Slack will never replace email - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dvirbenaroya/why-slack-will-never-replace-email-873a20856716 <comment><USER2> Slack also has other problems that have been totally ignored and neglected for years. One of them is accessibility. The app is impossible to work with without a mouse. They say it is "keyboard driven" and they keep adding features that ignore keyboard completely. Have you ever tried to jump to a thread without using the mouse? Or copy a link to the last message? Or share it? Or ask Slack to remind about it? Or snooze all notifications? They could at least put them in the main menu. People with disabilities who rely on things being in the menu, they can't do any those things. Can you imagine having to hire someone and they'd be like: "Ah sorry, I have to tell you something. I cannot use Slack app. I hope that's not a deal breaker". I wouldn't be surprised if someone sues SlackHQ for being discriminatory.

<comment><USER3> Slack dev here. We've actually fixed quite a few accessibility issues over the last year or so. There's still a ton to do, but if you haven't used Slack with a keyboard recently, give it a whirl.

More here: [https://marcozehe.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/status-of-the- acc...](https://marcozehe.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/status-of-the- accessibility-of-slack/)

<comment><USER4> I used recently and it's impossible to use with keyboard only, you can try yourself.

During duty shifts I was helping our support. The incoming flow of requests had peaks of ~3-4 situations per minute, all as messages in Slack channel, needed to be responded in newly created thread each. I've come up with a flow, but I cannot avoid mouse at all.

Slack just does not have enough key bindings to be used without mouse! Slack was a bottleneck for me. If you are not willing to invest into UX that's fine to have gateways for people to use whatever client UI they need. But you just cannot wear to hats by both removing gateways and avoiding investing into your client UX. Result is plainly awful.

Nothing personal, I am actually hate using Slack, sad to say that. I will avoid using Slack in current state at all cost whenever I can.

Good luck to you! Hope you will make your product better!

(edit: formatting, newlines added)

<comment><USER2> SlackHQ, we are software developers, devops and QA engineers, data scientists and IT support specialists - we are your biggest user base! When we say it is not working, please, listen to us. Please, do try using your app without the mouse and maybe then you will see what we are talking about. It is not a baseless demand, our companies pay to use your service. If your codebase was open-sourced we would've fixed this issues ourselves. Please, don't make us hate you. When you just started you were awesome, but now you are slowly turning into Atlassian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My only complaint for Slack (and any instant messaging app), is the sense of urgency it creates. It has been discussed on HN a lot, but I 've never seen someone complaint about the fact that you can invite to your organization people from other orgs. This feature is beloved by product managers. And hated by everyone else.

See. Before 'Slack', we had 3 channels of communication. 1\. Email (usually expectation of getting a reply within hours) 2\. Phonecall (reserved for urgent situations, expecting a reply within... seconds) 3\. Ticket system that had a little drop-down where you could select urgency. And you would expect a reply based on the urgency.

If you abused the urgency, we had a way to track that, and let you know.

Today however, Slack's "multiple organizations" feature pretty much shadowed the above. Now product manager from client org X, will require that you make a channel called "X-feature Commandos/dream team" then invite everyone involved on the project. Then they will ALWAYS end up wasting everyone's time for no reason. "Hey @here, X page is slow can you check it out?". "Sorry guys my bad. I was under the bay sea riding the Bart! Forgot LTE connections can be finnicky 100m under water. heh (ultra fast parrot emoji)"

<comment><USER6> If your job is to program, and people are sending you email and slack messages, you're a chump if you are replying in anything under 24 hours.

<comment><USER7> And if you don't reply within 24 hour: fired. By me at least. (don't be silly, I don't have the power to fire anyone anymore).

Yes, expecting a reply by email sooner than e.g. 4 working hours is futile.

But if you work in a team and only communicate once a day then you are not a team member, you are an ar#eh#le.

If you constantly check your emails and slack and write replies immediately then yes, we should probably have a chat about your time focus and productivity. But checking your emails quickly once an hour is common sense. And where appropriate with a quick receipt response, not a full answer.

And e.g. slack every 15 minutes or half an hour. Perhaps in a Pomodoro break or similar. (channel dependent)

It would perhaps be a good idea to have a well-known team/department convention on response times. More asynchronous for email especially if not internal (hours not days). Quite asynchronous in company-wide public slack chats, and more responsive but not instant in team irc-like chats.

Whether you program, write content, make sandwiches etc is no excuse to be an ar#eh#ole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When the Slack sales team came to my employer they pitched it as some sort of memory store - the reality is that it's nigh impossible to pick out a specific bit of information after a couple of months unless you remember who said something, where they said it, and approximately when. It's also annoying when an admin leaves because only the owner can remove their account - not another admin. I would also say Slack has a very bad habit of forcing new features down users throats - people have been complaining about threads for years but there is STILL no way to mute them or disable them. Someone installs an add-in that makes a lot of noise? Tough cookies to you, your options are to put up with it or uninstall it, there is no way to mute it. Like people joining you to new channels? No way to stop that either. Their API is a pain to deal with in staticly typed languages - you often have to decode a member of a substructure to discover what the overall type is. So overall I would say it's definitely not an e-mail replacement and it's very heavy handed for IM, there is definitely room for another product. I would personally prefer something more akin to IRC or the classic "cb simulators". The only real challenge today is working with mobile clients (and challenge is probably too strong a word).

</comment><comment><USER9> All these complaints about Slack, are strangely reminiscent of all the complaints about email pre-Slack; "re:re:re:re:re:", cc all the people, 200+ non-relevant emails per day etc etc.

I worry that people are trying fix org culture problems with communication software, which is unlikely to succeed.

<comment><USER10> That's exactly why we need to fix email - not replace it with another app with more notifications. I agree with Dvir - email's asynchronous nature is what makes the exact solution for business comms. It's instant, but not invasive, and doesn't expect an instant reply. Culturally, we need to also respect people's time. I'm sticking with email.

<comment><USER9> Most of the Slack channels I use are used async, and I only have notifications on for 2 out of ~15 channels. Good comms culture was much easier to develop with Slack + [Something for docs] for the teams I have worked with. But I very much understand that teams are different, and different cultures work optimally for different teams.

<comment><USER11> But then what's the point of using Slack? Your scenario describes you could just use email without downsides.

<comment><USER9> > without downsides

Hmm. Might be true for you.

Slack enabled "De-silo'ing". It became more efficient and convenient to ask a team, or knowledge group of something, instead of depending on specific persons. Easier to be flexible about which topics to follow or not. I.e. normally I don't interact much with the #ops channel, but Bill is on holiday, so I'm giving it attention this week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Slack is a productivity killer and whatever they are doing next is certain to be annoying. People ping each other asking questions instead of reading docs. People have calls instead of figuring it out. Annoying people just can't resist the temptation of @here.

It wouldn't be so bad if I could customize my experience but Slack fights hard against this. They claim one size fits all, if it's annoying then it's a cultural issue.

You can't get thousands of people on the same page. Different mindsets should be fostered, not punished.

<comment><USER13> > Annoying people just can't resist the temptation of @here

If people keep doing that repeatedly even after being told then you probably have bigger problems in the company than the messaging app of choice. You can also just disable it: [https://get.slack.help/hc/en- us/articles/115004855143-Set-wh...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en- us/articles/115004855143-Set-who-can-notify-a-channel-or-workspace)

> People ping each other asking questions instead of reading docs.

That's not a Slack problem, it always existed on IRC, people tapping you on the shoulder in the office or on mailing lists and forums.

<comment><USER11> I never understood people who get annoyed by @here. If you are somewhere where you don't want to be, and people send a message to you that you don't care about, you shouldn't be there in the first place. We have many channels in our company where complete strangers hang out, for example in the engineering channel like it was a garden party of some sort. You know: just for fun. I mean WTF is wrong with these people? Why are they in the channel if they are not interested? When I message with @here I don't give a shit if it annoys someone or not, as long as the message is completely in line with the channel's intended purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The number one point is to recognize the situation as a conflict of interests - everyone wants an immediate answer to his burning question, but nobody wants to be interrupted to answer somebody else questions. For the team as a whole there is probably some optimal interruption level which is higher than what the interrupted would set and lower than what the interrupter would choose. That is why muting and 'urgent' messages don't work - because people would tend to mute channels too much and on the other hand 'urgent' quickly inflates and everything starts to be urgent. I think a solution to this could be "attention budgets". There are many complications of course - there are times when you don't mind being interrupted and times when you do, and it is taxing to think about it consciously and set your levels. But I would start from attention budgets - this would also be a solution to general spam, but synchronous spam is much worse than asynchronous - so synchronous is a good place to start.

</comment><comment><USER15> I find things like this funny because Email is often much worse for getting ideas across and VERY FEW people put their whole idea in an Email and simply treat it with chat + 6 line signatures. Where I've worked email has simply been a very poor chat which I could not distinguish "info broadcasts" from "the server is down" without getting all notifications or none.

We switched to slack in 2014 because 1) it allowed us to notify mindfully for team-wide and person specific things. 2) it allowed people to have full blown conversations and keep others up to date on status/problems in channels. And 3) it allowed us to build automation right inline with the communication we were already doing.

Much of the complaints of slack seem to be from people who work with those who do not respect how to use it. Spamming @here for everything is the same as replying-all in email. Or, my personal pet-peeve, creating a new private group chat for everything making finding the old conversation nearly impossible.

