Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5B by FTC Over Privacy Issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/facebook-ftc-fine-earnings.html <comment><USER2> Seems like they should add another 0 to the fine after the recent hat trick:

1) Prompting users to give Facebook their email passwords.[0]

2) Using that email access to "inadvertently" upload the information of their email contacts.[1]

3) Storing said passwords and others in plaintext. [2]

It's pretty impressive that a company could do something so brazenly malevolent and be confident that they will escape with no more than a fine.

[0] [https://www.thedailybeast.com/beyond-sketchy-facebook- demand...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/beyond-sketchy-facebook-demanding- some-new-users-email-passwords)

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/18/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/18/facebook- uploaded-email-contacts-of-15m-users-without-consent)

[2] [https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored- hundreds...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds-of- millions-of-user-passwords-in-plain-text-for-years/)

<comment><USER3> I'm ashamed to say that up until now, when I saw Facebook (or similar) acting evil I thought about the quote, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

Well, fuck that and fuck me, those people are not idiots, they're criminals.

<comment><USER4> Not to contradict your overall sentiment, but people often focus on intention with these issues. I think that's wrong.

Like, if someone treads dog poo into my house on their shoes, it doesn't really matter if they did it by mistake, or spent ages walking around town trying to find some dog poo to step in before coming to my house; the effect is that there is now dog poo on my carpet.

We need to be more dispassionate when discussing these issues because otherwise threads like this descend into analysis of whether Zuckerberg/Bezos/whoever is a moral person. Which is a)probably unknowable and b)besides the point.

There is a problem here with a very big company that has more power than it knows how to handle, which can probably only be mitigated by breaking it up. That's all there is to it, really.

[edit] Just as an addendum, that's not to say that if the company has done something illegal, the people responsible shouldn't be prosecuted- they should.

<comment><USER5> There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship and/or seek criminal prosection.

Likewise for big companies. If a company is acting badly, you need to figure out if it was intentional. In both cases you seek damages, but your approach to making sure it never happens again will be very different.

<comment><USER4> > There definitely is a difference between someone accidentally tracking dog > poo into your house vs someone doing it intentionally; in the first case, > you all them to clean it up, and in the second case you break the friendship > and/or seek criminal prosection.

But the point is that this assumes you're able to tell the difference between the two cases- intent is often a really hard thing to prove. And often discussions about whether Facebook acted in good faith when it did certain things neglect the fact that they made a big mess everywhere, that needs sorting out regardless of their intent.

<comment><USER6> > hard thing to prove

It is and yet the legal system is busy with these sorts of proves all the time. e.g. if you have a professional insurance and caused some damage by mistake - that's covered, if you cause damage deliberately - it's not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Every insider I've spoken to said any FTC fine on Facebook under $10 billion > would be seen as a massive win, showing firm won't face serious consequences > for privacy violations. Wall St. seems to agree in response to news of > $3-$5b settlement [$FB up 4% after hours]

[https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1121148735818358784](https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1121148735818358784)

<comment><USER8> In other words, market rewards Facebook for being fined only $5 billion by increasing their market cap $20 billion. Unreal.

<comment><USER9> as it so turns out, you can't rely on capitalism to even have any morality, much less enforce one

<comment><USER10> Eh, a capitalist system is going to reflect the moral framework of the participants. The participant here is the stock market, and its moral framework is based on economic growth and profit for shareholders. In that regard this was a good outcome and, as a result, is rewarded.

<comment><USER11> Which means it has no morality no matter how you try to twist it.

<comment><USER10> Sure, no intrinsic morality...more of a passthrough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Before this thread becomes a Facebook bashing session, please keep in mind that Equifax leaked all your SSN data along with names and addresses and got away with no fines.

<comment><USER13> Can someone explain how Facebook gets a fine but Equifax doesn't? I don't understand how? Or has Equifax not been fined yet?

<comment><USER14> Facebook is a popular target right now and the subject is politically charged. That's it.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't seem great that fines are determined based on how hot/not some firm is politically. I'm pretty sure someone can make a list of 100 companies that deserve more fines than Facebook.

<comment><USER16> And all the connected criminals that got away ought to be punished first, I'm sure a judge will agree with the wisdom of this argument and let you go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems beside the "the bug bounty is far less than it would have sold for in the dark market" another meme has taken hold of HN. No matter how significant the fine is, there always be people clamoring how trivial it is compared to their revenues. It could have been $10B and you would hear the same thing. The only fine, then, worth slapping is one that bankrupts the entire company.

Facebook made ~$7B net income in 2018. Am I supposed to believe that $5B fine isn't going to affect them at all?

<comment><USER18> Facebook earned about $172 billion since 2013. Do you think facebook would have earned $167 billion while behaving legally?

What about ethically?

How much do you think Facebook would have earned if it acted responsibly?

Once you add punitive damages, I don't understand how you could possibly think $5 billion is anything less than an order of magnitude off.

<comment><USER19> This fine is not for everything unethical Facebook ever did. This fine is for Facebook giving data to Cambridge Analytica. I don't think Facebook got paid for that at all. When trying to google around for what people paid CA for the use of the data, I found numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

So in fact, Facebook is paying billions because they made a bad decision when choosing to grant access to data for research. That's a lot of money. I think if you'd asked what a likely fine was when the story broke, people would have guessed a few million dollars.

<comment><USER20> > Facebook is paying billions because they made a bad decision when choosing > to grant access to data for research

For clarity, Facebook didn't "choose to grant access to data" specifically to Cambridge Analytica. It used to be the case that Facebook's API would let the client app see all the information a FB user could see once they authorized it, including information about their friends. That's what CA exploited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Finding the right fine for actions like this is hard.

On one hand, we (as a society) want it to hurt, to cause the company real pain. On the other hand, we don't want to actually destroy the company. This leads to a "cost of doing business" problem, where evil practices become a preferred path for management, if evil is sufficiently profitable.

The underlying problem is that corporations are NOT people, whatever the law says, and the corporation itself has no inherent ethics or morality. The fire doesn't choose to burn the forest, it just does.

edit: I suppose the problem in part is society. We see a beauty and symmetry in capitalism, so we assume beautiful == good, a philosophical failing going all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Just because it's beautiful and useful doesn't mean it's "good" in a moral sense.

<comment><USER22> The size of the forest fire matters. Facebook is probably the first company in history that can cause planet wide forest fires at scale and speed never possible before.

That said I think they finally get that, after a long period of total denial. Not because of the fines and regulatory action which have come too late, but just from all the unintended unignorable consequences that have pilled up.

<comment><USER21> Yeah. The loss of long-term customers over privacy issues, addiction issues, and general creepiness is probably a greater concern to them than a fine.

I quit using Facebook because I realized it's actively unhealthy for me, and I've been "healing" since. They don't want the dribble of middle class tech nerds leaving the platform to become a flood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yet the stock is up almost 10% in after hours trading... the fine is not nearly enough to discourage criminal wrongdoing.

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/fb?ltr=1](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/fb?ltr=1)

<comment><USER24> It's almost as if the company reported earnings that beat expectations...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "The Silicon Valley company and the F.T.C.'s consumer protection and enforcement staff have been in negotiations for months over a financial penalty"

Honest question: What gets negotiated in this kind of settlement? What leverage does Facebook have in this situation to say, "no, that fine is too high"?

<comment><USER26> I'd assume it would look something like:

"No, that fine is too high. We'll settle this in court(s) since we think we can do better."

Now the FTC is facing a potentially big delay and a risk of no fine if the courts eventually hand Facebook a favorable decision.

<comment><USER27> > Now the FTC is facing a potentially big delay and a risk of no fine

The risk is much higher than that. There's a risk that a court rejects the entire justification for the fine greatly reducing both the ftc's ability to impose future fines and their power in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If Facebook is being charged this much for their (pretty serious) privacy issues, Equifax deserves to be shut down and have their lead executives face jail time.

I'm not defending Facebook, but I feel like whenever a huge financial instiitution does something, they're treated as a protected class, but other companies get hit pretty hard (justifiably)

</comment><comment><USER29> I feel like we need something better than fines. It really seems like fines are just becoming part of the cost of business to people with sufficient amounts of money.

That could also just be the angry techno-cynic in me though.

