Ask HN: Hiring remote and international  - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to present a candidate for hire who is not only remote, but international.  We are a US-based, YC startup.<p>What are the HR roadblocks/hurdles that I would face in trying to get this candidate hired?  The candidate does not want to move to the US.  Could this person be hired as a contractor internationally?  If we wanted to hire them full-time, permanent would that require setting up an entity in the country that they live in? <comment><USER2> >What are the HR roadblocks/hurdles that I would face in trying to get this candidate hired?

Most of the roadblocks would be in the form of communication and getting things done. However, if the person is capable of managing him/herself well and they are productive at work, whether in an office or not, the work will still get done.

>Could this person be hired as a contractor internationally?

That is what will be done. They will lose out on US-only benefits, but I've seen SV/SF salaries, and if you're paying that much to a person in a third- world country, they won't care for 401k or dental insurance. You should consult a lawyer for the best way around this (maybe a tax benefit too).

>If we wanted to hire them full-time, permanent would that require setting up an entity in the country that they live in?

Multinationals do this for tax and other benefits. You don't need to do this (unless you are producing a tangible product and there is big demand in the foreign market).

</comment><comment> bjelkeman-again We have the majority of our s/w developer hired as contractors. They have their own company, often a sole trader (one man company) in the country they live in.

We treat everyone as equal as we are able to. Contractors or employees. The way we define this: if you do the same job and have similar experience, the cost to the organisation will be the same. Salary+taxes+benefits costs are the same. This works quite well.

We have four s/w developers hired in the organization as employees. The other dozen are hired as contractors, including me as CTO & co-director.

<comment><USER3> It's easier when most of the employees are remote. If you've got an office where most of the action happens, the remote employees might start feeling like outsiders. I think that is one of the hardest things to overcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I worked as a contractor/consultant for a US startup for 2 and a half years before we had an Indian entity. Then I became a full-time employee. I don't see any problems hiring people from other nationalities working as a contractor but actually they are just like an employee.</comment>


How Microsoft turns their incompetence into my problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-microsoft-turns-incompetence-my-problem-mark-schouten/ <comment><USER2> This article would have been much stronger if the author included mail correspondence with Microsoft. Right now it is only one side of the story without any information on what exactly the author did to resolve the issue or provide Microsoft with information so they could help. We just have to trust the author he perfectly corresponded all information as well as Microsoft returning answers that were clearly shortcoming.

This is not going to stop anybody using their services. So if that is the authors intention (s)he should write a better rant :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, not the author of the article, but of course there's a history.

I don't think the intention of the post is to stop people using Microsoft's email platform. It is about making it easier to troubleshoot, getting more help from MS to fix issues.

Some more details here (in dutch) and they are not the only ISP with problems sending emails to MS's platforms.

[https://www.webhostingtalk.nl/lounge/195046-kunnen-we- zorgen...](https://www.webhostingtalk.nl/lounge/195046-kunnen-we-zorgen- microsoft-wakker-wordt.html)

<comment><USER2> > I don't think the intention of the post is to stop people using Microsoft's > email platform.

From the article:

> Please people. Stop using Outlook, Office365, Hotmail. Microsoft seems to be > unable to handle the amounts of email they receive and make it the issue of > the senders that they are incompetent.

What is the author advocating here if not to stop using their services?

> Dutch link

Still only hearsay unfortunately. In addition not all messages are technically sound. This is still a one-sided story presented without actual proof Microsoft acted in the wrong. With this information the title might as well be "how Microsoft turns my incompetence into my problem". There is simply not enough information for us to know.

Now, this sounds harsh but it is not intended as offense. I only want to point out how the message comes across to those not involved. Not sure what the author is trying to achieve but I think (s)he needs to change his/her communication if (s)he wants to achieve it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct that it is a rant and that it could have been written better with additional parts of the correspondence to make a more convincing point.

Note however that the forum I linked to where the post was shared is a forum visited by hosters/ISP's and quite a few of us recognize what the author is saying.

Seems there will be a follow up with more details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This title should be changed to "My problem with Microsoft customer service" or something less one-sided.

Anyway, Microsoft customer service is excellent in my experience. I can't think of a tech company with better customer service. Maybe Apple. Amazon has good service for retail customers, not sure about AWS though.

</comment><comment><USER4> Unrelated anecdote: one of my family members was recently having issues with one of Microsoft's online e-mail services (I forget if it's Outlook.com or related) recently dropping legit e-mails from group mailing lists, and I was glad to find something of relevance that I can send to them.</comment>


This Is What It's Like to Be a Teacher in America - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/longform/teaching-in-america/ <comment><USER2> > Person who works 180 days out of the year has 2 other jobs to help pay > bills.

Imagine my shock.

>"I can't tell you how many letters I got this summer that said final notice." Cooke, who makes about $69,000, often skips doctor's appointments to save the co-pay and worries about paying for her eldest daughter's college education.

My full sympathies to those who are struggling to get by, but something here just isn't adding up.

</comment><comment><USER3> When someone asks what happens if national debt, state debt, city debt keeps increasing?

This.

Teacher salaries will not rise. Counties and cities are already overburdened by existing liabilities and far too many bonds are junk. They just don't take in enough in taxes. When they start taking more in taxes, people leave.

This is how middle class erodes and social unrest begins.

</comment><comment><USER4> In SoCal we have teachers starting out with salaries in the 60k range. Not too bad, but they do have to have 6 years of schooling for most high school teachers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Becoming a teacher takes a whole lot of education. You have to get a 4 year degree plus 1 year of graduate work to get your teaching credential. For all that education you get:

> In 2016, for instance, the average teacher's starting salary was $38,617—20% > lower than that of other professions requiring a college degree.

Which not surprisingly leads to:

> Between 2008 and 2016, the number of new educators completing preparatory > programs fell by 23%

And on top of that:

> at least 17% leave the profession within the first five years, a 2015 study > found.

It's a crap job for crap pay. It's not surprising that not many people want to become a teacher. If we want more teachers and better teachers, we're going to have to pay them more and improve the working conditions.

<comment><USER2> > the average teacher's starting salary was $38,617—20% lower than that of > other professions requiring a college degree

Not bad considering they work ~30% fewer days.</comment></comment>


Meet Parsey's Cousins: Syntax for 40 languages, plus new SyntaxNet capabilities - <AUTHOR> https://research.googleblog.com/2016/08/meet-parseys-cousins-syntax-for-40.html <comment><USER2> Interesting! Thanks for sharing.</comment>


Understanding the most beautiful equation in Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://functionspace.org/articles/6/Understanding-the-most-beautiful-equation-in-Mathematics <comment><USER2> Loved the article, but there was this big jump between

        1 - x^2/2! + x^4/4! - ...

and

        cos x

(and similarly with sin x). Why exactly are these equal?

(Also, just a nitpick, shouldn't the addition be actually subtraction before both elippses to demonstrate the alternating sign?)

<comment><USER3> I was also perturbed by the jump from the definition of e to the taylor expansion. I know how to get there the long way (define e first, derive properties of the exponential derivative, then construct the Taylor series), does anyone know a shortcut?

<comment><USER4> Here is another way (a bit informal):

e = lim_{n->infinity} (1 + 1/n)^n

Now, apply the binomial theorem:

1 + n * 1/n + n! / (2 (n-2)! n^2) + ... + n! / (m! (n - m!) n^m) + ...

Now, for each m, we have this sequence:

a_n = n! / (m! (n - m)! n^m)

Which converges on 1/m!, so we are left with this:

1 + 1 + 1/2! + 1/3! + 1/4! + ...

<comment><USER3> it's a little ugly, because you have to have some strong conditions to use associativity on infinite series (and I forget what they are off the top of my head). Of course, this is true for splitting up the e^x into cos(x) and sin(x) as well.

<comment><USER5> The series has to be absolutely convergent. That is, you can rearrange the terms of \sum_{i=0}^\infty a_n freely if and only if \sum_{i=0}^\infty |a_n| converges. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_series_theorem>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the actually remarkable equation is

        e^ix = cos x + i sin x

The cliched "e^(i pi) + 1 = 0" is a fairly mundane consequence of the fact that pi was chosen to make this equation hold.

<comment><USER7> The latter is cliched because it incorporates an additional fundamental constant, pi. Who would have thought that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter when multiplied by the imaginary number and then exponentiated by another constant e would produce such a simple equation which also includes the multiplication identity and the addition identity? Yes, pi is chosen but it certainly encompasses the trigonometry and geometry (rotations, sinx, cosx, etc.).

<comment><USER6> My point is that it is only fundamental _because_ it leads to this equation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish I could take my up vote back. I read this article and the power series expansion of the exponential function was not clear. So I looked up the wikipedia article (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function>) and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_formula> which were much more clearer.