Discord has tons of improvements I've love to see in Slack namely around groups of channels and role management, but for the most part it seems the problems with slack are organization's unwillingness to understand it's purpose and how to best use it not as a pager system for your whims, but actually as an async communication system.

<comment><USER16> > Where I've worked email has simply been a very poor chat which I could not > distinguish "info broadcasts" from "the server is down" without getting all > notifications or none

Something like Procmail could provide such feature.

Slack (and Discord) is on the long term worse than e-mail/IRC because it isn't federated, nor an open protocol, nor FOSS. This means people are forced into a proprietary, centralized theme park of clients and servers. Its a potential security hazard to put sensitive data in such software.

Of course, Slack (and Discord) both have their set of advantages as well. The good news is, its a matter of time before FOSS alternatives catch up and become good _enough_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The advent of proprietary communication tools isn't really something I like, be that slack or discord or other services.

Something tells me that in 10 years neither service will be hip enough to warrant extensive support. If they were to hold relevant business critical information, it would need to be archived but will probably just end up being lost.

That is at least a difference to mail. Also external contacts could be invited to the appropriate channels, but I don't really see much engagement from these users if that actually does happen.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've already replaced email with Slack. It's not hard, email is really bad. That said, Slack is sorely lacking here, especially with threads. Slack "threads" are an awful experience, with replies generally ignored, so people don't use them. All I'd need is for Slack to treat threads like a real first class citizens, with a view like HN or Reddit, and I'd be a happy camper.

<comment><USER19> Threads as first class citizens is something that Zulip [0] focuses on, which makes it much easier to have multiple conversations within the same space. It also makes it easier to ignore any conversations you don't care about.

This avoids the problem with Slack where some people might use the threading features, while others ignore it. Personally I'm a huge fan of Zulip, having used HipChat, Slack, Mattermost, Skype for Business, and Discord in the past.

[0] [http://zulip.org](http://zulip.org)

<comment><USER20> Do you know if zulip is useable with only the keyboard?

<comment><USER21> yes, it is. [https://zulipchat.com/help/keyboard- shortcuts](https://zulipchat.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts) has the list of keyboard shortcuts.

<comment><USER20> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just wish the client wasn't so bad. I can't believe that if I send a message and I'm not connected at that precise instant that it catn't store and forward the message when I do get connected. In fact, I can't look at any of my slack messages at all.

Every other IM client, email, basically every communications medium since about 1998 has been able to do this, but apparently not Slack.

</comment><comment><USER23> Big problem I've seen is behavior in using Some vs email, and the monitoring capabilities managers have in monitoring either. From my observations, people use Slack very casually in the sense that they use it like they would any IM platform to socialize/gossip/vent on a whim while at work, not expecting that management has access to viewing each and every thread. This has lead to management playing favorites/politics. In the case of a friend who got a promotion to management at their employers recently, they had to see many of their teammates pre promotion get fired due to those teammates venting on Slack about inefficiencies/incompetencies in management, and management having read each and every response without those teammates realizing they had access.

Email still presents this issue, but not at this level of casual use/expectation of access by management

</comment><comment><USER24> I worked for a corporation with a 13- to 14-hour time difference. Also, the language barrier was significant. When we sent an email, it had to be translated to Japanese, then the reply often translated back. Slack (or any IM medium) was 100% worthless for this. It has its place, but it is not a cure- all.

</comment><comment><USER11> Something that I can't seem to find highlighted ever in any discussion about communication tools (but I acknowledge it was kind of hinted at by the federated nature of email in this post) is that by using email you have ultimate and complete control over the information received. I mean in slack you don't have much chance to download an archive of your messages, mentions and message threads (although it might be possible,IDK). On the other hand hosting your own email server (or even by using most of the popular email providers) you have this option out of the box. And this is more important then you think. In court for example this might be the decisive factor in your favour (e.g. having something vs having nothing). But it might be useful in other disputes too, not only in legal cases.

</comment><comment><USER25> Slack will never replace email as long as it doesn't have end to end encryption, a feature Slack has indicated it is not going to deliver anytime soon due to the "priorities of paying customers".

Personally I hate Slack as it provides too many distractions. Recently I have starting closing down Slack and only allow myself to check it every half an hour to improve my attention span and concentration. Slack seems to be a great tool for product and project managers, however, less so for developers.

It would be great if Slack would allow me to selectively mute certain channels.For example, the lunch-club channel is only relevant when I am actually onsite, however, I always want to be kept up to date on critical production issues.

<comment><USER26> When you're on a channel, on the top right you have a cogs for "Channel Settings" where you can find the option to mute that specific channel.

<comment><USER25> Can you also mute certain colleagues ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In case anybody doesn't know: Shift+Esc marks all messages read. Rarely is a keyboard shortcut so good for one's health.

I got this from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17374500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17374500) but there have been other benefactors: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shift%2Besc%20read&sort=byDate...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shift%2Besc%20read&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

<comment><USER28> Sometimes. It's about as reliable as the rest of Slack, which is to say not very.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Email is Lindy [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)

<comment><USER30> For those who don't what the Lindy Effect is:

The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non- perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate _decreases_ with time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm using slack in my office (We also use trello for checklist but Slack for communication) And I do think it'ss a bad decision for Slack to get into the email world.

It will open a door for security breaches and in my company we have some pretty important content on Slack

I also don't want EVERYTHING to be in one place I like the Slack as it is now, Adding emails to slack aswell will make it a really large platform.

</comment><comment><USER32> My company dropped slack for Microsoft Teams since it is basically free (bundled in the office 365 subscription).

Email still rocks all of our inter-branch communications and teams is better. The only advantage that Slack has over teams is that it works on GNU/Linux...

</comment><comment><USER33> The longer I use slack, the more unusable it is. People keep creating small groups with requests. Once you read a message it is almost impossible to find unless you remember everyone that was selected to be in the group.

The search is practically useless.

</comment><comment><USER34> I agree with the points about the culture problems that are communication medium agnostic. But the solution that the author of this article suggests is Spike, their product. I looked at Spike and while I got the gist of what Spike is for I did not get how does it work. Does it replace G Suite for example? Is it an email hosting? Or is it a complimentary app for G Suite/O365 users? How does it integrate? How does it look like when a person not using Spike receives and email send via Spike? Do they know it comes from Spike?

<comment><USER10> that's the point that the writer made - Spike can work with anyone (unlike other apps like Slack, Teams, Skype, etc.) Spike works with your regular email, like Gsuite and turns your emails into a chat conversation. The other person doesn't know you're using Spike - they see a regular email. You can even create a channel and message with people not on Spike. That's pretty cool stuff IMO

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm relatively bearish on Slack, but who knows what will happen in 5 years. Anecdotally I find a lot of people (myself included) have long shifted from "Slack is the greatest thing ever (e.g. 2015/2016)" to "Slack is more annoying than email." At the same time, I don't feel like there's been much new outside of changing the design of their homepage every 3-4 months (can someone explain why it makes sense to throw design/eng resources on this?) and search is still terrible.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't think Slack could universally replace email, but it could for some teams (ubiquitous addresses aside).

One of the teams I work with communicate _solely_ through Slack (and do use it asynchronously). All the other teams use some combination of email and Slack, and it wouldn't surprise me if there were teams out there avoiding Slack altogether.

It's just another tool. The usage depends entirely on the audience.

</comment><comment><USER37> Chinese companies have been relying on instant messenger as the primary communication channel for a long time. So definitely it works.

<comment><USER38> You can also eschew all electronic communication and do things purely in person—that works too. The valuable question to answer here is how well do these processes work compared to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The article talks about a few great features of e-mail that I totally agree with: open standards, portability, asynchronicity. While asynchronicity is achievable with Slack ,I get the feeling that if all of your colleagues are on synchronous mode and you're the odd one out, it'll create problems in the company as you can be labeled a slacker (heh!).

</comment><comment><USER40> For me, Slack has fully replaced email for any time sensitive communication. Email still exists but only for the following:

\- Company or department wide announcements

\- Welcoming new hires

\- Artifacts from build systems and automated tools

\- Inter-team communications when planning something new

Anything with a real deadline is communicated through slack or skype.

</comment><comment><USER41> Slack has replaced 99% of internal emails in our organisation. When pointing towards other platforms for long lived content, email just doesn't seem to have a use case. We still need it for external comms obviously.

</comment><comment> ga-vu Probably because they are two different things.... just sayin

</comment><comment><USER42> Uh, why _would_ Slack replace email? Non-sequitur.

<comment><USER38> Because of Slack positioning itself like that: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/slack-releases-new- financial...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/slack-releases-new-financials- ahead-of-investor-day.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Slack: it's like email, but you can't find shit.

</comment><comment><USER43> Does no one else use rocketchat?

</comment><comment><USER44> Never say never. Something will definitely replace email.

<comment><USER38> The only thing that can replace email is a better email. If we had a version of IMAP that worked with labels (download a message once regardless of how it's tagged) + push, email would be usable again. Currently this is only possible with IMAP with all its flaws OR by giving all your email to a third party to serve through an API designed for modern email. There are perverse incentives preventing this from occurring in any widespread fashion, which is allowing Slack to flourish on the dysfunction of the current communication ecosystem. If we do have a replacement for email, it's not gonna be from a for-profit entity.