</comment><comment><USER30> Can someone explain what happens to the money when a big company pays a government agency this much? Does it go into the federal budget? or does the ftc use it for its own purposes?

<comment><USER31> For US gov't, the Federal Treasury. Victims may also be compensated.

[https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/When- govern...](https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/When-government- fines-companies-who-gets-cash-3189724.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Good. They're a scummy company offering a scummy service to a society of self- absorbed users eager to buy the b.s. others are selling or vice versa. Commoditizing people like Silicon Valley companies have done is criminal nearly everywhere but the USA.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is pocket change for them. Reminds me of how they fine oil companies $50,000 and another $450,000 for violations. When they are making billions off of violating user privacy and will continue to keep using that user data for future business, this fine is nothing to them. It's like I manipulatively steal $10 from a million people and only lose a few bucks. They still profited.

<comment><USER34> $5,000,000,000 reminds you of $50,000? A fine of 1% of Facebook's value seems a bit more than pocket change.

<comment><USER35> What? FB's value naturally changes by more that 1% on quite a lot of days each year, without this fine.

Put it another way: if you took all of the daily market cap changes of FB's stock, but added -1% to one of them, could you pick out which one it was?

<comment><USER34> How does that make it not matter? My savings in the stock market do the same thing, but if I got a fine/bill that was 1% of my net worth, it would still be a huge deal.

<comment><USER35> If your net worth changes often randomly covered the fine amount, it is very different from if you were say a pensioner on a fixed income.

Having had days where NW changed by entire year's salaries, I can say it makes a huge difference to how you see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's interesting to consider the psychological aspect here. By publicly saying they expect a fine in the range $3-5 billion, Facebook increases the chance that the regulators ultimately decide on a figure in that range or close to it. This is an example of 'anchoring effect' : [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring)

Given this effect, Facebook has an incentive to 'low-ball' their estimate.

</comment><comment><USER37> > Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 93% of advertising > revenue for the first quarter of 2019, up from approximately 91% of > advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2018.

holy shit

</comment><comment><USER38> .....and $FB is up 6% in after-hours trading

</comment><comment><USER39> Everybody was doing it... Yelp, Linkedin, Facebook, and a few other big network that are no more: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/please-give-us-your- email-pass...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/please-give-us-your-email- password/)

</comment><comment><USER40> You read the headlines all the time about the EU fining whatever tech company some insane amount. I'm curious, though, if Google, Facebook, etc. actually pay the amount. I would expect them to fight these judgement tooth and nail, and do everything they can to avoid complying.

</comment><comment><USER41> Since the fine hasn't been decided by the FTC yet, I am not sure I see the point of declaring a number?

For instance, if the FTC was going to be happy with say a $4bn fine, this tells them that FB is happy to pay $5bn.

The only reason I can think of is that FB is quite sure the fine wouldn't be less than $5bn (maybe FB is asking for significantly higher), and they are trying to price-anchor it. Maybe this is a way of telling FTC that FB will accept something close to $5bn without any lawsuits or other appeals, don't try to negotiate more?

</comment><comment><USER42> This would be awesome if it applied to security breaches as well. Not sure how you would fine OPM, but there are a ton of consumer companies that have leaked data like a sieve.

</comment><comment><USER43> Facebook was evil because it was a "walled garden". And after Cambridge Analytica it's evil because "it wasn't a walled garden."

</comment><comment><USER44> They should take that $5 billion and use it to fund an alternative to Facebook.

(and one that is smart as to how to approach it, given Facebook's network monopoly. I.e. it should allow you to "use Facebook" in the same way I "use Yahoo mail" when I communicate with a Yahoo mail user from my Gmail account)

<comment><USER45> I want a government run Facebook as much as I want a Facebook run Facebook.

<comment><USER44> I didn't say a government run Facebook.

You're using an internet that came from government funding, btw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Great news! Now that investors know how much the bank robbers have to return as a form of punishment, they are on their way to the next bank. Stock is up breaking $200 after hours, and we will see you all +40% up in few years at the next "punishment pit stop".

</comment><comment><USER47> Why doesn't Zuck just quit? He's so rich. I would have fucked off and retired so long ago.

<comment><USER48> I would guess because he truly cares about making the world more open and connected and issn't in it for the money.

He also pledged to donate all his wealth along with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet

<comment><USER49> >> Why doesn't Zuck just quit? He's so rich. I would have fucked off and retired so long ago.

> I would guess because he truly cares about making the world more open and > connected and issn't in it for the money.

It's more likely that he just likes being powerful and in charge of something big. If he just "fucked off and retired" the power he'd wield would be much less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Still waiting for the day where social network is not based on identity, but based on real, useful content.

More than that, treat email just like password. That means, force users to change email regularly so that it's not leaked.

We need a better email system.

</comment><comment><USER51> As a Facebook ads consumer I'm disappointed that Facebook sucks so much when it comes to security. I pay lots of money to build a community on my pages I don't want my real estate to lose value because they are negligent

</comment><comment><USER52> This bump in the road aside, it's another $blowout$ quarter. Pretty impressive.

</comment><comment><USER53> The diffusion of responsibility here is pretty galling. It's not Facebook it's employees at Facebook. Facebook is people not a person. If nobody steps up then the leaders need to take responsibility.

</comment><comment><USER54> Where exactly does that $ go?

</comment><comment><USER55> To put the fine in context: Facebook reported $2.4B net profit for 1Q19, including a $3B Provision for legal expenses related to the FTC inquiry.

This is a material but hardly back-breaking fine.

</comment><comment><USER56> Will the money go to some government black hole? Seems like a waste of resources. How about requiring Facebook to offer better services or open source more tech.

<comment><USER57> Let's just say someone is building a wall

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Without new laws affecting the rest of us? Sounds good. More bad-company enforcement is better than more internet legislation on these issues at this time.

</comment><comment><USER59> You can find FB all day and it probably won't change a thing, but what if execs could be held personally liable for said transgressions?

</comment><comment><USER60> [https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/key- statistics?p=FB](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/key-statistics?p=FB) $55 Billion in revenue and EBITDA 29.23B and they get a $5 Billion fine for doing a lot of scummy, but profitable stuff.

The best part for FB? Two years from now FB will say to FTC, "you already fined us once...the largest fine ever blah blah blah"

<comment><USER61> How is that good? Next time they will fine them more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> They can really do whatever they want and get away with it. I can't say I'm surprised.

</comment><comment><USER63> Extremely non-deterrent.

</comment><comment><USER64> Too big to fine.

</comment><comment><USER65> Curious to where these fines go exactly?

</comment><comment><USER66> shut'em down. only fix that will actually fix the core problem.

</comment><comment><USER67> I did read this as $58 for several seconds, making 5B a suboptimal abbreviation

</comment><comment><USER68> not enough

</comment><comment><USER69> Isn't that just like 1 month's worth of revenue? That amounts to absolutely nothing in today's world, not even an incentive to reduce the bad behavior.

Jail time for lawbreaking executives _needs to happen_. The financial penalties do not dissuade bad behavior or act as a deterrent, so the same crimes will continue to be committed.

Are there any peer-reviewed studies looking at deterrence of financial/tech/privacy crimes in the modern era? I would expect that in _every case_ the penalty is lower than the profit, making it a continued incentive to break the law.

The only thing these people value truly is their time on this Earth to be free and breathe fresh air. If they risk jail time when breaking these laws, I think we would see a reduction in intentional _and repeated_ lawbreaking by large corporations.

<comment><USER70> 1 month of revenue is how many months of profit?

<comment><USER71> That misses the point: it's effectively a (cheap) speeding ticket for bad behavior over the life of the company. It would be a bargain at twice the price from their point of view.

<comment><USER72> 1 month of pay is a lot more than a speeding ticket.

<comment><USER73> Finland, Switzerland, and the UK are the first three places that pop into my mind where speeding tickets are calculated based on the income of the offender.

You'd have to be caught going _way_ above the limit to be fined above 1 month of pay, but it's possible.

<comment><USER19> I think if you were talking about such a large speeding ticket, you wouldn't use a speeding ticket as a metaphor for a small fine...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> And they'll shrug at $5b ...

A fine is not enough in this situation ...

