Main GNU source repository server compromised - <AUTHOR> http://savannah.gnu.org/

<comment><USER3> I see a lot of angry comments on their webpage, people asking why somebody would do this. Well, the real answer is probably - simply because he/she could. And to all of those wondering how anybody could do this to a project that hosts free software, well, the attackers don't really care. They saw the exploit and used it. Personally, I expected that a project such as Savannah wouldn't be vulnerable to an attack as simple as SQL injection.

<comment><USER4> Maybe someone had an idea for putting a vulnerability into a GNU utility.

 _Personally, I expected that a project such as Savannah wouldn't be vulnerable to an attack as simple as SQL injection._

Seconded. But then again, the GNU source code is mostly C, isn't it? They're used to doing things that most developers would consider intractable and therefore impossible to do safely: such as comprehensively sanitizing inputs so you can safely construct a query string out of them.

"Hey, those web guys say sanitizing inputs is effectively impossible. Should we really be doing this?"

"Snort. That's what they say about manually deallocating memory, too."

"Oh yeah! What a bunch of wimps! I'll get right to work on the query builder."

<comment><USER5> Going further: how about a vulnerability in every program compiled with gcc? I'll just leave this here:

<http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the comments on the linked page:

 _Date: Tue Nov 30 01:34:15 2010 Pseudo: mjflick - Savannah Hacker Comment: re: HappyCrow,

Only one project was targeted in this attack.

Second, a postmortem will be forthcoming, as well as more information shortly from the FSF staff, who are planning on making an official announcement about this._

</comment><comment><USER7> Ouch. This is bad.

It illustrates how much of a pain SQL injections are, if they can affect the GNU project which has some of the most incredibly talented hackers worlwide...

Props to them for having a working backup strategy though.

<comment><USER8> Actually, no... you have to be pretty ignorant to be subject to them. Use bind variables in your queries and you are done. That it's still one of the top 2-3 exploits tells you how horrible most developers really are.

<comment><USER9> No. You are _not done_ with SQL injection just because you use "bind variables". Plenty of things can't be parameterized that are nonetheless subject to user influence. Click the top of any reverse-sortable column in a web user interface to see one obvious example.

Parameterized queries are a good thing, and you should use them, but I feel like I've had to be a broken record about this over the last week: they are not magic anti- SQL injection fairy dust. Our whole team spends most of its time looking at smart people's code, and we routinely find SQL injection.

Plenty of people who aren't ignorant of SQL injection manage to let SQL injection slip through. Knowing how SQL injection works and being able to devise and implement engineering procedures to reliably prevent them are two very different things.

<comment><USER10> _Click the top of any reverse-sortable column in a web user interface to see one obvious example._

People don't do those in JavaScript?

That's what I did a decade ago. Well, then I moved it back to the server after we got tired of the performance problems that JavaScript had back then. But today it wouldn't be an issue. And when we moved it back, we were careful not to have an SQL injection attack. If memory serves we actually did the resort in Perl. (In our defense, much of the data we were serving lived in flat files, or were generated on the fly from a compute server, instead of coming from a database.) However at another company I had the same problem, and I did the obvious "process CGI parameter, insert appropriate ORDER BY statement". Where the definition of appropriate was by column position, from which I worked out the field to sort by, so I didn't have to trust the client for the name of that column.

I should back up. We didn't have any SQL injection attacks that I knew of and were reasonably careful. But that code base did not get audited, so I can't really know that. However after the next company that I worked for got bought by eBay, they did a penetration test on us. The worst thing that they found was an open redirect that could be used to let a spammer construct a link to any web page with us as the referer.

I'm happy to use this as a testament that programmers really can avoid SQL injections. However their surprise that they didn't find any SQL injections in our code supports your claim that most teams fail to do so successfully.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure what you think I'm arguing; that it's impossible to avoid SQLI? Of course not. All I'm saying is that parameterized queries aren't the end of the story; the teams that believe they don't have SQLI because they use parameterized queries are the ones that are going to lose their apps to SQLI.

<comment><USER10> What is the full story?

It seems to me that two tricks nail it. First use parametrized queries. And secondly if you have information you need to send/receive from the client that isn't easily parametrized, have a limited list of possible things that can be accepted back, which is checked in code while building the query.

If you're doing those two things, I don't see how much work it is to avoid SQLI. Furthermore if you're using a reasonable ORM, then you should get both of those pretty much for free. (Well you have the overhead of learning the ORM itself.)

<comment><USER9> There's almost nothing wrong with your second "trick" (when we write recommendations, we usually suggest people never allow users to directly write syntax, and that they structure their app so that the parameters the user sees couldn't possibly land in SQL; use "1" for "ASC" and "0" for "DESC", etc).

But it's not nearly as powerful a statement to say "use parameterized queries and then do everything else right" as it is to say "just use parameterized queries and you won't have this problem", is it?

<comment><USER11> How about "only pass user-sourced data in parameters"? So anything that isn't a parameter is coming from the app, possibly as a response to user data, but not actually _from_ user data. This statement seems just as powerful as the original. Anything misleading about it? Somewhere you can't use parameters _and_ can't simply use app-supplied query pieces?

<comment><USER9> You see how we're converging on "just use proper input validation", which is the all-time least useful piece of advice in software security?

<comment><USER11> Because input validation is hard to do. A rule to not pass input EVER (outside of parameters), even in a supposedly validated form, is something different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ok... I hope I misunderstood this, but does anyone see a problem in the order they're doing this in?

        [X] Reset passwords
        [/] Fix SQL injection and look for potential others
        [ ] Implement crypt-md5 support (like /etc/shadow, strong and LDAP-compatible) hashes
        [ ] Implement password strength enforcement

So they're basically forcing password resets, even though people can use "password123" in plaintext on a site that's not completely audited for vulnerabilities?

<comment><USER13> You eliminated step one, which clearly states:

[X] Put services online using backup, __except for password-based ones __(e.g. the web interface)

The other step you omitted is the one where they allow people to log in after fixing the vulnerability.

As for the audit, there's no such thing as a complete security audit, and there's no reason to keep the site down in fear of hypothetical holes.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, my mistake. I got the website<->other services restoration time backwards. Thanks for correcting :)

Re. audit - of course you cannot be sure, but once you get taken over and your system is offline anyways, it might be a good idea to at least grep the sources for queries and quickly check for obvious stuff. Which is what I assume they're doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Question - if they had been using a DVCS which checksums every commit, would they have been safer ? Presumably, you could build a tool that stores a list of checksums and if you had to do a restore, that tool could validate the backup.

Or is it that, with a little effort, DVCS' can be hacked/corrupted fundamentally ?

<comment><USER15> I don't think DVCS would have helped in any way. It's not the repository server itself that was compromised, AFAIK, but "only" the web interface. This allows password recovery and thus allows people to e.g. make malicious commits from a trusted account, but that would be no less true if there were a DVCS under it all.

<comment><USER14> agreed - but my question still stands: Take SVN for instance - if I managed to hack into a SVN server, can I change the source code (under SVN management) in a way that would be undetectable ?

Repeat the same question for git, mercurial and CVS.

<comment><USER15> For CVS and svn: you can hide it until someone actually looks at the relevant code. For git: not really (as long as you assume you change only the _data_ \- clever attackers could serve one repository to the developers and another to .mil/the rest of the world/...) I don't know about mercurial, but I'd wager it's the same as git in this respect.

In either case, an attacker could add arbitrary commits, and the system administrator would roll back to the last known-good backup as soon as the compromise was detected. I don't think DVCSes help much here.

<comment><USER14> _For CVS and svn: you can hide it until someone actually looks at the relevant code. For git: not really_

 _I don't think DVCSes help much here._

Those statements sound contradictory. Let me try to understand - <USER2> _distributed_ aspects of DVCSes would not have helped here. But the incidental fact of checksums in DVCSes (maybe necessitated by the nature of "distributed") does help. Right ?

<comment><USER15> Not all that much. If I hack your SVN repository, I put something like "if ($password == "1337h4xx0r") $admin = 1" into an old revision and hope you don't notice it when inspecting code. If I hack your git repository, I make a commit with text "spelling fix: invole -> involve" and slip in something like the above. Yes, it's a bit easier to detect, but not all that much - most such breaches seem to be found by system administrators before the developers notice them. (The kernel.org source code breach was detected because some mirror failed to line up with the main repository, for instance)

Of course, a smart hacker would do something less obvious. See the obfuscated C contest for inspiration.

And again, this assumes that I do not have any other access. In reality, I could change your $PATH to invoke a trojaned git binary, or somesuch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Headline missed a word : "again"

Original issue date: August 13, 2003

<http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2003-21.html>

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/MISSING-FILES.README

                                  Moving Forward

All releases after the 2003-08-01 date will have checksums GPG-signed by the GNU maintainer who prepared the release. This assures automatic certification of the integrity of all GNU source from that date onward.

<comment><USER17> Slightly different, as that compromise was of the FTP servers, which store packaged releases. Savannah is the development system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought more eyes on the source means that OSS is impenetrable. Guess not.

