Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/patent-troll-lodsys-settles-nothing-avoid-trial <comment><USER2> Isn't it nice to be patent troll in the US.

You can threaten 1000's of entities with legal action to extort money, since just defending against the allegation is very expensive. Then when a few of those threats don't stick, all you have to do is "settle for nothing" to avoid an actual trial. Nice.

The patent trolls are just a symptom, the legal system is the problem.

You leave a legal loophole and you'll find some parasitic scum that will exploit it. Personally I find it hard to believe that the people running these companies can sleep at night... But that is a different story.

<comment><USER3> It's one of those rare times, when I feel great that I am living in India. ;)

<comment><USER4> Instead of Patent Trolls, you have an apathetic business environment, crumbling infrastructure and no copyright protection at all. You just traded one set of problems for another one

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> England has some useful things that the US should consider.

i) loser pays costs.

ii) if Ann is offered £X out of court, but declines it, and the case goes to court and she's awarded £Y then she has to pay costs if £Y is less than £X.

iii) Costs are controlled.

There are considerable problems with the English legal system, and many people are not able to seek justice through the court system. But this kind of thing would probably prevent some of the abuses of the US system.

i) ([http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2013/9780111533291/conte...](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2013/9780111533291/contents)) ([http://www.justice.gov.uk/civil-justice- reforms](http://www.justice.gov.uk/civil-justice-reforms)) ([http://www.justice.gov.uk/legal- aid/funding](http://www.justice.gov.uk/legal-aid/funding)) ([http://www.justice.gov.uk/legal-aid/areas-of- work/civil/high...](http://www.justice.gov.uk/legal-aid/areas-of- work/civil/high-cost-cases))

ii) There was a case some years ago where two women (sisters?) were accused of swapping eggs. They were accused of taking cheap eggs out of the carton and putting expensive eggs in. They were offered a lot of money, but "wanted their day in court", and although the court said they didn't swap eggs the court offered a smaller amount in damages, which got wiped out by the costs they had to pay.

This is the kind of thing that I find tricky to web search for. It seems like it should be easy - ["legal case" "eggs"] and then various supermarket names. I should try limiting the date range to before 2005. But if anyone has any tips about how to better search for it I'd be grateful. (Of course, Usenet news probably has some discussion about it, but Google is sub-optimal for searching their Usenet archive. It's a great shame.)

<comment><USER6> Won't matter: a shell company can dissolve and not pay anything if they lose.

<comment> loup-vaillant What about holding the stakeholders personally responsible? Could it be done without too much side effects?

<comment><USER7> As soon as stakeholders are personally responsible, you suddenly have no protection afforded by the corporation.

"That's Great!" you might say. "Now everyone will make more careful decisions."

Except what will actually happen is people will stop forming companies, since they will be completely liable for things outside their control, like the bad decisions of others or stock market crashes or the weather.

The US corporation system is by no means perfect, but the protection it allows people who are actually trying to create things (read: not patent trolls) really does foster innovation a lot of the time.

<comment><USER8> I've always thought the justification for corporate limited liability was even flimsier than the justification for patent protection. At least with the latter you can point to economic theory and say that patents address free rider problems. What economic theory justifies corporate limited liability? Why should anyone be insulated from any liability incurred by their profit- making activities?

<comment><USER9> Because without limited liability there is a MUCH smaller incentive to start a company. There are plenty of good intros as to how the invention of limited liability really was the beginning of modern economic takeoff. I recommend Ascent of Money" by Niall Ferguson for a good intro.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but why is that smaller incentive not the right amount of incentive? You can create incentives for a lot of things, but generally those are distortionary. What economic justification is there for the idea that there needs to be a bigger incentive than the market provides?

<comment><USER9> That's an empirical question, and deserves an empirical treatment. I cannot do that in a comment. Luckily, this question has been thoroughly investigated for almost two centuries. If you want a serious treatment, you might look to:

[http://www.jstor.org/stable/825483?seq=2](http://www.jstor.org/stable/825483?seq=2) [http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/uclr52&d...](http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/uclr52&div=10&g_sent=1&collection=journals#103)

But if you want a more casual treatment that explains it (and all the associated issues like why bonds and stocks and debt contracts even exist), I really recommend The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
      *Joint* motion to settle (with) attorney fees are
      to be borne by the party that incurred them.

Good for Kaspersky, but effectively Lodsys collected payments on this particular patent from 54 out of 55 companies and then Kaspersky let them keep the patent in exchange for leaving them alone. Not sure if this is worthy of celebration at all.