Anyway, real-time communications are inherently a different beast from async communications—one is a highly searchable and taggable data store where you're expected to carefully read and type and form workflows around, and the other is for essentially war rooms for collaborative real-time work. Pitching slack as a replacement for email seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the product.</comment></comment>


Stripe launches beta in Ireland - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/paulsavage/status/334258571472678912

<comment><USER2> They just launched in the UK, too. I integrated them in about 2 hours and took a setup fee payment (£1,200) with zero hassle within hours of getting the beta email.

Awesome stuff. Best payment provider integration experience I've ever had (and I've had a few).

<comment><USER3> We're on the UK beta, still a bit confused though - is it all still in test mode only?

<comment><USER2> Well, we've taken a live payment from a live credit card...

<comment><USER4> I'm in the UK too, tested it with a CC and it worked fine, recurring payment actually came out of the account last week. Worked a treat!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The email that was sent from stripe

 _We're getting in touch because you asked to be notified when Stripe was available in Ireland. Good news: we are up and running in private beta, and we're excited to invite you to take part.

As of today, you can accept Visa and MasterCard transactions. You can choose to accept payments denominated in euros, with American Express and US dollar denominated transactions coming soon. All our standard docs and features apply -- jump in at <https://stripe.com/docs.*>

</comment><comment><USER5> So nice to see € there. But I would like to know if they have any roadmap for expanding to other countries. I'm from Spain and about to start a business, and I would love to set up payments with stripe and would like to know if it will be available in my country when we launch. Any information?

<comment><USER6> y'know, we're supposed to have a common single market here in EU (and _especailly_ within the eurozone). But it just seems like there is all these little examples of it not being a single market. ☹

<comment><USER5> unfortunately this is so true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great to see Stripe expanging in Europe! We at Sellfy (<http://sellfy.com/>) just rolled out GPB support for Stripe UK users looking to sell their downloads. I guess the Euros for Ireland are next.

</comment><comment><USER8> I got my invite last week and integrated it over the weekend, but I need to hold off until I can accept USD.

According to John at Stripe "Unfortunately, right now you'd need a US-routable dollar account to accept payments in USD. We're planning on having better native support for charging USD in the future, but have no timeline on it right now."

I'm planning on opening a US bank account when I'm in SF in August, if anyone knows how I can do that from Ireland instead let me know.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess adding multi-currency is another level of complexity, but something that I think users in Europe would want. Also exchange rates stuff probably has regulatory stuff with it too. I don't see anywhere on the stripe interface to add a 2nd bank account for a different currency. Does anyone have any tips on what banks to open a US a/c when I'm there next (I don't have a SSN).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who get really tired of the endless copying and imitating of Apple UIs? Look at the picture in the tweet, every single element from the gradient in the switch button, text shadows, color tones of icon and background to the section gradients. Sure, it looks nice, no doubt. But it's so un-original!

</comment><comment><USER10> Why these kind of payment services take quite long to add a new country?

What procedures are there?

<comment><USER11> For starters, getting a local bank account for the country, making sure that you are following local banking regulations and accounting rules...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm in France and interviewed with two payment solutions last week (just coincidence) and ask if they knew about Stripe and its fantastic api & solution and nobody was.

I guess Stripe will have to cross the Channel at some point.

<comment><USER13> We definitely want to cross the Channel, but can't say much about timelines as yet

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I got my UK invite over a month ago, I still haven't implemented it because I hadn't realised you needed SSL.

<comment><USER13> Check out <https://stripe.com/help/ssl#how-do-i-set-up-ssl> if you need help setting up SSL

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, this is awesome. Finally!

</comment><comment><USER16> Realex will not be happy</comment>


George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the 'scam' of self-driving cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/13/17561484/george-hotz-comma-ai-self-driving-car-scam-diy-kit <comment><USER2> Here's the low-level controller for Comma AI's self-driving software. Lateral and longitudinal control, as well as actuator command are contained within.

Their low level control is done in Python, on top of Android, on a smartphone. No further comment, your honor.

[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/devel/selfdrive/co...](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/devel/selfdrive/controls)

<comment><USER3> As much as I love Python, you need realtime processing for this kind of things. You can't have a slow language with gc pauses and no way to guaranty execution time for a given operation.

<comment><USER4> If you want to replace the always attentive driver who never blinks their eyes?

<comment><USER5> It's not necessarily about speed of reaction, although that certainly plays a part.

Such software needs to react in real time though, if the task that's turning the steering wheel gets preempted in the middle of taking a curve on a cliff your self-driving car will become a self-flying car.

Such a system would be the equivalent of a driver that suddenly starts texting at all sorts of poorly chosen times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When George demonstrated his first model I showed a friend who designs safety critical systems. To paraphrase he said, that of course you can hack something together in a weekend that does this.

However a analysing a million edge cases, making sure all failures fail in a safe way takes a lot of time and knowledge.

It made me think that this is a great demonstration of the difference between hobbyist hacking and professional engineering.

<comment><USER7> > that of course you can hack something together in a weekend that does this. > However a analysing a million edge cases, making sure all failures fail in a > safe way takes a lot of time and knowledge.

Thats true for a lot of things. Most developers can whip up a Slack clone in a weekend, create an uber clone in a weekend or create a Netflix clone in a weekend. But dealing with all the edge cases, the details, making it scalable, etc. that's were the pain is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > California's DMV requires all companies testing self-driving cars to report > how many times safety operators were forced to take control of its vehicles.

You make what you measure. This encourages companies to have their safety operators take over less often: if you tell the operators to err on the side of safety and take over more often, your car will look less safe.

I don't have a solution here, just pointing out how this actually can benefit companies that care less about safety.

<comment><USER9> Sorry if this is a stupid question but what does California do with these numbers? If Wayne has 10 engagements per mile driven with 10M miles driven and Tesla has 2 per mile with 500k miles driven and Uber has 1 per mile with 1M miles driven (all made up numbers), will there be some sort of penalty for below average scorers? Is it possible to categorically say who is the best? How does this work?

<comment><USER10> It just makes the data public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you are interested in learning more about George, you should listen to him talking at Mapbox's Locate conference with the Mapbox CEO, Eric Gundersen [1]. Its another example of George being George. I just happened to be called out during the talk, but overall rather enjoyed it.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9WxlR1ZTZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9WxlR1ZTZc)

<comment><USER12> I found his description of his company, "ghost riding for the masses", to be particularly amusing

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > If the driver looks down or away from the road for two seconds, a visual > warning will appear on the Eon's screen. After four seconds, the driver will > hear an audible alert. And after six seconds, the system will disengage and > begin to slow down.

The biggest use of some kind of driver assist system is something that can keep me going straight and at a constant speed on a relatively open road while I twist open a bottle cap and take a sip of a drink. Making me have a death stare out of the windshield to avoid disengagement is about as useful as standard cruise control. Except standard cruise control isn't going to be prone to making a mistake about whether or not I'm paying attention, and then stopping my car because it isn't satisfied.

<comment><USER14> Right. Keeping in lane for 2 secs when you spill your coffee or the kid screams or you do something else that makes you lose your concentration for a short while is great.

I don't need to sleep or work for an hour during a commute. Not now not tomorrow. I can drive the damn thing or at least _watch it drive itself_. And like mr Hotz I believe that's what it will be like for decades to come. My prediction is flying cars before completely self driving ones. And not some novelty one person quadcopter. I mean the proper Blade Runner ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What would the point of current self-driving car systems be? If you can't take your attention off the road anyway, it's basically a glorified, expensive cruise control.

<comment><USER16> Ever drive 8-12 hour days for 2 days straight? Used to do it 4-5, but sometimes up to 10, times per year. I'd pay many thousands for lane-keeping on rural interstates in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER17> Yep. I _love_ the headspace of focusing on something so simple for so long. If I weren't going to have the experience of driving, I would just fly.

<comment><USER16> _> If I weren't going to have the experience of driving, I would just fly._

I mean, today, ditto. But for like at least 100M of the 300M+ Americans, that's not an option for various reasons...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So now we'll have weekend "hackers" downloading this open source software, tweaking it, and hurling their cars down the road at high speed. Great.

The system also seems to have a single front facing camera. How will this detect for example a cyclist riding along the car and prevent the car from turning into him?

<comment><USER19> You seem to have pretty strong opinions without even actually taking the time to look into comma.ai and how it works.

All it takes is 5 minutes to know that it actually uses the built-in safety systems in cars like ADAS, LKAS, ACC. Hence, they only support only specific make/models. It's not just the "single front facing camera".

<comment><USER20> None of these built-in safety systems is design to work without a human driver having the actual responsibility. This is why e.g. ACC is a "comfort" system but not a "safety" system. Even systems like AEB don't come with a guarantee. They just might help.

<comment><USER19> >None of these built-in safety systems is design to work without a human driver having the actual responsibility

You are exactly right! which is why NEITHER comma.ai, Tesla's Autopilot, Nissan's Propilot, and GM Supercruise are being marketed as such i.e. only as L2/Partial Automation at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think that this being marketed as anything other than the next generation of cruise control is a lie. Don't get me wrong, for that it's absolutely great. I would pay for this kit (if my car was new enough to actually have software for it) just for the ability to be able to eat a sandwich on the way to work or cruise down the boring parts of E6 or I-10 in a more relaxed, reclined position.

