Is Betteridge's law of headlines correct? - <AUTHOR> http://calmerthanyouare.org/2015/03/19/betteridges-law.html <comment><USER2> No.

</comment><comment><USER3> > We're going to go out on a limb here and guesstimate that the remaining > "maybe" answers can, given enough time and effort, be turned into "yes" or > "no" answers, and that these will be distributed similarly to the 20:17 > ratio of the fully answered headlines.

The OP does admit to going out on a limb, but I don't think this is a justified assumption. Without having seen the headlines in question, I would guess they are in the maybe category because they are dubious at best.

<comment><USER4> Could be. You can have a look at the headline data here: [https://gist.github.com/matslina/64601f39ef12bd653be6](https://gist.github.com/matslina/64601f39ef12bd653be6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title sets us up for contradiction! If it's correct then the answer to this post is Yes, which contradicts Betteridge's law, so the answer must be No. :)

edit: I didn't think this was controversial or anything, it was meant to be playful, sorry HN, I'll take my downvote lumps I guess.

<comment><USER6> But answering "no" doesn't mean that, sometimes, the answer to these headline's question isn't "no". It simply means that Betteridge's law isn't always correct. Which I agree because, citing another pop/internet culture adage "only a Sith deals in absolutes".

<comment><USER7> ..which in itself, is an absolute.

We've come full circle, here :)

<comment><USER8> Wow, what a twist.

To think that Obi-Wan is secretly Ian Betteridge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love this idea. 30s ago I just read an NYT headline "Are wearable devices worse for you than cigarettes?"

No.

</comment><comment><USER10> Now do one about Moore's law.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't get it. If you have a headline that forces you to actually read the article to find out what it's talking about, or what the answer is, then people complain about "click bait".

If you use some kind of predictable cliché for your title, then articles like "Is X the new most dangerous thing?" isn't clickbait anymore - it's just "X is not the most dangerous thing (contrary to whatever belief/myth/contemporary opinion)". It's predictable and straightforward. And yet, that's apparently yet another reason for people to complain.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure Betteridge's Law could be applied much more effectively to American news headlines than anything else. For example, how many times do we see crazy headlines on Fox News like "Is Obama a gay communist terrorist?"

<comment><USER13> Indeed that is possibly the main driver for question-type headlines. Any crazy, even libelous, statement can be slipped in if it's worded as a question. The media outlets that rely on them are taking advantage of the biases of their readers, who will, at best, gloss over the text that might say "no", and simply fixate on the question as if it were a valid one. This famously led to the Glenn Beck situation of "We're not saying he's guilty, but he won't deny it!". [http://gawker.com/5355901/glenn-beck-pr-genius-spreads- the-f...](http://gawker.com/5355901/glenn-beck-pr-genius-spreads-the-false- rumor-he-raped-and-murdered-a-young-girl-in-1990)</comment></comment>


MIT Engineers Beat the Complexity of Deep Parallel Processing - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/mit-engineers-offer-a-new-solution-to-one-of-computings-most-complex-problems

<comment><USER2> The article has:

"The problem is NP-hard, actually, which is a designation applied to only the most difficult and unsolvable computing problems."

Nonsense. NP-hard problems are not "unsolvable". Instead, for any NP-hard problem, e.g., the traveling salesman problem, it's easy to write software that will obtain an optimal solution to any instance of the problem in finite time and often in practice quite reasonably short time. Nearly anyone who goes on a shopping trip to the grocery store, drug store, and lunch at a fast food restaurant gets an optimal solution just by hand.

In fact, clearly, easily, we get exactly optimal solutions to NP-hard optimization problems routinely millions of times a day, just by hand, even more easily and frequently by computer.

<comment><USER3> Your example has 3 locations in it. Of course it isn't hard! Try doing that for a billion locations.

<comment><USER2> I just responded to what the OP stated, in particular the claim of "unsolvable". The OP said nothing about 1 billion locations.

If the billion locations are all in a straight line, then not a problem!

For the set of real numbers R and a positive integer n and R^n with the usual inner product, norm, and topology, if the billion points are in R^n then there is a super cute algorithm: Find the minimum spanning tree (with a _good_ algorithm) of the billion locations and then, for the solution, just traverse the tree never returning to a location except at the end the first. Then for any x > 0, no matter how small, as the number of locations grows, and a billion is quite high, the algorithm will find a solution within x% of optimality with probability greater than 1 - x.

What's _hard_ about NP-hard, e.g., for the traveling salesman problem on m locations, is that no one knows how to write software that will solve, with an exactly optimal solution, worst case problems in time proportional to a polynomial in m. But that's nothing like what the OP claimed.

I was just responding to the OP.

Yes, 0-1 integer linear programming is also NP-hard. The last case I attacked had 600,000 variables and 40,016 constraints, and I wrote some software using Lagrangian relaxation, e.g., as in

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919311)

and got a feasible solution within 0.025% of optimality in 905 seconds on a 90 MHz PC.

Lesson: NP-hard does not always mean hopeless or "unsolvable" in practice.

Besides, for 1 billion locations, that would be one heck of a long time away from home for the salesman! Besides, as in nearly all real world optimization problems, the goal is to save resources, e.g., time, money, and saving all but the last penny is fine. Or, why spend billions to save the last penny?

Actually this point is important: Early in Garey and Johnson is a cartoon where a mathematician is reporting to an executive, presumably one at Bell who wants to know the least cost way to build a communications network, that he, the mathematician, cannot _solve_ the executive's problem but neither can a long line of other mathematicians.

Nonsense. All the executive wanted to do was design a network and save money, and that goal was quite likely quite doable.

Instead, sorry, it was as if the mathematician was looking for a long term job, that is, claiming that the executive should fund the mathematician to get a _solution_ so far not possible. In a word, the mathematician was lying in order to land a cushy job, for life!

For nearly anything, and not just NP-hard problems, say, a billion, too much of it is _hard_.

Yes, the question of P versus NP is one of the most astounding unsolved problems there is. The darned thing seems to be of even philosophical significance comparable with the work in set theory of Kurt Gödel and Paul Cohen, etc.

And, yes, Clay Math in Boston has a $1 million prize!

Yes, Scott Aaronson has much more to say!

Ah, somewhere I still have Max Zorn's (as in Zorn's lemma version of the axiom of choice) copy of Cohen's paper! I got it from Zorn when at a tea I asked him what Cohen had proved! So, yes, I have some interest in something of such philosophical interest!

Still, the claim in the OP that NP-hard problems are "unsolvable" is nonsense or needs a nonsense definition of _solvable_!</comment></comment></comment>


EmacsConf 2019 Call for Proposals - <AUTHOR> https://emacsconf.org/2019/cfp <comment><USER2> Note that this conference is "virtual", so no travelling necessary!</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you get your news? - <AUTHOR> I read HN on a daily basis and I have google news feed. In addition to this I read FT and Bloomberg from time to time. I feel that I get very narrow "field of view/info" and would like to expose myself to new information outside "my bubble".
Thanks! <comment><USER2> This same question was just asked 4 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17275345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17275345)</comment>


Dependency Drift: A Metric for Software Aging - <AUTHOR> https://nimbleindustries.io/2020/01/31/dependency-drift-a-metric-for-software-aging/ <comment><USER2> At Pivotal (now part of VMware, but it's easier to explain this way) we have an increasing number of teams that track "vulnerability budgets" and "legacy budgets", by way of analogy to "error budgets" from SRE approaches.[0]

Essentially, a vulnerability budget tracks days since last release for a dependency or system; a legacy budget tracks time left until a dependency or system falls out of support. Our CloudOps team and telemetry teams now plot these for their own systems and customer systems, producing a characteristic sawtooth pattern.

I think these are good steps forward, but I see some possible evolutions.

One evolution is to combine these into a more general risk framework like FAIR, so that we're able to use a _single_ budget for all these categories of risk.

Another is to consider risk exposure as a volume. At any given instant I have a wide range of risks in play, distributed over a wide range of systems. As time evolves these risks come and go. A single score (like the one sketched on the far side of the link) only gives me one axis of risk. I also need to know what systems are currently expressing that risk by the presence or absence of software, giving me a second axis. Finally, these evolve over time, giving a third axis.