Sadly, this article did nothing for me. I will remember to lookup wikipedia first...

<comment><USER9> If you had to look for the definition of exponential function, perhaps you should start from here - <http://www.mathsisfun.com/basic-math- definitions.html>

<comment><USER8> that site you posted might actually be of use to someone more than the original site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Personally, I prefer

e ^ i*tau = 1

But that's because I'm a tauist.

<comment><USER11> The advantage of the traditional format is that it not only includes four fundamental constants (1, 0, e, i and π) but it also includes the four fundamental operators (addition, multiplication, exponential and equality.)

I guess that: e ^ i*tau + 0 = 1

would be a suitable hack to get that beauty back.

<comment><USER12> Haha, fundamental constant counting fail.

b^)

<comment><USER13> Well, these are the four constants: 0, 1, i, e and tau. Yes, that really is four constants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And after you read this you should read this: <http://symbo1ics.com/blog/?p=1089> which was kind of fun as well.

<comment><USER15> I prefer that point of view if you want to understand Euler's identity, and I find John Baez does it even better: <http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/trig.html> The Baez article does leave it to the reader to convince himself that exp(i*theta) is good notation for a point on a unit circle.

I have problems with the attitude of the article you linked, though. Especially "Therefore, I'd like to complain to the thousands of people who find Euler's identity stunning and beautiful." followed by a snide list of reasons why someone might find it beautiful. It's very common when doing math that something amazing is obvious an hour later. I believe that we are better served by reminding ourselves that (a) nobody knows everything, and (b) the basics facts are actually very beautiful.

<comment><USER14> I totally agree on the attitude on the blog, the author is clearly working through non-mathematical issues on their own (if you read some of the other entries you can see how those challenges affect their writing). That said, I tend to see it as a counterpoint to mathematics blogs that are bit too gushing the other way. And its amusing the path that is taken as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's my favorite explanation of this formula:

[http://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive- understanding-...](http://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive- understanding-of-eulers-formula/)

<comment> a-nikolaev My favorite:

1) Using Taylor Series, show that exp(ix)=cos(x)+i*sin(x).

2) Then the result is trivial for x=pi

This image helps:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Euler%27s_formula.svg>

<comment><USER17> Taylor series are ugly; do it directly from the definition of the functions as solutions to specific differential equations =).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And just in case you weren't perfectly satisfied with the level of mathematical rigor of the article, here is a complete, formal, machine- verified and hyperlinked version of the proof: <http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/eulerid.html>

</comment><comment><USER19> There's some even more important gaps regarding analytic continuations of functions to complex numbers (and the resulting power series expansions). You can prove it this way, but it's not at all rigorous by today's standards.

<comment><USER20> This was more for basic understanding. There can be a follow-up article with a more rigorous approach :) The same was done here - [http://functionspace.org/articles/17/Solving----sum---- 1----...](http://functionspace.org/articles/17/Solving----sum----1</comment></comment><comment>infty </comment><comment>-1-n-----2</comment><comment>-with-Sine-Function--Basel-Problem)

</comment><comment><USER21> And here I was hoping it would be aboke Stokes' Theorem ;-(

<comment><USER22> I was hoping that too, but I knew it would be about Euler's identity, since to people with only incidental exposure to the concepts that underly it it seems (justifiably) inscrutable and mysterious, thus its general popularity. It's funny that cultivating the mathematician's refusal to assign _meaning_ to results can completely change which results you find fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would say that the Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory is the most beautiful result of all mathematics, though Euler's identity is certainly a contender.

<comment><USER23> What is Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory in the form of an _equation_?

<comment><USER4> The field extension lattice is isomorphic to the subgroup lattice; if you really wanted to, you could write this out symbolically (but I am not sure why you would want to, since it does not really convey the meaning of the theorem any better). I suppose you might say that such an isomorphism does not qualify as an equation, but that is a bit pedantic in my opinion since such isomorphisms have all the properties of an equivalence relation.

<comment><USER23> Right, it's a beautiful theorem, not so much a beautiful equation.

Euler's identity is a beautiful equation, because it ties together several of the most fundamental objects of mathematics, with one occurrence of each, with no wasted boilerplate. The notation is part of the beauty. It looks darn good, on the surface in addition to the beyond the ideas behind the surface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Small typo:

Euler defined the function e^x in analysis as:

       e^x = lim(1+x/n)^n

as x tends to infinity

Should be "as n tends to infinity".

</comment><comment><USER25> I find this view of e^z far more beautiful than a bunch of symbols rearranged by someone who thinks definitions provide insight...

[http://acko.net/files/mathbox/MathBox.js/examples/ComplexExp...](http://acko.net/files/mathbox/MathBox.js/examples/ComplexExponentiation.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> Can anyone name some of the actual uses of this equation in solving real world problems?

<comment><USER27> Well, this equation is really a consequence of the more general e^i _x = cos(x) + i_ sin(x). This, Euler's Formula, enormously simplifies sinusoidal equations. Most common trigonometric identities can be proven in only 3 or 4 steps if you spend 2 of them converting to/from the exponential form, but are far more complicated in the trigonometric form. Many problems in electricity, magnetism, and basic quantum physics would be drastically less wieldy (more unwieldy?) without it.

I don't know of any cases in which it makes things possible, but there are plenty of cases where it makes things practical.

</comment></comment><comment> alok-g >> Euler's brilliant mathematical mind replaced the real variable x with ix

Is there any proof that the equation remains true when x -> ix transformation is made? OK, I know there is formal proof for this; can someone explain please? :-)

</comment><comment><USER28> _Euler defined the function e^x in analysis as: e^x=lim(1+x/n)^n as x tends to infinity. So, we get:_

It should be as n tends to infinity.</pedantic>

</comment><comment><USER29> I've seen it taken to the i'th power:

e^(i*pi)i = 1^i

       or

e^-pi = 1^i

which seems very strange - e and pi are real numbers, so 1 to the i'th power must also be real?

</comment><comment><USER30> There is nothing particularly beautiful in this, it's just a trivially obvious identity (once you know the relevant theory, of course).

</comment><comment><USER31> I have this tattooed on my leg :) <http://imgur.com/LcIlm5L>

</comment><comment><USER20> Guys, there's lot more here - <http://functionspace.org/discussion/new> :)</comment>


XX Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/xx-combinator.html

<comment><USER2> Really?

There are always complaints about women in technology. Yet when I spent my Saturday nights in an underground lab, there weren't a lot of women in the lab. The bar and social spots on the humanities side were full of them though.

Is it okay to have double standards? If we make women only organizations to promote things, is it okay if we make men only organizations?

If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren't there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities?

<comment><USER3> I think organizations to get men into teaching and nursing would be valuable. Teaching especially. When an industry is slanted towards a gender, it really exacerbates groupthink.

I think you're mostly making a strawman argument. I don't know what your opinion on the matter is, but I think that most self-described feminists would agree that a dearth of men in teaching is just as much a problem as a dearth of women in engineering.

<comment><USER4> Teaching needs more men, because children (particularly boys) need more adult male role models.

Nursing can stay 90% female for all I care, though. I think most men prefer having female nurses (either of the hot variety or the motherly variety) and I'm guessing most women do too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Women who start businesses like to know what they're doing, and be trained and experienced in it._

What does this borderline-sexist generalization even _mean_?

 _First, there aren't enough women entrepreneurs. There aren't enough women VCs. There aren't enough women developers._

Is there a quota? The beauty of our (Western) society (at this moment in history) is that people have the freedom to shoot for whatever they want _independent_ of their race/religion/age/gender. Using people's physical or demographic characteristics to fill out some sort of social prescription is as offensive as it is misguided.

<comment><USER6> There is no shortage of men demonstrating to younger males that they can make it in technology. This is what we get to take for granted, and as a result, aren't really aware of. Girls trying to figure out what they want, out of the set of options that they think are viable/promising, don't have this benefit, and needlessly self-select themselves out.

Really? Downvoted? I'd love to know what for. Is what I'm saying making people angry?

<comment><USER7> > There is no shortage of men demonstrating to younger males that they can > make it in technology.

What, exactly, are these older men doing such that younger men can benefit and younger women can not?

If your response is "they're men", that's not something that they're doing. That's something that the younger women are doing, or rather, not doing, namely thinking that the gender of X matters in "X is doing Y, so I can do it too" when it doesn't.

<comment><USER6> I said what they were doing in the part you quoted. By dominating a field, they establish ample precedent that others like them can do so as well. This is not an intentional thing that they're doing. It's a byproduct. This phenomenon occurs all the time, for groups of all kinds.

To flip it around, think about nurses before male nurses became commonplace. What would run through your head, thinking about being a nurse? There are probably a lot of things that would stop you from taking the idea seriously, just because the profession was dominated by women and had hardly any men.