I think Hotz is wrong about the predictions of self driving cars, but he doesn't have to be right to make this business succeed in the medium term because he is filling an entirely different market niche here.

<comment><USER21> Truly self driving car is incredibly hard. He's right: waymo, cruise, Uber, Tesla are over-selling it. People have died in Teslas because drivers were over confident in their technology. Uber has run over people because their software couldn't see humans in dark.

A reliable and smarter cruise control can save so many lives. I think we're trying to jump the gun sometimes.

The number of highway deaths is insane. If software just augmented humans better and saved those people/animals we're coming out ahead as a civilization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm personally very happy that homemade self-driving tech would be illegal to use on the road in my country.

<comment><USER23> How about a small startup selling that tech? Would it be legal to use?

Curious, what kind of regulations does your country have in place?

<comment><USER22> I'm in Australia.

Cars need to be registered to legally be on the road, and you couldn't register a car with some homemade self-driving tech attached to it.

If you had a small startup selling the tech, I'm sure there's some painful and lengthy process to prove it's safe. But certainly if the code is user- modifiable, it wouldn't be approved.

How do other countries operate without such regulations? Certainly I've seen some crazy car mods on the road in US TV shows that would never be allowed without masses of red tape here in Australia. Even to import a normal car from Japan to Australia you need to get child restraint attachments installed/engineer approval/etc.

I don't know how a car could possibly be considered safe otherwise. Some of those "Pimp my Ride"-type show mods just don't seem safe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sour grapes? I recall when push button elevators were installed. The union insisted an operator was still needed - who asked you 'what floor?' and then pushed that button. Without operators, western, and indeed all global civilization would come to an end...

<comment><USER25> When push-button elevators were installed, they worked. Can you imagine if the pitch had been, "sometimes this elevator will kill the odd person, thanks for helping us work out the bugs." As a bonus, the actual working elevator might not emerge until decades after installation began, and the early models only worked on alternate Wednesday's.

<comment><USER26> This might be a valid point if the current system of driving wasn't already killing millions of people per year.

<comment><USER27> "Millions" is an overstatement. Annual deaths worldwide are around 1.25 million. And deaths in the U.S. have declined significantly from their peak in the '70s.

All of that begs the question of whether autonomous cars will save lives. It is always asserted that it will "because humans are such bad drivers compared to computers," but there's no actual, real-world data to back up that claim. Oh yes, some of these vehicles have been tested with millions of road miles, but that is far from the scale of billions or trillions of road miles on every kind of road under all conditions where people travel currently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I personally do not want a smartphone with a 3D printed case and heatsink controlling my car. Do you hear that? It's the sound of a critical flaw in your product, no matter what you do technically you are never going to have a mass appeal product that becomes more than the nerds who hang out in your Slack channel.

But it's fine for a lifestyle business I suppose. You can market to them and sell them over-priced odb2 fit-bit-for-your-car dongles. Until Honda or whoever comes out with a "good enough" consumer grade "auto-pilot" (whatever that means these days because you still have to watch the car like a teenage driver), you'll loose a huge swatch of users right there who are only spending time on it to be on the cutting edge of tech and to look cool for their friends. Once it becomes a blender, those users will leave and go on to the next thing that grabs their attention in a banner ad. Or else people will get bored, loose interest after the first few joy rides with their friends. I'd imagine retention would be difficult in a business like that which takes a lot of sustained effort and engagement from the users.

The only possible path forward in this market is to partner with an OEM (car manufacture vroom vroom), have access to users, or make some kind of must-have tech that you can then con one of the real big money backed self-driving companies into buying. I've seen a bunch of web apps popping up lately that offer to annotate your training data, those seem like a lot better pump and dump tech companies than this dashcam that plays Pandora and runs some cool python PID controller.

</comment><comment><USER29> geohot has always been equal parts brains and bombast.

</comment><comment><USER30> Driver assist is a good way to get people comfortable with automated driving. The only way autonomous vehicles will ever really show any benefit is if communities, municipalities and eventually, governments start rolling them out en masse and incentivising their purchase; SDVs driving together is the only way to finally eliminate traffic related deaths and make travel smooth and fast. As long as you have computers trying to predict and/or respond to erratic human behavior, you're fighting a losing battle; it doesn't matter how many times you rehearse it you'll hit a certain plateau where the correct decisions simply can't be determined.

</comment><comment><USER31> It seems likely that autonomy will not be first adopted by the US but instead in the 'wild west' of BRICs - Brazil, Russia, India or China.

Also maybe in a country small, rich, authoritarian, and organized enough to build infrastructure around it and limit liability like Singapore or Luxembourg.

And oh look, a cheap and open source solution that gets you started in CommaAI. I think they (or a fork of them) are quite good candidates for the first system to reach one trillion miles driven. There will no doubt be carnage. But the benefits of self driving are going to be first on display outside of US markets.

</comment><comment><USER32> Isn't a key part of openpilot, the vision related code, still closed source?

</comment><comment><USER33> This guy is all talk and represents one problem with Silicon Valley. There are a lot of people now who can talk the talk and get the attention needed to get money but with no ability to deliver. Stop giving him attention until he actually shows something that matches even a little bit of what he is promising.

People who know what they're doing technically are deeply aware of the issues with their technology. Anyone in this area knows how hard it is to make these vehicles work. He is finding out the reality of what he promised two years late and is spinning it to get more attention.

<comment><USER34> You are aware we are giving away open source software that will control your car, right? It's online today! And it's on par with the best systems money can buy, Tesla Autopilot and GM Super Cruise.

[https://github.com/commaai/openpilot](https://github.com/commaai/openpilot)

No ability to deliver?

<comment><USER35> Not disputing your claim, but how did you determine the comma Ai system was on par with that of autopilot and super cruise?

In general, are there any standardized tests for self driving cars, like car safety ratings but for the driving part? Basically, is there even a way to measure how good a driving system is?

<comment><USER34> Not really. It's mostly subjective, but a good metric is time between user action needed. We did 2 hours of press demos on highways without a single one. (usually it's about an hour)

In addition to us, we have a community of users on slack with thousands of miles of experience with each system. I think most would generally agree with the quality assessment. You'll also find a bunch of YouTube videos comparing them.

<comment> magic-chicken So you test the system with human drivers for a few miles, and if none of them dies then it's secure ? You actually rely on the subjectivity of uninformed users to assess the reliabilty of a safety-critical system ?

>> Not really. It's mostly subjective.

No. The quality of a safety-critical system is not subjective.

>> I think most would generally agree with the quality assessment.

You are not qualified to make that claim, and neither are your users.

<comment><USER21> Self driving systems is in its very early days and commaai is one of the open ones i.e you can take the software and verify under the hood. commaai isn't also lying that it's a glorified cruise control.

Unlike crash safety, crash and burn, topple etc, there are no open tests or third party certifications that can verify that car model X is subjectively this safe and passes this scenarios.

The big cos are notoriously secretive and throwing a lot of marketing money to create hype.

I'm just glad that certain states have allowed such cars to be tested on the streets.

We have to start somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17522766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17522766)

<comment><USER37> Thanks. Since that submission didn't get too much attention, we've moved those comments here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Interesting tidbit: Hotz actually means thief in a few languages.

I actually don't believe this guy. He may be brilliant, but there are quite a few brilliant people working on this problem - so no.

<comment><USER39> > Interesting tidbit: Hotz actually means thief in a few languages.

You've piqued my inner language geek, but cursory Googling / Google Translate hasn't given me any luck. What language(s) would that be?

<comment><USER38> If you google it, it comes up as the first result :) :)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=hotz+thief](https://www.google.com/search?q=hotz+thief)

<comment><USER40> Your comment here comes up as the first result for me. The second and third results are other comments in this thread. None of the other results on page 1 or 2 have any relevance, so I'd say it's pretty obscure.

What languages are you referring to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Hotz always reminds me of those kids using Adderall in the TV series Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER42> Brilliant! Pure AI is a dead end street. Turing machines cannot increase their minimal Kolmogorov sufficient statistic, so will always be unable to learn more information than is put into them originally. Humans are the only known information creators, and so only hybrid human/AI systems can work in the real world.

<comment><USER43> >Humans are the only known information creators

What do you think whale-sounds and bird-songs are?

<comment><USER42> If whale-sounds and bird-songs are information, and human intelligence is the only thing that can create information, then the conclusion is whales and birds were created by some kind of intelligence.

<comment><USER43> So it is your belief that whales and birds and all other animals were created by humans?

And if so, then why would a human not be able to create an AI that is capable of creating information?

<comment><USER42> I think they were created by God. God is a meta-intelligence, an intelligent being that can create other intelligent beings. Our intelligence is only capable of creating mechanical beings, which are necessarily not intelligent.

The second question does not follow. If intelligence is defined by the ability to do something non-algorithmic (i.e. create information), then AI can never be intelligent.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bose's new beat - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/bose-behind-the-scenes/ <comment><USER2> Audiophiles rag on Bose pretty hard. It's easy to see why if you look at their product line. They have home theater systems, but all of them use tiny plastic cube speakers that trade sound quality for unobtrusiveness. They have soundbars and waveboxes. Bose 901's are arguably their "flagship" audiophile product, but these are designed to bounce additional sound off your walls to make your room sound like a concert hall. The problem is that nobody masters recordings for speakers that intentionally add reverb. These gimmick speakers are designed to wow in the showroom with the right tracks, but do you really want everything you hear to sound like it's in a concert hall?