<comment><USER11> Quite, celebration would have been Kapersky forcing it to trial and leaving lodsys a smoking hole in the ground.

<comment><USER12> Even then, the shell company would just dissolve leaving the parent company unaffected.

<comment><USER13> The patent in question could be invalidated, and in the future patent trolls might be a little more careful what suits to file lest they lose their patent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Settling for nothing should be held against them in a future case. It's clear the value of their property is zero.

<comment><USER15> It should also be used against them in a criminal case for extortion / protection-racketeering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you live in the US, there is a lot of important patent reform legislation being drafted in committee right now, and reform has a lot of support (including from traditional archenemies like the MPAA). Somebody motivated me earlier today to write my congressman about it, and so should you. Remember, constituents who don't complain, don't exist.

The letter I'm drafting is sort of Texas-specific, but you are welcome to adapt it to your state. If so please post a link so others on HN can benefit.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/xkeb6qlnpnkjntn/patent_letter.pdf](https://www.dropbox.com/s/xkeb6qlnpnkjntn/patent_letter.pdf)

<comment><USER17> who is "Trenz Pruca"?

<comment><USER18> The fictitious placeholder in Pages templates: [https://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/images/overlay_template_07...](https://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/images/overlay_template_07_20090106.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd like to see a settlement negotiation swing the other way. Someone like Kaspersky Lab with solid footing insists that Lodsys pay _them_ to avoid trial. How much is Lodsys willing to pay to prevent the public exposure and invalidation of their patents?

<comment><USER20> Yeah, but by definition you'd never hear about it - Lodsys would have to insist on complete secrecy.

<comment><USER19> Often, that is the case, though there is a lot of scrutiny on the patent trolls these days. We're also seeing great shifts in transparency on the part of the people held up by these IP bandits. Witness The Oatmeal vs. FunnyJunk: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oatmeal_and_FunnyJunk_legal...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oatmeal_and_FunnyJunk_legal_dispute)

Some companies are crusading not just to defend their IP position, but to actively attempt to change the law so that these things can't happen again. Newegg is a prime example: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/newegg- nukes-corp...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/newegg-nukes- corporate-troll-alcatel-in-third-patent-appeal-win-this-year/)

"There are strategies I think would be really neat and effective that I literally can't execute. I can't make good law because I don't have any appellate cases left. They [the trolls] are dismissing cases against us before any dispositive motions." -Lee Cheng, Newegg's chief legal officer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So, the problem is that when you settle you give away your right to get your money back if the patent it later invalidated. This makes for a perverse incentive.

I wonder if there is some way of credibly signalling that you won't settle, even if you don't have the money for a lawsuit. Can you _give away_ your right to settle? IE, could we set up some organisation whereby you give them the right to veto any settlement you make to a patent troll? And that organisation then insists on a clause whereby any settlement can be undone if the patent is later invalidated.

Of course, the troll would probably insist on getting more money, but even if they do, if the patent is invalid you stand a good chance of get it back.

There's probably a flaw in the above scheme somewhere, but surely there's some way of doing this...

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if at some point it makes sense for someone like Kaspersky to ask the judge to deny the motion to dismiss by Lodsys and force a trial on them. IANAL but I don't think a judge has to dismiss even if the prosecution asks for a motion to dismiss.

</comment><comment><USER23> Linked from the original article is a case of a judge ruling patent exhaustion[1]:

 _Helferich 's patents cover the delivery of content (alerts with a hyperlink) to a cell phone._

The issue is not with cases like this, the issue is with bullshit patent being granted in the first place. They need to get rid of software patents, and wishy washy crap about how X could do Y if only we had money to build it rather than just dream it up. Invent something, build it and then let it be patentable.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/judge-sticks-end- users...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/judge-sticks-end-users-rules- against-text-message-troll)

</comment><comment><USER24> What kind of max damages are possible in an IP case like this?

</comment><comment><USER25> It sounds like if it's a matter of spending about $1mil to fight a troll in court and get the patent invalidated, the victims might do better by pooling the money they would have spent on settlement together on the first case to go to court and get the claims invalidated.

</comment><comment><USER26> I doubt this really say as much about the merits of Lodsys' case as the EFF proclaims. This is simply an economic decision. As I'll explain below, I think they have a relatively strong case. But going to trial is expensive for both sides, and I think Lodsys simply sees insufficient margins in seeing it through. The problem, as the article says, is that even getting to the stage where you can call their bluff like this is extremely expensive, and statistically very few defendants will take it this far. So for the few folks who do stick it out this far, Lodsys can simply drop out and still stay way ahead of the game.