</comment><comment><USER75> Get off Facebook. That's the only message Zuckerberg & Co will understand.</comment>


Amazon has won the Android tablet war – Kindle Fire has 54% of U.S. market share - <AUTHOR> http://androinica.com/2012/04/whats-the-most-popular-android-tablet-the-amazon-kindle-fire/

<comment><USER2> Surprised NOOK doesn't show up on that chart at all. I thought their sales were strong enough to be in the top several.</comment>


A Massive Leak of Nintendo Source Code Is Causing Chaos in Video Games - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kp7bx/a-massive-leak-of-nintendo-source-code-is-causing-chaos-in-video-games <comment><USER2> I'm a game developer, but i would consider myself "cautiously pro-gigaleak."

IMO, after a game has finished its natural sales cycle, there should be a way to preserve all of the work that went into bringing it to life. So much gets left on the cutting room floor, and then becomes forgotten without residual physical or digital documentation of what was done.

</comment><comment><USER3> As an old gamer, I would love to have next game consoles to include an emulator for every previous generation. Being able to play with my whole (past) library.

Dreamcast, super famicom, neo geo, etc had amazing games, hope they will not be forgotten because of copyright protection...

<comment><USER4> I like what Microsoft has been doing so far and I suspect it's worked out well for them. I bought the Xbone primarily because I would be able to play all the 360 games that I already had.

Of course, I didn't bother doing so in practice, and it turned out that the ps4 had many more games that I actually wanted to play. But the strategy worked!

Conversely, with Nintendo there are a number of classics that I've paid for at least three times.

Shit, in the case of Yoshi's Island, IMO one of the best platformers ever, it's four (or maybe more like 3.5 times): the original for SNES, the GBA version (with gimped effects!), the WiiU virtual console version, the SNES classic version, and now the 'Nintendo online' version.

That said, the fact that Nintendo can get it away with this without making me really hate them on any level, in the end, speaks highly of the amount of brand loyalty I've developed at this point.</comment></comment>


Michael Lewis hits back - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/04/11/michael_lewis_hits_back_at_critics_this_time_i_punched_wall_street_in_the_balls/ <comment><USER3> >> "What is true," says Lewis, "is that the sums of money involved — if you spread it across the market — are trivial, it's a penny a trade. But it's offensive as hell that rich people are stealing from middle-class people — even if it's just a penny. There's also the issue of what HFT does to the stability of the marketplace as a whole. And then there's the question of the whole screwed-up model it creates for success in life, when the guys who get rich do so by skimming on the market, so all of a sudden the young people at the best schools want to go skimming in the market — like that's a noble career path."

>> "I don't understand that argument. The little guy is the big guy. The little guy is not the day trader on eTrade; it's all the money packed up in pension funds and college endowment funds and mutual funds. The savings of the country is in big institutions."

Michael Lewis seems like a solid guy and I love how there's endless attempts to portray him as a sinister, self-interested actor.

<comment><USER4> Lewis may be a solid guy -- I don't know him, so I can't say.

I can say with a great deal of certainty that he hasn't read, or doesn't understand, any of the contemporary literature on market quality. If he did, he'd know that the efficient realization of market impact (you buy and the price goes up) is a property of effective markets. In the absence of actors to ensure this process of price discovery, all traders will pay unfair prices as small changes in supply and demand remain undigested.

I would also suggest that "young people at the best schools want to go skimming in the market" is reductio ad absurdum at best and ad hominem at worst, which sours my opinion of his ability to make a cogent argument without resorting to the Wall-Street-bogeyman trope. Then again, I suppose that's his job as a writer -- a story about the meek Canadian David battling the establishment equities market Goliath makes for a better read than a nuanced look at the role of various players in a complex ecosystem.

(Throwaway because my views are not necessarily those of my employer.)

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I understand your argument. Arbitrageurs help with price- discovery and are useful agents, though much maligned. HFT, as Lewis describes it, is not arbitrage, it's front-running. This doesn't add to market quality, it's just information theft.

<comment><USER6> HFTs are making price impact happen faster than big players can stop it. That's improving efficiency. That's exactly what Lewis is complaining about.

It's not front running since the HFT is not your agent.

[http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/fervent_defense_of_fr...](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/fervent_defense_of_frontrunning_hfts.html)

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure i follow the argument that introduction of information by a middleman is adding to market efficiency. Your note expressly suggests liquidity be be witheld...when trading with people who have information.

 _As a result, market makers try to focus on providing liquidity to people with consumption preference while avoiding (or charging higher prics to) the informed._

Only to usurp the information to benefit the market maker (or other intermediary party...fronting or not) at the expense of the person introducing information. Or, are you trying to say that person is actually 'witholding' information and by 'appropriating' it, you are then responsible for 'introducing' it?

<comment><USER6> Big players are hiding info about their trades and changes to the demand curve, at least until after their trade finishes. Predatory traders are revealing this info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So if the one particular strategy Lewis describes in his book -- inter- exchange arbitrage that inadvertendly beats someone's split up order -- was stopped/prevented, is that the end of it? There are many, many strategies across a million different products that HFTs run that have nothing to do with trying to "front-run" someone's order, many of them market making a product that only trade on one exchange (so no inter-exchange arbitrage to front run anyone) on products that trade an order of magnitude more dollar volume than US equities, e.g. E-mini S&P futures, US or german bond futures complex, etc. Are _all_ HFT strategies bad, or does Michael Lewis have a hard on for this single, particular strategy? My guess is that the overwhelming majority of profits of any HFT firm do not have anything to do with the particular strategy described in his book.

<comment><USER9> Well,

One could argue that giving someone latency for money is an inherent disservice to every other investor - whatever strategy you are following, you're getting opportunities before everyone else. One approach would be to have exactly one kind of connection to an exchange with a fixed delay level that everyone has to live with. Another approach is to have a small on every kind of transaction (Edit: other claim HFT pay a small fee and I am no expert but it's clear one could decrease HFT by raising transaction fees).

<comment><USER10> IEX does neither. They introduce artificial ~350 microsecond delays on their orders, among other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone read the criticism of the book in question? The Amazon review linked to in the article is very informative. I just finished the book and it read like an advertisement for IEX.

[http://www.amazon.com/review/R3PJO6KJGRMWUE/ref%3Dcm_cr_pr_v...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R3PJO6KJGRMWUE/ref%3Dcm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R3PJO6KJGRMWUE)

<comment><USER6> The review is fantastic. From a quick skim it is spot on in every point - <USER2> can detect far fewer factual errors in the review than in the hype about Lewis's book.

<comment><USER12> Out of curiosity, since you're a strong defender of HFT here, have you read Lewis' book yet? You mention the hype, but I've found the hype and the substance of the book to be quite different. A lot of the hype on both sides seems to start and end around the first few chapters (one of which was excerpted publicly) and the "60 Minutes" piece.

When I finally finished the book, I didn't get the sense that his target was HFT alone. He heaps plenty of criticism on the bankers, the dark pools, the brokers selling order flow of their customers, the SEC's revolving door and apathy, and (implicitly, with exercise left to the reader) the conflicts of interest of the people selling the SEC the systems (MIDAS) that purport to keep the market fair.

It's the defensiveness of the HFTs and exchanges (like Direct Edge's O'Brien) that has me a little bewildered at why they feel persecuted in particular, when a better strategy might be acknowledging that there are some systemic flaws and look to fix them before another ill-thought out regulatory approach is put into place.

I don't see IEX as a pure white knight, but I do give them props for getting into the arena with a solution for one part of the problem instead of complaining bitterly, spreading FUD and launching ad hominem attacks on authors who are shining light on a whole slew of questionable practices as a lot of the people in the hype machine have done on the financial news channels since the book has been out.

<comment><USER6> I haven't read the book. That's why I'm not attacking the book, but only specific claims which people who read the book repeat. Most notably, confusing people that the "little guy" is David Einhorn, confusing everyone (including Mark Cuban) that HFT's have some ability to "jump in front" of other orders (they don't), and obfuscating the fact that HFT's pulling their orders is just a way of price discriminating against big guys.