The sum of volume for any time slice is what ought to be budgeted.

Another thing is to make these problems behave less like "big-bang control", where we switch modes drastically when crossing a threshold value. What would be preferred is a greater degree of smoothness.

And finally, to make all of this tractable: automation. All the metrics and scorecards and reports and graphs in the world won't make this problem _easier_. They can at best make it _visible_ and _demoralising_.

[0] This presentation by David Laing and Jim Thomson is a good introduction: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXPmh9Ap114](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXPmh9Ap114)

David & Tim are responsible for an ongoing multi-year systematic investigation of upgrades as a technical and organisational behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole process of upgrading dependencies is annoying, mainly because stuff keeps breaking. I currently try to keep everything up-to-date, simply because then the number of breakages are spread out and easier to deal with, and when critical fixes come through, they're easier to apply. Automation does help with this. But ideally, I'd like the "it it ain't broke don't fix it" approach. It feels like such a waste of time.

I would love to see Dependabot go further and track upgrade breakage. Being notified about vulnerabilities is a great service and takes the load off. But too many times, it still breaks.

Recent example: Checkstyle security issue, Dependabot cuts a PR. Great. Except almost every minor release [0] has a breaking change. Some libraries are much better than this, and in fact I ended up simply ditching Checkstyle. (It's open source, they don't owe me anything. I get it.)

Until we quantify the breakage issue, you don't have enough data to make a decision if upgrading dependencies is worth it outside of a security fix. And in those cases, it's hard to make an argument keeping up to date is the best choice (other than personal philosophy).

[0] [https://checkstyle.org/releasenotes.html](https://checkstyle.org/releasenotes.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe Dependabot quantifies this to some extent with a "Compatibility score": [https://dependabot.com/#how-it-works](https://dependabot.com/#how-it- works)

But it can only measure what people have test coverage for, presumably.

<comment><USER3> I did see that, but it's pretty opaque (some percentage). And when I click through the badge, it takes me to GitHub's help page [0]. What would be helpful is to link to other public PRs so you might be able to find out how other people solved the issues. Is there any way to see historic compatibility scores to evaluate if it's worth to drop a certain dependency?

Edit: For normal dependency updates, compatibility probably more useful. For security fixes, what choice to you have other than to apply it, or spend more time investigating and trying to come up with your own mitigation?

[0] [https://help.github.com/articles/configuring-automated- secur...](https://help.github.com/articles/configuring-automated-security- fixes)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A variant of this idea that would be more useful to me personally would be some measure of how actively maintained my dependencies are. It would be nice to know if my long-lived project depends on something that has been abandoned.

Details might be tricky, given that some very useful packages simply don't need frequent updates.

<comment><USER5> I like the drift metric more, because some libraries are simply stable and don't need much updates anymore, this doesn't mean they are bad for your system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think you're on to something here. This is hot topic amongst our teams right now. Dependency maintenance looks to me to be one of those things like code duplication that correlates strongly with a multitude of sins.

It's also interesting to see someone else building a tool around a new metric. I'm doing something similar (shameless plug -> [https://without.fail/estimate- accuracy](https://without.fail/estimate-accuracy)) for determining how well estimates correlate with actual development times. I could definitely take some lessons from you because Dependency Drift is way more brandable than Estimate Accuracy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't this just re-invent the Libyears metric?

[https://libyear.com/](https://libyear.com/)

I have skimmed through this article, it seems fairly long but light on details. How does this differ from libyears? What actually is your metric?

That site (libyear.com) IMHO makes the concept refreshingly clear, this "Dependency Drift" site seems vague and markety. It's trying to make a big deal out of something, but what remains unclear after reading it. The libyear site is the opposite - clear and not a big deal.

</comment><comment><USER8> The problem is that this is a bunch of bollocks. But at the same time, that might actually resolve my problem with it as the pain gets fed back.

If one is _very very lucky_ , a library will have accurate changenotes explaining what the version increment actually means, distinguishing between security updates and wanking-over-new-subdependency-for-shiny-irrelevant- features updates.

However, if people are penalised for not wasting their time chasing the latest version of leftpad-with-custom-characters-except-in-locations-which-are-prime- or-square.0.4.3-beta.butnotreally, maybe we'll see shallower dependency trees in the important stuff.

Where 'important' ends up being defined as 'the packages which everyone else gravitates to, and therefore can't be avoided'.

Ideally we'd see security updates for previous major versions of things, for those of us without feature addiction, but that would demand more of the devs producing this crap.

</comment><comment><USER9> I agree this is an important metric and a kind of technical debt that's hard to capture.

How do you discriminate this from RenovateBot or Dependa-Bot? Both of those will not only track the drift but they'll also generate the PR to fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Co-author here, thanks for the input. We use Dependabot on all our projects and love it. I've not seen any kind of numeric metric in Dependabot or any of their competitors.

What I really want is a graph that shows, numerically, the drift over time. You can show this to your stakeholders: "See, look! We haven't dedicated time to stack upgrades and now look how far out of date we are creeping." And then, consequently, I want to see that chart burn down to zero as you do stay on top of things with the help of Dependabot or similar.

<comment><USER7> This is the libyears metric ( [https://libyear.com/](https://libyear.com/) ) tracked over time.

Or are you using a different metric that you haven't defined for us?</comment></comment></comment>


Remote Russians Recycle Rocket Wreckage - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/lens/space-rocket-parts-russia-towns.html <comment><USER2> It's actually a bit scary - many rockets use hydrazine as fuel and that thing can be best described as liquid evil.</comment>


125th Birthday of Ramanujan - <AUTHOR> http://www.usna.edu/Users/math/meh/ramanujan.html one of the greatest mathematicians human race has ever known <comment><USER2> A young George Polya, the Hungarian mathematician (and Stanford faculty) was in England once, and asked Hardy to see one of Ramanujan's notebooks. The next day, he returned the notebook in a panic, saying "there is so much in there, that I'll spend my entire life working on these proofs and never be able to do any original work". (paraphrased).

Ramanujan's accounts of how he arrived at the proofs ("the Goddess revealed it to me"), reminds me of Paul Erdos's "theory", that "God" has a big book of all possible proofs, called "The Book"; and if you're a nice mathematician, once in a while He will open the book and reveal one to you. Taking up this thread, a couple of mathematicians compiled some of the most beautiful proofs and published them as "Proofs from The Book". [http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-THE- BOOK-Martin-Aigner/dp/36420...](http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-THE-BOOK-Martin- Aigner/dp/3642008550)

</comment><comment><USER3> I recommend the fantastic book: The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. A good read even for someone not into mathematics.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to mention David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk: historical fiction about Hardy and Ramanujan. I enjoyed it very much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I enjoyed this documentary -

Ramanujan: Letters from an Indian Clerk: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OARGZ1xXCxs>

</comment><comment><USER6> Google is honouring him with a doodle today

Edit: Looks like Google is displaying it only in India

<https://www.google.co.in/>

<comment><USER7> Too bad nothing in the doodle has anything to do with anything Ramanujan did. (Beyond the level of "both contain square-root signs".)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I a huge fan of Ramanujan and one of my favorite story of his is: Ramanujan was in school and his teacher was explaining the concept of division when the numerator and denominator are the same. The teacher says "if there are 5 people in the class and we have 5 apples, then each one will get one apple. If we have 10 people and 10 apples, then each one will still get one apple".

Ramanujan asks the teacher, if there are zero people in the class and there are zero apples, will each person still get one apple?

I am not sure how old he was at that time but going by the topic, must have been in middle school. Amazing how his mind worked even at that young an age...

I believe the story was also mentioned in The Man Who Knew Infinity (but don't remember if the narrative is the same or not).

</comment><comment><USER9> I read GH Hardy's _A Mathematician's Apology_ last month and adored the relationship Hardy and Ramanujan had.

(great book by the way - easy to read for even a non math person)

</comment><comment><USER10> From the article: _Ramanujan's results were (as Hardy put it) "arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account"._

We can only marvel at (1) the human brain, the workings of which we know so little (as recent events in Newtown tragically reminded us in a very different way); and (2) mathematics, with which such a brain was able somehow to interact so fruitfully.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what's special about the number 125?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_(number)>

<comment><USER12> Wasn't 1729 also the name of the team Waterhouse was part of in Cryptonomicon?