<comment><USER7> > By dominating a field, they establish ample precedent that others like them > can do so as well.

And you think that "like" is gender?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a woman and these sorts of things bug me. OK, so there aren't enough women in tech. Perhaps that's because they just don't want to be in tech! Sure I've had my share of "oh, well, there's no way you'd be good/no way you know what you're talking about because you're a woman" or similar sexist attitudes, but I don't want to work for those sorts of people anyway.

IMO if you want to be in tech, you'll find a way to do what you want to do. People (all people! not just women!) who are motivated to do something will do what's necessary to achieve it. Sure it's nice to have another woman to chat to occasionally when you run into sexist jerks, but otherwise I get on just fine with people of any gender because I'm confident and know my stuff, work hard, and am pretty laid back. Probably helps that I grew up with the net a bit though (I'm almost 30) so am no longer horrified by gutter humour or swear words, or other "unladylike" things.

<comment><USER9> In my 3 years of TAing undergrad computer science intro classes, I am going to say you are wrong. The number of incredibly smart, gifted women who believed they were failing the course despite having some of the best scores was staggering. Many of them simply believed they were not good enough to compete with the loud-mouthed egotistical dicks in the class. They had no role models and no belief that they were good enough to compete with the guys who had been using computers since they were five.

I am not saying this is a problem for all women or that it only affects women, but it is still a problem that needs to be solved. Role models help, encouragement helps, and having someone around to convince these students they aren't stupid helps. I would rather more women get into TAing intro classes than this program, but take what you can get.

<comment><USER8> Wow, that's really sad. :( Maybe it was the lack of loud-mouthed dicks in my courses, but all the women I met in my compsci degree who were doing well actually really enjoyed it and, well, did well. (Or perhaps it's how our courses were set up; there wasn't much opportunity for people to be dicks).

I will admit, it can be quite intimidating as a woman to, say, start going to things like Linux Users Groups though; back when I first joined my local one (late 90s, early 2000s?) there were a lot of... intimidating people there. But there were also a number of women, and a few friends of mine also there, which was good for that moral support. But then again, these people are loud mouthed egotistical dicks to everyone that has an opposing view to them, usually, not just women (e.g. if they use emacs and you use vim, be prepared!).

In these very charged environments it only really came up a couple of times: one of these that happened to me was one of the main examples used in the "women in linux howto" (which I'm not a fan of actually, because I think it causes a bit of a negative feedback loop), and was dealt with very well by both male and female members of the group. Curiously, due to that howto, I _still_ get email from concerned guys hoping that I haven't been turned off LUGs for the rest of my life!

I definitely think it's a great idea to have more women in tech, especially education, but I think that they need to feel like they have a passion for it. And all the incentives, etc. make for a bit of a bad taste in the mouth w.r.t. that :)

<comment><USER10> You touch on a good point. Being in this field is intimidating for everyone! It is impossible to be the master of everything, and yet there are people who will challenge you on every front.

Showing up to some groups, posting on some boards (like this one even) and jumping into the conversation can be outright terrifying.

My XY-card doesn't make it instantly simple to show up to any event and feel comfortable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How about a women-only hacker space? That might create more female founders (of any age) in the long-term.

Also, one thing Tereza mentioned, that "women who start businesses like to know what they're doing", could be seen more as a problem to be addressed than a constraint to be worked around.

<comment><USER12> I'm all for women hackers/entrepreneurs self-organizing on an informal level and comparing notes, but I must confess that I have the same visceral reaction to women-only hacker spaces that I did to girls-only math classes when I was in 6th grade. Whatever floats your boat, but I've always believed that it shouldn't be about lacking a Y chromosome, it should be about doing the hacking/learning the math. I may be in the minority of the minority, but I would much prefer to build my business surrounded by people with a diversity of perspectives who could provide flashes of insight that would never occur to me as a typical INTJ scientist (although not a typical 30-something female, clearly). Narcissistic nutcases-- there are plenty of both genders-- are a fact of life.

I believe that the status quo is not going to evolve much through anything that can be construed by naysayers as affirmative action. Rather, women with technical and/or entrepreneurial aspirations need to get over themselves, stop being so concerned about peer pressure or what anybody else will think, do what they love, and prove to others that it can be done. Laura Finton, founder of oneforty and a Tech Stars grad is a great example. She started her company as a single mom with young kids as a solo founder with no programming skills. Even though I'm not a Twitter person at all, I take my hat off to her. She's taking the time to tell her story to the Boston entrepreneurial community and leading by example.

<comment><USER13> > Rather, women with technical and/or entrepreneurial aspirations need to get > over themselves, stop being so concerned about peer pressure or what anybody > else will think, do what they love, and prove to others that it can be done.

I don't think it's that simple though. For a majority change, positive feedback is required along the lifecyle from knowing nothing to loving it and having entrepreneurial aspirations. I think the main problem is the mostly invisible peer pressure _to do_ something else - not the peer pressure to _not_ do something. This is why more female role models are needed and more tech-oriented schooling from a young age and more gender neutral literature, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Waiting for XXX combinator...

<comment><USER15> I had that idea some time ago but looking at the problems of regulation I let it go.

I guess there isn't really a real platform for this that isn't bloated with bots, spam and ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> i think there's likely a minimal activation number where if there aren't enough women in a particular hacker space then the women who do come by don't stick.

as a woman myself, being a 40-yr-old entrepreneur makes sense in a dozen ways. one less important but rather interesting way is that one is more likely to be interacting with 40-yr-old males. i must say that most young men are rather self-minded. male hackers traditionally develop group process and team- supporting after a prolonged technical and super-independence+confidence phase. women tend to develop differently. once everyone matures and self actualizes interaction becomes awesome :-)

<comment><USER17> This will sound supremely sexist, but... I currently work in an office with tons of women. Whenever you read something about gender in the workplace, there is a lot of talk about how women are team-oriented and cooperative. However, in my experience this is not true at all. The women in my office are shockingly mean to each other... not a day goes by without someone sobbing and fleeing to the women's restroom. At companywide events, the talk is always about who did what backstabbing maneuver to whomever else, why this woman doesn't deserve this promotion, i can't believe she wore that to the office, she's probably sleeping with the VP of Sales, etc etc.

<comment><USER18> Too me it sound like a symptom of too many women at the same level and inability of management to handle the situation. I've worked with both male and female sports teams, and I would say that there's about the same amount of friction. I do think that men generally are raised with more "teamwork" in mind, i.e. more men do team sports. Just seem like a reason to get more female managers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So ... encourage 40yo women to enter the space by lowering the barrier of entry? Doesn't this seem sub-optimal for investors?

<comment><USER13> Where does it say to lower the barrier of entry?

<comment><USER19> The assumption is that these women are just as capable as Y Combinator applicants, but that the program is biased against them. Even if you believe this, any time you restrict the applicant pool arbitrarily (by gender/etc), you will lose some of the best applicants. For example, you will likely at least double the great applicants by allowing 40+ y/o males to enter as well. Hence, it just doesn't make sense as an investor to participate in "XX Combinator."

<comment><USER13> I still don't get that this means 'lower the barrier' though. Doesn't it mean raise one impenetrable barrier, i.e. XY? If the same number of XXs exist then the number will still be the same but fewer people will apply. If more women apply as a result of good PR about it being woman-friendly then they still may not get accepted on the same grounds as any other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services. If we had an adequate social support system there wouldn't have to be such a trade off between work and family.

<comment><USER5> _You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services._

Less of the "women" and more of the "people," please. Many men are involved in child care and housework in a significant way, and similarly have to make trade offs between work and family.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If so, we need to rename Y Combinator to XY Combinator.

<comment><USER21> Is that even necessary? It already is XY Combinator -- only 14 women out of 450 people in ycombinator total -- 3.1%. That's pathetic.

<comment><USER5> How does that tie up with the application rates? If only 2-5% of _applicants_ were women, the end result merely reflects reality.

What percentage of people in YCombinator are black, gay, Muslim, or otherwise? Would low percentages of people with these labels be "pathetic"?

<comment><USER21> What reality? Even if that were the case, I think it's worth questioning why only 2-5% of applicants are women.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Its sort of ironic that Jessica Livingston is on the ycombinator team. Is she not a hacker? I really don't think she isn't...

<comment><USER23> Please stop stacking your negatives. I can't read that last sentence.

<comment><USER22> Sorry it should read "Isn't jessica livingston a hacker because she is part of ycombinator?"</comment></comment></comment>


Sex censorship killed the internet we love - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/31/sex-censorship-killed-internet-fosta-sesta/ <comment><USER2> So don't use Google? It's their website, they are allowed to remove whatever they don't want from there. The beauty of the internet is that you can build your own blog, your own social network, your own ad network, your own congresists. We have the tools to do it. If there exists such an article then that means there's an opportunity to build those things.

