

That's why when plans get mocked up, the public spaces around commercial buildings are usually lush, but when the building are actually constructed, you see a few shrubs or maybe a few arbor vitae at ground level.

When the local people and regulating bodies care, things are different. The Wal-Mart parking lot in Hilton Head Island, SC is wooded and shaded. The town refuses to issue construction permits that require old growth trees to be cut down -- so there's 60" wide tree in the lot, with a buffer between it and the pavement. Instead of curbs directing water to storm drains, there are mulched beds that absorb alot of storm water. About 15 miles away near I-95, there is another Wal-Mart with the typical construction methods -- bulldoze, flatten and pave everything.

<comment><USER11> The Walmarts you mentioned:

Lush: [https://maps.google.com/maps?q=walmart++Hilton+Head+Island,+...](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=walmart++Hilton+Head+Island,+SC&ll=32.210849,-80.726606&spn=0.003767,0.006968&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&fb=1&gl=us&hq=walmart&hnear=Hilton+Head+Island,+Beaufort,+South+Carolina&t=h&z=18)

Fully paved: [https://maps.google.com/maps?q=walmart++Hilton+Head+Island,+...](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=walmart++Hilton+Head+Island,+SC&ll=32.309886,-80.974903&spn=0.007526,0.013937&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&fb=1&gl=us&hq=walmart&hnear=Hilton+Head+Island,+Beaufort,+South+Carolina&t=h&z=17)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel like most of the replies are focusing on the feasibility of putting trees in or on skyscrapers when I think the criticism levied in the article was more towards "designers" or architects who are using them as _decorations_ knowing they will never get to see actual production.

I don't think it actually matters to the author if trees can live and thrive in this environment but more so if they are actually implemented.

Including something in your design to make it special (or to win a project) knowing it will never be implemented is a design problem and one that could be translated to what we (hackers) do with technology projects.

<comment><USER13> I feel like

> There are plenty of scientific reasons why skyscrapers don't—and probably > won't—have trees, at least not to the heights which many architects propose.

implies strongly and clearly enough that the author doesn't think it's feasible.

That said, he's also clearly annoyed that designers/architects are being unrealistic in their proposals.

<comment><USER12> Maybe it's more me wishing he had taken that tact than him actually doing so. I felt like he _should_ be more mad at the architects and those who award projects to said architects with these "never to be implemented" features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Two other things about trees:

* They hold tons and tons of water and are generally massive (if you've never given a hardwood tree a good pruning, the volume and mass are surprising). A large, growing tree and its root system would add very significant load to the structure.

* They blow over sometimes. Probably frequently, on an exposed, elevated rooftop with limited soil depth (shallow roots, fairly easy to saturate). 20 tons of tree flying off a tower during a storm doesn't sound like fun.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Life sucks up there. For you, for me, for trees, and just about everything > else except peregrine falcons. It's hot, cold, windy, the rain lashes at > you, and the snow and sleet pelt you at high velocity. Life for city trees > is hard enough on the ground. I can't imagine what it's like at 500 feet, > where nearly every climate variable is more extreme than at street level.

How is being located on top of a tall building much different from being located on top of a tall hill or mountain? Wouldn't the only factors involved be the type of soil and species chosen?

<comment><USER16> Oh man what an interesting question!

The short answer is that a tall hill or mountain represents a broad elevation change that's contiguous with the surrounding landscape. Difference in air quality from sea level is not a simple function of elevation, but of air flow and direction. You actually have to treat the air near the surface as a flow.

Check out this extremely kickass old film: <http://youtu.be/7SkWxEUXIoM?t=29s> The drag near the solid surface greatly slows down, and introduces turbulence to, an otherwise laminar flow. This means that the air near the surface of the earth is doing a lot more interacting with the earth than the other air, and is getting and keeping a lot more heat and dissolved gases. Above that turbulent layer, you just have cold dry air. It loses heat, water condenses, gases fall out.

What can you use as an indicator for the height of the wet air layer? The height of the local trees! Their tops are about at the top of the survivable boundary layer in the air. Desert plants are short, rainforest plants are tall. Interestingly, this might lead you to wonder where the tallest trees in the world are.

Probably in some place where there's an ocean wind that blows into a blind valley, right? Because that thick boundary layer would just pile up and up, right?

Here's an elevation map of California: [http://www.netstate.com/states/geography/mapcom/images/ca_h....](http://www.netstate.com/states/geography/mapcom/images/ca_h.gif)

And here's where the Giant Sequoia redwoods are: [http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/sequoias_of_yosemite/distr...](http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/sequoias_of_yosemite/distribution.html)

So being on top of a tall building is like being on a spike up above the livable atmosphere for trees. Unless your city is built in a place that already had giant trees, it won't have much success growing them at heights above their native height.