<comment><USER13> That was Detachment 2702 (which was originally Detachment 2701, but Lawrence worried that Rudy would notice the name since it's the product of two primes)

<comment><USER14> Not just that, but two palindromic primes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here is AMS Editor, Krishnaswami Alladi's, notice on the same - <http://www.ams.org/notices/201211/rtx121101522p.pdf>

The Hindu newspaper celebrates Ramanujan@125 here - <http://www.thehindu.com/system/topicRoot/Ramanujan___125/>

</comment><comment><USER16> The question is in this day and age why can't we find another Ramanujan ? Have we somehow destroyed the ecosystem in which such a mind could exist and have a capacity for deep thoughts. Was he so special that someone like him could exist once every millennia. How many Ramanujans died before they could meet their Prof Hardy. Just wondering..

</comment><comment><USER17> This thread on reddit (/r/math) celebrating Ramanujan's 125th birthday highlights some of his most interesting results and stories about him: [http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/159q0h/today_is_sriniv...](http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/159q0h/today_is_srinivasa_ramanujans_birthday/)

</comment><comment><USER15> UFL recenlty held a conference to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Ramanujan's birth.

<http://www.math.ufl.edu/~fgarvan/ramanujan125.html>

</comment><comment><USER18> The Complicité theatre company made a wonderful play about Ramanujan called A Disappearing Number that was excellent and widely praised

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/sep/15/a-disappearing-n...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/sep/15/a-disappearing- number-review)

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disappearing_Number>

</comment><comment><USER19> This man had unimaginable genius!

</comment><comment><USER20> His life story would make a very inspirational film. I see this old link from 2006 about an upcoming film, but can't find any stories about the finished film. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4811920.stm> Was it cancelled perhaps?

<comment><USER21> there's a summary of attempts here - [http://www.indiastudychannel.com/resources/146675-A-film- an-...](http://www.indiastudychannel.com/resources/146675-A-film-an-Indian- mathematical-prodigy.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They mention that Hardy and Ramanujan solved P(n) - but I can't seem to find any information on their solution.

I'm not a maths person but this perked my interest - Anyone have more information?

<comment><USER7> They found an asymptotic series for p(n) -- the number of partitions of n, i.e. the number of ways to write n as a sum of positive integers where you don't count 1+2 and 2+1 as different ways -- with the property that if you take an appropriate number of terms, the nearest integer to the result equals p(n) exactly. Hans Rademacher later tweaked this to give a _convergent_ series that gives p(n) exactly.

The first term of the series (both Hardy&Ramanujan's and Rademacher's) is 1/(4 n sqrt(3)) exp(pi sqrt(2n/3)), which is already a good approximation in the sense that the ratio p(n)/this_approximation(n) tends to 1 as n gets large. This approximation theorem was conjectured by Ramanujan before he came to England, and proved by him and Hardy jointly.

You can find the actual formulae at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_%28number_theory%29#A...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_%28number_theory%29#Approximation_formulas) and more details at [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Sp7z9sK7RNkC&pg=PA68&...](http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Sp7z9sK7RNkC&pg=PA68&lpg=PA68) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> He died at the young age of 32! What a tragedy! Simply amazing what he had accomplished by then. Always wondered the impact he would have had had he not died at such an young age.

<comment><USER24> I read the bio - and it appears that he was partly killed by the Brits' crappy food!

"But the alien climate and culture took a toll on his health. Ramanujan had always lived in a tropical climate and had his mother (later his wife) to cook for him: now he faced the English winter, and he had to do all his own cooking to adhere to his caste's strict dietary rules."

<comment><USER21> it was during a war. there was little food for everyone. he was also a strict vegetarian, which didn't help, and he was suffering from tb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A good tribute to the genius he was

</comment><comment><USER26> I was watching _Good Will Hunting_ last night. I didn't realize this guy was real.

</comment><comment><USER27> Bill Gosper used Ramanujan's formula to calculate the first 17 million digits of pi

</comment><comment><USER28> But was he poisoned by a jealous Brit? We will never know :(</comment>


Why do dead whales explode? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/2/5674734/why-do-dead-whales-explode

<comment><USER2> Cows will do this too (Warning, gross picture):

[http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/trips/us2/dscf0622.jpg.html](http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/trips/us2/dscf0622.jpg.html)

Basically any animal that's got a pretty good seal going and that is in a prolonged state of decomposition will eventually puncture like a balloon at its weakest point. The reason is simply the gases created by the bacteria that decompose the body have to go somewhere, the better the seal the bigger the eventual bang.</comment>


Uber V. Waymo: Everything you need to know - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/timeline/waymo-v-uber-everything-you-need-to-know/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Levandowski's side-companies were acquired by Google in 2011 for around $50M"</comment>


Teleport 2.6 Released - <AUTHOR> https://gravitational.com/blog/teleport-release-2-6/?r=1 <comment><USER2> Teleport is great -- it's a ton better than manually managing SSH keys to a bunch of hosts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are packages for distributions a thing yet?

<comment> old-gregg Thank you for asking!

We're aware of some community-supported packages (brew, AUR) and there are contributed scripts in the OSS repository as well (rpm) but we're a bit hesitant to recommend `apt-get upgrade` path because Teleport has a recommended upgrade sequence documented here:

[https://gravitational.com/teleport/docs/admin- guide/#upgrade...](https://gravitational.com/teleport/docs/admin- guide/#upgrade-sequence)

I.e. you have to upgrade your auth/audit servers first. Some (too many?) folks run an equivalent of `apt upgrade/update` on their entire fleet, which makes it incompatible with the recommended upgrade sequence. OS distro managers aren't really optimized for multi-host software, they are too host-centric.

Besides, Teleport is a single binary, i.e. hopefully it's not too hard for users to get it right.

Either way, we're keeping this conversation open: [https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/issues/514](https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/issues/514)

<comment><USER3> That really does suck, having prebuilt packages I could throw into my repos would definitely save a step. I'd argue there many other ways for users to shoot themselves in the foot, so if that's your only reasoning for not providing them I'm disappointed.</comment></comment></comment>


The Long-Term Stock Exchange Is Worth a Shot - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-16/the-long-term-stock-exchange-is-worth-a-shot <comment><USER2> This article misses the reason why short term investors are potentially harmfull. The author writes: "One basic and important implication of this theory is that, if you hold a share of stock for a minute, you will want the company to increase its long-term earnings power during that minute. If, during your minute of ownership, the company announces "we have sold all our factories and ruined our productive capacity, but we booked a big profit for this minute," you will be sad. "

This is so simple it is wrong. The truth is, that the short term investor cares how PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE changes during that minute. For example, if Kobe steel holds off on making a fraud scandal public during that minute, that's a good thing, even if keeping the fraud skandal secret will hurt in the long term. The short term investor wants the IPhone X to be announced NOW, even if holding off on the announcment could give apple a leg up against the competitors. The short term investor wants toshiba to announce they've got a good deal selling off their memory business NOW, even if that makes it harder for toshiba to improve the price they get even further with a bidding war.

<comment><USER3> Exactly this. I'm observing how a midsized company shares fluctuate completely unrelated to the progress of our development efforts and actual relations and sales to customers. Product A was frozen and discarded after 2 year intense dev cycle (a failure), product B is not faring well in the competition, but we announced product C that may or may not succeed in 1+ years on a major tech show - shares go up. Next year product D is succeeding immensely, record contracts are signed with biggest customers in the world, product is ahead of competition - shares are down, because nobody knows.

tl;dr - PR is everything, often shadowing actual hw or sw "stuff" people make, and HFT capitalizes on this.

<comment><USER4> PR is nothing. The institutional investors who actually move stock prices barely even look at it. Humans try to make sense of random events by looking for causality, but ascribing stock movements to single factors is often like ascribing weather changes to animal sacrifices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting idea, but seems impractical because it causes very weird incentives:

* Can a company exist in both the "normal" exchange and the "long term" exchange at the same time? If so, can I short on the normal exchange and buy on the long term exchange for some free voting power that increases over time?