<comment><USER19> Nobody really cares about helping out with Savannah. On the emacs-devel mailing list every time Savannah is mentioned, it's in the context of "Yeah, we would like to do that but lack the manpower. Any volunteers?" followed by crickets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What a moran whoever did this.

<comment><USER16> "But he has nothing on at all," said a little child at last. "Good heavens! listen to the voice of an innocent child," said the father, and one whispered to the other what the child had said. "But he has nothing on at all," cried at last the whole people. That made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right; but he thought to himself, "Now I must bear up to the end." And the chamberlains walked with still greater dignity, as if they carried the train which did not exist.</comment></comment>


Sponsor a Tor relay - <AUTHOR> https://sponsor-privacy.com/

<comment><USER2> I wish there was more information about this organization. Additionally, I get an insecure https flag on Google chrome. SKETCH

<comment><AUTHOR> skoon33: That has been the biggest complaint so far and the site is currently being updated to clarify who is running it.

With regards to the insecure https flag, can you provide the version of chrome you are using? I'm not able to re-produce with 41.0.2272.118 (64-bit)

<comment><USER2> Chrome 42.0.2311.90

Thanks for responding. I apologize for the caustic nature of my previous comment; that was too much.

Good luck on getting this to a better place!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, just updated to that version and it appears to work. The only warning I get is "The identity of this website has been verified by Gandi Standard SSL CA but does not have public audit records". We'll do some more testing and see if we can dig anything up.

No worries about your comment, as I mentioned others had shared the same opinion so we are working on adjusting that. We've already updated the payment form to provide details on who our processor is and what to look for on your statement.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Stories – Master complex materials through short daily stories - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone! We're Nikita, Denis and Oleg from Prague, CZ. We are makers of Stories #https://story-board.pro. A learning tool with courses in a short story format. Powered by technology for creating a unique and adaptable learning path for every single course. Thus making it much easier for you to finalize purchased lessons.
We've started this project because no one of us never finished an online-course in Udemy. Even when it was necessary to gain a missing knowledge for getting a job.
How the CORE works. It is designed to support a network type of hierarchy. This allows for altering the learning path depending on your activity. For example, if you don't achieve the min score in the test you can be rolled back, with mid-score to branch1 and with a max score to a branch2.
Mobile app highlights: - The content types in the course always changing, avoiding long boring videos. Simplifying the understanding of the primary idea.
- No need for googling materials that remains uncertain. The app can catapult you to lessons from another course if the system diagnosis lack of crucial knowledge for further learning. - Collection of courses inside one course. Lessons will appear parallelly. However the number of daily lessons are limited, we don't want to force you to study.
- Constant course improvements. If an instructor observed that some parts are low performing she can update any lesson, save changes and the app will be updated instantly. Because it has no hardcoded elements, even buttons with various actions, are dynamically generated.
For now, we've added Network Theory and Complexity Sciences courses. But we would like hearing from you what skills would you like to gain with our tool. We have more than 500 instructors in a wait least and with your help, we can select those who will be among the first providers. Note: leave request at the bottom of the "explore" tab.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stories-study-easily/id14375...
Thank you. <comment><AUTHOR> Complete story: [https://dev.to/nikitaastakhov/stories-on-hn--master- complex-...](https://dev.to/nikitaastakhov/stories-on-hn--master-complex- materials-through-short-daily-stories-5g42)</comment>


Ask HN: They will bring back Windows Classic and make billions? - <AUTHOR>

I'm finding simple tasks that involve multiple windows challenging. Did Microsoft make Windows 8 so that when everyone hates it, they will bring back Windows Classic and make billions? <comment><USER2> Take a look at Scott Hanselman's blog post 'Windows 8 productivity: Who moved my cheese? Oh, there it is.'

[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows8ProductivityWhoMovedMy...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows8ProductivityWhoMovedMyCheeseOhThereItIs.aspx)

This helped me a lot. I don't particularly like the OS, but once you read that post you should find the experience manageable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not everybody hates it, though many do, and many find it confusing. Microsoft is attempting to build a future forward system by making people transition to it now. Arguably they should have done the windows 8 style interface (aka the metro interface, but there were TM issues with that or something) as a secondary optional interface on PCs and the main interface for tablets, then built on the experience they got from early adopters, but they decided to try to force things on people and have users test it, then learn from their mistakes, as they did with Vista.

<comment><USER4> Or at least have the user set which will be their default. I think Metro is actually fine for most users who are only using web, email, media, etc. even if on their laptops (yes, their are many people who fall into this category).

I find I'm in the desktop most of the time and almost never go to the metro start screen, which is a shame, because I'd like to be able to use their innovations, but most of the apps I run only run in desktop mode.

<comment><USER5> I like Windows 8, but I really just like using it on touchscreen devices. On a touchscreen device, I think it has the potential to dominate everything else, as long as the apps start to show up and the second round of devices isn't plagued by crippling hardware and software defects, like nearly everything that wasn't manufactured by Microsoft.

The best way I can describe using the new interface on a non-touch device is that it feels like the operating system equivalent of a console port.</comment></comment></comment>


The-illusion-of-asymmetric-insight - <AUTHOR> http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/08/21/the-illusion-of-asymmetric-insight/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting read. Not sure that if the same summer camp experiment was held now, with properly raised children, that the outcome would be quite the same. There might still be some competition, but I doubt it would come to nearly murder.

<comment><USER3> Your comment displays the very asymmetric bias the article is about: _we're_ not like _them_. _Our_ children are raised properly.

<comment><USER2> While I don't disagree with what you're saying, I do think that the general culture is a bit more tolerant of differences now than it was when the experiment was run.</comment></comment></comment>


FlexBox Cheatsheet - <AUTHOR> http://vudav.github.io/flexbox-cheatsheet/ <comment><USER2> I've personally gotten a lot of value out of the CSS-Tricks flexbox guide [0]. It's visual, and sufficiently comprehensive.

0 - [https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/](https://css- tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/)

<comment><USER3> I second this one! It's the only resource I've needed and still use for flexbox. I've got most use cases committed to memory by now, but every now and then I need to visually see what I'm trying to do and quickly reference its code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since others are posting their favorite FlexBox resource, I'll post my goto link -- The FlexBox playground by Gabi on Codepen:

[https://codepen.io/enxaneta/full/adLPwv/](https://codepen.io/enxaneta/full/adLPwv/)

It was the #1 most hearted pen of 2016:

[https://codepen.io/2016/popular/pens/10/](https://codepen.io/2016/popular/pens/10/)

</comment><comment><USER5> At our company, we semi-recently sunset our support for IE10, which has enabled all of our frontend guys to start redoing a lot of our app using flexbox. It's been one of the better decisions we've made. It's such a joy to use, reduced dozens (if not many more) lines of positioning code and has facilitated moving <divs> around so much easier. The only thing we've run into is adding "display:flex" to child elements, so that we can alter the contents direction and have rows / columns under the same parent (which has inevitably forced us to use "display:flex" all over the place).

I'm looking forward to when we can move to the CSS grid stuff personally, but at this point, we haven't due to less browser support for IE11. That and we're enjoying flexbox after many years of floats.

<comment><USER6> Whilst is awesome to be able to use flexbox quite freely IE11 and Safari still have a handful of slightly arcane issues, such as certain configurations of flex-wrap:wrap content requiring max-width:100% or flex-basis:auto to trigger the wrap rather than overflowing.

The golden rule of Flexbox layouts in those browsers seems to be "too much Flexbox breaks Flexbox"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Someone here at HN once directed me to the resource so I'll do the same: [https://flexboxfroggy.com/](https://flexboxfroggy.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> How do I change values? I tried clicking but all I get is a notification saying it's been copied to clipboard.

</comment><comment><USER9> I learn more of Flexbox by reading [https://hackernoon.com/11-things-i- learned-reading-the-flexb...](https://hackernoon.com/11-things-i-learned- reading-the-flexbox-spec-5f0c799c776b)

Great complement to mentioned articles.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is this just not working for me? I something supposed to be happening when I click the properties/values? Even if I allow the unsafe script that Chrome warns me about, all it does is copy something to the clipboard.

</comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't seem to do anything for me? ==> clicking does nothing (firefox). In JS console:

      Blocked loading mixed active content "http://code.jquery.com/jquery.js"[Learn More] vudav.github.io
      ReferenceError: $ is not defined[Learn More]

<comment><USER12> The page loads jquery over http instead of HTTPS. If you're viewing the above link via HTTPS, jquery ($) won't load properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Quick question: are we/you using flexbox now even for critical areas such as navigation? I've been putting off using it for areas like top nav due to browser support, but surely now we can use it without worrying about fallbacks? I guess the answer is always "depends" with links to can-i-use, but wanted to hear opinions.

I love flexbox, it's what we all wanted back in the day... now it's here, it's motivating me to code some new responsive templates from scratch, and I'm blown away how well flexbox handles nice neat responsive columns. It plays nicely with other CSS too.