Unless you choose very specific trees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this shows the problem that people like me have with design.

I don't notice good design. Things just work and everything is where it should be. It's taken hundreds of years of collected wisdom and research and skill to get it like that, and someone has worked very hard to make it so I don't notice their work.

I do notice when someone draws a willowy slender tree on the side of a towerblock. It'd be great to have more shrubbery and trees up high, but at least they could do it realistically. And I get the impression that they forget about all the root system and maintenance and etc.

England has a problem with terribly dull architecture.

<comment><USER18> There is a building in Paris whose facade is a forrest of shrubbery.

<http://www.eco-eloquence.com/wp-content/uploads/IMG_2736.jpg>

I was there and it's pretty cool looking. All the plants look very happy too.

<comment><USER19> That is the musee de quai branly. It's a vertical garden on one of the sides of the main building. If you look really close there is a lot of infrastructure to water and feed those plants. Also, at this altitude and orientation the plants are shielded from weather extremes fairly well. The architect was complaining that these high-rises don't have any of this plant nutrient infrastructure nor the shielding. If you've been to the top of the Eiffel tower you'll know the wind can get pretty intense up there. Now imagine trying to exist as a tree up there.

The problem is that architects are trying to make their buildings look more ecofriendly, green by putting more trees on it.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but couldn't we put all that infrastructure in skyscrapers?

Also trees are quite sturdy, in the desert they grow as high up as 1500m according to wikipedia. Here in Europe we have lone trees in the alps as high up as ~1800m if I remember my primary school geography correctly. Have you ever been so high? It gets pretty crazy as far as weather is concerned and situation can change from lovely sun to heavy storm with insane cold in a matter of minutes.

<comment><USER19> you could but most of these architect renderings don't look like they have any of that. Some of them are communal terraces with deep infrastructure for trees to grow down into. But a few of these renderings are smaller terraces and judging from the rendering just 30-50cm of structure above the apartment below. Except grass not much can grow there. I've seen some pullt it off fairly well. Like the Sands Marina Bay Hotel in Singapore. In real life it looks like it does in the renderings before groundbreaking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Maybe there is a certain height where this comes into play, but I've seen trees growing naturally (not by design) in abandoned buildings. The first I could think of is the 13-story Highland building here in Pittsburgh you can kind of make out the quite large tree in this photo <http://photos.mycapture.com/PITT/1314621/37517652E.jpg>

<comment><USER21> East St. Louis as well has a bunch of abandoned 10+ story buildings with trees growing on top. They're not the biggest but they're actually quite beautiful. Like nature taking back what belongs to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's another reason to not have trees on top of skyscrapers: It's _dangerous_.

Even the best-pruned tree will occasionally have the occasional branch break off in a severe storm. Normally that's not a problem -- but if the tree is 300' in the air, that branch can go flying a long way and hit someone with a lot of force when it reaches ground level. The sorts of companies which build big skyscrapers don't like to take risks like that; nor do most city zoning boards.

<comment><USER23> > Even the best-pruned tree will occasionally have the occasional branch break > off in a severe storm.

I would imagine it's not that easy for a tree to truly root itself in whatever shallow sandbox they plant it in. You're more likely to have the entire tree fly straight at you.

<comment><USER24> >You're more likely to have the entire tree fly straight at you.

Well, that certainly sounds much safer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Mister Spock has a 30 foot tall oak tree on top of a building for many years now, [http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3228/2896752060_d5bd34df28_z.j...](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3228/2896752060_d5bd34df28_z.jpg)

<comment><USER26> That's nice but that is hardly a skyscraper. By the look of it the building is around 15 floors high... let's say around 40m high. The author was talking about putting trees at 500feet in the air, that's 152m... considerably more.

<comment><USER25> I don't see height as being the issue, I beleive this building is around 50m-60m high.

This building is in front of the ocean and gets a fair share of both wind, salt and the occasional snow storm (it's in Vancouver).

It was lifted in place using a crane and since it's a large oak tree a system must have been been put into place to deal with the extensive amount of roots ( I'm not sure how long it's been there but at least 15+ years).

Here is Google maps street veiw, it has a better perspective: [https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=1919++Beach,+Vancouver,+BC,+CA...](https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=1919++Beach,+Vancouver,+BC,+CANADA+\(Eugenia+Place\)&ll=49.28911,-123.14293&spn=0.001912,0.003001&hnear=1919+Beach+Ave,+Vancouver,+British+Columbia+V6G+1Z2&t=h&z=19)

tl;dr Trees are not pussies, this is all about money (installation and maintenance).