* Many (most?) consumer-facing brokerages make a significant portion of their revenue by lending out their customers' securities. Voting rights transfer to the borrower of the security. Would this be the same in a long-term exchange? If yes, then this will break the existing revenue model. Online brokerages will need to make the money elsewhere (likely by charging higher trading fees), and this will push consumers back into existing exchanges with low cost trades.

* How long until there is a secondary market for buying and selling voting rights?

<comment><USER6> > Can a company exist in both the "normal" exchange and the "long term" > exchange at the same time?

The fact that a company is listed on multiple exchanges doesn't mean it has different sorts of stock for each exchange. This real subject of this article is tenure _voting_ , which is an aspect of the stock (not the exchange). The reason exchanges are mentioned is that exchanges have rules about the sorts of stock they will list. But to have tenure voting, you only need one exchange to allow out (like the proposed long-term exchange). And most stocks aren't cross-listed to multiple exchanges anyways.

> How long until there is a secondary market for buying and selling voting > rights?

Yes, this strikes me as the obvious problem. The equilibrium is for third party to buy and hold all the tenure-voting stock and then sell stakes in the dividends of the company plus allowing voting by proxy. Basically, the third party becomes an exchange, and all stock effectively has maximal tenure.

This problem is so obvious that it must have been addressed by the people proposing this.

<comment><USER7> >Yes, this strikes me as the obvious problem. The equilibrium is for third party to buy and hold all the tenure-voting stock and then sell stakes in the dividends of the company plus allowing voting by proxy. Basically, the third party becomes an exchange, and all stock effectively has maximal tenure.

You've essentially just described the current system. Most shares on NASDAQ and NYSE etc. are technically held by Depository Trust Company via its nominee, Cede & Co. [1]. Through a complicated set of regulatory and contractual arrangements, public companies, the beneficial owners of their stock (i.e. the investor at the end of the chain) and each intermediary (banks and brokers, etc.) all maintain a sort of legal fiction that the shares are "owned" by Joe Schmoe, even though all he really has is an attenuated set of contractual rights that flow through the various intermediaries between him and "his" shares held by Cede.

Joe Schmoe does not technically or legally own those shares. Cede does. Believe it or not, you were spot on in predicting that the third party would allow "voting by proxy." That's exactly how Joe Schmoe (i.e. all of us) must vote our shares if we want to participate in a stockholder vote. We can't just show up at the meeting (or fill out the company's proxy card). You send a "voting instruction form" telling your broker how you'd like to vote, and your broker then tells Cede & Co. how to vote your shares at the stockholder meeting.[2]

To address your specific point, tenure voting would surely be based on the tenure of the beneficial owner (i.e. the person at the end of the chain who gets to vote) not the nominee holding the shares in "street name" on the beneficial owner's behalf. This might take some reworking of the arrangements between the brokers, DTC, clearinghouses, etc. (likely needing to be be built into the financial systems that log transfers and ownership, if not already provided for) but would not really pose a significant barrier.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-14/banks- for...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-14/banks-forgot-who- was-supposed-to-own-dell-shares) [2] [https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/proxymatters/proxy_materials.s...](https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/proxymatters/proxy_materials.shtml#what_is_registered_owner)

<comment><USER8> > legal fiction that the shares are "owned" by Joe Schmoe, even though all he > really has is an attenuated set of contractual rights

What is a stock really, if not "a set of contractual rights"?

<comment><USER7> To oversimplify, property rights are often said to be good against the world, while contract rights are good against specific others.

A share of stock is itself a set of contractual rights, but the record owner has a property right in the share (and often a physical certificate). It doesn't matter if someone takes your share or inadvertently/accidentally sells it to an innocent buyer. It's still yours and you have a better claim to it than any buyer or later holder.

But a beneficial owner of a share held in "street name" has only a contractual right to his shares--essentially a promise from his broker that the broker will have at least [x] shares for him (note this means he does not have a claim to any specific or identifiable shares and his broker surely holds many times more since they'll have many other clients). And on top of that, his broker has an account with DTC that involves a second layer of contractual rights to the stock--essentially a promise from DTC to the broker that DTC will have at least [x] shares for the broker (again not specific or identifiable shares and DTC certainly has many times more shares since DTC holds nearly all shares held in "street name")

If your broker or DTC accidentally or inadvertently disposes of too many shares (and this can happen surprisingly often) you only have recourse against your broker or DTC. The agreements between [you and your broker] and [your broker and DTC] do not bind the new owner of the shares, who has no obligation under those agreements and, as a bona fide buyer + current holder, also has a better claim to the shares than you do.

If that wasn't specific enough, here's a very detailed summary and analysis of the current stock ownership structure and mechanics:

[http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...](http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1163&context=faculty_scholarship)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I learned about high-frequency trading, I toyed with the idea of opening up a stock-exchange with different rules:

\- one quote per day \- transactions of the day are processed in a random order (using a provable random deterministic algorithm) \- shares have to be kept for at least 3 months (Warren Buffet recommends 6 months) before being sold.

When Steve Jobs died, which was obviously an event that would have an impact on Apple's shares, the quotation was suspended for a day, so that people could take their time to evaluate the significance of the event. This was a confession that they knew that the high frequency changes is just noise and that the signal has a lower time resolution of about a day.

The prospects of future profits do not change every nanosecond.

<comment><USER10> How often does someone decide they want to sell (buy)? Market makers are reacting to demands for immediate liquidity in a distributed marketplace comprised of multiple equities exchanges.

<comment><USER11> To add to this, this model only works if the entire market place operates this way. If any other venue is providing pricing updates a venue that is halted, or somehow contributing to a delay in pricing updates, is going to be left behind.

In the hypothetical "one quote a day" market, the quotes will be insanely wide to account for the risk that the natural price of product moves through the quote (with no way to provide pricing/quoting updates).

That said, I like the idea of a slower market, but, much like the debate over Maker/Taker, it will take an entire industry shift and can't be done on a single venue.

<comment><USER9> It won't be insanely wide, it will be on par with the intra-day variations. What they may make a seller lose are on par with what they would lose by taking a few hours to think about their decisions.

> If any other venue is providing pricing updates a venue that is halted, or > somehow contributing to a delay in pricing updates, is going to be left > behind.

My suspicion is that some companies would prefer to only have investors instead of speculators. I suspect that a SE with such rules would favor long term investments over short term profits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My gut sense is that the important time period is length of hold going forward, not length of past hold.

Maybe the vote strength should instead go with the period of lockup instead? That is, I agree to hold my shares for ten years, so I get ten votes.

Perhaps it could even be slightly nonlinear with respect to the length of time? (years * 1+log(years)) or similar?

Edit: LTSE reminds me of LTCM. Not a great connotation?

<comment><USER13> There is some research in political science on paying for votes in elections. They came to the conclusion that you should pay $x and receive sqrt(x) votes. 100 dollars -> 10 votes. I would think the same reasoning would work here. Hold stock $x days, receive sqrt(x) votes (years is tricky because you can hold less than 1 year and the value increases quite a bit during that period).

<comment><USER14> Would such a political system not spiral into chaos really rapidly?

<comment><USER13> It's all theoretical. God knows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hey everybody, Eric Ries here, founder of the LTSE. I am coming late to the thread as I've been focused on launching my new book and am only seeing this now.

I love a lot of the comments here. I think many of the assumptions both in this piece and in the comments are reasonable guesses about what we are doing - but in a lot of cases wrong.

Part of the reason it has taken me more than five years to figure out how to build this company is that we have to be able to:

1\. Offer companies full liquidity and full protection from short-termism even if their stock trades on another exchange or they dual-list

2\. Build support among many financial system stakeholders and regulators to get approval to do this

3\. Build a multi-disciplinary team that is literate in the arcane ways of SF NY and DC all at once

We aren't quite ready to take the hood off and reveal how we solved all of these problems quite yet. This is stil a sensitive regulatory process and I'm limited in what I can say publicly. But to the extend I can, I'll try and answer questions in this thread. Please keep them coming.