<comment><USER3> hiccuphippo is wrong here. Violet Blue was arguing that censorship by Internet infrastructure systems (Google, Tumblr, Instagram, etc.) is destroying the free-for-all of information including material about sex, kink communities, and so forth. By adopting censorship policies the Internet infrastructure providers make the world less free and less interesting. I agree.

<comment><USER4> People don't really undersatnd the power of their small choices, Google is just another business if they find enough people is leaving their services because of the filters they will surely eliminate them.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Colors – A data-driven collection of beautiful color palettes - <AUTHOR> https://klart.co/colors <comment><USER2> I don't know if your data model (or general hypothesis) is working. There are some truly garish color combinations (too many to be a fluke) on the site, so I'm thinking some colors work better as part of a work rather than as a stand- alone palette

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, some are pretty funky :). Gradients, photographs etc can be one reason. Still I think some are pretty nice :).

<comment><USER3> I don't know how you're doing the palette extraction right now, but if want something to experiment with I'd suggest you take a look at using k-means clustering. In other words see the set of pixels as points in a 3D space (where the axes are red, green and blue) and then perform k-means clustering on the points. You could then extract the palette from the centroids. If k-means doesn't give satisfactory results, try spectral clustering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds cool, thanks :)! I'll look into some more methods soon!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What do you mean by "data-driven"? What algorithm are you using to produce the palettes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! It's data-driven in the sense that colors are not picked by hand but rather extracted from curated designs on Pixels (klart.co/pixels) :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice! Though it seems a lot like [http://coolors.co](http://coolors.co), any differentiating aspects?

<comment><AUTHOR> Coolors looks nice :). I generate all palettes automatically from my design curation Pixels (klart.co/pixels). I want it to be really simple to find color inspiration so you can just go to the site and press space to shuffle until you find something you like :).

<comment><USER5> I like Pixels very much, thank you for curating this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a way to pattern match against a set of requirements, like relative contrast or color difference?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet. Might be something I'll implement. Thanks :)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This link might be useful for comparison: [http://colormind.io](http://colormind.io)

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/groups/service/...](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/groups/service/html/communitystart?communityUuid=0ce34f5f-80c5-4fdf-b542-c7fd9c6fa05e&ftHelpTip=true)

</comment><comment><USER9> Love Colors and Color Science? Come support a dedicated Color Science community StackExchange Q&A site: [https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/110687/color- scie...](https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/110687/color- science?referrer=JmGHDk1JmPnR7e_6vfPwHQ2)

<comment><USER10> That's way too specific.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Why isn't a "color science" tag on the graphic design Q&A site enough?

<comment><USER12> No. This is a very different audience wanting to do things with colour, e.g. maths. The graphic design site does not have the right moderators and audience for it.

I do interesting things with colour from time to time and find myself in the realms of no documentation and no sensible answers from Stack Overflow. I don't care what code an algorithm is in, or if it was written by Ancient Greeks, what I want is a community that knows stuff about colour spaces, identifying colours in complex images, making palettes from data and so on. The 'graphic design' community isn't about that, for starters there is an expectation to be using applications rather than code for working with images.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Python overtakes Java to become second-most popular language on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://groups.hyvor.com/Java/213/java-news-python-overtakes-to-become-secondmost-popular-language-on-github <comment><USER2> Not a Python fan (like, at all) but can't say I'm surprised. I'm doing still lots of Java development as freelancer to pay the bills, but the Java9+ "update" has just deprecated too much of the Java ecosystem. World-class backward compat was the one thing that Java got right, but lifting a couple years old Java apps to Java 8 and 9 was such a painful experience (with Spring 3->4, idiotic deprecated "REST" frameworks, and old netty servlet and jspc maven conflicts, none of which had a reason to exist in the first place IMO). Ironically, as we're moving to a world of closed language ecosystems, and nobody produces regular shared or static libs anymore in favor of the respective language's own little package manager, the Java ecosystem could have played to Java's strength. It's depressing to loose a whole generation's work of love who saw Java as the go-to language for such a long time with two world-class IDEs to choose from, but I guess Java has run its course as a language that started as a bytecode format for set-top boxes. Will Python (started as the ABC language for non-technical users) take its place? I highly doubt it.

Update: do you have a recommendation for a Java exit strategy? Like, using a language that can compile to JVM byte codes to integrate with existing code bases, yet can also be compiled into native code on x86/64 and ARM/64 for linking against?

<comment><USER3> Java was a one size fits all language. Nobody wants that anymore. I work for a bank, most of our applications are in Java, but like 90% of these programs are very rudimentary transactional applications: take this piece of data and send it over there.

We had a small pilot project to test replacing a Java app with a NodeJS app. The node app was a single file of about 50 lines of code, whereas the Java app had all sorts of bullshit associated with it. It needs to be compiled and the dependencies need be installed, you need a specific version of the JDK, make sure you run in with special flags... all to receive an HTTP request, pick out some data, then forward it on to a downstream server. Huge productivity gains from never having to fight a build, it was stupid easy to set up the deployment pipeline too, much to the chagrin of the devops manager. Git pull, npm install, node app.js _and that's it_.

The Java exit strategy is to find the technology that serves your needs. There's just so much bullshit associated with having a language that does it all that I think people are starting to look for solutions with common sense defaults. Why, in 2019, is it still so fucking awkward to deal with JSON in Java? Why do I have to handle so many interfaces and classes to make a simple HTTP request?

C++ is facing the same reckoning as Java, thanks to Rust. You'd be stupid to start a C++ project these days, given all the sanity that Rust brought to that ecosystem.

<comment><USER4> > Java was a one size fits all language. Nobody wants that anymore.

That sounds like a very opinionated claim. Can you back it up with any kind of evidence?

Also, am I the only one that finds it kind of ironic that you describe how a scripting language, whose main use is creating interactive web pages, is used as a Java replacement?

<comment><USER2> No more ironic than using Java the original purpose of which was for developing portable interactive apps on set-top boxes ;)

<comment><USER4> It is ironic because the poster claimed that no one want one size fits all languages anymore. And then he goes on to describe how they replaced Java with Javascript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More statistics over here _(if anyone else is interested)_.

• [https://octoverse.github.com/#top- languages](https://octoverse.github.com/#top-languages)

• [https://madnight.github.io/githut/](https://madnight.github.io/githut/)

• [http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html](http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html)

• [https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming- language...](https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by- github-users/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Well deserved</comment>


Thoughts on Intel's Upcoming Software Guard Extensions (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2013/08/thoughts-on-intels-upcoming-software.html <comment><AUTHOR> Part 2:

[http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2013/09/thoughts-on- in...](http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2013/09/thoughts-on-intels- upcoming-software.html)</comment>


Do not install RVM until they fix the domain name and certificate issue - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rvm/rvm/issues/4841 <comment><USER2> A little bit hyperbolic no ? It would have failed to GET anyway..

It can still be installed from the ghuc..

curl [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rvm/rvm/master/binscripts/...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rvm/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm- installer) | bash -s stable

<comment><AUTHOR> No it wouldn't have failed to GET. The domain is resolved correctly ...but in the wrong IP.

Very easily someone could upload a malware which would be piped to bash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An interesting incident, but it is now fixed.</comment>


Outbox, The Startup That Digitizes Your Postal Mail, Raises $5 Million Series A - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/01/outbox-the-startup-that-digitizes-your-postal-mail-raises-5-million-series-a/

<comment><USER3> I recently bought a house that was gutted and had no mailbox when I moved in. I went for as long as possible without adding one. (It's 99% junk mail that I just recycle immediately.)

Well, you can't actually get away with this for one reason: the government. Specifically, the IRS, but probably the census too. (And they only allow you to use a PO Box if you certify that you cannot physically accept mail at your residence.) If they send you an important document, there better be a box for the USPS to put it in, or you could end up in hot water.

I wish the USPS & IRS & Census would allow addresses to opt-out of mail entirely. It's time to let people and companies go 100% paperless without paying for scanning services.

<comment><USER4> The Direct Mail Association has an opt-out (which is volutary, but _many_ mailers abide by it): [https://www.dmachoice.org/](https://www.dmachoice.org/)

The FTC runs a opt-out program for credit card and insurance offers which is mandated by law: [https://www.optoutprescreen.com/](https://www.optoutprescreen.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why anyone would think letting a company take your mail, read it, make a database from scanning its contents, then decide what you get to see from it, is preferable to the seconds it takes to throw a few envelopes in the trash.

Ooh, here, let me give you my email passwords so you can delete all the spam from my inbox too...

<comment><USER6> Ironically, I use unroll.me which arguably works like your last sentence - while it's saves me only "a few seconds", it still saves me from having to stare at the less-important mail when passively looking at my inbox.