<comment><USER27> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5437406>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I get what he's saying. I think he's more upset that architects are using a "tree" to add some level of trendiness to their buildings. When in fact they should be adding altitude hardened plants that are typically not the most aesthetic plant.

But it is after all just a model and hopefully someone will sit down and scratch their head and say, wait what happens if a branch falls off that tree? Lets just put some bushes up there that don't grow past the railing...

</comment><comment><USER29> Funny

"Trees won't survive in this conditions", but in Nature they are not watered, they are not pruned, and they have lived for millions of years

What harsh conditions are there in the side of a building that don't exist in nature? (Off the top of my head there are several, but it would be nice for him to specify)

It could be: temperature, winds, lack of cover (either soil cover or taller trees) and their corresponding soil dynamic.

But it shouldn't be too complicated to find a plant that works there.

<comment><USER30> Scroll down further. I almost missed it too for some reason due to the page structure, so I understand, but he does address that quite directly.

<comment><USER31> My issue is that it's pure speculation. Trees won't grow there because he says they won't. Except trees do grow under some of the most extreme conditions possible. This is after all just a blog.

<comment><USER30> No, they don't "grow under some of the most extreme conditions possible"; consider the meaning of the phrase "tree line". It is routine for conditions to be too extreme for trees to be feasible.

Life is very adaptable, but it's a category error to then conclude that any given life _form_ is very adaptable. Trees have limits. Ones based in physics.

<comment><USER31> > No, they don't "grow under some of the most extreme conditions possible"; > consider the meaning of the phrase "tree line". It is routine for conditions > to be too extreme for trees to be feasible.

'Routine' is a strong word. You'll note that tree lines exist at significant altitudes commonly on mountains. Typically places that trees cannot grow are also places that humans find difficult.

Demonstrating that trees are incapable of growing on buildings would of course shut me up, but the author didn't do that. What they did was to say 'trees wont grow on buildings'. A bare assertion. One counteracted by pictures in this very thread.

<comment><USER32> > Typically places that trees cannot grow are also places that humans find > difficult.

The windows on tall buildings don't open, which is not a coincidence. Humans can't survive for very long 50+ stories in the air either.

<comment><USER31> > The windows on tall buildings don't open, which is not a coincidence. Humans > can't survive for very long 50+ stories in the air either.

50+ stories is significantly less than the difference between my altitude and the altitude of many perfectly happy civilisations.

The reason windows don't open is that there are significant issues with cooling and regulating air pressure in a building that large. It has little to do with anything like oxygen concentration or even temperature.

<comment><USER32> The issue with tall buildings is not absolute altitude, the issue is elevation above the local boundary condition in the atmosphere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm a bit surprised that the article never mentioned the potential affects of the tree's roots on the structures supporting them. My driveway can tell you that the roots of a decent sized tree will not play nice with man made things that get in their way.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I wouldn't want my unit under or around whatever space was reserved for the roots. Nor would I want my unit next to or under any of _those_ units. After enough years a root will break through just about anything, or at least stress it. Then comes the water. And the critters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think the writer is being a bit unrealistic.

So long as you aren't somewhere at a rather high elevation to begin with, the temperature, elevation and wind chill factors seem like they'd be quite easy to work around. Even something as simple as buffering vegetation from the prevailing wind direction ought to go a long way.

Perhaps a more relevant point might be that the architects aren't fully designing their vegetation's support systems, but that seems like it would require a higher burden of proof. I wouldn't be surprised if issues such as 'what if a large branch fell off 500 feet above street level?' aren't fully thought out, either.

But I don't think there's any reason that someone using careful engineering and design couldn't put healthy plants on a tall building.

If he was merely intending to point out that many architects are placing vegetation without proper design and engineering, he may be right, but I don't think he really succeeded in making the point.

</comment><comment><USER36> On the contrary: do let's. [http://en.rocketnews24.com/2012/09/08/namba-parks- gets-rave-...](http://en.rocketnews24.com/2012/09/08/namba-parks-gets-rave- reviews-from-overseas/)

<comment><USER37> He mentions "500 ft" as a height that the trees would be at (and wouldn't deal well with). That's roughly 50 stories. I don't think that shopping malls reach those heights. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I live @ 9200 ft in the rocky mountains in colorado. Plenty of tree growing right out of the granite. It amazes me how easily plants and trees can make their homes here. At these altitudes, a wide, horizontal root system works better than a deep vertical root system. It is definately within our ability to plant trees on top of buildings.