<comment><USER10> I have no problem using it in more "modern" projects. This is another case where IE is really holding things back. If you need support for IE9 or earlier it's really just not worth the trouble, in my opinion. Most other browsers have pretty decent support for it, though. So if you're OK with only supporting IE11 onward, I think it's totally fine to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> My favorite one: [http://apps.workflower.fi/css- cheats/?name=flexbox](http://apps.workflower.fi/css-cheats/?name=flexbox)

</comment><comment><USER15> Typically a cheat sheet should explain what the things mean.

<comment><USER16> If it included detailed explanations it would be the opposite of a cheat sheet

<comment><USER17> But this has _zero_ explanation. It's more like an appendix than a cheatsheet. It lists all the flexbox commands you can use, but doesn't say a single word about what it is.

 _flex-direction: row (The flexible items are displayed horizontally, as a row)_ is a cheatsheet. _flex-direction: row_ is just a command.

<comment><USER13> I agree, and for simply learning flexbox in 5 minutes (really it's that easy), I used:

[https://www.w3schools.com/css/css3_flexbox.asp](https://www.w3schools.com/css/css3_flexbox.asp)

the "try it yourself" links are handy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This looks fantastic to learn what some of those mean, but just to save time when using flexbox I love this [http://the- echoplex.net/flexyboxes/](http://the-echoplex.net/flexyboxes/). It gives you all the code for what you set up. Every time I need flexbox, I use that and then tweak a few details, takes me a minute.

</comment><comment><USER19> My experience with Flexbox is that it's a struggle to use it on its own for responsive behavior but is much easier when combined with percentage-based width, height and margins.

See this as an example:

[https://github.com/idibidiart/react-native-responsive- grid](https://github.com/idibidiart/react-native-responsive-grid)

<comment><USER13> That's how it should be used anyway, I don't think anyone has ever suggested using Flexbox in isolation from other CSS methods such as percentage width.

For example sometimes you may want a 2-column layout only - so the items within the flexbox container only ever wrap once. Defining percentage width of those items, say 48% to allow for middle margin, is the only way I know to achieve this.

I've started using Flexbox after waiting a LONG time for it to become safely adopted. It's one of best things to happen to frontend dev in a long time. No excuses now not to make your own responsive template.

<comment><USER19> I meant it that I have learned to avoid using the relative size factor sizing (with flex-grow, flex-basis and flex-shrink) which is the default sizing model of Flexbox and have been using percentage baed sizing instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> These animated flexbox examples serve me very well:

[https://medium.freecodecamp.com/an-animated-guide-to- flexbox...](https://medium.freecodecamp.com/an-animated-guide-to- flexbox-d280cf6afc35)

Highly recommend if you haven't memorised what each property does yet.

</comment><comment><USER21> I miss the Hbox and Vbox of adobe Flex. They were so intuitive and i think i was able to manage almost all sorts of layout which Flexbox offers (ok, maybe not all but most) without ever once consulting the docs.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this supposed to be doing something? Clicking the little up/down arrows changes the numbers, but that's all I see happening?

</comment><comment><USER23> Flexbox is just fantastic. I use it in every project and it always makes things so easy. Helped A LOT when we built [https://www.StockDroids.com](https://www.StockDroids.com) and when I built a screenplay editor it did a great job with the magic of a "page within a page".

</comment><comment><USER24> I somehow misread the title as Firefox Cheatsheet and was actually excited to see if there was some neat shortcut key combinations or settings that I didn't know of. So now that that's said, anyone got something like this to recommend?

</comment><comment><USER25> The flexbugs repository is also a good resource for browser specific flexbox issues: [https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs](https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs)

</comment><comment><USER26> A good FlexBox guide with images : [http://cssreference.io/flexbox/](http://cssreference.io/flexbox/)

I use it all the time while making websites, it is well explained.

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://cvan.io/flexboxin5/](https://cvan.io/flexboxin5/) also help generate css

</comment><comment><USER28> The clipboard feature isn't working for me

</comment><comment><USER29> wtf friends, why are we ingesting and highly rating such a quantity of flexbox explainers</comment>


New DirectX Shader Compiler Based on Clang/LLVM Open-Sourced - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2017/01/23/new-directx-shader-compiler-based-on-clangllvm-now-available-as-open-source/ <comment><USER2> While it's really nice they built this on open source compiler infrastructure, it's also too bad they took all the LLVM code and changed the license headers on it (additionally pretending to relicense it and changing the copyright string) when that's 100% not okay:

[https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler/blob/mast...](https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler/blob/master/include/llvm/IR/Instruction.h#L5-L7)

I'm sure it was a script, but this needs to be fixed, stat.

Sadly, not even the first time: [https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/issues/35](https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/issues/35)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024377](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024377)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10018208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10018208) (which devolved into a licensing discussion)

It'd be nice if folks paid a little more attention, because for releases from large companies, stuff spreads quickly, which means a year from now, there are still likely to be "mit licensed" copies of this that are still wrong :(

<comment><USER3> If there's anyone reading this who's a LLVM contributor (and therefore copyright holder), can you send a DMCA notice to github over this please?

[https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown- policy/](https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy/)

<comment><USER4> I don't get it – why use the nuclear option when you could open an issue and ask them to look into it? This may be just an oversight.

<comment><USER5> It's almost certainly an oversight, an issue is the correct course of action here. You can always resort to DCMA if that isn't effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hopefully it will be of some help for this effort: [https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/362](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/362)

I'm kind of surprised that this happened, though I've heard it could happen from glslang developers. It helps reducing DX/HLSL lock-in, and it's as if usual MS management responsible for such lock-in fell asleep, and developers managed to release something good for the world for once.

<comment><USER7> Microsoft has been going away from that path for quite a while now, ever since Balmer left. For example the .NET runtime now runs on BSD/Unix/Mac OS X and sql server was released for Linux.

Ultimately it is still in the interest of Microsoft if their toolchain is interesting because it is compatible among all target devices (PC, Xbox, PS, Mobile) so I'm unsurprised they are moving in that direction.

<comment><USER8> > For example the .NET runtime now runs on BSD/Unix/Mac OS X

Under Balmer's time, there already publicly existed Microsoft Rotor - a .net runtime that ran under FreeBSD and OS X:

> > [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shared_Source_Com...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shared_Source_Common_Language_Infrastructure&oldid=722315020)

So don't do a corruption of historical facts.

<comment><USER9> While you're technically correct, ROTOR hadn't received any updates for a long time, and the source was licensed in such a was as to make sure anyone who could benefit from it running on *NIX platforms was heavily incentivized not to do so.

<comment><USER10> IIRC, Rotor's license explicitly forbade porting it to Linux.

The impression I got back then was not so much of Microsoft showing how "cross-platform" .Net was, more like a big middle finger towards Linux.

<comment><USER11> .NET Core on Linux runs on guess what... Rotor. Rotor has been relicensed to MIT

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I gotta say, this "new, open Microsoft" is really surprising me. I think what this signals is the end of selling software. Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall and realize that the money is in subscriptions and services.

Due to piracy, a company can no longer just release an incremental update of their software package every couple years. They have to have rolling updates and constant improvements to keep the money stream rolling in from their customers.

This is why MS is focusing on Azure, Office 360, Windows 10, etc.

<comment><USER8> > Due to piracy, a company can no longer just release an incremental update of > their software package every couple years.

In earlier days (before Microsoft introduced much stronger copy protection schemes, such as the necessity to activate the products or WGA) a lot more installed copies of Microsoft products were illegal copies (in particular on computers owned by private users). And Microsoft survived quite well. So if you really believe in the "piracy explanation", you are deeply brainwashed by rightholder's propaganda.

The IMHO most plausible reason why the model worked in former days, but worse today (though "worse" is probably a really bad word: revenue today is surely still much larger than in the former days), is that as long as Moore's law correlated to increased speed for _existing_ applications (without need for new programming tricks such as having to use multithreading, new SIMD instructions etc. in the programs to make use of the additional power of new processors), there was a good reason to buy a new PC every few years. With each new PC there came a new OEM version of Windows and sometimes some Microsoft Office applications. So the formerly existing correlation between Moore's law and speed for existing applications drove Microsoft's sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So now all the "NDA" excuses for not releasing graphic drivers source code are gone?

<comment><USER14> 1\. It never did exist

2\. AMD has

3\. Nvidia won't because their GPU does a lot of magic to fix DX9/DX10/DX11 screw ups some people shops who've partnered with Nvidia leave in their code.

<comment><USER15> I've heard a bit about the last point but I'd like to know more. Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER16> I think the third point is about that testimony:

[https://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your- opinions-...](https://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on- dx12vulkanmantle/#entry5215019)

<comment><USER17> That gets linked every now and then and it's pretty much BS, coming from someone who was an intern for a few months.

Yes, there are workarounds and tweaks in the driver but it there was no other way back when games were shipped on a CD and updates were necessarily not applied. But even today it's not an option for AMD/NVidia/Intel to ship a driver update that will knowingly break Doom/Quake or any other shipping title. If a released product relies on a driver bug, the driver bug must be there indefinitely unless the game/app developer ships an update (which they might not do, the game might be years old and no longer supported).