As to why I think their case is somewhat stronger than the usual troll: Firstly, it's patents partially survived Google's supposedly "devastating" re- examination request. Although the process is still ongoing, the claims that survived are golden. Those now have an "enhanced presumption of validity", which means if asserted at trial, the defendants would be wise to seek stronger alternate defenses besides invalidity.

Secondly, and speaking of alternate defenses: patent exhaustion. Exhaustion is triggered on first authorized sale [1]. I really cannot (and neither can the EFF) comment on this since all the relevant terms on which Apple, Google etc. have a license are secret. Further, since Apple was not allowed to intervene, it seems even less likely a defense.

Thirdly, the claims are "vague" only if you decide not to put much effort into understanding how they work. Much like non-lispers complaining about parentheses. I have seen vague claims, and these are downright straightforward in comparison, despite what the EFF's out of context snippets may imply. Also, mentioning fax machines is a non sequitur. If the main function of fax machines in this patent was to act as network components, by the Doctrine of Equivalents [2] they are functionally equivalent to the Internet of today. Heck, it could be carrier pigeons and still be valid. This is not an abuse of the system, and if you want to make it so, you'd need a lot more reform than is likely to happen.

I cannot comment on the quality (novelty, non-obviousness, etc.) of the claims since I have difficulty evaluating them in context of the state of the art in ~1992, to which these patents claim priority.

(IANAL. Which may also be why I think one solution to this problem is a drastic lowering of attorney fees :-P)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_equivalents](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_equivalents)

<comment><USER27> > This is simply an economic decision

Right. Lodsys thought that it was too risky for them, so they chose to drop the case. The amount that Lodsys would have gotten from licensing fees would have been more than the amount that it cost to bring the case to trial. So the only reason they would have to dismiss the case would be that they were worried that their patents were at risk. (Note: the risk could have been small, but still enough to worry them.)

They have no incentive to drop a case this far into it. Future targets now know that they just have to keep the case going and eventually Lodsys could just drop it.

<comment><USER26> _> They have no incentive to drop a case this far into it._

If you think of their model as an exercise in gambling, they do have an incentive. Jury trials for patent cases are notoriously hard to predict, and they risked a very real, non-zero chance of reaching a decision that, even if it didn't kill their patents, could cripple their campaign, say, something like "Patents are valid, but iOS apps don't infringe."

(Note that jury verdicts in patent cases seldom seem to have much to do with the technical merits of the case.)

So their potential outcomes were:

A. Drop case: continue settling with small entities for Y revenue going forward with estimated revenue R.

B. Favorable decision with X in damages: nice bonus to go along with contiuing revenue R.

C. Unfavorable decision: 0 damages as well as very likely loss of continuing revenue R.

Say the outcome has probabilities P(A), P(B) and P(C). They likely just assumed some values for these probabilities (actually, lots of empirical data out there these days, and P(B) is quite low)and X and R, and ran the numbers, and they got an expected result that wasn't too favorable. So they chose to minimize their risks, along with the associated rewards.

 _> Future targets now know that they just have to keep the case going and eventually Lodsys could just drop it._

Right, but the catch is that for most defendants it's too expensive to even just keep going on. And that's why they'll keep suing left and right and dismissing if anybody gets too close to trial. I don't know if there's any way to stop this campaign unless they slip up.

(PS, I was mistaken about the Apple situation. Apple could not intervene because Lodsys settled the cases it was trying to intervene on -- essentially a tactical retreat like this one -- so it doesn't really speak to the exhaustion defense as such.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Evidence the patent system is functioning properly.</comment>


Notch streaming his 7dfps (+ 0x10c sub-game) entry - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/notch/status/212178883888431105 <comment><AUTHOR> It's both for the 7DFPS competition, and will also be a sub-game in 0x10c. The stream is here: <http://www.twitch.tv/notch></comment>


An Open Source Tool for Scaling Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning - <AUTHOR> https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2018/12/12/rllib/ <comment><USER2> I can't see a reference so what I assume is this is an overview of functionality implemented in this large library so there's no particular paper that describes what they are talking about?

I ask because I usually like to "read the paper instead of the blog post", since papers are supposed to be complete and sort-of self-contained.

But I guess the glue doesn't get a paper.