<comment><USER39> I'm wondering if the author has ever seen a tree on the side of a mountain or cliff - it's hard to stop a tree from growing if they are left alone. He makes trees sound like whiny children who require constant pampering. Not the things that have been on earth longer than any invertebrates and will most likely out survive our species.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Looking at those pictures, I wonder "Where are the roots?" It's like the artists think the tree stops where the trunk meets the surface. I see rooms where peoples would be walking just under the trunk of the tree.

I could see using Bonsai style root trimming and enclosed spaces for the trees, but yeah, other than that it looks like pure fantasy.

</comment><comment><USER41> Please make it viable instead of halting it, just because it's hard.

</comment><comment><USER42> Apparently someone hasn't heard of the Guinigi Tower.

Trees on top of buildings didn't used to signify green. They used to signify power.

<comment><USER43> Guinigi Tower's height doesn't come close to that of a modern skyscraper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Please do not stop!

I absolutely love the idea of buildings lush with vegetation, as if in some post-apocalyptical world where nature has reclaimed the cities.

It may not be very possible/feasible, it may even be a public safety hazard, but I'm so fed up with steel, concrete and glass.

<comment><USER45> Agreed. I think a blanket "Don't even try" is silly, and antithetical to the ethos of HN. I'm surprised there isn't more backlash against this.

"Don't just draw them on the skyscraper, make it work." would be a better sentiment. If wind is a problem, find a way to break the wind. If roots are a problem, find a way to stop the roots, or trim the roots, and build that into the design.

But there's a pile of evidence for the benefits of adding greenery to cities, so please just don't say to stop trying.

<comment><USER46> Still, at least consider if climbing vines on trellises might serve better before putting a ton of effort into trees per se. They provide most of the same greenery benefits, can be made to fit the space, don't have dangerous roots, and are in many ways more robust. Plus they can have flowers or fruits near floor level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Who says these have to be real trees? Fake trees look damn impressive these days. All you have to do is dust them off. And hey -- the wind at these altitudes will do that for you. Now we just need to hire someone to clean up the bird poop.

</comment><comment><USER48> As a fan of urban exploration (photographing old left-behind structures in cities), I had a positive gut reaction to images of buildings overrun by plants.

To me putting trees on the exterior of a tall building makes the building look abandoned. When you find your way in and explore such a building, the artifacts, grittiness and worn-down aesthetic make you think about all the people who have ever lived and worked there.

For this personal reason, I think the trees might be an improvement. Much better than the typical sterile corporate look of skyscrapers. But I can understand why someone who has more architecture experience might think of it as a cliche.

</comment><comment><USER49> In San Francisco there at least one building with trees and other greenery about 500 ft up at 1 Front Street. It has them on the 35th through 38th floor with a rather high glass wind shield that keeps parts from blowing off the roof.

I know that's short compared to some of these massive skyscrapers they show, but as long as the building radiates heat back up at the trees, I don't really see why you couldn't go considerably higher.

</comment><comment><USER50> I see a huge potential market for holographic trees.

</comment><comment><USER51> Here's one example. It's an oak tree, right at the top of an apartment building.

[http://www.venturevancouver.com/blog/tree-on-top-of- building...](http://www.venturevancouver.com/blog/tree-on-top-of-building- vancouver-british-columbia)

<http://www.treecaretips.org/Pruning/TCI0308_p50.htm>

</comment><comment><USER52> This house: <http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2994951> is a few miles from where I live. Last time I saw it the green stripe over it was a sea of dead yellow grass.

</comment><comment> T-zex In my neighbourhood there is an apartment block with two pine trees on the roof terrace. The trees are about 2m high. I still do not understand how they are not causing any trouble. Its not a skyscraper but still..

</comment><comment><USER53> So far, I hadn't seen written what's most obvious problem to me. A dead branch or something from the tree that falls from a building will kill or cause serious injury to someone. Now if a few trees were dead center on the roof, they likely wouldn't, but anything close to overhanging in high winds will shake loose objects very dangerous to humans.

sure you could protect people by adding nets. Well then you have a skyscraper that looks trashier than it did without plants at all.

</comment><comment><USER54> Yes, trees bow on windy mountains (or even next to the ocean), but since when was this a bad thing and/or a sign that the trees were not healthy? This article is like saying "don't put plants on your balcony". True, it's more windy but many plants, especially trees, are created to be more durable.