If you got a driver update that broke your game or hindered performance, you would be upset.

Case in point: GLSL compilers which accept invalid input. That just can't be fixed without breaking some existing use.

Then there are different strategies how the driver might implement Direct3D/OpenGL feature X. If 98% of the cases Strategy A is better but for a popular game Startegy B is better, the driver will selectively enable strategy that for a specific game. This is typically done in collaboration with the game developer and the GPU driver developers.

Some years ago, cheating in benchmarks was rather common (and unsurprising). Benchmark results have disproportionate impact on sales and cheating, however dishonest, was a way to make a lot of sales with relatively little effort. I am under the impression that these days there are legally binding contracts between the manufacturers and benchmark companies that disallow this dubious practice.

But in reality, most of the driver workarounds/hacks are artifacts of closed source development and binary releases and almost everyone benefits from them. The customer gets better performance, the game developer doesn't have to do as many workarounds (although it's beneficial for them to have a working relationship with the GPU vendors) and the GPU company gets sales because your favorite game runs better.

I understand that this is giving some grief to indie developers and open source hackers. Not everyone can or wants to sign an NDA required for collaborating with GPU vendors.

Please stop re-posting that forum post. It does not accurately reflect the reality.

disclaimer: I'm a GPU driver programmer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh they are still working on DirectX 12.

Microsoft has the tendency to downside and almost stop development after reaching near monopoly of a niche. Everyone remembers the Internet Explorer 6 years, it took years and Firefox reaching 25% market share to continue development of IE7. The same with DirectX: DirectX 9 was too successful, and OpenGL supported was limited to OpenGL 1 in WinXP and onwards (only tricks like bootstrapping allows OpenGL2+ on Win). DirectX 9 was around for many years. When OpenGL 3 and 4 came around, Microsoft restarted development of DirectX 10. DirectX 11 was merely a maintenance release. When the new AMD API (now Vulcan) came along, Microsoft restarted development with DirectX 12. Nowadays 99.9% of all new games are DirectX10/11 or Vulcan and support Win7+ and are usually available over Steam and/or GoG. And PlayStation 4 is very successful worldwide. XBoxOne is mainly successful in US and has little presents worldwide, Microsoft even stopped announcing sales two years ago - it's that bad. Nor are there any new exclusive games to speak of, PS4 has dozends of exclusive games, Win7+ has millions of exclusive games. Win10 Store is a complete desaster, worst software ever and hardly anyone would use it to buy games, if there are far better alternatives like Steam and GoG. Is DirectX 12 still a thing?

<comment><USER19> Regardless of urban legends, game consoles have their own graphic APIs.

PlayStation 4 doesn't use OpenGL either, rather LibCGM.

From all other PlayStations, including the portable ones, only the PlayStation 3 did support a mixture of OpenGL 1.0 + NVidia's Cg for shaders in addition to their actual graphics API. Almost no one ever bother with it, other than creating game prototypes.

Nintendo Switch has adopted Vulkan, but it remains to be seen if it will be any more successful on the market than Wii U was. None of the other Nintendo consoles do support OpenGL, rather they have an OpenGL-like API, GX and GX2.

Actually if it wasn't for Apple's adoption of OpenGL ES 1.0 for the iPhone, the first hardware support after Nokia's N95, it wouldn't probably ever taken off on the mobile devices.

<comment><USER6> Revisit this topic when graphics APIs lock-in age will come to an end.

<comment><USER19> Middleware has already settled that question several years ago, only FOSS advocates without experience in the games industry keep wishing for a different outcome.

<comment><USER6> Nothing is settled, until the tax of supporting multiple APIs exist. Don't imagine it comes for free. The price is paid, whether it's in the middleware or not. You pay this tax in various ways, from slower progress of game engines, to more bugs in your games. And it clearly demonstrates the intent. Those who push this tax on developers don't want faster progress and higher quality. They want lock-in.

<comment><USER19> Like I said, without experience in the games industry.

That is not how professional game developers see it, attending a few GDC would help to understand this.

Or if you don't want to pay for a ticket, there are plenty of talks available for free at GDC Vault.

<comment><USER6> Whose experience in the industry says that lock-in is good for development? Sources please. Or may be you have an example of GDC presentations titled "Lock-in - the ultimate driver of engines' progress" or "Drive development costs down by proliferating lock-in"?

<comment><USER19> > Whose experience in the industry says that lock-in is good for development?

Lock-in is only in the heads of FOSS advocates, not in the game developers that want to squeeze the hardware to the limits of what it can do, while selleing the game.

> Sources please.

Go to GDC, IGDA, PAX, Game Development university degrees events close to you and do some networking talking with actual professional game developers, what is their opinion about graphical APIs.

Attend their talks about graphic APIs.

Read articles on magazines like Gamasutra, EDGE, Game Connections, Making Games about graphic APIs and the industry view on them.

<comment><USER6> _> Attend their talks about graphic APIs._

Again, please show me any talk which says, that developers benefit from the need to address vendor lock-in which forces them to support multiple APIs instead of having an option of good cross platform ones. I doubt you can show any such talk.

 _> Lock-in is only in the heads of FOSS advocates_

Oh, now you are trying to deny that lock-in exists? Then read about it from those who actually push it on developers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock- in)

But I suppose you'll say that it's all imaginary. In such case further discussion is pointless. Figure out, does it exist and you support it, or you think it doesn't exist and you actually don't.

<comment><USER19> > Again, please show me any talk which says, that developers benefit from the > need to address vendor lock-in which forces them to support multiple APIs > instead of having an option of good cross platform ones. I doubt you can > show any such talk.

You know that even OpenGL requires multiple paths full with extensions for supporting properly various render targets, right?

So if there isn't a talk accessible in the Internet it didn't happen?!

Again, talk to professional game developers, which apparently it is something you don't do.

As for the rest, FOSS advocates see lock-in as an hindrance, professional game developers see lock-in as the right set of features to make their game outsell the others.

That was the magic of computer hardware like Commodore 64, Atari, Amiga.

It was the lock-in to their hardware, to their special processors that made these platforms special, and many of the ports just meh quality.

This is the culture of games industry, pushing an agenda without understanding how the industry works, is like D. Quixote fighting windmills.

> But I suppose you'll say that it's all imaginary. In such case further > discussion is pointless.

Of course, because I have the game industry experience that you lack and are unwilling to accept how it actually works.

Which I might add, also caused me issues in the past, because I used to think like you, before having had the opportunity to see the industry from inside.

<comment><USER6> It has nothing to do with FOSS specifically. Lock-in is a hindrance for pragmatic reasons. Time costs money, which you seem to blindly ignore. Trying to say that lock-in is something positive is beyond silly.

 _> Of course, because I have the game industry experience_

Apparently your experience didn't demonstrate you the negative effects of lock-in. May be you can develop an engine for all APIs at once for the cost of one?

So far, I'm waiting for some more substantial sources from you about benefits of lock-in for the industry, and how it's not a tax that hinders development, instead of abstract "get it from GDC".

<comment><USER19> > May be you can develop an engine for all APIs at once for the cost of one?

Because as anyone in the industry knows, the portability of APIs like OpenGL only happens in theory.

To expose the hardware features that makes the game shine and stand out over others, one needs to make use OpenGL extensions.

A different set of calls for each card model, manufacturer and game consoles if they expose an OpenGL wrapper API.

Then there are the workarounds for the API calls that are supposed to be part of portable OpenGL, but then again behave differently across graphics hardware and drivers, leading to additional code paths.

The shading language features are also different across OpenGL versions and graphic drivers.

Finally OpenGL and OpenGL ES are common just in the name and a few overlapping APIs, leading to rewrites between desktop and mobile platforms.

In the end, the development effort of writing "portable" OpenGL, while taking advantage of vendor extensions and working around bugs is bigger than use exposing an common abstraction layer on the games engine that takes advantage of each native API without piles of workarounds.

<comment><USER6> OpenGL wasn't portable enough to be performant at the same time, for several reasons. I'm talking about Vulkan, not about OpenGL and its troubles in the past. Vulkan addresses the issues which you mentioned.

<comment><USER20> Vulkan still has extensions. The whole reason game developers want to have lock-in is so that you can squeeze the maximum possible quality out of a known set of hardware.

Once you start abstracting that away you are falling behind other companies who may be able to draw slightly more particles at slightly higher frame rates at slightly higher resolutions.

The whole reason Nintendo is still saying "we have Vulkan" is because they are the only console manufacturer were raw graphical performance was never the system seller.

<comment><USER21> Lock-in doesn't cause you to be able to 'squeeze performance' out of the hardware. It causes you to specialize your code to the platform so much you can't port it to another.

It's the other way around. Developers don't care much about portability. The care about APIs that allow them to build performant programs. For them, a bad side effect of such APIs is vendor lock-in.

Why would a game developer want to limit his audience?

<comment><USER8> > Lock-in doesn't cause you to be able to 'squeeze performance' out of the > hardware.