<comment><USER3> Look for the paper on Ray in this year's OSDI.</comment></comment>


Eclipse OpenJ9 – Open-source JVM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/eclipse/openj9 <comment><USER2> It's the IBM J9 donated to the Eclipse foundation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_J9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_J9)

</comment><comment><USER3> The "Welcome to the Eclipse OpenJ9 repository" is just brilliant. So many product blogs and source code repositories fail to introduce the product first.

<comment><USER4> I'm confused. Do you think they're doing it right with that as an intro?

<comment><USER5> On the first point I can see that it's high performance enterprise grade jvm. It's a good introduction. There are many projects that's difficult to understand even after scrolling or clicking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really interesting: CUDA support out of the box[1]. I've never seen this before, does any other JVM do it?

[1] [https://github.com/eclipse/openj9/tree/master/runtime/cuda](https://github.com/eclipse/openj9/tree/master/runtime/cuda)

<comment><USER7> We've actually implemented something like this ourselves with our linear algebra library.

We wrote our own gc for cuda: [https://github.com/deeplearning4j/nd4j/tree/master/nd4j-back...](https://github.com/deeplearning4j/nd4j/tree/master/nd4j-backends/nd4j-backend- impls/nd4j-cuda/src/main/java/org/nd4j/jita)

as well as: [https://deeplearning4j.org/workspaces](https://deeplearning4j.org/workspaces)

It also integrates with the JVM via weak references as well.

I can attest to: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269537) as well, you really need this 3rd party due to the frequency of how often cuda changes. We usually end up having to support the 2 most recent cuda versions.

<comment><USER6> Very cool, thanks for the reference!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems like such a long time ago since Sun/Oracle and Apache Software Foundation fought over the licensing of the Java Technology Compatibility Kit (Java implementation test suite) for Apache Harmony, their JVM and Java class library implementation which was used as part of Android for a long time.[1,2]

Hopefully OpenJ9 will meet with better success. On paper, it seems to meet the restrictions that Oracle currently imposes for TCK access, namely that it is available under a GPL license and that its class library is derived from OpenJDK.[3,4] And it comes from IBM, which has been able to put aside its differences with Oracle on OpenJDK in the past, when it became clear that Oracle would never support Harmony (which IBM previously backed).[5]

But when it comes to Oracle and intellectual property, who knows?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to_obtain_a_TCK_license_from_Sun)

[2] [http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html](http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html)

[3] [http://openjdk.java.net/groups/conformance/JckAccess/](http://openjdk.java.net/groups/conformance/JckAccess/)

[4] [http://openjdk.java.net/legal/octla-java- se-8.pdf](http://openjdk.java.net/legal/octla-java-se-8.pdf)

[5] [http://blog.joda.org/2010/10/no-java-7-end- game_4619.html](http://blog.joda.org/2010/10/no-java-7-end-game_4619.html)

<comment><USER9> > namely that it is available under a GPL license

Not exclusively from what I see, seems you can choose the Eclipse Public License. From your #4 link:

> Licensee may not: [...] (iii) distribute a Licensee Implementation under any > license other than a GPL License

I hope they revoke their TCK license personally (ex-dev below stated it passed). I would hope then implementations would stop supporting this "Java" naming/certification single-company gatekeeping and instead support and contribute to the open test suite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So IBM has OpenJ9 and OMR, Oracle has Graal and Truffle.

The JVM space is suddenly getting very interesting. But my question is, why now? While OMR did opened up a year ago it didn't seems to have gained any traction.

Then there was the JavaEE last week opened also going to Eclipse, which is strange because it has always been IBM going to Eclipse and Oracle goes to Apache.

Not to mention the OpenJDK builds [https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform- group/faster-and-easi...](https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/faster- and-easier-use-and-redistribution-of-java-se)

What is going on in the Java Land? Because I dont for a moment believe these company are doing it for good of Java. At least not from IBM and Oracle.

Or am i thinking too much into it?

<comment><USER7> Hi,

I do not work at any of the major JVM vendors but can point to trends in the space. Disclosure: My business relies heavily on the JVM and I am heavily involved in the java community from the AI side. We also do a ton of java systems development and have had conversations with many of the JVM vendors over the years including azul,oracle,red hat, and IBM.

Azul started running a "pure openjdk" distro a bit ago that they provide support for. They also provide a licensed embedded version. They are differentiating with a pauseless GC.

Oracle uses the JVM in a lot of their products. App servers are slowing down in favor of microservices now. This unbundling started with spring boot and supporting Java EE annotations.