 _spreading FUD and launching ad hominem attacks on authors_

The only person spreading FUD is Lewis. I'm unaware of any ad-hominem attacks on him - all I see is "Lewis is wrong in X,Y,Z, did that idiot even talk to an HFT?" (Not an ad hominem Lewis being an idiot is orthogonal to the real argument, which is X,Y,Z.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Folks interested in HFT might like this - HFT firm Virtu has a nearly flawless daily trading record over the past 3.4 years:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/virtu-hft-only-one-losing- day...](http://www.businessinsider.com/virtu-hft-only-one-losing-day-2014-3)

Prospectus:

[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1592386/000104746914...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1592386/000104746914002070/a2218589zs-1.htm)

Looking at the S&P 500, it was positive for 55.8% of the trading days between 2010 and 2013:

[http://www.crestmontresearch.com/docs/Stock-Yo- Yo.pdf](http://www.crestmontresearch.com/docs/Stock-Yo-Yo.pdf)

BofA had 10 trading day losses in 2013:

[http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/02/28/goldmans- tra...](http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/02/28/goldmans-trading- revenue-more-daily-losses-fewer-outsize-gains/)

US equity HFT revenues are around $1.3 billion, making it a pretty small niche compared to wider market activity: "TABB Group estimates that US equity HFT revenues have declined from approximately $7.2 billion in 2009 to about $1.3 billion in 2014."

<comment><USER14> Law of large numbers. This is not surprising.

EDIT: Law of large numbers. Not central limit theorem. I blame alcohol.

<comment><USER10> Um, what? If anything, applying the theorem in this case would say that profits should be normally distributed, whereas it's fairly common for market makers to have perfect/near-perfect trading records.

<comment><USER14> Sorry, that was vague. My point was that market participants who make many trades will rapidly converge on their mean return, with little fluctuation. If you sample a normal distribution 10M times with a mean of 0.01%, you will very rarely see a negative sum of the samples.

<comment><USER10> The theorem says nothing of the sort. By your argument, if I flip a coin 10M times, where heads is 1 and tails is -1, and get a mean of 0, then I will very rarely see tails. You're confusing mean and variance.

<comment><USER14> Sorry. I said some pretty silly things.

See the new version of the posts. Hopefully it's a bit more coherent now.

<comment><USER10> Ok, I think your main idea was that since they've achieved consistently positive returns, then they're likely to keep it up. Even if that were true, the 800lb gorilla question is how they've managed to achieve such consistency in the first place.

<comment><USER8> They have slightly positive return per trade, and they make millions of trades per day. Their PnL is the sum of their trades -- the expected values grows like O(n), while the volatility grows like O(sqrt(n)), so for n = several million, the probability their PnL will be negative is extraordinarily low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I will admit that Lewis has rustled my jimmies. But if he's interpreting this "punching in the balls" as a good guy punching the bad guys, he's mixed up. Electronic trading is the present, and it should be the future. In fact, every market that still exists as a network of people calling one-another or standing in a pit would be made many factors better by opening them up to the public and allowing trades to take place on electronic exchanges.

I get scared of what Lewis is saying in the same way it scares me when I hear of school districts banning the teaching of evolution. I'm not scared that Lewis is right. I'm scared that his misinformed screed will actually gain traction.

<comment><USER9> _Electronic trading is the present, and it should be the future._

You know HFT isn't identical to any electronic exchange, right. I haven't evaluated in great depth whether Lewis is correct or not. But I'm pretty sure you can't defend HFT solely on the basis of "this is inevitable" (after all exchanges makes elaborate and special allowances for HFT, it's not a strategy you can sit at home and do). Any market is based on rules. If, for example, every transaction, no matter how quick or small, involved a small fee, I don't think HFT could exist as it does now.

Again, the point isn't that I've prove HFT should be banned but rather that like any other construct, it needs to justify it's existence rather than talk about inevitability - sort of like you defend patents if you want but you can't defend based on property rights.

<comment><USER6> Tangentially, the particular construct you describe ("transaction tax") has proved it is not worth it. Canada tried it out.

[http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/pub/faculty/milne/322/IIROC_FeeCh...](http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/pub/faculty/milne/322/IIROC_FeeChange_submission_KM_AP3.pdf)

It hurt the little guy, raised costs, and allowed the big guy to more easily hide their orders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tangential question :

What are the barriers to entry to HFT?

Or, put differently - how well funded would a venture have to be to realistically compete in this space?

Assuming talent (e.g. market knowledge, quantitative skills, ML competence) was not an issue - how realistic would it be to get access to the fiber & real estate necessary to compete with the very few market leaders?

<comment><USER6> Fees million at most. Real estate + connections are commoditized - tens of thousands a month for starting out.

<comment><USER16> > _tens of thousands a month for starting out._

I couldn't find any reports of prices _that_ low. According to one article, at least, Spread [1] charges ~$300k a month.[2]

[1] [http://spreadnetworks.com/network- map/](http://spreadnetworks.com/network-map/)

[2] [http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/high- frequency-t...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/high-frequency- trading-danger-risk-wall-street)

<comment><USER6> My NDA prevents me from discussing pricing. If you look up my resume and do some sleuthing, you can probably piece together the details of where to go for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The phrase "hits back" implies he somehow addressed the arguments against him, as opposed to merely saying "yay publicity".

<comment><USER10> Umm, all week he and Katsuyama have been in the media addressing the criticism, e.g. the CNBC debate [0].

[0] [http://www.cnbc.com/id/101544772](http://www.cnbc.com/id/101544772)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Billy Beane still hasn't been to a World Series let alone won one. Michael Oher was illegally recruited by an Ole Miss booster who skirted NCAA rules by adopting him.

Michael Lewis is Malcolm Gladwell with normal hair. He does seem like a solid guy who really knows what he's talking about. That's how he sells books.

<comment><USER18> That's strange logic. Whatever happened or not with Billy Beane, he's absolutely right about the HFT-bank-broker strategies that he singles out in his book. Most of the critics of the book seem to not have read it, sadly..

<comment><USER17> I suppose my comment was silly and snarky. Clearly Michael Lewis is a gifted writer. But he's not a journalist, and he takes sides. He uses his enormous talent to demonize some and lionize others, when often the facts of the case could easily be viewed from another perspective. The problem isn't simply that Lewis's critics don't have the facts on their side; it's that they lack his eloquence and his podium.

To that end, referring to The Blind Side, the fact that Lewis was a schoolmate of Tuohy at an elite prep school in New Orleans, and the NCAA did investigate the Tuohy-Oher relationship, its not beyond the realm of possibility that Tuohy got away with something in adopting Oher.

As to Billy Beane, thanks to Michael Lewis he's touted as a visionary who literally changed the game of baseball, except the teams he put together have never been to the World Series, and over his GM career, the A's are slightly over .500. It's possible that he's not so revolutionary.

This is not to say the Lewis gets his facts wrong. He doesn't by and large. But non-fiction is like photography in that it is not a clinical representation, and the same event from different perspectives can be understood very differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I applaud Lewis' effort and maybe it will sink in this time, but this is not really news for a lot of people.

The story is that Wall Street big powerful trading firms have an inside edge against retail (middle class) customers.

It's not exactly new. This has been happening for decades.

They did it before computers with information, now they are doing it with fiber cable.

<comment><USER20> If they're using their edge to reduce the bid/ask spread of the retail customers to a penny instead of the 25 cents or more that it used to be, how is that hurting retail customers?

<comment><USER18> If that was all they were doing, that'd be fine. But read the book.

Some exchanges have 150 types of orders that are mostly undocumented and unknown to most regular players, created specifically so that HFT can not do what they publicly appear to be doing, or take incentives without providing liquidity, etc. The public price that everybody seems is outdated compared to the private prices that HFTers see, so they can risklessly front-run people because they already know if a price has dropped or rise, etc. All that stuff isn't just fast market-making.

<comment><USER14> Undocumented? [http://cdn.batstrading.com/resources/membership/BATS_FIX_Spe...](http://cdn.batstrading.com/resources/membership/BATS_FIX_Specification.pdf)

The "public price that everyone else sees" is the same price as the HFTs see. These are available on the direct feeds from the various exchanges, and there's no discrimination against non-HFTs. Anyone who pays for it can get it. It's an equivalent advantage to having a Bloomberg - more data, faster.

<comment><USER18> It isn't. The SIP is much slower than what the HFTers can put together. Read the book, it's in there.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are functional languages inherently slow?  - <AUTHOR> http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/are-functional-languages-inherently.html

<comment><USER2> > Functional languages require infrastructure that > inevitably adds overheads > over what can theoretically > be attained using assembler by hand. In > particular, > first-class lexical closures only work well with > garbage > collection because they allow values to be > carried out of scope.