Let's assume GPU X supports some feature that GPU Y does not. Then you either use an (say OpenGL or Vulkan) extension to use it to squeeze out performance (lock-in) or you eschew the lock-in, don't use the feature and ignore the performance advantage. Now multiply this with lots of features and also consider that the graphic APIs of consoles offer some rather unique features that don't map directly to, say, DirectX11 or OpenGL.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Emacs starter kit? - <AUTHOR>

Which one should I use?
https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit https://github.com/topfunky/emacs-starter-kit https://github.com/eschulte/emacs-starter-kit
If you can't make an absolute recommendation, could you explain some of the differences so I can decide? It is a bit over my head as I am very new to emacs. <comment><USER2> I don't know of any particular "starter kits". Generally speaking, the way I (and most people I know) got started was either by copying a friends .emacs file or just googling for something when you realize you need it. The latest versions of (at least GNU) emacs ship with a lot of language major modes.

If you're on debian/ubuntu, the emacs-goodies-el is a good package to grab, as it has a bunch of useful packages including color-themes.

<http://www.emacswiki.org/> tends to be fairly helpful to get started, as is the included manual (although its only ~3.5 years after I started using emacs that I'm starting to abandon the arrow keys in favor of the builtin movement chords)

I think as you use emacs, you realize "I really want feature X", then you google for it and find it exists and you're happier for it. After a while you get more comfortable with your .emacs file you start adding your own keybindings, macros, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> The echulte one is the one I use because it has a _fantastic_ literate add-on that inlines org-mode into your startup scripts. Actually, it's the other way around now I think about it - you write org-mode files and inline your elisp customisations :) My personal init.org looks like this:

      Writing
      Programming
      Game dev
      Settings

and so on. All my settings for all my packages are in here - I just tab to change the visibility. At startup the package generates the correct elisp files from the org file. But the defaults are all sensible too if you're just getting started.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that, I used org-mode previously so went with this one. Can you briefly explain the literate org-mode addon and your init.org? Thanks

<comment><USER3> Sure. Your init files are actually .org files so you can arrange your customisations in logical order by sections. The actual code is encapsulated between #+begin_src and #+end_src tags and the init file will generated the proper .el files for you. here's an extract:

      Personal customisations

      * Settings
      ** Paths

      #+begin_src emacs-lisp

      ;; PATH settings

      (setenv "PATH"
        (concat
         "/bin" ":"
       ;; and so on
        )

#+end_src emacs-lisp __Colors __Abbreviations __Misc

So your .emacs becomes an org file with all the goodness, organisation and layout friendliness that implies. No need to split all your settings and elisp stuff across different files to keep it tidy - just stick them under another bullet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't worry about it too much. It's just a way to configure your Emacs with some niceties while you're busy learning the editor. I've spent a bit of time digging through the starter kits and learning how everything is configured for the languages I care about. The keybindings mods and additions are much better than the Emacs defaults.

I use technomancy's, I'd assume the differences are negligible and great changes make their way back to technomancy.

</comment><comment><USER5> Topfunky's report is a fork of technomancy's. Eschulte's fork contains modes for most programming languages. Both topfunky's and eschulte's fork contain a lot of modes and are well maintained.

I use the topfunky fork. These starterkits contain instructions on how to add more modes so just choose something that has most you want and the rest :)

Welcome to emacs.</comment>


ARM Disrupting Intel with its Business Model - <AUTHOR> http://www.fernstrategy.com/2011/03/10/arm-disrupting-intel-with-its-business-model/ <comment><USER2> This seems to me a case of mis-attribution of success.

The article says "Intel's dominance in the global microprocessor market is being threatened by the rapid rise of ARM Holdings.".

ARM Holdings might be "rising rapidly" today but it was founded in 1990. They've been doing ARM processors with the exact same business model for the past 20 years.

The reason they're successful today is simply because they have superior technology in an area (power consumption) that is important for a quickly growing mobile markets.

Arguably ARM was a better architecture than x86 from the beginning but it didn't matter: after Windows/x86 got majority of the market share, the switching cost for a different processor were too big and Intel was doing a good job driving x86 in ways that mattered for that market (performance).

Only when a completely new market emerged (for PDAs, iPods and cell-phones) that was free from requirement to support legacy code, ARM found it's place because it delivered one thing much better than Intel with their existing line of x86 processors: power consumption was dramatically lower. It also happens that this was a core requirement for mobile devices.

We can't go back in time and see how ARM Holdings would hold up if they were doing their own manufacturing as well, but in my opinion the business model has a minor impact on their current success.

The most important thing is that they have a product that is superior to competition.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the article, I discuss the importance of ARM's technological advantage over Intel in the area of energy efficiency, especially for portable devices (see paragraph 2). My key point is that even if Intel can match (or beat) ARM from a technical standpoint (e.g., clock speed and energy efficiency), the company may still get disrupted due to ARM's unique business model. ARM's business model provides a benefit for OEM customers in the areas of cost, customization, and supplier-customer relations.

I recognize that it's not just ARM's business model that poses a threat; the threat stems from a combination of ARM's business model, its current technical advantage (in energy efficiency), and trends in computing, with a shift away from PCs (and the Wintel standard) to connected devices running Android and iOS. To your point, the shift away from the Wintel standard has significantly reduced the barriers (i.e., backward compatibility) to the adoption of the ARM architecture for OEMs.

(Note, ARM's recent "rapid rise" in the processor market is illustrated, in part, by the company's stock market performance, with a market cap that has grown about 5x over the last two years.)

<comment><USER3> I wonder if "disruptive" is really the right term here. As you point out, Intel dominates in market applications such as servers, desktop PCs, and netbooks -- and it's not at all clear to me that Intel's business there is threatened in any way by ARM chips or business model.

Where ARM has succeeded is in new markets (phones and tablets) that both rely on low-power operation and are relatively immune to legacy code or chip architecture issues. As far as I'm aware, Intel's never been successful in those spaces and even took the strategic step of dumping its ARM (Xscale) operation.

My point being, if Intel's secure in established markets and uncompetitive in newer markets, that's not a technological disruption in the classic Christenson sense. It's merely the consequence of earlier strategic decisions to not go after newer low-power application markets. Where would Intel be, for example, if in the early days they had dumped the microprocessor business to focus on their core business of memory chips?

edit: typo

<comment><AUTHOR> The risk for Intel (and x86) is that ARM-based processors appear to be moving up-market into servers and datacenters, a sign of technology disruption.

\- Calxeda (formerly Smooth-stone) is developing servers based on ARM-based technology. (<http://www.calxeda.com/>)

\- In November 2010 it was revealed that Dell is prototyping ARM-based Cortex-A9 servers.

\- In January 2011, Nvidia announced Project Denver, with "plans to build high-performance ARM based CPU cores, designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers."

\- Microsoft recently announced that Windows 8 will support both x86 and ARM architectures.

\- In a February 2011 analysts presentation, Warren East, CEO of ARM Holdings, suggested that ARM is seeking to expand into the PC and server market: "There's a blurring between computers and smartphones, and ARM's success in smartphones is helping us get into computing...Cortex A processors support multiprocessing and that delivers the high level of performance required by server applications." ([http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/arm_holdings_q4_2010...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/arm_holdings_q4_2010_numbers/)).

In October 2010, I posted a related article, "The End of x86?," that examines the potential disruption of x86 by ARM using Christensen's disruptive technology framework: <http://www.fernstrategy.com/2010/10/21/the-end-of-x86/>

<comment><USER3> Hmm... Calxeda and Dell are at the prototype stage and haven't shipped yet. In the Register article, ARM admits they have "0%" market share in PCs and servers. So the data for ARM in those markets essentially boils down to "boy, those markets would sure be profitable" and "just wait until 2020!"

There's a lot more to the server market than power savings. The Register article also notes: "It is a pity that ARM is not moving the quad-core, 40-bit Cortex-A15 to market faster and talking about either 64-bit kickers or how it will manage virtualized 32-bit applications on multi-core ARM servers such that no one cares that they are 32-bit applications."

As to Microsoft, I can remember Windows NT shipping for DEC Alpha, MIPS, and Power PC. Just because Windows 8 will work on ARM-based netbooks doesn't justify extrapolation to the PC and server markets. And even if Microsoft did (theoretically) support ARM in those markets, well, they actually shipped NT for Alpha, MIPS, and Power PC, and where are those architectures now?

My read of history is that if ARM ever became a real threat to Intel in PCs and servers, the company would simply lower profit margins in those markets to starve the competition. But hey, maybe this time things really will be different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This analysis is pretty superficial.

Yes, ARM is ahead on low-power devices, and yes Intel can (and probably will) catch up, especially as ARM moves towards more powerful processors (dual core, etc). This article did acknowledge that at least, which most seem to miss.

It does go into a few of the advantages of the licencing model ("this model enables OEMs to customize integrated chips that conform to different form factors", etc), but it didn't discuss the disadvantages this model brings.

For example, Intel has a pretty significant lead in building chip foundries. AMD hasn't been able to compete successfully at the high end because of that, and the ARM licencing model doesn't generate the profits needed to go head-to- head with Intel in foundry and high end research.