We can see this with Java EE migrating to eclipse now because the annotations themselves have become commoditized.

Red hat started supporting jdk 7 in RHEL and was probably a bigger proponent of the "open" bits.

Overall here, just of note: Java has always had the JCP. [https://jcp.org/en/home/index](https://jcp.org/en/home/index)

I'm guessing that enough of the member organizations started pushing more for opening of the JVM.

Finally overall, we can see in the space that even at java conferences, a lot of conversations are moving towards "JVM as a platform" including scala and clojure in the conferences now.

So overall, I would say it's largely a shift in both the thinking and the way you monetize the JVM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's awesome. It was always some weird situation with abstract JVM specification but only one de-facto standard implementation which everyone used. I hope J9 will be a viable alternative, so everyone wins.

<comment><AUTHOR> How so? There was BEA JRockIT, IBM J9, Azuul, Oracle and HP also have a JVM iirc.

<comment><USER12> I've been a Java dev for a decade, and I never once used anything but Sun / Oracle's version (now OpenJDK, which is almost the same thing).

I really have no idea who ever used these other JVM implementations. I'm guessing it would be companies with specialized hardware such as IBM mainframes or finance firms paying a lot of money to squeeze out performance with WebLogic. Either because of poor marketing or some other reason, no developer or company I worked with had a reason to use anything else.

<comment><USER13> Back in the early 2000s, the IBM JVM was freely available and frequently used as a drop-in replacement for the Sun JVM, since it was often faster and less memory-hungry.

IBM also had an open-source Java compiler written in C++, Jikes [1], that was considerably faster than Sun's javac. However, it was eventually abandoned. Jikes is coincidentally also the name of IBM's open-source research JVM [2], which is still under development.

Azuul is apparently popular in areas requiring low latency, such as financial trading.

As an aside, there are many niches that most people haven't heard about. You might be surprised about all the kinds of software that are hiding under rocks — invisible to most people because they're not working in that industry. Things like MUMPS, K/kdb, Fortran, Delphi — lots of obscure stuff that has left the mainstream (or never entered it in the first place) but is still in use.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jikes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jikes)

[2] [https://github.com/JikesRVM/JikesRVM](https://github.com/JikesRVM/JikesRVM)

<comment><USER14> Jikes RVM was known as Jalapeño first, then they changed the name to Jikes RVM due to a name clash (Jikes Java compiler already existing at the time). I'm not sure it is still active though, a lot of researchers left IBM a few years ago (2012) and Java ceased to be the hot topic anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow. It's been about 6 years since I last used j9, but at the time I used it it was extremely good. But I was running on Power, which is it's sweet spot.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hi all,

I'm one of the authors behind [https://www.adoptopenjdk.net](https://www.adoptopenjdk.net) (CI at ci.adoptopenjdk.net, project at github/adoptopenjdk) where we are providing nightly and release builds of OpenJ9 (as well as a host of other OpenJDK derivatives). We've recently been granted the TCK (as the London Java Community) and so you'll shortly have professionally tested 'You can call this Java' binaries.

</comment><comment><USER17> Let's get straight to the really important question, can J9 or AOT help maybe just a little with clojure startup time woes?

<comment><USER18> I tried some quick tests using a fully AOT, short-running thing we run in house. Here the cost is the set-up of JVM and loading of Clojure stuff (CentOS 7 Vagrant VM on my Mac).

 _J9:_

time ./jdk-9+181/bin/java -client -jar l2i-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar

real 0m1.987s user 0m3.383s sys 0m0.161s

time ./jdk-9+181/bin/java -server -jar l2i-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar

real 0m2.949s user 0m5.452s sys 0m0.167s

 _OpenJDK 8:_

[root@localhost ~]# time java -server -jar l2i-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar

real 0m1.545s user 0m2.510s sys 0m0.175s

time java -client -jar l2i-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar

real 0m1.456s user 0m2.309s sys 0m0.182s

\----

For whatever it means, this is a repeated execution of 10 runs together for J9:

real 0m17.341s user 0m26.783s sys 0m1.344s

And this is the same thing for openjdk version "1.8.0_144"

real 0m15.169s user 0m24.573s sys 0m1.711s

So I'd say that the answer to your question is is no, they are in the same class for a short-running Clojure app dominated by startup times, unless there is some special tweak.

<comment><USER19> The OpenJ9 infrastructure is somewhat different [for the better] than what I'm used to using internally, but I have only ever seen the shared class cache enabled when the -Xshareclasses [1] option is passed to the JVM. Do these numbers change significantly (especially after a warm-up run) if you add that option to J9's option set?