Inevitable is an overly broad characterization. For example, in this particular case, Manticore uses a combination of control-flow analysis and reflow analysis to inline higher-order functions in instances when we can determine that the free variables (if there are any) are obtainable in some other static way. This observation extends to the general allocation result; modern functional language compilers do quite a bit to get that under control (see my IFL paper on arity raising/unboxing/ripping apart datatypes, which provides a survey of the state of the art circa 2009) and, particularly given the additional register freedom when you're not wedded to the C calling convention, can do some real magic to avoid performing allocations, particularly in inner loops. GHC's is type-directed unboxing/type unrolling, IIRC, which in practice is on par (modulo separate compilation issues) with the implemented MLton work cited in this post.

So, it's less that poor performance is "inevitable" and more that it requires fairly insane amounts of work by the compiler developer. And, for example, I seem to remember that the Visual C++ team spent more person-hours on template compiler error message clarity in one product cycle than we will spend on the entire Manticore project in its lifetime. And yes, I know the "sufficiently smart compiler" joke.

A more fundamental complaint is that functional language implementations tend to provide _fragile_ performance. That is, without understanding some fairly gritty details of the compiler and runtime, it is difficult to understand why, for example, the second time you made a call to a non-inlined combinator providing a second function argument at the same type, your program became slower in MLton but not in GHC (YMMV; a representative but not authoritative example). A good way to see this phenomenon is to look at optimized benchmarks for OCaml or GHC (e.g. in the PL shootout) and ask, "is this idiomatic ML/Haskell code?" Many benchmarks for functional languages that perform close to C look suspiciously like the original C benchmark, with just a few functional sprinkles on top.

I don't know of a good answer to that performance problem without requiring users to become near-experts with the compiler, and that's not good practice.

<comment><USER3> I am not convinced that requiring users to become near-experts in their given compiler (and by extension their chosen platform) is a bad practice.

I think it is a fine balance when writing code to find a way to express algorithms such that they a) are understandable to other developers and b) maximize the opportunity for the compiler to optimize the code into machine instructions.

That does not mean that compiler writers can stop after creating an assembler, since its just turtles all the way up from there; but it does mean that compiler writers should be thinking about how to maximize the machine/developer interface.

Given this view, you certainly cannot extract language creators from language compilers, which either leads us to a world where all work is done creating new languages or one where we all develop in lisp ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > However, few practical applications benefit from persistence in practice so > this is often not advantageous.

This statement is questionable.

What _is_ true is this: many professional software developers are comfortable with imperative/OOP/mutability. This is easier (not simpler) because it's familiar. The benefits of immutability are not obvious/familiar.

Persistent data structures enable immutable data with cheap(ish) operations that can produce updated versions of that data. This means I can expose data to multiple threads, calling functions, etc... without worrying about that data being placed into an inconsistent state or viewed in an inconsistent state by callers.

Back when much of our profession malloc'ed their memory, we always had to answer the question "who is going to free() this chunk of the heap?" And when we answered wrong, or forgot to answer, we leaked memory. Garbage collectors, while imperfect from a controlability and performance standpoint, are much better at this than humans.

An excellent analogy exists with mutable data. When I expose a piece of mutable data via any public interface, I have to ask the question "who can change this data and how will consistency be enforced?" I'm left with the answer "I don't know, I hope no one gets it wrong" or even worse: "they better lock the right semaphore(s) in the correct order". Immutable data (implemented via persistent data structures) enables me to instead say "here's the data, if any caller would like to update, they can a) pass me an updated version which I can validate, or b) call into some part of my public interface and instruct me what update to make"

Or, in the case of Clojure (my blub at the moment), put the runtime in charge of maintaining consistency during mutation using refs and the STM.

<comment><USER5> When you expose a piece of mutable data, usually it's wrapped up in an interface that enforces the access and consistence of that piece of data so that you have control rather than let it up to the callers. If you don't want to have the synchronization wrapper, it's ok. Just document it clearly and let the callers deal with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _If you have a benchmark comparing C with a functional language then it is almost certainly an extremely simple program. Arguably so simple that it is of little practical relevance today._

A lot of simple tasks are highly relevant. For example, in numerical simulation, you probably want a fast matrix-vector multiply. Conceptually this is extremely simple, and it's easy to benchmark. Examples of practical relevance: climate modeling, simulating combustion in engines, and optimizing control surfaces on airplanes.

"Sort" is simple. Does that make it irrelevant?

How about finding the standard deviation of a bunch of numbers?

<comment><USER7> How relevant are numerical benchmarks when comparing languages? In practice you'll probably use BLAS, LAPACK, etc. for numerical computing and get on with it; you're unlikely to write code that is both faster and numerically stable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am not an expert in functional languages, but I reason about it (that is, the question "Are FP languages inherently slow?", not the article) in the following way. I am curious to know if this reasoning is, well, reasonable.

\- CPUs are inherently not functional. They are imperative, as they are Turing machines. They don't speak high-level math.

\- Therefore, programs written in a functional language must always be translated into imperative code for execution. Compare this with an imperative language where the compiler need not perform super-fancy translation.

\- If the problem can be mapped efficiently to machine code by the compiler, the functional program is fast; otherwise, it may be slow. Either way, it may be very hard to know what is going on behind the scenes.

\- This is not always a lose; sometimes the compiler can perform extensive optimizations because it speaks math, and the functional language will win handily.

\- Writing in an imperative language, you always know how your program will behave; however, you lose the opportunity to have the compiler deduce a better way (assuming there is a better way) by writing in a functional language.

\- But if there is no better way, you have the opportunity to make the execution very fast by modeling the imperative solution around the constraints of the hardware.

Of course, there are other dimensions to performance, among them programmer productivity and number of defects.

<comment><USER9> It just seems funny to have an argument between the user having to use the machine's phrasing vs. having to use the phrasing of higher math. Higher math is clearly not the only abstraction. Ergonomics for one person coding or for two people collaborating, on a practical task, seem more important to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The speed of a language depends on it's implementation, not on the language itself

<comment><USER11> That is true of _languages_ , but it is in fact the case that there are algorithms that run in O(n) time when written impurely, but require O(nlogn) or such when written in a purely functional style, even in state of the art FP languages. Since FP languages provide impure facilities for use in the real world, you _can_ still use the O(n) algorithms, but at the cost of purity.

So the relevant question here really is not "are functional languages inherently slow?", but "is pure functional programming inherently slow?". AFAIK, the answer to that question is not conclusively proven yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> No, see GHC here: [http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming- lang...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages- are-fastest.php)

A lot of work goes into getting it that performant, but it's entirely doable with the right knowhow.

(Before anyone gets pedantic, I realize that languages aren't slow, just implementations of them, etc.)

<comment><USER13> Well, GHC is still slower than C, C++, Ada and Fortran, so the link doesn't really refute his point.

And, looking at the code, a lot of the Haskell is subverting purity and laziness by using things like Data.ByteString.Internal and Data.ByteString.Unsafe, so I think that actually makes the case even stronger.

<comment><USER14> > subverting purity and laziness

That's an interesting choice of words. Quite obviously no useful program can be totally pure (otherwise it'd do nothing but heat the machine). And Simon Peyton Jones is on record saying that he's not sure if he'd carry the laziness torch quite so far if he had to do it all over again. Neither is to say that these aren't powerful or useful techniques, but rather that in Haskell they're chosen as defaults -- impure and/or strict code are the outliers that require justification, not the other way around. So given that, in what way is using ByteStrings (safe or unsafe) subversion? Far from it -- use the tool that makes sense.

With most functional languages, the usual technique to writing fast code is to first write it to be correct, and then transform it to be fast. And that's exactly what unsafe ByteStrings are: optimizations. There's nothing wrong with optimized code, and I see no problem with the technique. The only relation it bears to the OP is that it's an explicit unboxing. Perhaps the compiler should automatically do that unboxing, but that's easier said than done.

<comment><USER13> I guess my biggest problem is all of the people claiming Haskell is pure, lazy and fast. It seems disingenuous when to actually be fast requires swapping out the standard data structures with non-pure, non-lazy versions.

To put it another way, a naive implementation in C will compile and be relatively fast, while a naive implementation in Haskell will, at the very least, require replacing the standard data structures with things like ByteStrings, just to match the default C speed.