Thanks for taking a look at what we are building!

<comment><USER16> Your name sounds familiar. Can you give a short summary of what else you've been doing?

*edit: Ah, I found something myself. You're the lean startup guy right? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_startup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_startup)

<comment><USER15> Indeed I am :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article doesn't mention it, but this is a project of Eric Ries, of Lean Startup fame. An earlier article is here: [https://qz.com/704657/eric-ries- ltse-long-term-stock-exchang...](https://qz.com/704657/eric-ries-ltse-long- term-stock-exchange/)

<comment><USER18> This article has considerably more information and answers a lot of questions in the comments. IMHO it should replace the original article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The quote at the very end of the article seems to summarize my feelings:

"Skeptics wonder whether the LTSE is just another way for tech founders and elite Silicon Valley investors to maintain control at the expense of other shareholders."

</comment><comment><USER20> And when an owner wants to raise liquidity? They'll take a hit due to the cliff issue (voting rights have value and you destroy voting rights by selling). So any company with tenured voting rights will have created a system that forces owners to sell shares at a discount to their current value. And because they can't sell for more value than they get from holding, they would tend to prefer value-destroying and excessive short term cash distributions up and until the point where the damage from those distributions equalizes with the value destroyed at sale.

I'm sure some economist smarter than me could formalize the issue, but unless the cliff issue is solved, this sort of ownership scheme will not result in shareholders maximizing long term value.

A dominant founder-CEO could mitigate or overpower the incentives described above, but my guess is that any company that successfully gets of the ground using this scheme will replace their tenured shares with ordinary common shares at some point.

</comment><comment><USER21> That sounds very interesting conceptually.

Businesses have been moving further and further into short-termism; with the next quarter being the most important metric. This is partly due to investors also being short-term, and voting on the board who will bring the most value in the shortest period.

I'd be interested in taking part in a Long-Term stock exchange, even if it is an experiment at this point.

<comment><USER22> > Businesses have been moving further and further into short-termism; with the > next quarter being the most important metric.

That's the conventional wisdom, I've heard it my whole life, and I see no evidence of it. AMZN, MSFT, etc.

I've known CEOs who believed it, and manipulated the books to make the short term look better at the expense of the long term. Investors weren't fooled and the stocks would tank.

<comment><USER23> AMZN ist the stand-out example, but AMZN, FB, GOOG are exceptions. Think back to 2006/2007 when PE and activist investors would take board seats and force companies to over-lever and do stock buy-backs while stocks were all-time high. How many companies can survive short-term incented PE or activist investors?

<comment><USER22> A short term investor still has to sell the stock. Why would someone buy it at a high price if that high price was based on short term thinking that sacrificed long term results?

The only hope of the short term investor is that the buyer will be incompetent. How viable is that for people who devote their careers to stock analysis and trading?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How would this work with someone pulling something similar to Altaba?

Suppose you have $1B worth of stock, and 10% of the value is in the vested voting rights that you'd lose by selling it. Instead of selling part of it on the open market, you sell shares in a shell corporation that holds that stock. Surely the discount in ShellCorp's stock price compared to UnderlyingCorp is less than 10%? And the cost of setting up ShellCorp is going to be far less than losing 10% of the value of your holding.

<comment><USER25> Perhaps you'd tie voting rights to a named human beneficial owner, so the prospective purchaser of your shell corporation wouldn't inherit them[1]

Though it might have the interesting side effect of fund managers who exercise their voting rights being better compensated and staying in their jobs longer...

[1]possible to devise some kind of unusual contractual arrangement where the "beneficial owner" retained formal title to the shares but accepted an obligation to both hand over stock yields and vote in the interests of the other party. But this is something you could effectively ban.

<comment><USER24> You can't ban separating out economic interest and formal title to the shares without banning options, forward contracts, and other derivatives on the stock. Like, these are not unusual contractual arrangements. These are standardized and sold on the market. Put options transfer the downside risk to the writer, call options transfer the upside risk to the buyer, futures contracts essentially do both.

<comment><USER25> My point was you'd ban titleholders from selling a contract directing them to exercise their votes as a delegate of the purchaser, not the more general separation of title and economic interest which is obviously valuable for a large number of reasons.

(I mean, it's still a bit messy because fund managers have a fidicuary duty to exercise their voting rights on behalf of their own shareholders, but I don't have the ability to dictate a new aggressively activist investor policy to Vanguard)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How that plays out would be very sensitive to the exact formula for tenure. Ie. A voting "cliff" where you can only vote after year 1. Vs votes per years held * shares, in which case an early investor could get entrenched.

<comment><USER27> I would probably go for some middle ground such as if (year > 0) then shares * Square root (years).

Just because someone has held a stock for 20 years does not necessarily mean they are currently interested in the long term. But, it probably points in that direction.

<comment><USER28> You might want an upper limit, so either logistic growth [1] or something like 1 - exp(-(T + T_0)) feels like it makes more sense.

I especially like logistic growth for having slow growth at the start and end, only growing quickly in the middle.

[1] [https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/ecology/populati...](https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/ecology/population- growth-and-regulation/a/exponential-logistic-growth)

<comment><USER29> You don't need an upperbound as long as your function is sufficiently slow growing.

Example:

Log(years) doesn't have a bound, but is unlikely to cause problems over any reasonable time scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This strategy is Small-Game fallacy.

Reducing the complexity of the real world -> If only shares held for a long term have full rights, you will obfuscate how you pay for those rights. either the stock will have a depreciated market price to what it 'should' trade at or the voting rights will be acquired through rent seeking by long-term holders.

</comment><comment><USER31> > Anyway here's a story about the Long-Term Stock Exchange, which is a new > planned stock exchange backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist types > that will have "tenure voting," in which shareholders who hold their shares > for a long time will get more votes.

This has been discussed already on HN, and I believe it's a bad idea.

All that would do would be to create two kinds of shares : the normal ones and those with high voting power. The market would then want to price them differently, and if you want to prevent long-term owners to sell their shares (for instance if they want to enjoy the increased value), then you are doing some kind of capital control.

It's just a bad idea. In a free country capital can be bought and sold : if you give voting rights to someone, he should be able to sell them, which would probably defeat whatever purpose you had when you gave those rights in the first place.

<comment><USER32> If I got this correctly, when you sell your shares with high voting power, they lose their high voting power.

<comment><USER31> Then you'd just create an incentive to sell the share in dark markets. You'd officially still be the owner of the share, but in secret you would have sold your voting right by agreeing with someone to vote on command in exchange for money.

As is said in the 1981 movie "rollover", capitalism is like a force of nature : you can try to fight it, but in the end it always win[1]

And even if somehow you succeed, you would have created capital that can not be bought nor sold, or can only be bought and sold from and to a particular category of investors. You would have introduced a bit of communism in the system (in the sense that in communism, buying or selling capital is forbidden). I guess some people will be happy about that, but I won't.

1\. [https://youtu.be/m1aQ-XGWors?t=151](https://youtu.be/m1aQ-XGWors?t=151)

<comment><USER32> Are those dark markets contracts enforceable?

By the way, this is nothing like communism, not even close. This is a perfectly market oriented solution, if you don't like the idea, don't buy this kind of shares, nobody forces you to do so. If the model will prove good for companies and their investors, it will prosper, otherwise, it won't.

<comment><USER31> > Are those dark markets contracts enforceable?

Of course they are. When absurd laws try to prohibit market forces, shadow markets emerge and they tend to have their own enforcement policies. Think mafia, prohibition in the 20s, corruption and stuff. Things get ugly, but they get done. The point of having regulated markets is precisely to put some order and fairness into this.

> This is a perfectly market oriented solution, if you don't like the idea, > don't buy this kind of shares

It is not, and the problem is that if that idea were to become popular, then capital would become more and more difficult to buy. So yeah, it's a step towards communism indeed. In the end, it's all about adding restrictions to the circulation of capital.

You can't artificially attach a right to something that would depend on the duration of ownership. In a free country, you can buy and sell stuff, which by definition means their value can not depend on the duration of ownership.