I do agree that it's a more challenging environment than a forest, but if the building is willing to cover the costs of maintenance, I don't see why not have them!

</comment><comment><USER55> I lived in Singapore for a while where I commonly saw trees on the top of skyscrapers. Sky gardens live and thrive in South East Asia.

</comment><comment><USER56> we do have some buildings in NYC with trees sustained for years. Trump 5th ave being one example.

[http://www.honestbuildings.com/dres/di_full_23c708c1-5549-c4...](http://www.honestbuildings.com/dres/di_full_23c708c1-5549-c4a3-0912-b6d488ccbb19.jpg)

I guess it's more manageable because the trees are not on very top?

</comment><comment><USER57> There's a tracking hash ("#.UU-2q9uRnOI.facebook") that probably should be trimmed before posting.

</comment><comment><USER58> Here's one that has thrived for years, but it has its own planter! [http://www.jpmtree.com/images/sides/JPM,%20Vancouvers%20High...](http://www.jpmtree.com/images/sides/JPM,%20Vancouvers%20Highest%20Tree.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER59> this is a really, really interesting critique of why the current idea of trees on buildings is wrong, but it's a bit short-sighted in that it just says "stop". The next logical step in this is to contemplate how a rooftop environment would affect the evolution of trees moving forward; how human architecture will interact with the genetic lineage of trees in the future, and how we can encourage an evolutionary process so that we get to a point where trees on buildings _are_ possible. Either way, upvote; there's a lot of interesting content in this article.

</comment><comment><USER60> I can't help but think of Betteridge's Law, even when a headline is a request.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines>

</comment><comment><USER61> shows what picking a different submission time will do <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5416289>

</comment><comment><USER62> Capita Centre, Sydney, Harry Seidler & Associates 1989

</comment><comment><USER63> When I saw the title of this article I really hoped it was a metaphor for software, ideally about building products on top of proprietary APIs.

</comment><comment><USER64> Is architects drawing trees on skyscrapers an analogy for something non- function-related we do with software (other than put a bird on it).

</comment><comment><USER65> Reminds me of the arcologies in SimCity, though the one this brings to mind had a dome over the roof park.

</comment><comment><USER66> This reminded me of Gremlins 2.

</comment><comment><USER67> Can't the trees be enclosed?

<comment><USER68> Yep, but trees are big, so the enclosure will have to be similarly massive.

One thing not mentioned in the article: roots. Tree roots get _everywhere_ and have no respect for the clean lines of your skyscraper. They are also _capable_ of going anywhere it damn well pleases - anyone who's seen tree roots break concrete sidewalks and barriers can attest to that.

Whatever trees we put on skyscrapers won't last very long. You'd have to destroy them/replace them every few years.

<comment><USER69> The expense makes tree'd buildings a show of conspicuous consumption not "green". This IS marketing genius in that it appeals to both the "ha ha I'm richer than you" crowd and also at least superficially to the wanna be greenies.

There is a certain "startup wisdom" to it in that one way to save marketing dollars is to appeal to two groups at the same time. Maybe a very crude tech example would be facebook being a workforce automation system for teen girls social interactions AND also for their mothers, sorta. There are cars like that, the Prius was cool enough from a technological standpoint that I got one quite a few years ago although I don't care about the mileage, yet it also appeals to the greenies as being lower eco impact or something. You can be a success only appealing to one group, but if you can appeal to two for free, why not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> typical frustrated architect :)

how about new ideas and solving problems to make them a reality? if it were for people like him alone, we'd still have only blocky concrete buildings.

</comment><comment><USER71> Putting trees on skyscrapers is lame when its only purpose is to gussy-up an image, but honest to goodness metropolitan reforestation where condos and apartment buildings are self-sustaining and eco-friendly is something we should move forward with.

Instead of building outward as in urban sprawl, build upward with vertical forests: [https://cbpowerandindustrial.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/future...](https://cbpowerandindustrial.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/future- of-home-sweet-home/)</comment>


Show HN: DesignerBoard - Behance, Dribbble and DesignerNews, all in one - <AUTHOR> http://designerboard.co/#popular

<comment><USER2> Will be using this to browse design shots from now on. It's a much better interface than having to click through pages on Dribbble.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like the UI! Looks great.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sweet! Great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I really appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love the design.</comment>


US Senate Testimony: Crypto Is the Mother of All Scams - <AUTHOR> https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Roubini%20Testimony%2010-11-18.pdf?_lrsc=77fa845c-a7a2-4e2e-b4e7-18b4357f1900 <comment><USER2> "Blockchain Is The Most Over-Hyped Technology Ever, No Better than a Spreadsheet/Database"

I think he fundamentally understands and misunderstand something that most people, (though probably not here) don't get.