<comment><USER14> Pure and fast is certainly feasible -- you don't always need to use unsafe bytestrings for example. Laziness makes performance hard to predict because you have no clue when something will get evaluated -- there's no contract with the compiler. Maybe one day some group of really smart people will figure out how to take advantage of that to write compilers that produce really fast code, but I think language-wide laziness is not a feature bound for mainstream languages. Targeted laziness? Probably, it's very useful for expressing data structures. But not everywhere by default.

In any case, I don't think people are trying to be disingenuous. Haskell is, or can be, all three of those things. It's just very hard to get them all at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No, OCaml and Haskell can be faster than C at times. Look at some benchmarks.

<comment><USER16> I did a benchmark. Naive Haskell implementation took 28 seconds, heavily optimized / hinted Haskell version took 11 seconds. Naive C implementation took 0.3 seconds.

<https://github.com/deliciousrobots/sml_life>

<comment><USER17> I have no idea what is heavily optimized about that Haskell code. I am no Haskell expert, but all you did was use an unboxed array. I added one strictness annotation to the "v" parameter on your iter function and it reduced the time from 10 seconds to 1.5 on my laptop.

None of the other code you wrote uses a linked list, so I don't know why you used them for Haskell. You used vector types for most of them (which Haskell has, by the way). Pretty disingenuous.

I admit that the prominent use of lists in newbie Haskell tutorials could have mislead you, but you seem to know the difference in data types since you used vectors everywhere else.

<comment><USER16> Why did you accuse me of being disingenuous? I used an Array (life-array.hs), if Haskell implements Arrays as a linked list... well, that's a problem.

<comment><USER17> I accused you of that, because it seemed like you knew what you were doing with the other implementations, and then just suddenly forgot data structure performance when you got to Haskell. It was an asshole move, and I am sorry.

They aren't linked lists, but you still used a linked list internal to your "iter" function, where you used a vector (or array) there in other implementations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Semi-OT: is there a good primer on GC people could recommend? His discussion of different GC strategies piqued my interest, but I'm not entirely sure where to start.

<comment><USER2> The GC book by Jones is the place to start to understand GC in general. He also has a new "GC Handbook," but I haven't looked through it yet to see how well it covers modern parallel and concurrent collectors, particularly for NUMA machines.

Having spent a large portion of the last five years working on a parallel concurrent collector that scales to 48-AMD and 64-Intel cores, I can say the game's totally different on NUMA architectures. Unfortunately, not much has been written yet on it (I have an MSPC paper; the Intel folks have a paper on Pillar that was at ISMM; that's about it). Feel free to ping me directly if you get to advanced material and need more pointers. Many of the systems have not yet been published, as it's shockingly difficult to publish on modern GC implementations these days.

<comment><USER18> Not sure if anybody reads comments five days later, but thanks for the suggestion and the offer! I appreciate it.

Why do you suppose it's so hard to publish about them? A general lack of interest?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If ever Betteridge's law applied...

<comment><USER20> Despite the (not great) title, I think it's actually a fairly interesting article, which isn't so much about the conclusion, but some difficulty and success points w.r.t. functional-language efficiency.</comment></comment>


Do you have this kind of comments in your source code?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.kootech.net/article/1378271050-Do-you-have-this-kind-of-comments-in-your-source-code-

<comment><USER2> This one is my favorite from there:

        #define TRUE FALSE
        // Happy debugging suckers

One other I found here on HN: [https://github.com/PlatinumSkink/MiniRPG/commit/595c77f35e45...](https://github.com/PlatinumSkink/MiniRPG/commit/595c77f35e4559546474b65763185b4b311e0b7d)

OT: no, I don't write such comments in the code but came across some funny ones here and then.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found this in our codebase the other day:

        // BEGIN VALIDATION CONDITION
        // Would you like some sauce with your spaghetti?

</comment><comment><USER4> $me != whats going on</comment>


Ask HN:Do you tailor your content specifically for Hacker News? - <AUTHOR>

A couple years ago I ran a handful of mildly popular blogs and we would tailor our content specifically for a social news site like Digg or even target content at Twitter users.<p>Many of the people here have their own blogs and many frequent the HN front page. I was just wondering how many of you tailor your articles for Hacker News? <comment><USER2> The content I post to my blog is certainly influenced by the interests of my readership; and HN readers (along with reddit readers and FreeBSD developers and tarsnap users) form part of that.

I wouldn't say that I tailor articles for HN -- certainly that is not my intention -- but at the same time I can't deny that there is some influence there.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had blog posts that are a direct result of my interactions with several HN members. HN is a great catalyst for debates. Thus, sometimes I write what I write because of an idea picked up from a discussion that originated here. However, I wouldn't say I'm tailoring my content for HN either, since, generally, I write so that others (i.e. people outside this community) can at least understand what's the topic at hand and its repercussions.</comment>


Julian Assange answers questions from Guardian readers - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/dec/03/julian-assange-wikileaks

<comment><USER2> this was one of his most interesting responses:

"Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit inorder to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases."

<comment> mike-cardwell I thought that was interesting too. I'm not sure I believe it though. It seems more likely to me that they made up this story after they were kicked off.

<comment><USER2> Distinctly possible. But this kind of testing would be consistent with his overall philosophy. And it worked out great for them to be kicked off: they were able to rehost quickly, got a lot of publicity, and a lot of people who care more about free speech than the specifics of cables are now more energized.

EDIT: I was surprised to see the parent downvoted (although it's since recovered). Maybe he's right, maybe not, but it's certainly worth discussing -- so the comment adds value to the discussion.</comment></comment></comment>


Secure email provider Tutanota launches free encrypted calendar - <AUTHOR> https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/free-encrypted-calendar/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad to see this. Calendar integration (or lack thereof) was a large part of my decision making process when I was last shopping around for email providers. I wound up sacrificing privacy for a good calendar since I use it daily. I may have to re-evaluate providers soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been a key feature in my decision to settle on a primary email provider. With ProtonMail and Tutanota without a true suite of personal organization, I settled on FastMail with the leery eye that it may includes some compromises on privacy. ProtonMail is soon to be releasing their calendar product, though their pricing is a few times more than Tutanota.

Edit: This might be against protocol (I'll delete if so) but I did some further digging

\- Why is Protonmail better than Tutanota : [https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/b84kd3/why_is_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/b84kd3/why_is_protonmail_better_than_tutanota/ejyu35v/)

\- And, why is Tutanota better than Protonmail: [https://www.reddit.com/r/tutanota/comments/b82a05/why_is_tut...](https://www.reddit.com/r/tutanota/comments/b82a05/why_is_tutanota_better_than_protonmail/)

Very interesting.

<comment><USER4> Neither Tutanota nor Protonmail provide IMAP.

Yea, yea, I know: Protonmail lets you if you pay for this proprietary client app that you then have to install; but come on, it's 2019, even Hotmail provides IMAP.

For some people it's actually useful to have offline access to email and, you know, being able to _search_ their email content.

<comment><USER5> I mean, the core issue is that IMAP was never really intended to be used in the way that encrypted email works right?

<comment><USER4> > I mean, the core issue is that IMAP was never really intended to be used in > the way that encrypted email works right?

Well, why is Protonmail able to provide IMAP then? (although restricted to paying customers, using proprietary software)[0]

[0]: [https://protonmail.com/bridge/](https://protonmail.com/bridge/)

<comment><USER5> Because they're using a piece of software to bolt stuff on top of IMAP because IMAP by itself was never intended to do what their software is doing

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to be 1/3 price of Fastmail on comparable plans too, anyone used both?

Fastmail doesn't support on the fly 'reply from' addresses which is annoying.

e.g. if I send a pattern of (incoming) To addresses to a folder, I can reply from any address I've configured beforehand, and I can set a default for the folder, but I can't reply from the same address as I received the email at, without going into settings to set it up (annoying for one-off).

Sometimes causes problems with support ticketing systems too.

<comment><USER7> FastMail supports on the fly reply from if you have a catch-all alias on your domain. It defaults to replying from the same address. If you want to change the from address to something else, just select the "*@domain.tld" entry in the sender list. This turns "from:" into a text input.

See [https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias- catchall.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html)

<comment><USER6> Oh. Thanks! How does that work for composing new mail, can you write something arbitrary? Or you also specify a few aliases that you'll choose from when they're not the delivered-to address for a reply?