[1] [https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSYKE2_8.0.0/...](https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSYKE2_8.0.0/com.ibm.java.lnx.80.doc/diag/appendixes/cmdline/Xshareclasses.html)

<comment><USER18> see above

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Curious what performance it has comparing to default VM from OpenJDK.

<comment><USER2> There was a redhat sponsored benchmark released 3-4 years ago, should however note that J9 was developed by IBM, which owns the Power architecture and this test was run on Intel.

[http://www.principledtechnologies.com/Red%20Hat/RHEL6_rhj_06...](http://www.principledtechnologies.com/Red%20Hat/RHEL6_rhj_0613.pdf)

<comment><USER19> Disclaimer: I work on the IBM J9 JIT + OMR compiler team, so I am in no way a neutral authority, nor do I speak for my employer.

'Even' on Intel, we go back and forth on benchmarks, depending on what each side is focusing on. Some metrics take longer than others to flip-flop but both sides have some _very_ smart people constantly working to make performance better.

And FWIW, we have a team dedicated to making x86 perform well.

Two things to consider about this particular result:

1) This is running on what I expect to be our pxa6470sr4-20130207_01 release (if I'm interpreting the 'java-x86_64-70-4' correctly). There has been a _ton_ of work on J9 since then, and I would be _very_ leery of using that result as canonical for 2017

2) SPEC jbb2013 was retracted due to a flaw: [https://www.spec.org/jbb2013/defectnotice.html](https://www.spec.org/jbb2013/defectnotice.html) . I don't know what the implications of that flaw would be on these benchmark results (if any) but I would want more data before concluding anything.

That said, the 'other side' does do some really good work, and does score wins. We work hard to do the same. Even on Intel ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting news in Java world.

Does this support AOT ?

<comment><USER22> [http://www.eclipse.org/openj9/](http://www.eclipse.org/openj9/)

"Shared classes and Ahead-of-Time (AOT) technologies typically provide a 20-40% reduction in start-up time while improving the overall ramp-up time of applications. This capability is crucial for short-running Java applications or for horizontal scalability solutions that rely on the frequent provisioning and deprovisioning of JVM instances to manage workloads."

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In my experience J9 needs to be finely tuned to reach maximum performance for a specific use case other than enterprise application throughput. Try using the -Xquickstart flag if you want to improve startup time.

</comment><comment><USER24> Any chance of an official unikernel distribution, or single entry-point mechanism for container images.

This along with AOT cached classes being baked into a vm/container image would be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wonder if it will be possible to compile under OS X. Curiously OS X binaries have never been available for J9.

<comment><USER26> Eclipse OpenJ9 builds on top of Eclipse OMR. Eclipse OMR has OS X builds ... What a great thing it would be to have OpenJ9 building and running on OS X :) !

Disclaimer: I am a project lead for both Eclipse OpenJ9 and Eclipse OMR.

OS X has been talked about, but we have a lot of plumbing to connect up at the project right now and that has high priority for us. If someone wants to kick that work off, I would happily encourage it :) .

<comment><USER26> I opened an issue where discussion on OS X support can happen: [https://github.com/eclipse/openj9/issues/36](https://github.com/eclipse/openj9/issues/36)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Congrats! This is really cool!

</comment><comment><USER28> Is it a move from IBM to sidestep Oracle ? (I have no idea, just asking)

</comment><comment><USER9> So is this OpenJDK-derived? If so, too bad, I've been hoping for a truly independent implementation. If not, does it pass the TCK?

<comment><USER29> Ex-J9 engineer here, J9 was built completely in a clean-room. It does pass the TCK tests.

<comment><USER30> What is the 9 for? Jackknife? Jabbering?

<comment><USER29> There's some mythology here, perhaps another J9 greybeard can answer. The story I've heard so far goes as follows...

There was some constant for 8K that was mistyped incorrectly, something like instead of:

#define 8K 8192

They mistyped and wrote:

#define 8K 8096

This caused all sorts of bugs and was known internally as the 8K bug. When time came to write the Java VM, they wanted to name it as "post 8k bug" they named it K9, but K9 sounds like a dog (woof) so they decremented the K to land on J9.

At least that's what I've heard...

 _shrugs_

<comment><USER31> Here's the true story: [https://medium.com/@rservant/how-did-the-j9-in- openj9-get-it...](https://medium.com/@rservant/how-did-the-j9-in-openj9-get- its-name-95a6416b4cb9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Better late than never.