Bose simply doesn't target audiophiles. They don't make audiophile products. However, they've carved out a niche for themselves that makes them billions every year. That niche is basically one step removed from snake-oil. Bose has somehow managed their image so that people think Bose really can cram audiophile-grade performance into precisely the kind of tiny, plastic boxes no other audio company can get halfway decent sound out of. Bose fails as hard as anyone else at that, but somehow people believe they've succeeded and line up to buy their products. Whatever Bose is doing for advertising, it's elite. This article is probably an example of what they're doing.

<comment><USER3> I do think some of their headphones are best in class - Not the greatest value for money though. Their QC line have the best noise cancelling, and if that's the most important criteria they are the ones I recommend to people. (Personally I use Sennheiser for my ANC cans as the sound is better and noise cancelling is not too far off).

Their sports in-ears are great also - I've never found any in-ear headphone that beats the MIE2 in comfort and not falling out, and the sound isn't bad either.

<comment><USER4> I have the inner ear version, and the noise canceling is ridiculously good. $300 was hard to swallow for the sound quality, but you're paying for the NC.

<comment><USER2> A good pair of canal-phones that fit properly _should_ provide enough noise isolation (on the order of 25-40 dB, depending on design) that active cancellation is unnecessary in most environments. People performing in front of heavy-duty speaker stacks often use canal-phones to be able to hear what they're doing without going deaf. The caveat is you really do need to mess around with different tips to find ones that fit and shove those suckers in deep enough to get a good seal, which a lot of people hate doing. Noise cancellation is great to have in over-ear cans but would be of very limited utility in canal-phones, assuming their isolation doesn't suck. $300 will get you a very good pair of Etymotics or Shures, which you should be able to get very good isolation with. If you can afford more, custom molded canal-phones are the gold standard.

I've heard, in many places, that Bose's noise-cancelling over-ear cans are decent though.

<comment><USER5> Having had Shures, and now Bose QC20s, there is a significant difference. The noise canceling definitely works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You're a knowledgeable lot, so I think I'll put this question out to you all.

I'm looking for a budget pair of cans, I usually spend about 20 bucks because I'm both cheap and poor. I was considering the HD202's, I usually get by with HD201's but the cords short out and fray after a year or so of everyday use.

I only have two requirements: over-ear headphones with a comically oversized cord

appreciate any recommendations in advance.

<comment><USER7> I've used my Sony MDR-7506 daily for 18 years now. They sound good. You can get new pair from Amazon for $80.

And it has you totally covered in your wish for an oversized cord.

<comment><USER8> Sony's studio headphones are seriously underrated. I suspect because they aren't marketed to the hip and trendy crowd. They actually look pretty ugly (like a 1970s reject) but they work so freaking well.

I've had mine for twenty years, no issues, no frays, and I'd replace them with other Sony studio headphones if something were to happen.

The cord is a beast. I'm not worried about it failing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This guy generally has good advice: [https://www.youtube.com/user/ZeosReviews](https://www.youtube.com/user/ZeosReviews) (But let me know if he turns into an affiliate marketing shill.)

Headphone guide: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Zeos/comments/3ttvhy/guide_headphon...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Zeos/comments/3ttvhy/guide_headphones_general_music/)

Gaming headphone guide: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Zeos/comments/3tu9gl/guide_headphon...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Zeos/comments/3tu9gl/guide_headphones_gaming/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I had QC25, $300, needs fucking piece of paper to be put into ear cup to work. Bose is a rip off. Just look into this vid - 40000 views of how and where to put piece of paper into your $300 headphones - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OYva0hOW0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OYva0hOW0Q)

<comment><USER11> The description says that he slept while wearing the headphones so I suppose damage should not be that surprising. Since when 40k YouTube videos became the gold standard for anything?

I was one of the group which said Bose are overpriced but my work has open office layout and it gets really loud. Manager agreed to expense the noise canceling headphone and I must say QC25 are great noise canceling/dampening and VERY comfortable and light. Earlier I could not keep headphones on for longer hours but I have no issues with QC. Also they work great on the planes.

<comment><USER10> I didn't did anything bad with them just used them in office. I was happy customer until they broke (after 7 month of usage)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow that suspension is amazing. If you don't have the time to watch the entire article you should at least watch the video demonstration.

I wonder why they don't integrate it into ambulances. In that application cost or weight shouldn't matter as much.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is this anything more than a puff piece for Bose? I really like the vignette of a dying old man being overjoyed by the state of their noise cancelling technology

<comment><USER14> It isn't binary. Something can both be a puff piece and be interesting. An aware reader adjusts for bias, and finds what's useful, in any kind of propaganda.

<comment><USER15> But how will adblockers draw the line?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have been using the Bose QC noise-cancelling headphones for many years. Bose has been great. They even replaced my pair for a 70% off upgrade price after being a loyal customer for only 3 or 4 years, so I could get some new features and nice cushy new soft ear muffs. They take a beating. I constantly drop them on hard floors, the travel with me all over the world constantly, and their quality has never diminished.

</comment><comment><USER17> > The idea was to invent a system that anticipated and rose above bumps in the > road. A little like riding on a magic carpet.

This became the Bose Ride seat for commercial trucks.

[http://www.boseride.com/](http://www.boseride.com/)

It has a linear actuator that is run by a computer monitoring a set of accelerometers.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am really not a fan of these kind of companies - Beats, Bose who claim to provide the best sound experience with their mumbo jumbo patented technology, sell earphones at an astonishingly high price which do not even sound good. I search for good earphones/speaker in head-fi - it's a good source of earphone reviews.

I bought MEElectronics A151[0] (1st gen) in 2012, they were at half the price of Bose earphones, and to me, sounds so much better than them. I treat them so badly - throwing them anywhere after coming back home, still going strong.

[http://www.meeaudio.com/a151p-balanced-armature-in-ear- headp...](http://www.meeaudio.com/a151p-balanced-armature-in-ear-headphone- with-inline-microphone-and-remote-2nd-generation/)

I think one should not make any compromises with earphone and eyeglasses. It was a significant purchase as I was a student then and I feel it was worth it.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is obviously a very thinly veiled marketing piece for Bose.

</comment><comment><USER20> For decades Dr. Bose held an aggressive "not invented here" bias, which they are now finally moving on from. It's great to see Bose becoming active in the startup scene in Boston, including a sponsorship of the MassChallenge accelerator. Say what you will about the marketing hype or sound quality, it is an extremely well run diversified business that goes way beyond headphones.

</comment><comment><USER21> I might read like a puff piece to some, but it was insightful nonetheless.

Thanks for sharing it!

</comment><comment><USER22> I met an engineer that worked at Bose. They had some quirky rules like "no eating in the office" not because of mess, but to get you out of your office at least once every few hours.

</comment><comment><USER23> The Bose L1 Model II is a good sound system for small bands.

</comment><comment><USER24> Bose sounds like a really nice company to work in.

<comment><USER25> I have two friends who work there who enjoy it very much. Good company culture and work/life balance, while still working on interesting products.</comment></comment>


Dear BoltBus - <AUTHOR> http://ron.gejman.com/blog/2010/12/16/dear-boltbus/

<comment><USER2> This is a nice feature request, but can we try to get out of habit of proclaiming enhancements as "trivial" without knowing anything about the architecture? We all hate it when our customers/clients/bosses do this to us, right? Let's lead by example.

</comment><comment><USER3> Being able to see delays via a mobile app might be enough to get me to try BoltBus and Megabus again.

In my experience, BoltBus and Megabus have extremely poor customer service. I've had multiple bad experiences with them and as a result I refuse to use their services any more.

Last month I waited an hour and a half in 40 degree weather for the Megabus from NYC to Philadelphia. Throughout that time, none of the staff on site had any idea of what was going on, or if they did no one told us what the problem was and when we could expect the next bus to arrive. We heard later that both buses scheduled during that time had broken down.

<comment><USER4> You can have dirt-cheap or you can have customer service. The east coast intercity bus lines are very clearly built around the former.

<comment><USER5> But you can have dirt cheap and provide information - that's really the service that people want. They don't need a massage, free food, live entertainment etc... Information can be cheap - put a transponder on all the buses and push out a kml feed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not that hard to do this and the service it provides is great. I currently live in Princeton, where they have the TigerTracker: <http://princeton.transloc.com/>

And I know that, for instance, the Swiss railways can also be tracked in real time: <http://www.swisstrains.ch/>

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been in this same situation before. Campus busses at my university do this; why can't a company that only does buses do it too? In fact, I'd even pay an extra buck to see the info. They could use GPS data plus a phone app to improve their ticketing system too. i.e. use your phone to check in when you're in front of the bus and it gets verified on their site instead of handing the driver a piece of paper and an ID.

</comment><comment><USER8> I live in Boston.

When I saw _Salt_ in the theater, there's a scene where Evelyn Salt, in disguise, rides in from DC to New York. The audience laughed when they saw her on the BoltBus.

</comment><comment><USER9> The site's down. Does anyone have a mirror?

<comment><USER2> Sorry, no mirror that I can find. Basically the author was describing his experience needing to wait outside in the cold for a late BoltBus. He didn't mind so much that the bus was late, but wished he knew how late it was going to be.