A blockchain is an immutable distributed ledger (database). It is a terrible decision for anything that can be centralized (something where you can trust some party).

It is incredible tool and a case where you can't trust anybody.

There are very few applications where The trade off of trust does not outweigh the efficiency of centralization, but should you have such a case…

<comment><USER3> I stopped reading the paper after this quote.

If the author doesn't understand the tech or has a very simplistic understanding of it, their opinion on it doesn't matter and shouldn't hold any weight.

<comment><USER4> I think he understands the technology better than a fair percentage of casual readers here. Perhaps you should read the rest of the paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> a decentralized ponzi scheme. that's what I said : )

but I am curious to see how it functions in times of crisis. does it go to shit, explode, or nothing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Crypto has 1 advantage... signed transactions are undeniable and cannot be argued with. This feels almost like a new UI paradigm.

At the same time, this can be a terrible disadvantage... mistakes are brutally punished with no recourse. Lose your key or get hacked and you lose everything. There is no warning.

To me, interacting with large amounts of crypto feels like running full speed through an electrified razor-wire maze.

</comment><comment><USER7> USD is the mother of all scams.

</comment><comment><USER8> I imagine you could have said equally terrible things about the internet ten years after it's protocols were developed. Bubble! Scams! Blah blah blah...

If you don't have even one good thing to say about something that has obvious benefits, you may be unreasonably biased.

<comment><USER9> Obvious benefits of the internet: communicate instantly with anyone anywhere in the world with any interface that can be digitized.

Obvious benefits of blockchain: You can get tons of free money from idiot investors? You can hide wealth from the tax man with private fiat? You can forget your bank account number and never be able to access your money again? You can have a database that takes ten times as much electricity to maintain? There are so many benefits!

<comment><USER8> Just because something can be used for "evil" doesn't mean it can't be used for "good". You really can't imagine any "good" benefit?

<comment><USER4> The only benefit that doesn't involve evading regulations is (a dream) of lower fees for sending money. But even that hasn't materialized and comes with rather large costs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Oxford has an electric bell that's been ringing for 173 years - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/oxford-has-a-bell-thats-been-ringing-for-173-years-486147066 <comment><USER2> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell)

<comment><USER3> 2Hz for 140 years? At PI seconds in a nanocentury, that's over 8 billion hits of those bells ([http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/history.asp?page=exhibit1](http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/history.asp?page=exhibit1) claims ten billion)

Given that each hit produces a sound, it should be possible to estimate a lower bound for the energy loss at each ring of a bell, and from that, a lower bound on the amount of energy output by each battery so far. Anyone dare make a guess what amount of power each hit of a bell takes?

Also, this thing seems to operate in air. Air resistance will make some contribution, but movement of the sphere seems to be minimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps they can use gamma-ray tomography to see the internal structure of the battery without opening it: [http://www.hzdr.de/db/Cms?pOid=12301&pNid=240](http://www.hzdr.de/db/Cms?pOid=12301&pNid=240) I don't know if it can be modified to distinguish the materials.

<comment><USER3> Gamma rays are ionizing. Couldn't that cause problems, discharging the batteries faster (see e.g. [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=641274...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6412744&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6412744) for an indication that there will be some effect)?

I also don't know how large such a tomograph is. It might just be impractical to move it (or can these bells be moved?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A video of the oxford bell: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dx1-f8xQio](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dx1-f8xQio)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how much people can hear it...

I saw some people claiming you cannot hear it on the article comments and linking to youtube video, but I can...

But I can hear other things as well, so I am not surprised (for example I absolutely hate being left alone with certain models of ultrasound machines, I dunno what they do, but when they are idling, I can hear them... When someone is actually using the ultrasound, then the sound stops...)

<comment><USER7> I've had a similar experience with certain laptops - an electronic squealing sound that apparently only I can hear. As best I can tell, the sound comes from an inverter connected to the displays.

<comment><USER8> It's usually one of two things:

1/ An electromagnetic/mechanical effect in the transformer in the inverter. You can usually stop it by carefully undoing the tape around the transformer and giving it a squeeze.

2/ The audio system is routed next to a bus somewhere and it is just plain old noise being pumped out of the speakers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is very interesting! I wonder if I can get the same battery in my Android phone so it can last longer.

<comment><USER10> The makeup of the batteries is unknown, but they are most likely just Zamboni piles. There is probably nothing impressive about the batteries themselves, the longevity of the experiment owes itself to the extremely low power draw of the apparatus.