</comment><comment><USER33> Will a Java expert (JVM developer) please answer this question? Thank you.

How impossible would it be to add a delete keyword to the JVM, and why?

<comment><USER34> Java does memory recovery strictly by garbage collection. To delete an object remove all references to that object and wait.

A "delete now" operation imposes requirements on implementations that are not strictly required.

Any advantages gained from destructors can be realized via explicit cleanup methods and (as a hedge against mis-use) state checking for initialized and destroyed objects. A delete operation also adds risk that an object that has been deleted may be referenced again (although with esoteric stuff like PhantomReferences you can almost do it).

<comment><USER35> What about the "automatically gets cleaned up when the object goes out of scope" advantage of destructors?

<comment><USER36> You can do that with try-with-resources</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wolfram Language - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/03/frontiers-of-computational-thinking-a-sxsw-report/ <comment> one-more-minute tl;dr: The Wolfram Language is an _ok_ 30-year-old language with a huge standard library. You can do really amazing things in a single line of code... as long as there's a built-in function to do that thing. Hmm.

I actually really like Mathematica as a tool for symbolic/mathematical stuff – they're the best at what they do best. But all this Wolfram Language stuff is just way overblown, and realistically a proprietary standard library – however huge – just can't compete with the open source ecosystems of Python and friends.

<comment><USER5> > tl;dr: The Wolfram Language is an ok 30-year-old language I don't think it > is just 'OK'. It is lispy, with a HEAVY emphasis on symbolic computation. I > have yet to see anything even remotely similar to it. EDIT:

There's also the visualization aspect. Things like Jupyter (formerly iPython) come close, but still can't do things like render video. If you don't want to read the article, there's this video: [https://youtu.be/_P9HqHVPeik?t=67](https://youtu.be/_P9HqHVPeik?t=67) (initial ego trip skipped)

(Another edit: fix typo)

<comment><USER6> The language agnostic Jupyter with its interactive notebook comes close to Mathematica's environment. [http://jupyter.org/](http://jupyter.org/)

Jupyter supports Python and other languages like Julia ([https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl](https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl) ). I don't know if there are JS and Lua bindings but both would lend themself because of their first class functions and functional language features.

<comment><USER7> For JavaScript it is easy - just start a cell with "%%javascript", see e.g. [http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/davidrpugh/cookbook- code/...](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/davidrpugh/cookbook- code/blob/master/notebooks/chapter03_notebook/03_controls.ipynb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whenever Wolfram writes/speaks, it's really hard to wade through Wolfram's overlong rambling about how awesome he is, to find the interesting content.

<comment><USER9> Yes. I once read a quote that went something like: "I wonder which will become self-aware first: Wolfram Alpha or Stephen Wolfram..."

<comment><USER10> That reads better if you add a colon after "first", otherwise you might not pause in the right place.

<comment><USER9> Agreed - that was a typo. I'd edit if I could.

<comment><USER11> We added a colon for you.

(Compulsive editors ourselves, we welcome anyone being driven crazy by a frozen typo or solecism in their comment to obtain relief by emailing email@example.com.)

<comment><USER9> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Wolfram Language is quite cool. Sure, it's a shame it's proprietary - <USER2> it has a lot to offer, a few neat ideas, and makes for great, visual demos such as the ones featured in that talk. The fact that you can get cool things running in a few lines of code, like the 3D stack of edges, is appealing - <USER3> don't think there are many languages out there that allow you to do things like this in a few lines of code, and with such flexibility.

(it is quite a shame that Wolfram always has to assert how great they are, how revolutionary it is, how they invented everything, how unlike anything else ever done before their work is. It's off putting. Let your work speak for itself, and leave the meta comments out. But I digress.)

I like the "tweet a program" concept. One issue with kids growing up mostly on mobile phones is that it makes them less likely to try to see what's inside and program it themselves. One solution some have attempted is to have IDEs directly running on tablets/phones, but those tend to be fairly clunky. Allowing people to experiment with computation in unconventional manners, e.g. over Twitter, strikes me as an interesting path. I had a similar project a couple years ago where you would tweet concise instructions to a bot that ran them into a virtual machine, for which the output was a 32x32 pixel image buffer and would get tweeted back to you. If you've played with forth salon or shadertoy, it's the same idea but with a language optimized so as to get cool results in <140 characters. Sadly, like many of my other bots, Twitter shut it down.