Also, it's more than a few seconds depending on your situation. You have to walk to a central mailbox for many newer suburbs. A rarer scenario, when I lived in Tahoe I had to drive down the mountain I lived to a P.O.Box - <USER2> just to throw junk mail in the trash.

<comment><USER5> You can find a use case for just about everything. There's a use case for PRISM but that doesn't make it a good idea.

The problem is, for added convenience (which might, like if you have to drive down a mountain, be more than minor) you're giving a startup complete control over your identity and just trusting them not to exploit that.

If Outbox decides one day to censor the content, or sell your data, or if a third party pays them to get copies of your mail, what can you do if they acquiesce? If the US Postal Service announced it was going to pre-screen and digitize all outgoing mail, and only send people digital copies of everything but the 'spam', everyone would be screaming bloody tyranny.

Admittedly, though, i've never had to drive down a mountain to get my mail and I might just be too paranoid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm going to re-post my comment from the previous thread because I think it applies even more now. How did they get $5 million in funding? What is their business plan? I would really like to know.

\----

1\. Collect mail door-to-door

2\. Scan each page of mail, including envelopes

3\. Post scans online

4\. Return requested physical mail

5\. Charge $4.99 for this service

6\. ...

7\. Profit?

Looking at their job postings, they have one person per city managing a team of people working probably close to minimum wage going door-to-door. These people most likely scan mail at their homes using a scanner provided by Outbox.

Let's say they pay a City Manager $100,000, or $125,000 after taxes, unemployment insurance, and benefits. An individual can take on 30 customers, is paid above minimum wage (let's say $15 after taxes, etc.), and works 7 hours a day (or 35 hours/week, making them part-time employees). That's roughly $30,000 per worker annually.

At $4.99 per month, none of the economics work. At 30 customers per part-time employee, the break even point is $100 per month per customer. At $4.99 per month each PTE needs to handle around 600 customers each to break even. 100 customers per PTE at $30/month also breaks even. But even 100 per PTE seems unrealistic.

Unless I'm missing something very basic, it just doesn't scale at $4.99 per month. At all. It's not even close.

<comment><USER8> Do they really need to go door-to-door? Why can't the USPS just forward it all to Outbox?

<comment><USER9> I think they tried to set this up once, but the USPS is giving a partnership with them the cold shoulder...

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/28/4039990/the-postal- service...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/28/4039990/the-postal-service-is- bad-but-outbox-is-worse)

"At the time of its announcement, Outbox suggested it had reached an agreement with the USPS to allow it to intercept mail from ever being delivered to your home, and that it would instead be delivered to its warehouse. This would have made the service less wasteful, to be sure. From its description of the service today, that no longer appears to be the case, and Outbox employs its own "postmen" to pick up already delivered mail from your home mailbox."

<comment><USER10> Could still happen in the future. Certainly, last-mile delivery is an expensive pain point for USPS. But cutting that deal is going to be high-risk and expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What differentiates Outbox from [https://www.earthclassmail.com/](https://www.earthclassmail.com/) or [http://www.virtualpostmail.com/](http://www.virtualpostmail.com/) (besides the price) that warrants a $5 million series A round?

<comment><USER12> Earth class mail had exactly the same idea 2004 and got 21.4M funding [1]. A documentary from 2008 about them: [http://www.hulu.com/start-up- junkies](http://www.hulu.com/start-up-junkies) . They later fired the founder and changed from B2C to B2B [2]: "As many a tech startup has discovered, though, a great idea doesn't always make a good business. Digitizing all that paper proved hugely expensive, and Earth Class Mail couldn't make its business pay." [1] [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/earthclassmail](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/earthclassmail) [2] [http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2011/01/earth_class...](http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2011/01/earth_class_mail_attempts_rebo.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052).

Two important take-aways:

1) Your physical mail is destroyed eventually - not stored for perpetuity.

2) This doesn't have to be an alternative to your home-address mail; it can also be used as a P.O. box.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why aren't the USPS doing this? They already have to process some addressed mail specially (eg if you have them a forwarding address), so it would be practical for them to deliver your mail virtually.

<comment><USER7> Selling a subscription service for something like this would be a great strategy for the USPS, but it's a giant bureaucracy employing 8 million people. Change happens slowly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Given all of the NSA/PRISM revelations as of late, wouldn't you want exactly the opposite of this?

<comment><USER16> Exactly my though. ;) I was thinking recently whether I shouldn't go back to have my phone invoices and bank monthly reports to be delivered by snail instead of email, like in those old times. ;-)

<comment><USER15> I take it back [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail- mai...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail- mail.html?hp&_r=0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Post Danmark (Danish Postal Services) offer a similar service called e-Boks.[0] The main drawback is that e-Boks is only available for senders that are registered as e-Boks senders. Fortunately, these include all government services (both local and national), as well as several private companies.

[0] [https://www.postdanmark.dk/da/Privat/Modtag%20Post/Sider/e-b...](https://www.postdanmark.dk/da/Privat/Modtag%20Post/Sider/e-boks.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER18> As someone who has moved around a lot this is a great service. Setup one address for all postal mail and no matter where I am I can get access to it. When I move the address stays the same - I can easily update my email address its sending to if need be.

Being able to search my archive of mail would also save me a bunch of time though I can imagine I would be deleting the majority of it.

I'd prefer it if the service was based outside of the US.

</comment><comment><USER19> In the short term, it is a waste to 'undeliver' mail so you can send it digitally.

However, if they can get some traction, it would drive a lot of direct mail advertising digital. I hope they make it work. There are still 80+ billion pieces of junk mail sent in the US each year.

My company ([http://www.exemplartech.com](http://www.exemplartech.com)) is working on this from the advertisers side but we need companies like Zumbox, Doxo, Manilla, and Outbox to get the consumers to change behavior.

<comment><USER20> Or just let me opt out of your paper spam. If I want something, I'll go find it on my own.

<comment><USER21> I was under the impression that spam was one of the bigger sources of revenue for the post office...

<comment><USER19> About $17B out of $65B.

[http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/#H2](http://about.usps.com/who- we-are/postal-facts/#H2)

89.5 letters * $0.20 = ~ $17B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why is this a thing? Are people so lazy to go through their own mail that they need to spend money to have someone else do it for them? Even if you factor in far-off edge cases, there is little to no money to made here except for the most insane of people who are almost never at their home address, and that number isn't all that large.

<comment><USER23> Speaking for a family of four in Chicago: the amount of crap mail we get is a constant chore, and we regularly miss important things amidst the piles of upsell offers from the banks that own our mortgage, or the dealership that sold us a car, or the store we mail-ordered a pan from once, &c.

I think you're wrong about the appeal of this service. I wish we had something like it here.

Also, "laziness"? What does that even mean? There's a finite number of minutes in every day. Make a case for why I should spend any of those minutes dealing with paper mail. How many other goods and services do _you_ use that we could interrogate as a facilitator of "laziness"?

<comment><USER24> Speaking for a family of three in Chicago, we get a lot of crap mail as well. Really, it's all we get.

But: a) my 3 year old has fun grabbing it out of the box and pretending it's from various people. b) it takes literally a few seconds to just throw it out.

Now, if we were getting so much junk mail that it was making us miss our actual, important mail, that'd be a problem.

But we don't get any actual, important mail. It's 99% junk.

Anywho. The Postal Service is going to disappear in my 3 year old's lifetime anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The other hidden use case: College students / Travelers that just want to keep their mailing address at a 'home base' (e.g. their parents house or a close friend).

This is way cheaper of an option than using earth class mail, and allows for any super-important stuff to still get home quickly.

</comment><comment><USER25> Finnish Post Office has offered this for about 5 years already, it's called 'NetPosti'.

</comment><comment><USER26> I would much rather have an Outbox mailing address that I can give out. Would be much easier for Outbox to manage as well.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is like slapping a very insecure solution on a problem that will eventually die (snail mail).

</comment><comment><USER28> Great, so now the NSA can harvest my post too?</comment>


Jan Koum promoting WhatsApp on forum in 2009 (It's free bitches) - <AUTHOR> http://www.luxury4play.com/off-topic/24177-yo-check-out-my-iphone-app-its-free-bitches.html

<comment><USER2> protected behind registration wall :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh sorry didn't know.</comment></comment>


Stephen R. Covey Taught Me Not to Be Like Him - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/stephen_r_covey_taught_me_not.html <comment><USER2> So, which is it? Do you, or don't you, want to be like him?

</comment><comment><USER3> Summary of the article:

Stephen Convey Taught Me Not to Be Like Him, but screw that, I still want to.</comment>


Half of US stock fund assets are now invested in index funds - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1623418/index-funds-now-account-for-half-the-us-stock-market/ <comment><USER3> It'd be nice if it were easy to buy a Vanguard ETF but modified to either avoid specific companies or set to create incentives for certain types of companies. Like a company could get an outsized weight if it has a more diverse executive team or compensated them less than %N00 of the average worker. Just to give passive investors some sort of tool to nudge companies into better behavior (as defined by their aggregate preferences).