He then wrote the company saying they should install GPS tracking in the buses so a customer would know exactly when it was going to arrive and could thus seek shelter in a coffee shop until the last minute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why wouldn't they do this?

<comment><USER11> Well I'm assuming someone has probably already pitched something like this to them but as it's a budget service they do not want to add any more to their cost structure. I'm ball-parking that tech company would probably sell this to them for about $80k for the development plus a couple thousand a year in maintenance. Maybe they could add $1 to their ticket price as a premium service and if it was widely popular they could just add it into price structure (with some margin).

(side note - is this a common business concept or term, for adding premium services and then just adding that into the price later with the services included?)

Could a savvy hacker whip something like this up fairly easy? Possibly, but they would need to find this person first.</comment></comment>


Using C for a specialized data store - <AUTHOR> http://pixenomics.tumblr.com/post/18892378997/using-c-for-a-specialized-data-store

<comment><USER2> Umm, we're talking about just over 18MB here (1200 * 1000 pixels, 16 bytes/pixel, see [http://pixenomics.tumblr.com/post/16895861678/how-to- send-1-...](http://pixenomics.tumblr.com/post/16895861678/how-to- send-1-2-million-pixels)). That you can just dump over the wire as a binary blob. Why are we talking about this again? Use your favourite language, just keep it in a big blob in memory, and have fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> Memory isn't an issue. It's processing the data and turning the storage into a format the client can read. A big blob isn't easy to send to the client unless it's an image or something and then it becomes an issue when you want to manipulate the data or process it.

<comment><USER3> it's a 1000x1000 image... this is a trivial problem

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER4> What he means is: you wouldn't look for a "solution" for writing a 1 mb text file to disk, because its quite trivial and fast in any language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems to me they skipped right over the most obvious option: Redis.

It's quite fast, you can use a Redis string as a random-access array up to 512MB/each, and there are several good ways to handle persistence/backup. I don't think there was a need for them to write any C themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> We were looking at that (as well as riak) but processing the data would require pulling all the data into PHP. I guess you could do the processing in C but it's then just as easy to store it there as well.

<comment><USER6> Have you looked into the LUA scripting option for Redis? Allows for some processing to happen on the server side, and it's quite powerful.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like a good option. Thanks, will note it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using HTML as the Media Type for your API - <AUTHOR> http://codeartisan.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/using-html-as-media-type-for-your-api.html <comment><USER2> I think one of the big reasons that JSON took off is because it removed the attribute/value dilemma, e.g. should I do this:

      <color pattern="checked">blue</color>

or this:

      <color>
        <pattern>checked</pattern>
        <value>blue</value>
      </color>

or even this:

      <color value="blue" pattern="checked" />

And lots of variations. JSON simplified everything into just maps and arrays, so there's one straightforward, simple way to do it.

Using HTML for your API response re-introduces all the confusion as to what to put where, and now you've got to decide which random HTML tag to use for which element. For 99% of the cases, I see no benefit to it.

The only thing I think of is if you're returning a very large and complex data set, and you want to take advantage of jQuery/similar to use selectors to extract certain patterns of data, which could be a cool thing do to. Have to say, I've never needed that before, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> JSON wins because it's easier to manipulate JSON data directly in your language of choice because the data is already in a usable structure. If you instead receive data as HTML, you have to read that data into some native structure before you can work with it, which is too much hassle just for the minor benefit of having the data be directly presentable in a web browser.

... and by the way what if like most web designers I don't agree with the HTML layout of the data? For example I don't want list items in a bullet list, I want them in sortable table or in a combobox droplist instead. Then I have to convert the data into some readable structure so I can change it's layout, which means reading the data into a Javascript object perhaps ... gee, I wish the API just gave me JSON output in the first place.

<comment><USER4> "... which is too much hassle just for the minor benefit of having the data be directly presentable in a web browser."

The point is that this is not a minor benefit. You literally have documentation for your API built in. You don't need to write a whole set of docs listing what parameters are acceptable for which requests. You get the semantics of form handling and link-following for free. Having worked on an API that basically brings HTML form handling to raw JSON and XML (Twilio's), where we had to work hard to create documentation for what we were doing, I can tell you this is a big deal.

Incidentally, using a media type like HTML is the only way to build a true REST API. If more people understood that, we might be able to have a saner discussion around REST and its trade offs.

<comment><USER5> >Incidentally, using a media type like HTML is the only way to build a true REST API.

That would definitely be a worthwhile point to consider, if REST didn't have several completely impractical requirements that people inevitably abandon the moment they try to make their site do anything more complex than (unauthenticated) CRUD.

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree, I'm just saying that if we had discussions around REST that started with the assumption that you had to use HTML or something like it, then a lot more people would have a better idea of what REST actually is and could start to make more reasoned arguments about its costs and benefits.

<comment><USER5> Maybe so, maybe so. But I seriously doubt that that's the reason REST advocates have a hard time explaining the benefits of being unable to use authentication (and attendant sessioning) under a literal reading of "no out of band info".

I'd have to say that the major impediment in that case is that there _are_ no benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're just going to send plain HTML over the wire, why are you going to even bother thinking at the level of abstraction that most developers (well, at least me) tend to think of when "developing an API"? I'll give you that it's a loose notion, but there's another issue. If you're building a non- trivial web application, how does sending HTML as a media type help you to decouple your data from the DOM? I believe the answer is that it doesn't. You could make the argument that decoupling becomes less of a necessity when you are providing more "fine-grained" access by controlling exactly what HTML is generated from the server at each endpoint. I say it could be argued, but I wouldn't argue it.

<comment><USER7> I think it's somewhat of a benefit to make the clients expect to do a little searching to find the data/links/forms they want to use--it makes them a little more robust and adaptable (I guess because they have lowered expectations!). Contrast this to a client dependent on an XML or JSON Schema. Yeah, that client is easy to write, but you've now locked the server into not changing its format or you've doomed the client to break when the server decides to change anyway. I'm shooting for something a little better.

You can't totally decouple the clients; they have to understand in some way the vocabulary the server is using, but you can do a lot to decouple them from the _structure_ of the markup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the thing that keeps people from adopting HTML as a content type for APIs is the fact that tools don't parse HTML into native data structures. All the tools build up a DOM structure, which makes sense since that's what HTML is generally used to represent.

If we could agree to use some subset of HTML that would map to native objects in most languages, then we could build tools around that standard.

Or we could approach from the other side and just try to bolt on some hypermedia features to JSON, as projects like HAL are attempting to do. This seems to have more traction at the moment.

<comment><USER7> Yep, this is really the point. If we think hypermedia APIs give you evolvability, then we've got to figure out how to do it; we don't have libraries for that sitting around, so someone has to do some work somewhere.

HAL is going for "start with something clean for machines (JSON and XML), layer in hypermedia, get people to adopt it." This seems like a perfectly reasonable approach.

I'm suggesting another approach, which is "start with something that supports hypermedia and is already ubiquitous on the web, and figure out how to get machines to make sense of it."

I'm not sure either one is easy, so it's worth having multiple horses in the race, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you are concerned with having your API conform to HATEOAS, HTML offers some clear advantages over JSON. Namely, HTML has well defined "hypermedia affordances", or "H Factors"; plain old JSON has none:

 _H Factor_

<http://www.amundsen.com/hypermedia/hfactor/>

 _Hypermedia-Oriented Design_

<http://amundsen.com/articles/hypermedia-oriented-design/>

It's possible to develop and document a well-defined "semantic profile" for a hypermedia API that uses HTML as the base media type. For an example see:

 _ALPS - Application-Level Profile Semantics_

<http://amundsen.com/hypermedia/profiles/>

By leveraging some or all of the details of the API, machine-to-machine logic can be developed fairly easily. In his recent book _Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node_ , Mike Amundsen demonstrates an example of a "microblogging bot" that consumes an API conforming to the semantic profile detailed in the ALPS document. The bot (written in JavaScript), knowing only the semantics involved with registration and "create post" links/forms, and an entry point for the API, is able to signup and begin making posts.

The interesting thing is that the precise implementation of the API is not important, e.g. whether it's written with NodeJS or PHP or Clojure or whatever. Also, from one implementation to another, the pages served by the API could vary in terms of the layout of the pages, CSS, etc. So long as the pages conform to the semantic profile, the bot should be able to work equally well with a wide variety of implementations.

Regarding JSON, there are a number of attempts to develop hypermedia-rich media types on top of it:

 _HAL_

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kelly-json-hal-03>

 _JSON-LD_

<http://json-ld.org/>

 _Collection+JSON_

<http://www.amundsen.com/media-types/collection/>

 _Siren_

<https://github.com/kevinswiber/siren>

There are others as well.

<comment><USER7> A lot of Mike Amundsen's work you've listed here is a direct inspiration for this article. Thanks, MCA!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> FWIW, with RDF (RDFa, etc) and such, you could have machine readable and human readable API endpoints. Kind of like XSL but a decade or more newer, and possibly inclusive of it, depending on what you want to do.</comment>


Brent Simmons On switching away from Core Data - <AUTHOR> http://inessential.com/2010/02/26/on_switching_away_from_core_data

<comment><USER2> I just read this article about optimizing NetNewsWire for the iPhone in NetNewsWire for the iPhone. Definitely looking forward to seeing the performance improvements in the next release. It's great to see a developer who knows when it's the right time to tweak and how to do so.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr: When operating over a small subset of a large dataset use an ORM such as Core Data, when operating over a large subset of a large dataset use direct SQL access.