<comment><USER11> I'd say the self-discharge rate of these batteries is impressive compared to any of the commonly-used battery types on the market today. Of course, they deliver so little current that they're unusable for most purposes, but the shelf life is amazing.</comment></comment></comment>


What script is used to run hacker news? - <AUTHOR>

I want to setup something like hacker news for my site. Is it some php mysql script that is available or did they make their own? Anybody recognize it?<p>Thanks, D <comment><USER2> HN runs on software written by pg (and others?), using a language called Arc (developed by pg and rtm).

See: <http://arclanguage.org/>

<http://arclanguage.org/item?id=8742> provides some info.

<http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.1.tar> is newer than the arc2.tar referenced above.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could have a look at <http://pligg.com/> \- it's an open source Digg- alike. I've used it on a company intranet and it's not bad.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://arclanguage.org/>

It is surprisingly easy to set up

</comment><comment><USER5> You might want to checkout the Reddit source - <http://code.reddit.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> I believe it is ARC Forum.</comment>


22-Year-Old College Student Says Alexa Skills "Changed His Life" - <AUTHOR> https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/b66bf85d-b194-4e24-a5f1-302592074a22/with-alexa-developer-rewards-david-markey-says-alexa-changed-his-life <comment><USER2> Earning $1500 USD for developing a digital trinket for Amazon while attending one of the most expensive schools on the planet is not life-changing.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps not the $1500 itself, but small "wins" in life are a strong motivator.</comment></comment>


Using jQuery with Angular 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.syntaxsuccess.com/viewarticle/using-jquery-with-angular-2.0 <comment><USER2> Reinventing the old DOM modifications with the modern framework ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I would use it sparingly :-) Mostly to still allow existing jQuery plugins.</comment></comment>


Why Startups Shouldn't Have To Pay To Pitch Angel Investors - <AUTHOR> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/why-startups-shouldnt-have-to-pay-to-pitch-angel-investors/ <comment><USER2> This is a re-post of Jasons email in its entirety, I assume it is with permission, it certainly is an interesting read.

He's literally going to take the fight to funds that charge for presentations.</comment>


Facebook IPO Seen Deepening Investor Distrust Of Stocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-25/facebook-ipo-fallout-deepens-investor-distrust-of-stocks.html

<comment><USER2> You know what? Good. A stock that explodes after the IPO means it was priced too low, and the company didn't raise a fair amount of capital.

Facebook is obviously smart enough to think for the long term. I don't trust the financial machinery to do that.

<comment><USER3> Here's how real people think about a hyped, flop of an IPO:

People don't like the feeling of being sold something for more than it's worth. We call that being "ripped off," and most folks don't take too kindly to it. I believe you described this as getting a "fair amount."

People also don't like the folks who rip off other people. It's kind of a dick move to rip someone off. Those folks tend to do quite well, yes. That's FB in this case, who as you note made out just swell.

People especially resent it when those guys get incredibly wealthy by ripping off millions of people.

> Facebook is obviously smart enough to think for the long term. I don't trust > the financial machinery to do that.

I think we can all agree - there's nobody we can trust more than Facebook to rip us off properly.

<comment><USER4> I'm with you.

It still baffles me how anyone could think that this IPO was about anything but making vulgar amounts of money for Facebook.

I guess the label is now more accurate than ever: "...dumb fucks."

<comment><USER5> What IPO isn't about making money for the company? Only the VC pump-and-dump scams, not anything you want to be part of

<comment><USER3> Most companies' IPOs don't include going to great lengths to successfully offload far more of their shares at a significantly higher price than the shares could sustain.

There's a big difference between leaving money on the table and riding the hype wave for all its worth. Plenty of room for reasonable compromise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No it's not. FTA:

"The IPO produced the worst five-day return among the largest U.S. deals of the past decade."

That's an _extremely_ qualified factoid. Please retitle this post.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it is. On an absolute basis, the Facebook IPO resulted in the lowest 5-day return of _any_ US IPO in the past century. The qualifier "largest" was used only because FB lost more capital in 5 days than the total market caps of the companies involved in the worst IPOs, so it is not the worst IPO on a relative basis. Even then, Facebook still ranks among the worst IPOs in the past decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That means the IPO was priced right. Investment bankers used to deliberately priced IPO low to let their favorite clients profited with the popup right off the gate. The companies lost lots of money when their IPO priced low.

Looks like Facebook avoided the problem and got the right price.