Let me make that reasoning clearer. Imagine I've owned an object for an extended duration, and that this extended duration gives it an additional value V. In a free market, I'm supposed to be able to sell this value V, but if I do, then the buyer will own this object with this extra value V, despite the fact that he's just bought the object. So your initial goal of giving value to duration ownership has been defeated.

<comment><USER32> So basically a free market is free as long as it only creates contracts that you like, otherwise it's communism. Ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am by no means stating it as a conclusion, but rather just as a discussion point, how does this differ from the mutual funds and etfs under a single umbrella, i.e. something like vanguard? Where the stated mission is sort of long term stewardship over the short term activist role.

Now, how well that mission is fulfilled is another thing. The reason I note vanguard specifically is because of the current activist spat between P&G and Nelson Peltz/Trian Partners. Of the top 3 holders (vanguard, black rock, state street), only vanguard voted against the activist shakeup.

I guess I'm just having trouble seeing the difference between giving a bunch of small investors more power, vs a large amount of krill with similar goals making up a whale the company can't ignore. It seems the tenure setup complicates a lot without immediately perceptible benefit, at least to me.

<comment><USER34> It's worth asking why we make the distinction between "activists" and big fund managers in the first place. Shouldn't all fund managers be doing what's best for their shareholders?

You should check out John Bogle's "Clash of Cultures" (founder of Vanguard), he discusses this problem at length.

In general I'm inclined to agree with you though. This thing has a lot of hype around it because it's backed by Eric Ries, the "Lean Startup" author, but I don't really see a problem with the NYSE/Nasdaq in their current form. People overlook the liquidity, depth, and other benefits of such well-run exchanges; it's not at all clear to me that an average investor would be better off on this "long-term" exchange, where I'm sure volumes will be a lot lower, and bid/ask spreads will be wider than on a "bad" exchange with many "short-term" players, who, as a side-effect of their actions, create tons of liquidity for small-potatoes investors.

Frankly, I don't understand the point of this at all. There's nothing stopping a long-term oriented investor from holding shares a long period of time in today's markets. And there are real risks of corporations being too long-term focused. The existence of Amazon, at a minimum, should show that companies with 10-20 year investment horizons are tenable under the current system.

<comment><USER35> Multiple classes of shares with different voting rights are though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> One of the mainly value of a stock exchange is that it is super cheap and liquid to sell your security and access your funds. A long term holding is just PE, VC, or some other type of funding.

<comment><USER37> And people should get access to participate in that, not just private millionaires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> There is a pervasive idea that longer term investments are somehow better (morally superior, more socially responsible) than short-term. This stems from the ancient prejudice toward financiers (usually jews) and the corresponding ancient prejudice against speculation. Let me debunk it:

\- Suppose an 18 year old and a 80 year old each buy a share of company XYZ's stock. Whatever their goals might otherwise be, the 80 year old might quite plausibly have a different time horizon expectation for returns than the 18 year old. If both choose to buy the same stock, they must both believe the stock is a good investment for their respective time horizon goals. Maybe it will be, maybe it won't be. In both cases, someone else sold each of the shares they both bought. The person who sold the shares had deemed the stock a not-so-good investment compared to other options and wished to liquidate.

\- Now, suppose that we add a day trader to the mix, who also buys a share because she thinks that company XYZ offers a good investment based on her specific time-horizon goals. The demand she induced on the available stock helped to support the validity of whatever the current price appears to be. By being willing to buy, she helped create a market for the 18 year old and 70 year old to sell, should one of them change their mind about the stock.

\- Now imagine we have 1000 day traders, 1000 18-25 year olds, and 1000 70-80 year olds participating in the market for this stock, with some buying and some selling every day. Due to all the transactions, we have high levels of liquidity for the stock and low "inventory risk" associated with holding the stock in inventory as a market maker, and thus lower spreads. Market maker spreads are a function of risk, which is correlated with supply and demand. The more supply and demand, the less risk there is to holding inventory.

\- Now suppose we decide we don't like anyone who wishes to invest on a less- than-10-year time horizon. We determine that they are acting to incentivize the company to focus only on short-term profits. So we pull some strings and simply kick out those investors and limit investment only to those promising a long-term view. Now, there is less demand for shares, making them cheaper and limiting XYZ company's ability to fundraise. With less capital, XYZ must rein in its growth projections.

\- What good were those projections anyway if they were based on short-term investors' dollars being available? Wasn't the capital invested by short-term investors likely to disappear at the first sign that short-term results might be floundering? How can a business adequately plan for the long term if it is distracted by the need to fundraise from such a fickle lot?

\- The answer is simple: If a company's business activity is focused on long- term goals and long-term thinking, then it will attract like-minded investors. Like the random walk of day to day stock price, day to day information and speculation will result in short-term transactions occurring, but those transactions benefit the firm significantly as they provide an excellent price discovery mechanism. The day-to-day price will also reflect both short-term and long-term industry-wide shifts, and this will be true both in a long-term constrained exchange and an unconstrained exchange. If the firm is doing wind farms and has a 30-50 year view, and then suddenly a company doing solar comes up with a 100x efficiency improvement, that is going to impact the long-term viability of wind tech, as it should.

While I agree that firms embodying short-term thinking is a problem, the market mechanism offered by the exchange is not the problem, the problem is that executives and employees are generally given predominantly short-term incentives to care about. Imagine the following:

\- Instead of ISOs issue employees a basket of different time-deferred options, so that each employee gets his/her comp incentive spread over time.

\- Instead of giving the CEO shares of stock, give the CEO both present and future shares, and leverage the future ones to the point where any bias the CEO might have had toward short-term thinking is washed out by the appeal of the longer-term incentive. Any hypothetical business results can be used to preview what the CEO would earn in each scenario. If the owners of the company want long-term results, let that be the way the CEO will make the most (time and risk-adjusted) money.

Just as $100 now is worth more than $100 next year to any rational person, the comp incentives for future-looking payouts would need to be more generous in order to impact behavior in a comparable way. They would also need to be invulnerable to termination, since being worried about getting terminated and losing some or all of one's stock is a big disincentive for long-term thinking. The employee should be incentivized to act as if the role is a great fit and he/she will be there for the rest of his/her career, even though we all know that is highly unlikely if not absurd.

I think the ideal scenario for employees including the CEO would be a daily payout of cash salary, plus a daily payout of some basket of immediately vesting, future-weighted non-salary compensation.

In startups, this would look bad to the accountants who had to account for the future-weighted stuff in terms of some mythical hockey stick graph, but without it there really is very little incentive to care about the future in any non-unicorn startup. Big companies manage to create longer-term focus on retaining employment and benefits, and thus end up with a lot of 9-to-5'ers but do a terrible job of preventing organizations from doing repeated short- term-oriented fire drills. Unicorn startups create strong future incentives, but those immediately disappear once the company stops being a unicorn (or the handwriting on the wall suggests it might).

It should also be noted that startups are almost by definition not long-term in nature. The seed investors need a buyer so there needs to be a series A, and the series A investors need a buyer so there needs to be a series B, etc. It's a sales process that (when it works as intended) results in an IPO where each phase of investors get a nice leveraged payout when an IPO occurs, but the whole ecosystem is meant to create that IPO payout, which is fundamentally short-term thinking. The sales pitch at each phase boils down to "wow check out this long term win available to you at a discount because the market doesn't yet realize this is a long term win".

<comment><USER25> Isn't the particular problem this is aiming to solve less that the founder CEOs aren't able to think in 30 year time horizons but more that sometimes they _are_ [1], but fear that when most market participants have much higher discount rates, their position is vulnerable to activist takeovers (if the market's preferred yields are sufficiently short term, they'll get a value boost for kicking out the execs who's hockey stick growth is forecast for ten years' time in favour of those promising earlier revenue growth). It's not the market makers they're worried about, it's the people that actually hold stock for long enough to vote, hence the desire to weight the voters in favour of themselves and the investors that bought into their vision, and not the people buying with the intention of flipping after good quarterly figures.

I mean, they're certainly not going to raise bigger IPOs on a brand new marginal exchange with no track record and a lack of liquidity, but I'm not sure that's the real aim here. (You might need a new exchange to introduce rules like making key executives immune to termination too)

That said, I'm not sure how real a problem it is: AMZN has a very long term strategy and unusual approach towards margins and its stock is doing just fine. And cynics might suggest that other tech stocks returning unimpressive quarterly figures might actually not have thirty year plans...