There are also couple of useful links in there.

<comment><USER4> Core Data isn't an ORM, even if EOF originally was.

<comment><USER3> I didn't realize that, but you're right:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/523482/core-data-vs- sqlit...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/523482/core-data-vs-sqlite3)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to handle a temp month of large traffic spikes and requests? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have any good articles or suggestions on how to handle a temporary spike in traffic/requests?
A friend and I, every year, run a month long contest site that's a parody of the March Madness tournament. The contest usually gets very high amounts of traffic in that month, and in the past, it tends to make the site go down quite a bit. Last year, we tried using CloudFlare (http://www.cloudflare.com), but it still seemed to go down quite a bit because people are making requests on the site (they vote). More or less, my current host just can't handle that much traffic/requests (even with the CloudFlare layer in between).
What's a good way to setup the temporary site so it has a very good up-time? Is there certain hosts? We don't make much money, so low cost is also key, as it usually is.
Any help would be amazing! <comment><USER2> With solutions like Heroku you can quickly scale your site and only be charged by the hour. Same story with a more hands of approach like EC2, although it probably will take extra work.</comment>


GrubHub stock down 40% after terrible earnings call - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/29/grubhub-down-30percent-after-a-terrible-earnings-cause-analysts-to-bail.html <comment><USER2> As a consumer, I'm not really aware of them. I know what Uber Eats and Postmates are, but not GrubHub. I may have heard of GrubHub, but I don't have a reason to use it.</comment>


Aluminum Battery Charges in 1 Minute - <AUTHOR> http://mfgtalkradio.com/aluminum-battery-charges-in-1-minute/

<comment><USER2> _Plus aluminum cells only carry 40 watts of electricity per kilogram compared to lithium's 100 to 206 W /kg power density. "Improving the cathode material could eventually increase the voltage and energy density," said Dai. "Otherwise, our battery has everything else you'd dream that a battery should have: inexpensive electrodes, good safety, high-speed charging, flexibility and long cycle life. I see this as a new battery in its early days. It's quite exciting."_

I found that almost hilarious. "Yeah, five times less energy density, but otherwise perfect and totally going to kill lithium ion."

Yawn.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if it's better suited for large scale energy storage? Cheaper materials, improved safety, and longer cycle life may be worthwhile, even at the expense of storage density, as that might be less important in a static setting like that?

Edit: Ah, they actually mention that application in the Stanford article linked elsewhere in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Better announcement/overview link:

[https://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/march/aluminum-ion- batte...](https://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/march/aluminum-ion- battery-033115.html)

Or the research paper itself (alas paywalled):

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14340.html)

<comment><USER5> HN discussion of the Stanford article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9331102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9331102)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A max 40 Wh/kg is ridiculous. For comparison, I have some Li-ions that are 260 Wh/kg. They say that the main advantage is the 7x number of charge cycles, but if your aluminum battery weighs seven times more for the same capacity you could literally carry seven equivalent Li-ion batteries (!) and just change which one you use to get 7x the charge cycles.

</comment><comment><USER7> Aluminium–air battery: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery)

Iron-air battery has some great advantages too (and disadvantages). It is used in hearing aids.

</comment><comment><USER8> "The aluminum-ion cell isn't perfect (yet) as it can only produce about 2 volts, far less than the 3.6V that lithium-ion an muster." Derp

<comment><USER9> Voltage doesn't matter at all.</comment></comment>


What good is Wall Street? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_cassidy?currentPage=all <comment><USER2> A well written, balanced article. As someone who has spent many years in the banking/investment industries on both the "buy" and "sell" sides I can say that there is no doubt in my mind that banks are an essential part of a healthy economy. I can also say without any doubt that banks have been allowed to go way too far and that it is all about the short-term rewards.

</comment><comment><USER3> The real problem is not that firms took innovated and took risks, it's that no one seems to have been held responsible. All the "failed" banks, investment houses, and businesses should have been allowed to fail. They should have been liquidated to pay their creditors and their assets allowed to be bought out by firms that acted responsibly. Instead, the irresponsible were/are bailed out, and their managers are allowed to continue operating.

The lesson is: Take risks. You will pocket profits right away and bailouts will cover any downside.

<comment><USER4> That's a nice, plausible position to take, and very popular too. Well done for saying what the people want to hear.

Now, taking a more realistic view, when Lehman collapsed, the stock market went into free-fall. The links between all those financial corporations are so thick that if one of them is allowed to fail, it threatens to bring the whole thing down.

If the governments of the world had not, with uncommon speed and purpose, stepped in and "bailed out the banks", money would, at this point, be more useful as fuel in a stove than as a bartering device.

The idea of letting failing companies fail is valid as long as they don't bring down the whole system. If you let companies grow to such a level of interconnectedness and size that they have the potential to destroy the whole world economy in a matter of months, and then you suddenly realise that they are that big and they are failing, the correct course of action is not to let them fail, but to sort out the short-term problem (i.e. bail them out) and then work on the long-term problem (cut down their size and complexity so they can once again fail without destroying everything).

Until a proper regulatory framework is in place to prevent financial companies from getting so intertwined and large that they can bring down the whole house of cards (for that's what _every_ economy is, a house of cards based upon the common trust that it's all going to work out ok), it is in fact very reasonable to suggest that a good medium-term step is to get those companies to "stop innovating", given that their incentives are such that they will inevitably bring the whole thing down if allowed.

This is a more realistic view than the "let them fail" silliness.

<comment><USER5> +1.

Paul Krugman of the NY Times wrote extensively both during the crisis and since about the correct way to handle this situation:

1\. Put the failing bank into "receivership". I.e., a "receiver" (temporary managerment) appointed by the government takes over the company and tries to salvage it.

2\. Fire the original management team. I.e., the ones that got them into this mess with their excessive risktaking. Good. They should suffer the consequences of their bad management decisions. That's capitalism.

3\. Take on whatever additional debt or equity financing is necessary to turn the company around - without paying any regard to the positions or desires of the current stockholders. The current stockholders' positions' will likely get diluted to nearly worthless. Good. They should suffer the consequences of their bad investing decisions. That's capitalism.

4\. After the company is turned around, take it out from under government receivership, hire a new management, and (if needed/appropriate) launch it public again via an IPO.

There's a long, established history for handling failed banks this way (read up on the S&L Crisis), and it's the proper way to keep an institution alive and out of bankruptcy, without rewarding the management and stockholders who brought it to bankruptcy in the first place.

Krugman often pointed out, though, that the Obama administration was too scared to go this route - perhaps because they were worried about the absurd accusations of "socialism" that the Psychotic Right would undoubtably have started screaming about.

So instead, they chose to reward the management and shareholders that caused the problem, by using government money to help prop up the value in their worthless company. Moral hazard indeed! Privatize all the profits, but give all the losses to the public. And socialism is the evil here?!?!?!?

<comment><USER6> Your comment loses value through the unmitigated bias showing through. You had me until 'Psychotic Right' as though viewing the problems through a left/right filter is the explanation.

The fact is we'll never know what would have happened if large companies were allowed to fail, because they weren't. It might have been worse, it might have been better. For sure it would have been worse in the short term, but these issues should be measured over the medium to long term. One of the messages that has been sent out with the current handling is that there is a Fed put on any high risk adventure, and that's not good.

Personally I think that there is something to be said for the 'bandaid' approach. Not sticking something over the top to cover the problems, but a short sharp shock of pulling it off and let the problems be.

The problem with the bailouts is that they cover over the fact that some companies were allowed to fail. Lehman, for one. And the world didn't stop turning. Sure, this caused liquidity problems and risk premiums to escalate dramatically, to the detriment of employment and the real economy. But it's foolish to pretend that this isn't going to happen anyway. The problem with Krugman and others is that they believe a lack of demand is the problem. They view the problem through this prism, and as such they come up with solutions that match their world view.

Others (including me) say that perhaps the problem is excessive debt. And until that excessive debt is eliminated from the system, productive companies are unable to make use of the resources tied up in the unproductive ones currently taking shelter with public money. You say the institutions should be kept alive, I say that they should be destroyed and the buildings and staff and infrastructure released to new institutions who can find a way to be competitive.

I believe you shouldn't look at the problem in terms of a company or bank failing. That's just the symptom. Once the debt had built up excessively, it was only a matter of time and method for the companies to fail. The problem was watering down of regulation that had stood the test of time for 70 years, and regulators becoming toothless. So far, this hasn't been fixed.

This is a not a left/right blue/red debate. It is a debate as to the level that central governments should take in directing and manipulating markets. Neither 'side' is debating this. Nobody will try and defend central planning and a command economy, because it is comprehensively proven as a failed model, yet we seem to be reversing backwards into this situation on the say-so of a bunch of people who couldn't see the problems headed their way. They don't seem to realise that controlling the fundamentals of money (supply and price) causes wrong investment choices through inappropriate price signalling. And then they try and correct those choices by further fiddling with central control instead of letting the chips fall where they will fall. Because they're going to do this eventually - no amount of bailing out will fix a fundamentally out-of-date business model.