This is a real problem for ARM. To quote Ars:

 _First, there's simply no way that any ARM CPU vendor, NVIDIA included, will even approach Intel's desktop and server x86 parts in terms of raw performance any time in the next five years, and probably not in this decade. Intel will retain its process leadership, and Xeon will retain the CPU performance crown. Per-thread performance is a very, very hard problem to solve, and Intel is the hands-down leader here. The ARM enthusiasm on this front among pundits and analysts is way overblown—you don't just sprinkle magic out-of-order pixie dust on a mobile phone CPU core and turn it into a Core i3, i5, or Xeon competitor. People who expect to see a classic processor performance shoot-out in which some multicore ARM chip spanks a Xeon are going to be disappointed for the foreseeable future.

It's also the case that as ARM moves up the performance ladder, it will necessarily start to drop in terms of power efficiency. Again, there is no magic pixie dust here, and the impact of the ISA alone on power consumption in processors that draw many tens of watts is negligible. A multicore ARM chip and a multicore Xeon chip that give similar performance on compute-intensive workloads will have similar power profiles; to believe otherwise is to believe in magical little ARM performance elves._

[http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-t...](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/02/nvidia-30-and- the-riscification-of-x86.ars) (read this whole article - it's very good).

That leaves the low-to-midrange to ARM. As has already been noted, Intel is quickly becoming power-competitive there, and is very, very good at producing chips cheaply.

I'm not saying ARM isn't an important competitor, but I am saying the whole "ARM will eat Intel from below" narrative is naive. It's going to be a fierce competition, and it's not at all clear that ARM's business model really is an advantage at all.

Meanwhile, Intel can hedge it's bets and play at the licencing game, too. For example, they have experimented with licencing Atom manufacture to TSMC (the same ARM foundry mentioned in the article): [http://www.pcworld.com/article/160496/intel_opens_up_the_ato...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/160496/intel_opens_up_the_atom_processor_to_tsmc.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Might also be interesting to add that Intel had a very nice ARM platform (XScale) which was sold to Marvell. They had the full ARM license deal, not just the ability to put ARM cores on a micro like everyone else in the world.

So I would argue that Intel has a pretty good understanding of ARM strengths and their business model, they just think that they can go the distance and come up with something competitive. Even given the fantastic growth of ARM, Intel is about 100 times bigger so it's probably more useful to compare Intel to the processor manufacturers that use ARMs in mobile platforms.

<comment><USER6> There's a danger that Intel will continue to chase high profit sectors and stagnate technically due to lack of competition there. The gap between what is technically achievable and what we get today in x86 processors has been widening for years and is not slowing down.

<comment><USER7> That's a general problem with large companies, they often can't afford to pivot and succeed in lower profit sectors, even if its clear that the high profit sectors are going to stagnate and shrink over time.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. What they typically do is acquire someone who can. In Intel's case I'd doubt they would acquire ARM because they would probably have to continue to license the technology to everyone else (I don't really know what I'm talking about here). However, they could acquire someone who has the "low power CPU technology" they would need to compete. If you think about who that someone could be nobody really comes to mind. Maybe they could buy back Marvell. Qualcomm, Samsung, TI are clearly out of the question.

<comment><USER7> > However, they could acquire someone who has the "low power CPU technology"

The other possibility is that Atom will slowly become more competitive. Weirdly, I think the most important thing for that would be a solid Android- on-x86 story, so device manufacturers don't have to do so much custom GUI work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the key point here is that Intel is one company while ARM is many. All feed each other improving competing designs, proving technologies and exploring their markets in ways a single company could not do with volumes that dwarf (and have been consistently dwarfing) the PC market.

As humongous as it is, Intel simply can't compete against the combined power of ARM plus its myriad of licensees. Eventually, from the diversity of the ARM ecosystem would emerge a competitor for Intel's (and AMD's) x86 lineup. Once set in motion, it was a matter of time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice article. To add, I think the problem is with intel's strategy and their technology than the cost.

Intel expected notebooks to be more dominant and their roadmap showed. As soon as Kindle started taking off with ebooks, Apple realized they could do better than Kindle with iPad.

By selling xscale unit to Marvell, Intel did a mistake.

Total OEM cost for netbook was in the range of 10-20 vs just the processor in ipad is claimed to be $30 (after everyone taking their cut. Everyone includes ARM-Samsung-Packaging compnies)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is just a small point, but the article says that Intel will "close the energy efficiency gap with ARM" in 2011-2012 with the release of the latest Atom processor. What it overlooks is the fact that it won't be competing with _current_ ARM chips. Nvidia and Samsung and TI aren't going to just sit there waiting for Intel to catch up; they'll be improving their designs and moving to smaller fabrication, just like Intel is doing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Real disruption won't come until ARM create (edit: design) a real general purpose, mainstream 64-bit processor.

<comment><USER11> ARM holdings licenses. I think Nvidia may do what you're talking about.

<comment><USER12> Isn't that what he mean? ARM would design, and license, a general purpose processor.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps. He's changed his post since I replied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> it is absolutely not clear that separation of "general architecture designer", "specific chip design customizer" and "foundry" is a winning business model. In my view Intel has been successful because they've owned all three pieces and thus have ripped the benefits from, sorry for the profanity, the synergy.

Intel don't have competitive product in that specific market that ARM is so successful. Once/if it gets it, will see then. I'm not saying that it will win - it can go in any direction, but we'll be really able to compare Apples to Apples then.</comment>


Canonical Becomes a Patron of KDE E.V - <AUTHOR> https://dot.kde.org/2016/08/18/canonical-becomes-patron-kde-ev <comment><USER2> One can only hope hat they get behind KDE...</comment>


Tell HN: Google+ is already getting over 1% of Google.com traffic - <AUTHOR>

Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/https://plus.google.com
Alexa takes average of last 30 days on "Where Visitors Go on xyz.com" list. So the real number must be significantly higher than 1%.
FWIW, that's more than what maps.google.com gets. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/https://plus.google.com></comment>


PG: "A recipe that might produce the next Facebook, if you're college students." - <AUTHOR>

> [16] Here's a recipe that might produce the next Facebook, if you're college students. If you have a connection to one of the more powerful sororities at your school, approach the queen bees thereof and offer to be their personal IT consultants, building anything they could imagine needing in their social lives that didn't already exist. Anything that got built this way would be very promising, because such users are not just the most demanding but also the perfect point to spread from.
I have no idea whether this would work.
Source: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html#f1n
Snapchat/Tinder, anyone? ;) <comment><USER2> come pick me up, I am drunk and I need a ride home

</comment><comment><USER3> Also do their homework. "Queens" love that.</comment>


How Jim Simons Built the World's Most Lucrative Black Box - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-01/how-jim-simons-built-the-world-s-most-lucrative-black-box <comment><USER2> Article is about this book that will be released on Tuesday.

[https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market- Revolution/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market- Revolution/dp/073521798X/)

This Numberphile interview with him is interesting:

[https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0](https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0)</comment>


I Saw the Crisis Coming. Why Didn't the Fed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/opinion/04burry.html?ref=opinion <comment><USER2> There's an old saying: Academic economists have successfully predicted nine of the last five major recessions.

That is: One possible answer to the question in the title is: "Because actually the available information didn't make it clear what would happen and when; you thought it did, but actually you just got lucky."

Whether that's actually the case here is of course difficult to tell. On the one hand, hindsight bias (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias>) makes it likely that it won't _feel_ like it is, even if it is. On the other hand, uh, it does indeed feel like the crisis was pretty predictable. (But I bet that most people who are now saying "well, that was hardly surprising" failed, just as FWIW I failed, to short the market heavily or anything. Not-being- surprised is cheap.)

<comment><USER3> I have to agree with the idea that he just got lucky.

If he was really so sure of his assessment back then then why didn't he short sell a bucket load of these mortgage backed securities?

<comment><AUTHOR> He came up with the credit default swap trade where you buy insurance against mortgage backed securities failing.

This was really a great trade because his losses were capped at around 5% a year while his upside was huge, imagine a 6:1 payout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"Everybody missed it. Academia, the Federal Reserve, all regulators."_ \- Alan Greenspan

That is complete bullshit. Try telling that to Paulson, who made billions on the crash. I saw the signs myself, but did not understand them, not believing that people like Greenspan would allow something so stupid to take place. When studies show that Americans trust their government less than ever, mark me down as a statistic.

When a bank official told me that "jobless, bankrupt, illegal immigrant, it doesn't matter," they can get somone a home loan, I should have known what that meant, and so should the Fed.

Greenspan should just shut up and accept his legacy.

<comment><USER5> There were a lot of us watching the signs in 2005 or so. There were a lot of us who didn't miss it. And it wasn't "crackpot conspiracy theory" types; it was normal people looking to buy a home and wondering why median prices in our area climbed from 3x to 5x median income within a few years, when the 3x figure had been pretty steady since WWII. A little bit of research showed that a lot of houses had been bought on unusual terms -- no-doc loans, very little down, adjustable rates, and so on. For those of us who expect to buy a home with 20% down, a 15-30 year mortgage, and payments less than 38% of take-home income, it seemed very strange that banks were lending people money on considerably looser terms. Easy money leading to a sharp climb in prices, combined with a big increase in speculators/flippers, should have been a tipoff that we were looking at a bubble market.