<comment><USER4> There are some ETFs that focus on "ethical" and "socially responsible" companies. I don't think Vanguard has any. DSI seems to be the biggest one.

<comment><USER5> Vanguard just launched VEIGX [https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual- funds/profile/overview/...](https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual- funds/profile/overview/veigx) as their environmental, social, and governance index fund.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I didn't know that.

It's interesting that this is an actively managed fund. There are actually a few indices for this kind of thing but apparently Vanguard is not using them: [https://www.msci.com/esg-indexes](https://www.msci.com/esg-indexes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Atlantic article from 2017 [1] mentioned that every company having the same set of investors might reduce competition on the market:

"Julio Rotemberg, then a newly minted economist from Princeton, posited that "firms, acting in the interest of their shareholders," might "tend to act collusively when their shareholders have diversified portfolios." The idea, which Rotemberg explored in a working paper, was that if investors own a slice of every firm, they will make more money if firms compete less and collectively raise prices, at the expense of consumers"

The article does point out that there are also other opinions on the subject.

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/are- ind...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/are-index-funds- evil/534183/)

<comment><AUTHOR> doesn't that already happen? It seems like many firms converge on a single price for a service or product, such has domain names, soda, candy, or web hosting or credit card fees, give or take 10 percent or so.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that theoretically that could both indicate collusion or market efficiency.

<comment><USER8> Can we tell the difference just by estimating production costs? (at least in the case of soda, candy etc). Or is it more complicated than that?

<comment><USER7> In theory, yes. If you had a good estimate of __marginal __economic costs then it would be easier to conclude if there is collusion. In practice, it is very difficult to estimate economic costs. This, for example, would include estimating the opportunity cost of each company 's investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an extremely interesting turn of events that leads to a few questions.

Do the index funds participate in all of the elections for all of the companies they hold?

If yes how do the funds vote? For the interests of the individuals companies or do they push cross company agendas?

If no then does this mean that index funds are concentrating voting power in the hands of non fund holders?

<comment><USER10> Yes, index funds vote. They tend to push for shareholder-friendly issues (independence of corp board, blocking poison pills, etc) and less on 'political' issues. Some research [[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2475150](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2475150)] has shown that you can see a significant difference between companies in the index and not in the index on these issues.

Most index funds are not as active as other investors, but they tend to maintain voting shares rather than get discounted non-voting shares because the latter always end up getting screwed by the voting shares...

<comment><USER11> > Most index funds are not as active as other investors, but they tend to > maintain voting shares rather than get discounted non-voting shares because > the latter always end up getting screwed by the voting shares...

How? In my (Canadian) experience with dual-class shares, they're usually the same slices of the pie and the same dividend payouts.

The usual problem is when the voting shares are impossible to actually buy, so you're at the whims of the founding family's ego. But then you don't even have the choice of buying the voting. And sometimes when you could, the founders own 51%+ anyway, so you're just buying a vote you can't use and paying that premium to the founding family again.

<comment><USER10> Voting shares can vote on whether or not the company issues more shares, pays out accumulated profit as dividend, takes on a debt load that may look good in the short-term but will have a crippling impact on the long-term, etc. An index fund cannot just decide to dump a company's shares because management has decided to drive the company off a cliff for the sake of a quick payoff, so paying a bit extra for voting rights tends to be in their interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> All this does is make all stocks move up or down regardless of their individual performance to some extent.

If there is a big swing in either direction. Some stocks will get way overvalued or undervalued compared to their intrinsic value. Maybe this is beneficial to a value investor that picks stocks instead of investing in ETF's? I wonder if ETFS will make the market drop a lot in the next crash and will the etf's even track their underlying accurately? Lot's of arbitrage opportunities.

<comment><USER13> "Lot's of arbitrage opportunities. "

Probably with put options.

[https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-09/horseman-global- un...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-09/horseman-global-unveils-new- shorting-philosophy-using-etf-flows-catalyst)

ETFs were an outstanding idea but never meant to be used on such an excessive scale. If once stock falls and many of the ETFs have to re-balance their index to reflect this, this creates a feed back effect. And if Index ETFs and HFT are the last ones trading this stock, good luck with this.

Everything works until it doesn't.

<comment><USER14> Cap-weighted index funds do not have to rebalance when a stock falls (this is the most common type as I understand it). Consider a cap-weighted index where there are only two stocks, A and B. At time 0 the have an equal market cap of $1B each. The underlying mutual fund has $20M of AUM, so they hold $10M of A and $10M of B.

        State of the world
        </comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

        Market caps   A=$1B B=$1B
        Fund holdings A=$10M B=$10M

Now at time 1 some bad news about B is made public. B's price falls by 50%.

        Market caps   A=$1B B=$0.5B
        Fund holdings A=$10M B=$5M

As you can see, the market cap weighted target for B dropped from 50% to 33%. But the fund's holdings of B also dropped from 50% to 33%. No rebalancing is required because the asset price changed at the same time as the market cap weighted fraction changed.

The only time a fund needs to rebalance is when a security is removed from or added to the underlying index. I don't know how that is handled, but I suspect it is predictable and priced in.

<comment><USER12> What happens when the ETF value goes down not because the value of the underlying stock goes down but because people are selling the ETF?

Won't they need to rebalance then? The way it will happen is they will have to sell all the stocks in the ETF according to their percent allocation

<comment><USER14> Authorized participants [1] will buy the undervalued shares and redeem them for shares in the underlying fund for a profit. FWIW, there is no such thing as "rebalancing" an ETF. The underlying fund can rebalance, but the ETF is an exchange-traded representation of the underlying fund. There's nothing in it to rebalance.

[1]: [https://www.etf.com/etf-education-center/7540-what-is-the- et...](https://www.etf.com/etf-education-center/7540-what-is-the-etf- creationredemption-mechanism.html?nopaging=1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A relevant perspective for the tech community is this:

\- Index funds will buy whatever there is that passes a filter (eg market cap)

\- Private companies like Uber now rival the size of large cap firms

\- So if you can pull it off, you can find a buyer for your VC backed firm who doesn't think.

<comment><USER11> Depends on the inclusion criteria and process are. I don't think index funds buy at IPO.

Presumably they would start to buy after 90 days and a small chunk each trading day, determined by average daily volume and other factors.

By that point, the active buyers/shorters should do their usual bit of fighting each other until the price is « correct ».

Doing massive buy and sell orders based on known criteria would be problematic.

<comment><USER15> > By that point, the active buyers/shorters should do their usual bit of > fighting each other until the price is « correct ».

Their assessment will include the fact that large buy orders are coming.

> Doing massive buy and sell orders based on known criteria would be > problematic.

There's a number of firms that run quant strategies based on index add/removes.

<comment><USER11> In theory. But it's possible for there to not be enough depth of market on the date/time of a massive buy/sell order from a big ETF.

I'm sure they have the data and know which method works out best in practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wondering if this could lead to an "index fund bubble". If everyone invested using index funds, markets exhibit increasingly erratic behaviour [https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/09/19/ar...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/09/19/are- we-headed-for-a-passive-index-meltdown/#7c7ba185413e)

<comment><USER11> There's no difference, in aggregate, between retail investors investing in an index fund vs a million investors throwing a million darts at a million newspaper stock pages.

(Ignoring weighting/market cap, but the point is that a lot of investing was passive anyway)

One experiences a lot less variability, bookkeeping and trading fees though.

<comment><USER17> There is a difference. The S&P500, e. g., is not constructed by throwing darts.

<comment><USER11> Which could be considered « active » since they have to look at the top 500, and add/remove as required in a manner that won't cause a company dropping from 500 to 501 from becoming 600 because of a sell off.

But that just goes to the point I'm making: there are varying degrees of active and passive funds. The rise of passive index funds won't distort much of anything when funds were coming from a passive fund that tried to sell itself (and charge) as active.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a noob in investing so I have a few questions:

* Is this a bad news?

* Are there index funds that blindly follow the top 500 but actively remove dumb stocks?

* Should I avoid American-only index fund? Looks like the Chinese market is becoming pretty strong and there doesn't seem to be any insurance that the American market will stay as strong in the next 20+ years. I would comfortable betting on the world market, but not really on one country's market.

* I have some money saved up that I don't know what to do with. I'll probably look into investing for an apartment in the next 2-5 years. Should I let it sit in my bank account or should I put everything in an index fund?

<comment><USER19> I'm surprised lot of people here think this is not bad news. It most certainly is. Think about it: Index funds don't make any moves by themselves, they simply follow the aggregate decision of active investors that are still in market. This is all good when they have < 50% share but above that now there is more asset that _follows_ smaller assets.