<comment><USER9> It's not all good. Facebook employees are locked up for 3 months right? So the winners here were the VC's and other "preferred stock holders" who were allowed to sell their stock as part of the IPO. And the banks/underwriters who apparently always profit from ipo's even if they are mispriced.

The losers for the most part were retail investors and various funds/traders who believed the banks that the IPO was correctly priced, and probably facebook employees who will have to sell at a lower price now because this botched IPO has sown a lot of distrust in facebook stock.

The goal for an IPO is to correctly price the offering. Usually tech stocks are wildly over-valued and speculated on when they IPO, that doesn't make the banks wrong for setting a reasonable price.

 _Shrug_ it's all bullshit anyway. When your talking in the scale of billions of dollars, capitalism can get pretty inefficient. Internet bubbles just highlight the most absurd parts of it. $1B for a 1 month project on iOS(instagram)? $100B for a monopoly on the social graph?(facebook) It makes no sense, but it's really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to market inefficiencies and the huge amount of capital some companies have compared to the value they provide to society.

<comment><USER8> Well, the main thing is the FB company got a great price on the IPO. The employees etc can be benefited in the long run from the great cash position the company is at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm amazed the article didn't mention the lawsuits that are being filed against the lead underwriters Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc; according to the claims, some institutional investors got insider info that presumably leaked through the "Chinese wall" that FB was ill-positioned to take advantage of growing mobile ad views and thus would have to lower its earnings guidance for the next quarter.

Then again, the SEC and practically all government agencies are revolving doors with big business so I wouldn't be surprised that all they get is a slap on the wrist.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's been less than a week.

<comment><USER12> That is exactly what they are considering...

 _"The IPO produced the worst five-day return among the largest U.S. deals of the past decade."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A 16% drop hardly qualifies as the "worst performing IPO of the decade".

<comment><USER12> Is there one that is worse that they missed? Article seems to suggest that MF Global Holdings Inc. had the second worst opening week.

<comment><USER14> BATS IPO had to be pulled. Although it's not the worst because traders were made whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wouldn't touch fb stocks with a 10 ft poll.

</comment><comment><USER16> The funny thing to me is how everyone swears that they only invest due to fundamentals, they absolutely aren't just gambling their money in the big slot machine and hoping to see three cherries come up instantly and coins pour into the tray.

And then when three cherries don't come up on the first spin, man, are they pissed off.

</comment><comment><USER14> We won't know for some time (at least until a possible twitter IPO) the scale of the damage caused by the Facebook IPO on investors' appetites for social stocks. I'd reserve judgment.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can we just stop beating this dead horse for once please?

<comment><USER18> Why? Like it or not, FB is the bellwether for the current technology/economic climate. It's one of the biggest IPOs ever, not just in size, but in renown. There was a mainstream movie made about it before it was even public. It's a _huge_ story.

It's important to gauge these things as they happen, so the next time around you get to be the one saying, "I've seen this before." These stories may all turn out to be moot, and in 10 years Facebook could be a huge brand, in which case you can look back and remember how Bloomberg labelled it the worst performing IPO of the decade. Or, it could go south....

<comment><USER19> You're right, it's important to gauge these things, and there's been a lot of things going on this past week, and people tend to assume because the facebook IPO didn't behave the exact same way as the linkedIn IPO that it has somehow failed... but it's the stock market. It's unpredictable, and so many things affect the price of a stock. There were trading glitches, largely affecting daytraders and companies who had no desire to hold the stock long term in the first place. And there's also been a lot of back and forth on the European debt crisis this past week and general volatility over all tech stocks, not just facebook, but facebook is in the spotlight right now.

I don't think facebook's IPO has any real bearing on the industry at hand. Other recent tech IPOs like LinkedIn and Jive have varied by more than 10% in the past week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's funny is FB still had a better week than DELL. Somehow that surprise just isn't worth talking about.</comment>


The Fed is Now Pumping $200 Billion Per Month - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fed-is-now-pumping-200-billion-per-month-2011-4

<comment><USER2> I have trouble understanding the term 'adjusted US Monetary Base', is it m0, m1, or m2?</comment>


The Case Against Tipping in America - <AUTHOR> https://www.eater.com/a/case-against-tipping <comment><USER2> "tipped minimum" - just wow! As someone living in Asia the American tipping culture is ridiculous and highly unfair. This countr is broken on so many levels.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm still confused how the definition of a good tip changed from 15% to 20%.

<comment><USER4> Because popular culture is created by former waiters. In movies and TV, the classic sign of a villain is that he is a bad tipper. Most screenweiters / directors / etc. got their start while waiting tables in Los Angeles.</comment></comment>