<comment><USER4> Lehman was indeed allowed to fail, and the crisis that its failure caused was sufficient to ensure that no government would be stupid enough to try that experiment another time. Of course, this is all theorising, but the general thinking in financial circles is that the government had to step in with monster bailouts to restore confidence precisely because Lehman was allowed to fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wall Street organizations, in their present form, are functionally bankrupt. Having been bailed out, the clearing of bad debt never happened. This effectively trapped a large amount of capital in their vaults. In addition, the government is doing everything possible to funnel more productive resources into these black holes.

The real systemic risk was in throwing good resources after the bad. The "contagion" was other governments being spurred to do the same.

</comment><comment><USER8> Some of this article is well written however the attacks on innovations such as ABS an CDOs is tacky, yes they haven't done well, but that's the nature of innovation. You're always going to have some innovations that do well and other that do badly, the only way you'll find out is through execution. They were both designed to solve practical problems in liquidity and price discovery.

Picking through individual failures and saying the whole system is bad on that basis is like saying startups are worthless because WebVan failed.

<comment><USER9> I think the point is that they actually don't solve any practical problems in liquidity or price discovery.

Does anyone on earth care about the price of lumber within even a 24 hour window? Why should we care about a sub second window? We don't. Wall Street refers to the high frequency game as "taking the dumb money". I call it "ripping off the value investors who actually serve a role in the economy".

Finance serves an important function in the economy, routing money to where it's needed. Are they doing a better job of that now than they were in 1985? Not really. So why are they extracting 10X the money in bonuses and profits?

<comment><USER10> _Wall Street refers to the high frequency game as "taking the dumb money"._

This is a rather strange thing for them to say, since it's usually the smart money types complaining about HFT.

It used to be that mutual/pension funds and other institutional investors could hide their big trades in noise - the market would adjust slowly, and other people (retail investors, smaller shops, assorted other suckers) would absorb the price impact of the trades. Now they are complaining they can't do this anymore.

[http://www.advancedtrading.com/exchanges/showArticle.jhtml?a...](http://www.advancedtrading.com/exchanges/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219401479)

(The authors of this article work for a "rent our 'screw the retail guys' algorithm" outfit.)

Basically, assorted HFT shops catch them in the act, trade ahead of them, and split the profits with the former "suckers" [1].

[1] Crossing the spread means that the passive investors in the market are making a premium.

[1] See also this article: [http://www.zerohedge.com/article/pipeline- executives-confirm...](http://www.zerohedge.com/article/pipeline-executives- confirm-abusive-hft-practices-including-potential-front-running)

<comment><USER9> Well, you know a lot more about HFT than I do, I just know that I've heard several people refer to their trading practices as taking the dumb money, including a one-guy algo shop that sounded similar to how you've described your work.

At the end of the day though, I'm still stuck on my 1985 story -- compensation, profits, bonuses, etc have skyrocketed since then. But what good have all the newfangled instruments done for the rest of the economy? Doesn't seem like much. So is it just rent-seeking?

EDIT: RE: hiding the big trades in noise. What's wrong with that? Why should they have to develop a special HFT algorithm in order to simply move shares around without getting their lunch eaten? This is exactly the kind of value extraction I'm talking about. HFT shops have now created a huge expense for these retail shops that didn't exist before.. are the financial markets functioning better as a result? No, they're just sucking more money out as transaction costs.

<comment><USER10> Comp/bonuses went up for some. It went to zero for many others. In 1985, banks had armies of line workers processing trades, managed by officers making decent money. The average comp at a bank might be the average of 1 officer and 100-500 low level line workers. It would be better than other office jobs, but not great.

In 2010, the officer specs out business requirements after talking to traders and regulators, sends the high level work to IT and the CRUD apps to Bangalore. 475 of the 500 line workers have been replaced by a data center in Nutley, NJ, 5 remain in the US handling cash wires and other time-zone sensitive work, and 20 work via email out of an office park in Pune.

For obvious reasons, the average comp of 1 officer + 3 IT guys + 5 US line workers is going to be far higher than the average comp of 500 grunts + 1 officer.

Additionally, for many reasons (IT being one of the biggest ones), it's also vastly easier today to strike out on your own than ever before. In 1985, if you wanted to quit and start a hedge fund, it was tough. Today, a hedge fund can be operated by 3-4 guys + servers. Banks are forced to pay their traders enough money to prevent them from quitting and doing exactly this.

(Remind you of another high comp industry, with established players giving out big comp packages to retain talent?)

Edit (in response to your edit): _RE: hiding the big trades in noise. What's wrong with that? Why should they have to develop a special HFT algorithm in order to simply move shares around without getting their lunch eaten? This is exactly the kind of value extraction I'm talking about. HFT shops have now created a huge expense for these retail shops that didn't exist before.._

When you make a large trade, there will be a price impact. This is unavoidable - if you are selling millions of shares, supply went up, and price must drop.

In 1985, institutional investors (not retail investors) tried to make sure that _other people_ (their counterparties) suffered the price impact. They would sell shares at full price, retail investors (i.e., my Mom) would buy from them, and then shares would go down once the market figured out supply dramatically increased.

In 2010, some HFT shops will sell to my Mom at a favorable price, and then buy from the institutional investor after prices go down. This benefits the HFT shop and retail investors at the expense of the institutional investor. I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm saying it benefits "dumb money" (little guys who can't afford to rent an algorithm) at the expense of "smart money" (Goldman, Vanguard, Calpers Pension Fund).

[edit2: just a disclaimer - specific numbers/cities should not be taken as precise. The data center might be in Jersey City or Brooklyn, Pune might be Cebu or even Baltimore, and there might have been 250 or 1000 line workers rather than 500.]

<comment><USER9> This is an awesome convo BTW, thanks for providing all the detail about the industry.

Regarding our high comp industry vs theirs.. we've reinvented the world at least twice since 1985, and like I said, I haven't seen a reinvention of finance in any positive way. If they're that much more efficient now (and I agree that they are along the lines you're saying), where are the savings for the rest of the economy? I'm all about the TD Ameritrades of the world where I can do an $8 trade, that's providing value and they deserve every penny they earn. But it seems like most of the hedge funds are just playing games to extract money from less sophisticated investors.

Regarding your average comp comparison -- that's fine, I'm all about profiting from efficienbut what about the aggregate comp? Is that higher, too?

<comment><USER10> _Regarding our high comp industry vs theirs.. we've reinvented the world at least twice since 1985, and like I said, I haven't seen a reinvention of finance in any positive way._

In almost every financial service that existed in 1985, margins have been cut to the bone (the main exceptions being M&A and IPO services). The commission on stock trades is now $0-8, it used to be $150, as you note.

When businesses need futures/options (mainly for hedging purposes), they often just buy them on the open market rather than contacting a GS/MS/JPM rep and paying through the nose for the privilege.

Regarding hedge funds/private equity, Warren Buffet and others have commented that there are very few hidden gems left, particularly gems detectable by financial/technical analysis. I.e., good businesses are getting more investment.

 _Regarding your average comp comparison -- that's fine, I'm all about profiting from efficienbut what about the aggregate comp? Is that higher, too?_

It's a good question. Top traders get more, but they also tend to earn more. Good IT is certainly vastly cheaper than armies of line workers, and HFT is cheaper than human market makers. More financial services are provided today - my understanding is that credit cards were hardly pervasive in 1985, and no one would cell you a phone on quasi-credit like they do today.

I have absolutely no idea and I'd be very skeptical of anyone who claims to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ... At Goldman, it has been reported, nearly a thousand employees received bonuses of at least a million dollars in 2009. Not surprisingly, Wall Street has become the preferred destination for the bright young people who used to want to start up their own companies, work for NASA, or join the Peace Corps. At Harvard this spring, about a third of the seniors with secure jobs were heading to work in finance. Ben Friedman, a professor of economics at Harvard, recently wrote an article lamenting "the direction of such a large fraction of our most-skilled, best-educated, and most highly motivated young citizens to the financial sector."

Read more [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_cassidy#ixzz1612hb0Zy)

\- The unintended consequences of the Federal Reserve system of monetary distortion.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's gotten Michael Douglas at least 2 paying gigs.

</comment><comment><USER13> Well, the Ferengi make regular pilgrimages to Earth's Wall Street, to them it's a holy site of commerce. That probably brings in a lot of tourism money.

<comment><USER14> Sources?

<comment><USER7> <http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Wall_Street>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Didn't really read it all the way through, but for some reason, it is only me that finds it weird that the publish date is November 29, 2010? Is this an error or intentional?

<comment><USER16> Magazines (like the New Yorker) are usually dated a bit into the future, so that they look fresh on the news stands. At my local magazine shop, almost of the monthly magazines are already on their December issues, and some of them have been out for a week or two.

Have you really never noticed this before?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What good is Google? or OkCupid? or any matching service?

For those who have nothing to seek, these services are indeed an environmental scourge. ;)</comment>


Web App Autopsy - <AUTHOR> http://particletree.com/features/web-app-autopsy/ <comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why they call it an Autopsy. That suggests that something is dead...

<comment><USER2> Unless you're on Heroes or House...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This was one of (at least!) 2 good talks on web apps at SXSW, both of which have online sources I've put previously on ycnews:

\- <http://www.carsonified.com/sxsw.pdf> \- <http://particletree.com/sxsw/autopsy.zip></comment>