There's no excuse for "experts" like Greenspan to have missed it, when the everyday people running websites like seattlebubble.com saw it coming.

<comment><USER6> It dawned on me when I saw this in the NY Times:

[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/15/business/arm3...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/15/business/arm3.gif)

Note the date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem is: Greenspan may very well be right in his assessment that Burry may just have been 'a supremely lucky flipper of coins'. There are thousands of people in similar positions making predictions about all kinds of phenomena. Whatever the outcome, there are always a number of predictions that are 'uncannily' close to that outcome. Unfortunately, these 'correct' predictions are only seldomly made by the same people. If someone truly had better insight, you would expect them to make the right predictions more often. However, if history teaches anything, it is that I can safely predict that Burry will never again make such an accurate prediction and that it will never be clear whether he was a prophet or a lucky bastard.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that Burry is simply arguing that the methods he and other shorts used to call this crisis (which Taleb refers to as a gray swan -- since so many called it) should be more closely examined, rather than being simply dismissed as statistical aberrations. Maybe investors/wall street can learn a useful thing or two from them.

To me, spotting bubbles is not so difficult. There are a few great investors who have excellent track records when it comes to dodging bubbles/crises. They may not profit immensely, but their downside is usually protected and they are cash rich to pick up securities on the cheap.

The real difficulty comes from figuring out when a bubble will burst -- which is really anyone's guess. Burry himself ran into trouble on this end which created friction and eventually lawsuits with his investors.

<comment><USER8> Figuring out the "when" is definitely the most difficult part. I had been watching the markets and the housing bubble very carefully for __years __before the crisis finally arrived. It is so amazing how long these things take to play out, and how distorted the markets can get before they finally snap.

Despite the attention I paid to it, I still failed to make a profit. When things finally started unravelling, I took several put option positions (assuming the price would decrease) in the obviously doomed companies, for really cheap prices. But my mistake was not goibg out further time wise. I was up substantially (500% was my best) in almost all my positions within a week or two, but when the fed and other players weighed in with changes to the rules of the stock market, and CEO's taking actions that are blatently fraudulent but not enforced by the SEC, things turned against me and I ended up selling for a 40% loss. Of course if I had simply taken a boring short position I could have made a guaranteed 40-60 percent, but how exciting is that?? :)

Making money in the market, even when you KNOW what is going to happen, is amazingly hard. Especially when the FED and SEC are literally changing the rules on a daily basis, as they were back then, and when CEO's can lie, cheat, and steal with impunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> For ordinary investors, the housing bubble was a tricky thing to play.

There were two public companies that had CDS portfolios where they stood to make a lot of money. A direct equity investment or LEAPS would have worked well there. I took this approach.

Alternatively, it seems like out the money puts on financial institutions would have done really well. Michael Lewis chronicles a few guys from Cornwall Capital that made something like 100:1 payouts on out the money puts for Bear Stearns. These guys crushed it when Bear went BK. This cheap insurance approach is used by a few really well known investors and it is the one I'm gravitating towards for the future.

<comment><USER8> Ya, out of the money puts was the route I took as well. However, when the company you buy puts in suddenly takes on a couple hundred million of new debt in order to do a share buy back so the CEO can cash his shares out, puts don't perform too well.

Nor do they do so well when the SEC decides to suddenly ban short selling on a certain subset of stocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Mr. Greenspan said that he sat through innumerable meetings at the Fed with crack economists, and not one of them warned of the problems that were to come. By Mr. Greenspan's logic, anyone who might have foreseen the housing bubble would have been invited into the ivory tower, so if all those who were there did not hear it, then no one could have said it.

As a nation, we cannot afford to live with Mr. Greenspan's way of thinking. The truth is, he should have seen what was coming and offered a sober, apolitical warning. Everyone would have listened; when he talked about the economy, the world hung on every single word."

Instead of expecting Greenspan to see exactly what Burry saw, wouldn't it be better if we didn't have a single point of failure? In the absence of Wall Street's reliance on the Fed, Burry's insurance plays could have further pushed up prices and signaled to everyone else that something was wrong.

<comment><USER10> "In the absence of Wall Street's reliance on the Fed, Burry's insurance plays could have further pushed up prices and signaled to everyone else that something was wrong."

Can you explain this point further? How did Burry's investments not raise the prices of credit default swaps? What does Wall Street rely on the Fed for that led to that result?

<comment><USER11> This is precisely what needs addressing. CDS are over the counter trades without a central clearinghouse. Therefore little data is available and the counter parties create terms blindly.

This is what they mean when talking about transparency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For anyone interested in learning more about Michael Burry, I wrote a post using material from an old message board he used to run:

[http://streetcapitalist.com/2010/03/24/learning-from- michael...](http://streetcapitalist.com/2010/03/24/learning-from-michael- burry/)

It is pretty amazing to see how far he has come since then, from a young doctor posting about investing on the internet to going head to head with Greenspan.

</comment><comment><USER12> Most people could have predicted it and many people did. This includes not only people like Mike Burry, George Soros and others that made money out of the whole mess, but also those bastards in Goldman Sachs who after touting and selling housing debt derivatives for the entire bubble ended up being short on housing just when the bubble burst.

Multiple people in academia predicted the crash. Nouriel Roubini (spelling is wrong) Peter Schif, every economist that ever posted on Counterpunch, etc.

And also of course most ordinary people predicted it. If you look at the housing forums on the Internet from about 3 to 4 years ago you will see that most people were sure there would be a crash and only people that were already deeply invested in real estate were trying to think of ever more creative ways to deny it.

So Greenspan's statements speak more about him than the actual reality. He and the Bush government just surrounded themselves with economists from one very narrow school of thought and did not listen to anyone else. It is not that people did not predict the recession, it is that Greenspan would not listen to anyone who predicted it, therefore nobody that he bothered to listen to predicted it.

</comment><comment><USER13> The Fed DID see what was happening. They saw M3 soaring.

So they did the logical thing. They discontinued publishing the M3 statistic in 2006.

Yep, they decided we just need to bury our heads in the sand and the developing crisis would just go away.

But did it?

[http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/money-supply- chart...](http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/money-supply-charts)

<comment><USER14> Dear God.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There will always be a distribution of opinions and therefore people with "foresight".

The real challenge is to design a system with more stability.

My opinion is that while we have had many putative capitalists in charge of regulating markets, we have very little understanding of what it takes for markets to function well. One thing missing from the debate is an interest in reducing informational asymmetries. If I have two bags of apples one paper and one see-through plastic, you are going to buy the plastic bag (environmental issues aside).

Our financial markets don't work very well, because financial accounting is the opaque paper bag.

</comment><comment><USER16> The problem is, there are always a lot of people seeing a crash coming. The difficult part is telling if they are right or just being crackpots.

<comment><USER17> 1.) 'Crackpots' labeling is an easy way for corporate mass media to label the truth tellers to discourage you from researching further (If you look at 2005-2007 CNBC interviews, they called alot of these people 'crackpots') 2.) Most of the time these 'truth tellers' are way early in their calls. It's up you to look at the numbers/charts and figure out when the said phenomenom should occur.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately there are also real crackpots, and they all claim to be marginalized by the establishment. If I have to look at the numbers and charts and figure it out myself, then I would rather also find the data myself. Then I avoid getting data that is doctored or otherwise deceiving.

That said, it is often worth paying attention to those who are a little bit outside the mainstream. That goes especially in economics, which is far from an exact science, and is full of political agendas.

<comment><USER17> Agreed; you put it better than I did :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Give it 10 years, and when the LHC spawns a dimensional rift connecting us to Xen, I guarantee at least one man will come forward and say, "I can't believe nobody else saw it coming". He will be treated like a prophet, when in reality he was just a lucky alarmist.

Either that, or he will be me- a lucky satirist.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think this is actually an argument for more accessible markets. Retail investing was not offering vehicles to the average investor who wanted to invest believing that house prices would fall. I wondered to many professional and non-professional investors how t invest against the housing market to no avail. If people had understood how to "bet" against house prices then I am confident the bubble would have deflated more gently and earlier. The easiest retail position to take is a "long" purchase of an investment instrument. What is needed is the knowledge of and retail accessibility to bubble-deflating investments.

How far should this go? Anyone should be able to own and even construct derivatives. Such a market would bring along a host of educational material and means to understand the provenance of your derivatives and the counter- party risk. Obviously this accessibility and transparency would benefit professional derivative investors as the pool of clients, information, transparency, and alternative parties and views with which to trade expands.

But this is impossible as long as the notion of "qualified investor" exists. If Greenspan and traditional economics has any hope of being correct then what is needed is to enlarge the pool of "qualified investors" to simply everyone. We need not more regulation but less but for the requirement that the prospectus be accurate, intelligible, and anyone that sells "investments" must do business with anyone has the purchase price.