<comment><USER7> You can enter something arbitrary (both for new mail and for replies). You can also configure sender identities you need repeatedly so you don't need to type them out. It's pretty neat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Last I checked, Tutanota does not support DKIM for custom domains.

</comment><comment><USER9> oh nice.. thanks I have a "better" option it is called... Filofax</comment>


Ask HN: Will we ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all? - <AUTHOR> It seems every area of our lives has been improved through technology except for the cost of housing. Food and produce has reduced in price to the point where the average minimum wage provides a decent standard of living but the prospect of house ownership is a 25 to 30 year loan repayment (if you are able to get a loan). I know world populations are increasing causing scarcity and that we are also improving our transportation technology but human accommodation needs have not changed and we still seem unable to "hack" urban housing at scale. Do you see any changes coming down the line that will improve this situation? <comment><USER2> The reason housing is expensive regardless of technological advances is because it's a people problem, not a technological problem. The people who would benefit the most from cheaper urban housing are not in a position to vote for the policies that would cause that to happen, as the vast majority of them don't live in those cities.

The only way to solve this problem is to wrest control of local policy decisions away from municipal governments and make them instead at the state or national level. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon, since those already living in cities are much more incentivized to fight to retain the status quo than those who don't live there are incentivized to fight for changes that could hypothetically help them.

<comment><USER3> The reason housing is so expensive is because it is a financial vehicle, and has little to do with housing density. It's a fantasy that building more will bring prices down.

Housing prices were remarkably consistent with all other prices for the 100 years before around 1998.

<comment><USER4> This argument doesn't past the smell test as it doesn't explain why home prices are less today in Detroit than 10 years ago and why home prices fell around the country in 2008.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Technology has improved the cost of housing.

In the USA, the average house size has grown. So has its quality. It has air conditioning standard in warm climates. It has safer electrical systems that handle higher loads. It has more carpeting. More bathrooms. Better appliances, with washers and dryers standard. More, bigger windows. Higher ceilings in basements. Lower-maintenance building envelopes. Better fire safety, with fire sprinklers being required in many jurisdictions. Off-street parking. The list goes on and on.

Technology helps explain why housing has improved so much. Much of the home is fabricated offsite and trucked in. Computers help make more efficient use of materials. Manufactured building products (like oriented strand board) make more efficient use of lumber, and create more durable products. The labor savings are immense: compare the labor to sweat a house of copper pipes versus using pex. Compare plastering a house versus drywall. Not even in the same league cost wise.

Do not make the mistake of looking at a few extraordinarily high cost areas like SF or NYC and believe they represent anything typical. They do not. Housing has improved dramatically in just a few decades.

<comment><USER6> What's relevant is the cost of housing where people want to live.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but that's too subjective to measure. A better proxy may be housing cost relative to wages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With regards to the US, there is affordable and attractive urban housing, just not in cities that people particularly want to live in.

I mean, look at the Midwest. Houses there cost nothing compared to houses in metro areas along the coast. It's not like cities there are terribly middling either. You look at the Cleveland Metro, and it has 3.2 million people, it has a lot of historical architecture, it has good infrastructure, it's alright overall.

But everyone wants to live in LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver, New York, Miami, or pretty much any other major city along our nation's western or eastern coasts (not so much the southern coast, unless you like living in a greenhouse in the summer).

I mean, I get it, all the cool stuff is happening elsewhere, but Midwesterners are still having a good time, sans beach.

In case you're wondering, I myself live in New Mexico in a place called Albuquerque. Affordable, but not as affordable as some Midwestern cities. Because the city wasn't in the Rust Belt there's also fewer older structures. The boom took place once all the nuclear scientists moved in and gas was cheap, so it's pretty badly sprawled out.

<comment><USER9> You're omitting a major factor in this. Jobs.

I moved from Chicago to the Bay Area and while I'm not a developer, the opportunities are still night and day in terms of the job options, the pay, benefits, etc.

A cheap mortgage on a nice house in a good neighborhood means squat if there are not a lot of job options, or only ones a long commute away.

Personally I think the best thing to help this is make remote work more viable for non developer professions that don't have as much demand or leverage. This would enable more people to live in affordable areas if getting another remote job were comparable to living in a market flush with jobs.

<comment><USER8> That is true, I am conveniently omitting the jobs part.

So maybe the right answer to ask is not how to create more affordable and attractive housing, but rather how to spread the jobs out to cities overlooked by employers.

Why isn't there a satellite Google office in Cincinnati, in other words?

<comment><USER10> Why does Google need physical offices in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why does it have to be urban? As a rural resident I do not understand the attraction. I can walk or bike everywhere that I want to go. Thousands of miles of trails branch out in every direction depending on my heart's content. Farms within easy distance produce a bounty to enjoy, including world class beer. I am not sure why the growing trend toward global mega-cities is in our best interest.

<comment><USER12> Everyone's different. I certainly like nature but I can't imagine living in the countryside. Just to give you my perspective why I think city life is fantastic:

First thing that comes to mind: I like (mostly non-mainstream) music and I like to go to live music events. There's no way I can do that frequently in a rural area. Well, apart from driving to the next larger city, that is.

Which brings me to the next point: While public transport in larger cities often is far from perfect it's ok to pretty decent most of the time. Living in a rural area requires owning a car, something which I've given up on years ago and never intend to do again.

Then there's the economic aspect of cities: Where there's a greater density of people and companies there also is more potential income available. Cities allow you to make new connections on a regular basis. Meeting new people allows you to explore new opportunities - economic or otherwise - if only by serendipity.

Apart from that, large cities counterintuitively also make sense ecologically because they require less resources than if the some number of human beings lived spread out through the country.

<comment><USER11> All good points.

I personally consider every time I get in the car to be a failure on my part that I regret. It takes some planning, but I get around mostly by walking, biking, and taking advantage of our regional bus system (which admittedly does not come very often). Other friends of mine commute by cross country skiing or by rowing when the weather makes it conducive.

There is a lot of great music in rural areas, especially live music. It helps if you develop an appreciation for fiddle music and sad songs about logging camps, the love that you lost, and really good dogs. Admittedly these may be acquired tastes.

Having close contacts in urban areas certainly helps on the income front, and I will admit is that a minimum of a three hour drive to the nearest major airport makes jetting off to speak or consult challenging.

I am definitely going to look into the ecological balance, because I that is something I cannot speak to. A lot of my neighbors have solar panels and are off the grid, but you could be right about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Understand a few things first:

A) The 'cost of housing' is usually not the building itself. It's the land. So, we can't compare to other products.

B) It's greatly affected by financing, interest rates, accepted norms. Ex: when interest rates drop, housing prices balloon. Also - as people accept longer and longer mortgages, housing prices ballon.

C) It's a relative thing, not a 'cost' thing. There are x number of people and say, roughly x spots for housing. The riches people will live where they want. The others go elsewhere. If rich people want to live in an urban area, there is nary a solution for 'low cost' housing in that area.

Some things like 'rent control' \- if applied responsibly can maybe help, but they can also create other weird problems.

Social housing might help, but also, some other odd problems.

The only want to allow poor people to live in expensive areas is to seriously mess with market forces, and that can be problematic.

The 'problem' we are trying to address here is age old: 'the fair and equitable distribution of resources'. It's not going to be solved with some new technology or process :), it will probably be some smart economic thinking.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a supply and demand issue at the core. There is simply more demand for housing units than available and so prices continue to rise until demand tapers off.

Using New York City as an example there are about 3.4 million residential housing units available and a population that is set to reach 9 million in the next few years (500k increase).

It's true that there is not much raw land left for new development, but the city can change zoning in areas. Imagine if 100,000 1 family houses are rezoned to allow for even just 8 unit multi-family walkup. 800,000 new housing units would help counter the demand that causes the price to keep rising.

The home construction industry also has issues which end raising the finished cost of housing. An interesting read is "Sweat Equity" by Larry Angell, A self-published book where the author describes why it made financial sense for him to leave his job for a year to build his own house rather than buy a house and continue working.

<comment><USER14> Zoning is also a big issue in LA and hasn't been updated since the 70s I believe.