[1]or want to be considered that way to justify still not turning any profits as their growth metrics start to plateau

<comment><USER39> Since the 1980s activist shareholders have been heavily restricted, it's a big cause of the explosion in CEO compensation.

We need more activist shareholders, not a plan to kill off the few remaining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > shareholders who hold their shares for a long time will get more votes

What prevents me from selling my vote, without technically selling my share?

</comment><comment><USER41> Regardless of my strategy, one benefit of stocks is liquidity. If something comes up, I can cash out pretty much immediately thought I may not like the return. kes th This proposal sounds like tenure, being in place for a long time entitles me to something. It makes the market more complicated and for no proven benefit. No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER42> I want a reddit (or hackernews) with this style voting. The longer you've been a member, the more your vote counts.

There would probably be unintended consequences galore but it would interesting to see if it helped preserve culture and avoid the "it was better in the early days" syndrome.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think it's all going to depend on how the tenure mechanism is implemented. There's got to be some way for new money to "catch up" to old money within some reasonable time horizon, say 10 years, rather than old money's voting power growing unbounded.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is so contrived. Why not have different classes selling in the same market? Something like DVR or differential voting rights. Depending on the market and need prices of DVR might be less or more.

</comment><comment><USER45> You want a long-term exchange? Istitute a mandatory holding period and/or limited trading times.

This is the exact kind of experimental BS that lead to the derivative bubble.

</comment><comment><USER46> This seems like a lot of very highly directed, complex, and confusing artificial policy-making in order to achieve something that could probably be approximated far more simply and understandably by placing a small tax on equity transactions. Long term investors would be barely affected, high frequency traders would be forced to re-evaluate their approach, and the government could collect some highly needed revenue.

<comment><USER15> If you get the political coalition assembled to make this, please give me a call

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> At this point I think the problem is that the economy is debt based and depends on stocks going up anyway.

</comment><comment><USER48> Forget all the practical hurdles, tell me why this premise is even correct. Just because I've owned a share for a long time, that implies that I have more interest in the long term performance of the company going forward? Just because the word "long" is part of the description of a past action doesn't mean it's in any way correlated with an expected future action. And it's often negative. See: basketball games, retirement, and (gasp) stock vesting. You think a VC who's owned a company for 9.9 years and is reaching the end of its fund has more incentive to vote in the long term interest of the company than a pension who just bought?

<comment><USER49> Explicit expectations by the market towards the leadership.

As in: Do not worry about quarterly profits but longterm success

<comment><USER50> Does anyone report to you? If they do, how would you respond if they said "I'd like to check in with you on my progress/metrics/etc... just once a year." Sound like a good idea? It's a terrible idea for managing people and a terrible idea for corporate governance. As high performance organizations move to daily if internal accountability it's laughable that they complain accountability every 90 days to them owners of the company is too much.

<comment><USER49> there is a difference between long term planning and short term execution

yes short term execution should be monitored but it should not lead long term execution plans

<comment><USER39> Owners should be able to decide at any moment it's time to throw out management and start fresh.

<comment><USER49> this does not contradict my statement

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> IMO, short term investing including stock options does nothing but move money from one group to another by creating artificial Flux. The stock market for the most part is a closed cycle in which a large group of investors, mostly the loosing ones, think that the stock market creates value and the ones who make the money from these ignorant "investors" are completely aware of and dependent on the loosing parties stupidity.

We should open gambling shops for those who want to day trade or deal in Stock options because that is all that they are doing.

The only stock market that promotes long term growth and profitability of businesses is one that awards long term investment.

<comment><USER52> The market isn't a mechanism to let salarymen invest their retirement money in something. The market is a mechanism to plan and optimize _all_ production and resource allocation across the entire world, all the time. This has to be fast.

If you think options (your example, not mine) are somehow inherently nothing more than gambling, it's because you don't understand how options work. Options are one of the least exotic and most straightforwardly useful securities.</comment></comment>


Russians urged to Smoke,Drink more - <AUTHOR> http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/world/view/20100902-290065/Russians-urged-to-smoke-drink-more

<comment><USER2> I guess they don't have a National Health Service there, either...</comment>


Jetty introduces WebSocket support (reluctantly) - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/jetty-introduces-websocket-support-relunctantly?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ajaxian+%28Ajaxian+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> Heres to hoping this gets implemented into Lift soon! If I was more adept at Scala I'd give a go at it..</comment>


The Amazon rainforest in Brazil is ablaze - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/21/amazonian-rainforest-is-ablaze-turning-day-into-night-brazils-capital-city/ <comment><USER2> Sad news, the natural order of the planet is being disrupted while the world continues about its ways.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there even a way to combat this? I mean the already raging fire, can it be stopped?

<comment><USER4> Well, it'll stop after a while.</comment></comment>


China Deserves Donald Trump - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/opinion/china-trump-trade.html <comment><USER2> > so he'd be wise to curb his nationalistic "no-one-tells-China-what-to-do" > bluster

This comment highlights both ignorance of Chinese history and continuing American arrogance.

China has been painfully dictated what to do during the last 200 years. This has had a profound effect on the country and has led to the collapse of imperial rule and the drive to 'rejuvenate' the country (to use the official term in China).

This is also arrogant because it suggests that China should be told what to do coming from THE country (the USA) that really is the archetype of "no-one tells us what to do".

I would quip that one of the US's issues with China is that China is not told what to do and is too big to be easily coerced. A bit of a rude awakening for the US...

> Huawei then uses ... its rising global market dominance to set the next > generation of global 5G telecom standards around its own technologies, not > those of Qualcomm or Sweden's Ericsson.

Which is exactly what Qualcomm did for 3G. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

<comment><USER3> >> so he'd be wise to curb his nationalistic "no-one-tells-China-what-to-do" bluster >This comment highlights both ignorance of Chinese history and continuing American arrogance.

>China has been painfully dictated what to do during the last 200 years. This has had a profound effect on the country and has led to the collapse of imperial rule and the drive to 'rejuvenate' the country (to use the official term in China).

I disagree. China has been given some unfair advantages in order to help it build its economy over the last 40 years. Instead of growing up and becoming an adult, they've become the playground bully with their IP theft and closed market.

>This is also arrogant because it suggests that China should be told what to do coming from THE country (the USA) that really is the archetype of "no-one tells us what to do".

If China doesn't figure out the game real fast, they're going to lose it. And to do that, they really need to do what people are telling them they should do.

<comment><USER2> > I disagree

I should point that the part of my comment you quoted expressed the historical reality, not an opinion.

<comment><USER3> I still disagree.

<comment><USER2> The good thing with disagreeing with reality is that reality does not care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article makes a good point about "cheating". I personally don't like that word here, but by blocking other companies like Amazon, Google, FB, etc from entering in China, then copying those companies and selling the products to the rest of the world, this presents a problem for trade fairness.</comment>


New book co-discovery app - <AUTHOR> http://steven.bitsetters.com/2010/10/11/read-sync/

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, I can't bring myself to type my Amazon credentials into his "sign in to Kindle" form, or I'd love this idea even more than I do.</comment>


GitHub wil change default branch name from 'master' to 'main' - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1271253144442253312 <comment><USER2> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch.

(I know bitkeeper used master/slave terminology for repositories; that is completely irrelevant to git).

<comment><USER4> Given how even distributed systems used to use master/slave frequently, and some still do, and that people don't say "master branch" and typically just say "master", I think it would be surprising for someone to avoid that association if they are educated in computer sincere using those terms (which again many places do).

Also, it's not reading comprehension, it's subconscious level associations that people basically can't avoid.

<comment><USER5> > that people basically can't avoid

This is the coddling referred to in a sibling comment. What basis do you have for thinking such misconceptions are unavoidable? This is tantamount to saying "people can never change", which flies in the face of all evidence I've seen. It seems to me entirely more likely that most folks simply don't take the time to practice decent cognitive hygiene.

Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication of their views going forward.