Taleb says market-based black swans are becoming more common. The question is: are they common enough to make a profitable business out of suppressing them?

<comment><USER20> A very insightful comment.

I like to say that if Greenspan had replaced his famous "irrational exuberance" comment with one citing "incredible short selling opportunities for insightful investors" things would have turned out much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The only time Greenspan could have meaningfully intervened was back in 2002 or earlier, and even then intervention would have caused enough pain to have the media deem it a "crisis" in itself.

Notably he did speak up about Fannie and Freddie in the early 2000s but was silenced by the GOP's drive to make war -- nobody wanted the economy cooled at all when gas prices were already creeping up.

So what's the man to do now? He could admit all that about the war and cast serious doubt on the Fed's independence and the US financial system, or he could insist that the boom/bust was a complete and total mystery.

In his last book he goes to great pains to marvel at seemingly impossible "risk adjusted rates of return" throughout a variety of markets, but concludes that in the case of housing it's still "froth" and not a bubble. Since the bubble hadn't become obvious at the time of the book's publication, what else would he say?

But more practically, we should all realize that if housing prices had dipped about 1-2% less than they did, most of the damage would not have occurred. Our institutions (banks, etc.) were calibrated to handle some amount of systemic risk, but not as much as it turned out they should have.

Hindsight is 20/20 and Burry may have been extra prescient, but like any bettor he could have been wrong. Since he had no additional information than the rest of the market, we can conclude that the rest were all sheep (or idiots) or that there was actually some _\-- gasp --_ chance going on.

The difference is that the majority of people, institutions, etc., misjudged just how much calamity would be caused by price deviations that they calculated to be highly improbable.

<comment><USER21> > Notably he did speak up about Fannie and Freddie in the early 2000s but was > silenced by the GOP's drive to make war

Wrong. Fannie and Freddie were protected by Dems, not Repubs. Mccain got his teeth kicked in over this one.

Interestingly enough, Fannie and Freddie execs during that time were largely Dems, most of whom who landed in the Obama administration. While at Fannie and Freddie, they took out millions.

Oh, and during this time, Fannie and Freddie were lying about the mortages in their portfolios, which threw off everyone's risk evaluation. (Their portfolios contained far more subprime than they admitted to.)

If Fannie and Freddie weren't politically connected GSEs, folks would be in jail.

<comment><USER20> Everything you say is accurate except the insinuation that Democrats are mostly at fault. George W. Bush was in office for the worst of it, and he spent his political capital trying to convince people that a war was necessary.

He spent 99% of his political capital on war and at best 1% on everything else. He was far from powerless, having control of both houses of congress. The fact is he was perfectly fine with the GSEs being someone else's problem so nobody would get distracted away from the "war".

Incidentally the GSEs were taken off government books in order to make the budget look better so we could "afford" the Vietnam war.

<comment><USER21> > Everything you say is accurate except the insinuation that Democrats are > mostly at fault. George W. Bush was in office for the worst of it

In this matter, Bush's sins are sins of omission - as you point out, he didn't do anything. Dems did something, but what they did was wrong. For example, they actively protected Fannie and Freddie. Those are sins of comission.

Note that Bush didn't change the regulatory structure - he went with what Clinton left him. Again - omission vs comission.

It's the difference between manslaughter and murder.

And, that's ignoring ACORN's role. Among other things, they picketed banks that didn't make enough loans to folks who couldn't afford them. They tried to intervene with regulators. And so on.

Yes, Bush might have been able to keep this from happening, but he would have been fighting Dems the whole way.

He didn't fight. They pushed bad policies. There is a difference.

And, I note that Barney Frank is still in office and Gorelick, among others, are in the Obama administration.

Bush? Not in office.

<comment><USER22> There is plenty of blame to go around, but one of the biggest mistakes leading up to the financial crisis was significantly lowering the amount of cash reserves the investment banks needed to keep on hand. That happened on Bush's watch with Republicans in charge of every branch of government.

And the revoking of Glass-Steagall under Clinton? That was introduced by Republicans in both the House and Senate, with the Senate vote being almost entirely on party lines. Yes, Clinton signed it, but it was a Republican bill.

<comment><USER21> > And the revoking of Glass-Steagall under Clinton?

Irrelevant because it didn't have any effect on the crisis.

In fact, it allowed some transactions that had some hope of slowing things down.

Note that the non-regulated institutions did better, as did the non-regulated arms of regulated institutions.

AIG was regulated up the wazoo.

<comment><USER22> Some of the "too big to fail" issues we saw was definitely because companies got into multiple lines of business that Glass-Steagall would have prevented.

<comment><USER21> > Some of the "too big to fail" issues we saw was definitely because companies > got into multiple lines of business that Glass-Steagall would have > prevented.

Those "other lines of biz" provided some diversification that gave them some chance of survival. It also made it possible for banks to save some of the trading firms.

You clearly disagree, so let's have names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Check out "Peter Schiff was right" video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw>

Now, talk about "nobody could have predicted this" (c) Obama

<comment><USER8> Yes, Peter Schiff was probably the most prolific person on warning about the impending crisis. However, despite how smart he is, when the crisis finally came, his portfolios (precious metals,short US$) got hit very hard, for a short period of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If this article piqued your interest, please PLEASE read The Big Short by Michael Lewis, in which he tells the entire, fascinating story of Michael Burry, the one-eyed genius with Asburger's who fought against the entire Wall Street establishment.

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393072231>

<comment><USER25> Previously featured on ycombinator, with a link to an excerpt about Michael Burry from _The Big Short_.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160552>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Related: [http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/04/wall- str...](http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/04/wall-street- excerpt-201004?printable=true)

</comment><comment><USER27> It was pretty obvious, I think. And I will remark that the NY Times at least once wrote up the people doing interest-only mortgages as bold financial innovators.

</comment><comment><USER28> I saw it coming too. (But I only put my money in a shorting mutual fund. Didn't have the great vision, this guy did. Still, I avoided the losses most experienced.)

If I could see it, anyone could have. I'm not particularly smart or well- connected.

</comment><comment><USER29> I started seriously worrying about the crash back in 2004 [1], and while I was wrong about a lot of details (not least, ahem, the result of the 2004 US presidential election), I was bang-on about the underlying problem. What eventually surprised me was just how long the bubble was able to continue inflating before it finally popped.

[1] <http://www3.sympatico.ca/taylormcgreal/thecomingcrash.html>

</comment><comment><USER30> The relationship between Wall Street and Washington blurred the lines too much. As a regulator, its tough to recognize a fundamental flaw in the investing practices of the firms that these people used to work for.

The "good old boy" network was reluctant to admit that they all screwed up.

</comment><comment><USER31> Well, you don't see what you wouldn't want to see even if it's right in front of your face. And that works collectively in a society as well.

No matter how many people are yelling "soon, we're toast!", you won't hear it if you don't want to imagine such an outcome in the first place.

Boom.

</comment><comment><USER32> A couple years back, I remember reading an article that argued that housing was way overpriced because the rents were only about half the value of the house. They should be in line with each other.

</comment><comment><USER33> What do you mean they didn't see it coming?

The Fed _engineers_ this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER17> Audit the fed: <http://www.auditthefed.com/>

Whereas: Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Treasury have put the American taxpayer on the hook for over $12 trillion in bailouts and loans; and

Whereas: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently refused to tell Congress who has received trillions in these funds from the Federal Reserve; and

Whereas: Allowing the Fed to operate our nation's monetary system in almost complete secrecy leads to abuse, inflation, and a lower quality of life for every American

<comment><USER34> The banks paid TARP back, with interest. That means the taxpayers _made_ money.

<comment><USER35> Only if you exclude the AIG bailout (much of which went directly to the banks as counterparties) from the figures...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It is a fucking conspiracy. fed is run by the banks, banks didn't want fed to intervene bc they were making big bonuses and it was good for the people there. duh.

This is an obvious case of corruption of our government. No one was regulating because they _didn't want to regulate it_.

This is why there needs to be things like campaign finance reform and people should seriously go to jail without chance of being pardoned for these types of crimes.

Willful ignorance of this shit should have been considered aiding & abetting theft.

But no, no one will go to jail because the rich and powerful never go to jail. They didn't get rich and powerful by not being corrupt.

<comment><USER36> go fuck yourself guy who down-voted me, you are part of the willful ignorance.

Greenspan was a goddamned Rayndian. Stephen Friedman had super strong ties to goldman sachs, In fact, almost everyone high up in the fed has ties to banking in one form or another. None of the people involved are even interested fair in regulation.

I don't understand why this is controversial. it is a fucking conspiracy and I'm calling it as it is.

Would my post have been better if I had suggested execution, or is the real reason it is downvoted because it is unpopular to call something a conspiracy?

we all tell ourselves these fairy tales about how the world is fair and there are no conspiracies and closed door deals between those in power, but it is all a lie.

<comment><USER14> Dude. What in the history of Hacker News would make you possibly believe that a post starting with "It's a fucking conspiracy" in earnest would do anything except get brutally downvoted?</comment></comment></comment>