Consider the extreme example: Let's say 99.999999% of assets are in index funds and now there are basically only 10 people left in market who are doing active investing. So when these 10 people decides to sell stock of some company, that stock will fall by some minor amount but immediately all index funds would need to react to this minor drop and sell _their_ holdings. But that would cause more market drop and price would take a death spiral route. This basically means that those 10 people now left to do active investment can now control the market. Any of their small movements gets amplified by large gorillas of index funds.

Above is just tip of the iceburg. The secret of the success of index funds has been very simple: They aggregate all the active investors and these average turns out to be better than individual. However when number of active investors reduces, the variance would increase and this means index funds would become less and less optimal over time.

<comment><USER20> > So when these 10 people decides to sell stock of some company, that stock > will fall by some minor amount but immediately all index funds would need to > react to this minor drop and sell their holdings.

That's not how it would work.

1) When one of the 10 sells they must be selling to another of the 10 who is buying. There's no such thing as just selling. Instead the way that the price would drop would be that the 10 start trading that stock between themselves at a lower price than it had been before.

2) If the price dropped then that wouldn't mean that the index fund had to sell. The index fund aims to own a fixed proportion of each company. If they own $98 million of a $100 million company and then the share price drops in half then they now own $49 million of a $50 million company. There's no need for them to do anything.

<comment><USER19> 1) few parties can collude to sell or buy at the price they desire.

2) Index fund must balance their portfolio. If stock A goes down and B goes up then they must sell off A and buy more of B to re-balance. At least that has been my understanding.

Above two in combination means that you can cause chain reaction which is to be expected because much larger dollars is simply trying to imitate much smaller dollars. So later gets to control the former.

<comment><USER21> _Index fund must balance their portfolio._

They must balance to the underlying index, not so that they hold the same value of each stock. If A goes down and B goes up they don't have to do anything unless the change is so dramatic that it causes the people who compile the index to update which stocks are in the index.

What can happen is that a stock being added/removed from a major index can cause a large amount of buying/selling by index funds as they are 'forced' to add or remove that stock in their portfolio. However that is a fairly rare occurrence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I learned this lesson, but I wish I had learned it sooner.

A few decades ago I started dollar-cost averaging into a hot-rod actively managed fund. As always seems to happen, the fund cooled down and I was late to catch on. My money was not effectively put to use.

Then I started reading (and YouTube watching) people like Malkiel, Buffet, Bogle, Dalio, etc. They all clearly explain the benefits of index funds for the vast majority of people. I believe them.

Indexing is the way to go. Read Bogleheads.org for great advice on this and other topics.

</comment><comment><USER23> If the allocation of assets to index funds approach 100%, wouldnt that distort the prices of stocks? Instead of the price reflecting the fundamentals of the business and earnings, it would simply reflect how the index is moving. A bad company with a dying business would not decline in price because money was flowing in its index.

And active managers would not short dying businesses if they realize _everyone else_ was blindly plowing money to it because it belonged to an index. Thus worsening the situation. The price of a stock is no longer "efficient" and not a reflection of the information available to the entire market.

Personally I wish index funds were abolished, forcing everyone to pick and choose the companies they think will flourish or fail.

<comment><USER24> > _Personally I wish index funds were abolished, forcing everyone to pick and > choose the companies they think will flourish or fail._

Given that even the so-called professionals that manage active funds can't consistently beat the index, J. Random Schmoe has no chance:

* [https://www.aaii.com/journal/article/most-mutual-funds-do-no...](https://www.aaii.com/journal/article/most-mutual-funds-do-not-outperform) * [https://www.ifa.com/articles/despite_brief_reprieve_2018_spi...](https://www.ifa.com/articles/despite_brief_reprieve_2018_spiva_report_reveals_active_funds_fail_dent_indexing_lead_-_works/)

PDFs:

* [https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2...](https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2016.pdf) * [https://us.spindices.com/documents/research/research-fleetin...](https://us.spindices.com/documents/research/research-fleeting-alpha-evidence-from-the-spiva-and-persistence-scorecards.pdf)

<comment><USER11> Maybe. J Random Schmoe may do better because they're investing their own money. The money manager managing JRS' money on their behalf may make choices that help our MMM's best friend more than anything else. Great for MM, but terrible for JRS.

<comment><USER24> Back in the day I invested some money when AAPL was at $100 and when RIMM was at $100. I was only half-right in my assessments.

Given that last time I did an IQ test I was on the right-hand side of the proverbial Bell curve, I'm not sure how well anyone that is below average (IQ 100) would fair.

I've since learned my lesson and stuck with index funds (dividends being re- invested), and gotten market returns that have been quite nice. At some point markets will tank, and I will rebalance by liquidating some bonds and picking up some more equities (selling high, buying low).

And yet @AznHisoka thinks I should not be allowed to easily get market returns by investing in index funds. (Which the Oracle of Omaha himself, Warren Buffet, suggests that most people do.)

<comment><USER23> Index funds are great for individuals. And I recommend most people stick with them.

But if the purpose of the stock market is to allocate the right amount of capital to companies based on their fundamentals and earnings, index funds don't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love the assertion that a stock reflects some sort of real value. They don't, the market is an irrational pile of crap, and that's why index funds are the best. They take the cream of the crap.

<comment><USER11> I like to think they get all the value of active investing without having to pay for it.

Kinda like if I beat the price of your life insurance policy by 1 cent. I've effectively externalise the actuarial and marketing costs to somebody else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One must also consider that people are using passive index funds as a tool to make active bets.

E.g. if you are buying some US pharmaceutical index fund you are buying a passive product _but_ are actually making two very active bets: you asume that pharmaceutical industry will outperform other sectors and that US pharmaceutical firms will do better than the rest of the world.

<comment><USER27> What bet am I making when I buy an entire stock market index fund?

<comment><USER26> You are still making a number of small bets unknowingly.

A "entire stock market index fund" (which one?) has a methodology for weighting the funds and the markets it invests in. Most funds today weigh their selection by market capitalization. A other weigthing method, such as considering country GDP, might deliver superior results.

Also such "entire stock market index funds" usually only include large cap stocks -- small or micro cap stocks may or may not deliver better results.

Also such "entire stock market index funds" often will exclude entire countries. E.g. the very popular MSCI World and MSCI Emerging Markets funds contain 0 stocks from Ukraine but last year Ukraine had the best performing stock market worldwide.

<comment><USER11> I've made the decision to not bother with international diversification beyond US and local (Canadian) indicies.

Why?

Non-US countries usually don't have diverse stock indexes. You'll have their big telecoms, their big banks and a few other industries. A lot of their big industries will be owned by multinationals anyway, and the smaller ones are private.

The US large caps provide tons of international diversification, with a lot less paperwork and withholding taxes.

Google, Apple, Facebook, McDo's, any oil company, etc. have large amounts of foreign revenue/branches, even in countries without a stock market that you could buy on.

If anything, US investors have too much international diversification when they buy US large cap indicies.

If the US economy does well but the rest doesn't, US stock market returns will be poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does the stock market perform its socially beneficial function if a majority of capital is passively indexed?

Could passive index funds, which seek to mimic the stock market, actually be in control of the stock market? Are they mimicking themselves?

Should we be concerned that most passive capital is invested in the same companies, in the same proportion, weighted mainly by market cap?

Can passive index fund trading move the stock market?

If there is an economic downturn, how would a wave of cash withdrawals from passive index funds affect stock prices?

Have active managers changed their behavior in response to the rising dominance of passive index funds?

NO ONE knows the answers to these questions, at least not with certainty, because we're in _uncharted territory_.

This is the first time in history that a stock market has been dominated by passive index funds.

<comment><USER29> > NO ONE knows the answers to these questions,

NO ONE knew the answers to those same questions about active investment either, though. Markets are markets, and behave in crazy unstable pro-cyclic ways because of psychology, not abstract theory.

Here's an obvious hypothesis: Nothing's going to change at all. The fraction of holdings in these index funds is high, but matches the fraction that was always just thrown into the "balanced random junk" segments of portfolios. Players who want to make focused bets on particular securities or industries will continue to do so, in exactly the same proportion they did before.

I mean, NO ONE knows if that is true or not, but I'd put money down on it.

<comment><USER28> It's possible. I did not make any claims to the contrary.

That said, in the event of market stress, it seems that more _individual_ portfolios will be more highly correlated _with each other_ than in the past.

Isn't that a significant change? In light of it, are you willing to bet that aggregate investor behavior in a future period of stress will be similar to what we have seen in the past?

<comment><USER30> Maybe it will contribute to the increased correlation between stocks and other investments

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's difficult to evaluate whether this is good or bad since we can't rewind and see what would have happened if we didn't go this route.