Rather than pushing back on the issue, challenging these people to perform the self-analysis needed to disabuse themselves of faulty logic, decisions like GitHub's only work to foster and perpetuate a distorted world.

Evidently, this is somehow too much of an ask. How did it ever come to pass that it's _everyone else's_ responsibility to kowtow to the lowest common denominator? Why is it verboten to hold them to a higher standard?

<comment><USER4> This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how psychology works. "Cognitive hygiene" is not something most people have, if any. To claim you have it is quite arrogant to most of psychological research.

> Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see > this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as > vindication of their views going forward.

This is an approach that is not productive, but also not applicable here as those types of actions are usually once the rest of the world has moved, and a small minority has not. This is quite early in such a transition and if anything I would expect Github to be praised for it. I certainly appreciate Github starting the process and conversation here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Git init defaults to master, i don't care what it's called but why are they diverging from git defaults?

This will just add yet another inconsistency to confuse newbies as they transition from using github directly to plain git cli... The more cynical side of me would think that may even be intentional.

<comment><USER7> Pray that git doesn't fall victim to the same disease. That might cause an avalanche of stupidity like this one among VCS web GUIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When will all this political correctness and social justice warrior nonsense stop? Just because a word _can_ be used in a way that causes offense, doesn't mean that it's always used that way. Also, people need to relax a bit and not hunt down things that could potentially offend so aggressively. Take it easy, if something offensive was intended you'll probably know from the surrounding context - stop shooting down individual words.

<comment><USER9> It won't stop until companies start refusing to hire leftist activists, or take investment from them, and fire the ones that do sneak through the hiring process.

A lot of this bullying evaporates when there's some risk involved in doing it, but that doesn't happen because companies are filled with people that have no strong moral foundation to their lives. So they aren't really sure if they're good people and easily pushed around by anyone who comes along and says with conviction and clarity, "you are a good person if you do X and a terrible bad evil person if you don't".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this related to master-slave? Master-slave in programming has nothing to do with humans, the contexts are separate. What's it say about society if people are unable to differentiate, separate the language in two contexts?

<comment><USER11> It says that our world has descended into utter madness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Master," in many contexts, need not be associated with slavery. You can be a (grand)master at chess without having any slaves. You can have a master's degree without having any slaves. In the case of git, I don't think there is a clear connection to slavery either (the non-master branches are typically referred to as feature or development branches). So unless chess grandmasters and master's degrees are going to also change names, I don't see why git needs to.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not enough. Master branch should be deleted outright. Then go in and pattern match the word "slave" in people's code and delete that as well (including all prior revisions). Only then will systemic racism be fully abolished. /s

At the speed this is going, I'm beginning to worry about my master's degree, male/female connectors, and color coding in electrical code.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is getting really stupid now. Who are these people? At the risk of invoking the slippery slope, they will _never_ be satisfied.

Will the silent majority bend over to these extremists on Twitter?

<comment><USER15> What if we already went down a slippery slope by permitting racist language to permeate culture and making things right requires an equally slippery slope? Could this be the reality we live in now?

I would contend, however, that those who are trying to combat racism and it's markings in our culture are in more of an uphill climb.

<comment><USER14> You're right, we should remove the words from the language such that not even "racist" concepts can be expressed. An act of daring of such thought itself should be a crime. In fact we should call this new language: newspeak.

<comment><USER15> This story is about a business (Github) deciding to change language in their product that could carry racist connotations. It's not about criminalizing racist language.

<comment><USER14> Except this usage doesn't and has never had racist connotations. If one wilfully chooses to misinterpret the meaning of words then that is on them.

Much the same way RMS did not defend Epstein. Truth is often the first casualty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pure lunacy, hope this turns out to be a joke.

</comment><comment><USER17> I feel like this will break a very significant amount of tooling

<comment><USER18> Now that consider all tools need to support new non-offensive terminology and old racist terminology used in existing projects

<comment><USER17> I'm saying that every tool/service that integrates with Github will now have to know whether the "default" branch is called master or main. Bugs will be caused by that and a lot of services will break.

<comment><USER19> They already had to know that. Plenty of repos use `develop` as their primary branch name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd say "blacklist" and "whitelist" are more offensive / have a stronger argument of colour being used to discriminate (albeit not directly related to races) / would be better to have "deny list" and "allow list".

"Race condition" is just as offensive as "Master Branch" \- neither are relating to prejudice / historic injustice; but use different meanings of these potentially loaded words.

That said, nothing against switching to non-loaded terms; especially if the effort to do so is less than the effort to debate it. But we mustn't accuse people of being racist just because they're using terminology that some are offended by when those using the terminology are simply using terminology they've learnt, and could have no reasonable expectation to have considered that it may be deemed offsensive.

</comment><comment><USER21> Masterdegrees and master bedrooms are next on the list.

The virtue signalling can't stop right now.

</comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps a better broader link than a single tweet without context: [https://www.cnet.com/news/master-and-slave-tech-terms- face-s...](https://www.cnet.com/news/master-and-slave-tech-terms-face- scrutiny-amid-anti-racism-efforts/)

</comment><comment><USER22> People need to fix the real problems, words are just words, please analyze the intentions and context.

</comment><comment><USER23> So now I have to replace all the "master"s in my aliases to "main"... except I have to switch back when I work on an older repository.

Yay.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have no problem with folks doing this but it feels like hollow, performative grandstanding that allows tech folk to feel like they're helping without doing anything that will make them truly uncomfortable. How many companies will do this but continue to let talent pipeline issues languish, or neglect unconscious biases create an uneven playing field for employees?

</comment><comment><USER25> master isn't a special branch right?

Like I know some projects set their default branch as develop.

Also the set upstream command, that let's you have a local branch name different from remote, right?

<comment><USER8> "master" is a special name. For one, it's the branch that git will initially check out after you clone a repository.

<comment><USER26> No, git checks out whatever branch the remote points HEAD to

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> 'main' doesn't seem like a good solution if this is really what they're going to do. it might just be me but a 'master' branch in some repos might not be equal to what you could consider a 'main' branch.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd like to see the Venn diagram of (people who are complaining about renaming 'master' to 'main') and (people who complain about misspelling 'lose' as 'loose', "it's" as "its", etc).

I don't have a fully-formed idea of what I'm getting at yet, but I suspect that the overlap is high, and it seems inconsistent. Like for "master", especially when coupled with "slave", the expectation is that the context of its usage in computing makes it clear that this has nothing to do with humans claiming to own other humans. But use "loose" where "lose" is the right word, and you're gonna get a snide or "helpful" response about the misspelling, even though the context makes it perfectly clear what the intended meaning was in the vast majority of cases.

<comment><USER29> I'd like to see a Venn diagram of (people claiming the word master can offend someone) and (people actually offended by the word master). I suspect the overlap is nonexistent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I saw a great point mentioned elsewhere on Twitter that an even better methodology is to use "prod" and "dev", as it makes the intent that little bit clearer.

<comment><USER18> But we already follow git-flow and have master, prod, staging and dev branches

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The term "main" is a trigger to non-lead developers.

</comment><comment><USER32> Awesome.

Let's do this industry wide and never talk about it again.

<comment><USER11> better yet, why don't we just strike the word "master" from the English language, that way no mortal will make the mistake ever again?

<comment><USER32> I think, context is the point here.

It's like with content that is needlessly sexualized. We should keep stuff like that to the context it belongs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> remember factorybot ?

</comment><comment><USER34> Even existing projects??? No, that's not going to break tons of stuff and tooling built and running on production around "master" /s

<comment><USER25> Has someone said that's what they're doing? Have you seen more information about this change?

Because the link here is just saying "that's a good idea and we're working on it" in response to someone asking about changing the default branch name.

Like default sounds like new project creation time.

<comment><USER34> That's what I'm asking. I mean there are probably tons and tons of custom built tools, ci/cd's around the current default "master" branch. It would be awesome to wake up and see a ton of alarms and all builds and deployments failing, wouldn't it.

<comment><USER25> In that case. It's very likely to be done to existing projects.

Creating a different branch requires commiting to the repo, at least from what I understand.

And and branch name is just a text field.</comment></comment></comment></comment>