If you look at a satellite view of the city, there are nodes of density with massive amounts of individual house spaces. But it's expensive all over. I don't think there's any real solution to that outside of another real estate collapse here (which only set things back for a few years and stopped some gentrification creep).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Technologists giveth, rentiers taketh away.

"Will we ever have affordable and attractive urban housing for all?". No, not as thing stand. Those with a monopoly on credit will continue to use competition for accommodation as a means to leach every spare drop of wealth from the productive members of society.

</comment><comment><USER16> Its a really fascinating problem and if I ever won the powerball I'd take a crack at it. It touches _everything_ , from the fundamental differences between capitalism and communism to the raw math of just how much steel and concrete (or w/e) it would take to give everyone ~30+m^2. Which, when the nominator is all sorted out, inevitably leads to the question of what to do with the denominator.

Realistically we either need a massive borderline miraculous leap forward in materials science and construction technology (like carbon nanofiber weaving spider drones) or a completely different system from capitalism for allocating for basic needs, or a looooot less people. Its not really a space problem at all so much as a energy cost and societal values one.

<comment><USER13> It has zero to do with steel, concrete or anything material.

The cost of making the building is not the issues.

It's the property price that is the issue, always.

<comment><USER7>
        It's the property price that is the issue

And a Land Value Tax instead of traditional property tax would go a long way to solving this problem. (Basically, tax the value of the raw land, not the man-made property on top.)

It would prevent speculative ownership of land and encourage development of underused land in high-value areas. It would also capture a lot of the value of urban development, so that the urban area gets the money rather than private owners who simply got lucky enough to buy the property.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Housing is partly a status symbol and those that can afford it often put measures in place to make sure that those they don't want to have living next to them can't afford to. Housing that is affordable for all, will by definition not be attractive for all. You imply the existence of a goal that doesn't actually exist and for which there is no consensus.

Even if that were a goal, you couldn't reach it because there is only so much space. This would be a problem even, if we were to use what space is available, which is usually not the case for political reasons.

Improved technology won't help you and even changing politics wouldn't get you to this.

</comment><comment><USER18> No we won't ever have affordable and _attractive_ urban housing for all, because standards of attractiveness will naturally adjust to be somewhat beyond whatever is affordable and accessible to all.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am very aware of the benefits to urban living, but i do wonder if humans are inherently happier living in high density environments. I feel like the benefits of urban living are less crucial if the human population was prevented from growing or even reduced with time.

<comment><USER20> I've spent a considerable amount of time living in Tokyo and New York City. In NY, most weekends I would take the bus to my tiny hometown in Pennsylvania where I was surrounded by nature. I find that the things I get mentally from the city is extreme amounts of social interaction, and from the countryside I get the deep connection with nature. I think it is near impossible to find the social interaction I'm looking for in small towns, as I want a high concentration of smart, open minded people.

<comment><USER21> Woah woah.. it's not very open minded of you to say that small town folks are dumb and closed minded!

<comment><USER22> It's true, dumb is the opposite of smart, but nothing there implies that small town folk are dumb.

Small town folk are of average intelligence, with a lower concentration of significantly smarter people simply due to the fact that high paying jobs are concentrated in urban areas.

If you were to concentrate high paying jobs in small towns, you'd see the reverse happening.

As for being closed minded---I'd find that people from urban areas are more close minded if they happen to live in their enclave without much interaction outside of it. Many people in cities are highly mobile, but many people in cities just treat their neighborhood as a walled garden, and are highly defensive against other types of people.

<comment><USER23> That still makes the assumption that the smartest people must necessarily be taking on the highest paying jobs. That may or may not be true.

<comment><USER24> No, it assumes smarter people take higher paying jobs on average, which is most likely true.

[https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/02/11/the-incredible- correlat...](https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/02/11/the-incredible-correlation- between-iq-income/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is it technology holding housing back, or politics? I thought it was mostly the latter?

<comment><USER26> I too believe it's mostly political. If some hypothetical SV startup invented a shoebox sized device that cost $100 and when sprinkled with water would unfold into a multi unit residence, we would still be faced with a ton of other issues relating to zoning, particularly density and parking requirements, that would continue to make housing prohibitive.

Also, Americans have been sold on the idea of real estate as an investment and I'm not sure how we will ever get policies that lead to lower housing prices when that essentially means that a large part of the population will have to agree to enact policies that will result in depreciation of their primary asset.

<comment><USER27> Otoh a device to shrink humans to fit in a shoebox would be disruptive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The problem is lots of people want to live in the same areas.

</comment><comment><USER29> The answer is to rework city zoning laws to allow for more vertical building and less car parking requirements, but $$$, nimbyism and "I was here first" thinking gets in the way. Way more people want to live in cities than can afford it and it's a shame that cities aren't thinking about this enough.

It's a people problem, not a technology one - the elevator was already invented.

"The Rent Is Too Damn High" is a good, short book on this.

</comment><comment><USER30> Capsule hotels could work nicely for single people if an entrepreneur brought the concept to the US:

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

By the way, someone really ought to define what they mean when they discuss affordable things. It seems everyone has a different idea of what that means.

</comment><comment><USER31> Yes. The internet allows you to avoid high cost areas.

I pay about 25% of the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment in SFO for a 4 bedroom house with a great yards, with a 15 year mortgage.

Any gap in salary for not living in SFO/NYC/BOS is more than accounted for. In my case, over my lifetime I'll come out $4M ahead.

<comment><USER32> What's the catch?

<comment><USER31> You either need to find a job locally, which is a bit of a hustle, or travel.

You won't be working for a hit new startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I believe that we eventually will have a reliable and cheap way of making durable houses, maybe 3D printing. There are machines capable of doing so now, its just a matter of refining and provide them with enough availability

The main issues I see are:

Construction is a low skill labor intensive source of jobs, so unions and government don't want to cut it. And a more efficient way of building will probably mean less people working.

Most people loves being showing off, a huge house is the best way of showing how much money and power you have. Why print this wall when you could buy some expensive material?

</comment><comment><USER34> Clustering low income residents creates the "street prison" phenomenon. Such housing complexes often have bars on windows for residents' protection. They may have increased frequency police patrols. In effect, people voluntarily incarcerate themselves.

We need to solve that problem first. Sadly, I don't have a solution.

</comment><comment><USER35> The prevailing winds in the regulatory climate do not seem to point towards a skyscraper construction boom anytime soon.

Over in technology, we're rapidly marching towards cheap household-scale solar panels and batteries, commodity autonomous driving technology, and cheap electric cars. Elon Musk's satellite constellation will deliver decent internet service regardless of the population density/economics needed to support fibre buildout. Telepresence is already good and keeps getting better.

The society coming down the line is one made of energy-independent prefab houses with no particular constraints on location (so they'll go to where land is cheapest), drastically improved freeway throughput (autonomous cars can pack much more densely), and car interiors not much different from small apartments (you'll be able to eat, sleep, and work while the computer drives).

So, as it gets easier to live farther from work, the economic incentives for everyone to cluster into a few square miles will diminish greatly.

</comment><comment><USER36> When (not if!) ride-sharing in electric cars becomes much bigger, it will free up a huge amount of real estate from car-related use to other uses. (Fun fact: In the U.S., there are four parking spots for every one of the 255 million cars.) Add to that, all of the gas stations, oil change outfits, car washes, auto parts stores, auto dealerships, etc., etc. Every home that elects to go car-less will now have whatever garage, carport, driveway space available for an extra bedroom, garden, etc.

The other urban trend of smaller housing unit zoning will allow increased density which will also bring the cost of housing down. The demand is there a NY Times article reported that when new micro apartments (260 to 360 square feet) were available, 60,000 people applied for one of the the 55 units. Article: [http://tinyurl.com/ntdjvt9](http://tinyurl.com/ntdjvt9)

</comment><comment><USER37> I would imagine, in 15 - 20 years time, when self driving Car is a thing, the need for Urban Housing will drop. You car can be summoned whenever you need and not worried about where to park it as it will find and park itself.

</comment><comment><USER38> No. I hope not. Not everyone wants it anyway.

<comment><USER39> Why would you not want some people to get what they want? If they were happy would their happiness make you unhappy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> As long as demand outstrips supply, I can't foresee that happening.

<comment><USER41> Demand will always outstrip supply in trendy areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think that "affordable", "attractive", and "urban" form kind of an Iron Triangle in the sense that you can have any two out of three.</comment>