I can only rely on two things:

(1) This option is cheap in terms of fewer fees, and easier in that I don't have to agonize over picking obscure stocks.

(2) If I get fucked, everyone is fucked, so I'm sure we'll figure something out or just be on our merry way to hell together.

A little shrewd and fatalistic I guess.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if there is a link between the amount of github commits and stock return.

<comment><USER33> What's the market cap per line of code?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The reason that index funds are so popular is because actively managed ones are so bad. Why pay a manager to do worse than the index?

</comment><comment><USER19> I think this is point of infliction. I highly suspect that there is probably a mathamatical theorem here which might state that index funds are efficient only when they occupy less than 50% of the asset share. One of the byproduct of this distribution is that many bad companies which wants to do IPO and they will get auto-funded by small-cap, mid-cap index funds. Also, now there are smaller number of players who are moving knobs and index funds are simply the followers to these small players. In 10 years the effects of this would become quite apparent. If Buffet was going to bet on index funds for next 10 years, he would most likely lose.

</comment><comment><USER11> I want to know how « active » the actively managed funds are.

If the fund is actively looking for deep value bets and trying to drum up increased value for stockholders, then it's truly active.

But if they're just creating a « high-income fund » and just throwing together a basket of high dividend stocks, or a real estate fund and putting together a basket of REITs, they're effectively passive funds and have little impact on the market vs. true index funds. On average, switching between these doesn't distort the market.

<comment><USER35> The Norwegian Consumer Council just won a lawsuit against the country's largest bank, DNB, for claiming just that: [https://www.reuters.com/article/norway-dnb- lawsuit/update-1-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/norway-dnb- lawsuit/update-1-norways-dnb-faces-compensation-bill-for-overcharging-fund- investors-idUSL5N22L3C5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This also means one more thing: Institutional investors and smart money is selling into this rising market. Retail investors are going to be left holding the bag.

The headline should be: Institutional and professional investors are going into cash resulting in individual investors that buy ETF's share to go up to 50 percent.

When professional will start shorting and going the other direction. Headline will be: 80 percent of falling US assets are now invested in index funds.

<comment><USER24> Storytime:

> _Meet Bob._

> _Bob is the world's worst market timer._

> _What follows is Bob's tale of terrible timing of his stock purchases._

* [https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...](https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-timer/)

<comment><USER12> If you are never going to sell your ETF/stocks then yeah it doesn't matter. I read online once that a mutual fund tried to see which of there customers made the most money. The customers that made the most were the ones who had forgotten they made that investment and the others who were dead.

<comment><USER24> > If you are never going to sell your ETF/stocks then yeah it doesn't matter.

Most people are not investing for 'fun', but rather for retirement. So "never" selling, or at least not-selling for several decades, is actually a reasonable assumption.

The main problem is that the general public read headlines and see " _Markets Are Crashing!!1!_ " and pull out. Whereas if they could keep their cool a bit, and stay invested (and ideally keeping investing (monthly?) on the way down), they'll generally end up okay when they approach retirement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Nobody really was/is freaking out over broad equity active mutual funds that hold assets with a very high correlation to the index. ETFs offer intraday arbitrage opportunities during market panics (up or down), unlike mutual funds.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm a fan of index funds but part of me can't help but wonder if this development will result in actively-managed funds and wealthy individual investors having outsized influence on market direction?

<comment><USER22> Why would that be? The actively-managed funds will be less relevant, holding fewer dollars and fewer shares purchased.

<comment><USER38> Changes in stock price are measured by the prices that trades happen at, and passively managed funds are much less likely to do trades (Per dollar invested).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is it possible for too much money to be in funds that automatically allocate based on company value? Imagine if 90% was in index funds like the S&P - <USER2> that distort the accuracy of the market?

<comment> kiran-rao The limiting factor is leverage. If a hedge fund (or equivalent) had enough data and confidence in a company, they would borrow money to increase their position size. This would make it possibly to affect price for non passive investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is the a complete list of the index funds somewhere?

<comment><USER41> Maybe [https://www.justetf.com/en/find- etf.html](https://www.justetf.com/en/find-etf.html) will help you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If everyone piles into the same asset, wouldn't that asset be overbought?

</comment><comment><USER43> The reason this is not a problem is that stocks which are undervalued intrinsically will be purchased by larger companies that see the value.

Of all the important economic issues of our time, this is not one of them.

</comment><comment><USER44> anyone buy repeating insurance (put options) along with index funds / futures ?

<comment><USER45> Tail hedging seems great in theory and I know that several professional investors do it (Universa, Nassim Taleb, etc), but I'm not sure how they make it work. S&P500 out-of-money puts are expensive and it just seems that years or decades of put losses leading up to the "big event" could run you dry.

<comment><USER44> sell at the money monthly straddles to finance the otm puts ?

<comment><USER46> selling insurance to buy insurance defeats the point, ATM options only pay for expected moves so you have no protection gain with your strategy

<comment><USER44> The point is giving up some upside gain for downside protection. You are net selling insurance, with a slight bullish bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Fidelity, the largest fund manager with $6T AUM, is taking a different direction. HN won't want to hear this but here it goes: (get your pitchforks ready)

"Fidelity Investments' new cryptocurrency company will offer trading for institutional customers in a few weeks, Bloomberg reported Monday.

Betting that the cryptocurrency bear market will turn around, Fidelity created its cryptocurrency platform Fidelity Digital Assets in October. The new company began a custody service to securely store bitcoin for its customers in March, CNBC reported. Now, it will be letting customers buy and sell the cryptocurrency in the upcoming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.

Fidelity, a roughly 72-year-old family controlled firm, is primarily known for managing retirement plans and mutual funds. But it also spends $2.5 billion per year on technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain.

Forty-seven percent of institutional investors think digital assets are worth investing in, according to a survey released by Fidelity on May 2.

Further, of the 450 institutions interviewed by Fidelity for research for its new company, everyone from wealthy families to hedge funds to pensions, 22% of respondents already owned a cryptocurrency.

Since the bitcoin boom in 2017, the world's largest cryptocurrency has dropped more than 60% since its high of almost $20,000 at the end of 2017 and was trading near $5,703 on Monday.

Fidelity is only offering the crypto trade to institutional customers. Rivals like Robinhood and E-Trade Financial are taking on retail investors."

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/06/fidelity-is-reportedly- about...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/06/fidelity-is-reportedly-about-to- offer-cryptocurrency-trading-for-pros-within-a-few-weeks.html)

<comment><USER48> Which bit will we not like?

JP Morgan are launching a crypto currency also btw.

[https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2019/02/14/jp-morgan- launches...](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2019/02/14/jp-morgan-launches-its- own-cryptocurrency-the-first-for-a-major-us-bank/)

<comment><USER47> The bit about cryptocurrency. Many in the HN community are anti-crypto and with just about as much emotional enthusiasm as an anti-vaxxer. I'm a long time member of HN, before crypto became popular. I've seen the continual rise in negative sentiment. As a veteran software engineer (cutting code since I was a kid in the 80's), there's always been a purist camp that can't quite wrap their head around the financial markets. Dotcommy crypto scams aside, some equate the financial markets with 'badness' or the dark side (wallst = bad). The adoption of crypto is inevitable and unstoppable. I spend my time developing algorithms for financial markets in C, C++ and Python and have yet to see any software engineers in this camp reject crypto. I encourage all to not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Crypto is a great trading vehicle and a great way for a new breed of company to raise capital from a new and truly global capital market.

I'd encourage those that are anit-crypto in the community to adapt. I never wanted to move from real BBSs to Compuserve, but I had to. Never moved to AOL just went straight to geocities which was a mistake but here we are.

<comment><USER48> I haven't really detected _anti_ crypto, sentiment. Theres many (most?) people who are bearish on crypto, and I would count myself in that number. And when I say bearish I mean Bitcoin won't be worth $Xmillion and be used for some meaningful portion of trade anytime soon.

Actually, I think banks launching their own crypto currencies could be the one of the best chances they've got. I assume the banks have identified valid use cases for them. The ironic thing is they sacrifice the supposed advantage of crypto currencies, which is their decentralisation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Maybe index funds should not be allowed in the first place? It's extreme navel-gazing at best. Does that have anything to do with the purpose of public markets (to fund the economy)?

<comment> yoz-y As opposed to putting your money into some gambler's hands or trying to get lucky yourself?

<comment><USER49> it is not supposed to be gambling</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Apologizes for Shipping 10k Copies of Comey's Book to White House - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/amazon-apologizes-for-shipping-ten-thousand-copies-of-comeys-book-to-white-house/amp <comment><USER2> FYI this is an article from a SATIRE column. All the articles in that column are in jest.

Though how great would it be if bezos' Comments from the article were true!

</comment><comment><USER3> PR stunt to promote Comey's book?</comment>