But yeah, given their aspirations for education etc., some open source components would be nice. It strikes me as a great exploratory/prototyping language, although it'd probably be hard to maintain large codebases of it due to the fuzziness of the instructions and a certain opacity in the backend.

All that being said, the tail end of the talk (about immortality and the singularity and the box of trillion souls - basically, when the paragraphs don't have code examples anymore) does fall into the standard techno-religious singularity crackpot speculation where things sound vaguely scientific - <USER4> enough to give them an air of credibility - but where the terms used are fuzzy and slippery enough to be manipulated into whatever direction the speaker wishes while maintaining an illusion of rigorous reasoning.

<comment><USER13> I dunno, a lot of us got our start on TI calculators, and their input was comparatively awful.

But they had a small environment and a hierarchial menu of the various key words and common functions. And it worked pretty well.

<comment><USER12> That's a good point! I also started programming on a graphing calculator.

One difference is that calculators were very limited in what they could do. No camera, no GPS, no internet connection, the screen was monochrome and 80x80 or so pixels... so the very limited language and input methods worked fine.

But on modern day devices, you want to build complex apps that can interact over the network, use the various sensors on the device, display rich media, manipulate video/images in real time, etc. The programming environment has to allow for all of this, which is the tricky part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Has anyone here used the Wolfram Language? How discoverable is it? How does debugging work? What about state management? All the demos are small, stateless calculations. What is it look like when you want to build long- lived, stateful systems - say a robot that builds an internal map as it moves.

<comment><USER15> It's OK. Debugging is doable, but it's a bit awkward IMO. In terms of discoverability, well generally the documentation is among the best you will find anywhere and it's all inter-linked and full of examples, so that's a strong point. You can build programs with state, it mostly a functional language but it doesn't enforce purity or anything.

It is certainly capable enough that building something like what you're describing wouldn't be hard, but my experience is that it really isn't that great for that kind of usage (part of this is the readability, more on that in a sec). I think of it more as a "query" language... I tend to find that it works best if you use it by building up a few fundamental entities (say, symbolic equations or data) and then analyze them (transform data, plot, solve equations etc). In this usage it's pretty amazing, but whenever I try to do something like in a "real" programming language it is miserable. For instance, I once implemented GMRES in it and jeez it was absolutely miserable. On the other hand, I can do pure wizardry with stuff like data processing and visualization.

Basically, as long as you stick to composition of built-in functions, it's wonderful. When you want to do something from scratch though, that's when the suffering starts. It's also really easy to shoot yourself in the foot performance-wise... the language is very flexible in terms of allowing many different programming styles. Typically, however, only the functional-style implementation is really performant. For instance, you can use traditional indexed loops just fine, but their performance is generally at least an order of magnitude slower.

One other thing that drives me nuts about it is readability. It suffers from the same issue as Lisps with parenthesis overload, except for WL it's all braces and square brackets. If you put in good spacing and let the autoindent do its thing then it is pretty readable, but a lot of people don't. Somebody elsewhere linked this image [http://indiegames.com/2014/03/10/wolfram%20example.jpg](http://indiegames.com/2014/03/10/wolfram%20example.jpg) , which is a pretty good example of how it can be really awful. And writing code that looks like that is pretty widespread in the community, though it has gotten better in the past couple years.

Tl;dr I think it's pretty sweet, but I wouldn't use it for what you ask for. Your tastes may differ, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> From what was shown it is really cool. Not because of the language itself, but for integration with data (from W|A?). It's like a CSI SQL.

Also, Wolfram is all nice for how he did this all by himself and how he let us use big tower of ideas and technology he built, also by himself, over the past 40 years.

edit:

on a related note, how does it compare with IPython/Jupyter?

<comment><USER17> It's not like the Wolfram Language examples you see are independent of the Wolfram KnowledgeBase or their other cloud services, and you have to leverage it from some deployed product (like Mathematica) you're paying for. This detail is sort of glossed over.

You can do some of it from free-to-use services like Alpha.

Also, good god does he love to take credit. There's whole teams of people who work on the underlying technology that powers it, although he does credit the guys who come up with algorithms that they use, especially when documenting them, but you have to dig for that... and then there's the people that gather, purchase and curate data sets that power the Knowledge Base, and even the SMP engine that became Mathematica was a group effort...

Which is why I'll never pay for a Wolfram Research product, as interesting as or powerful as it could be. All it does it serve to support the legacy of an egomaniac.

<comment><USER18> It's super weird to me how Hackernews is extremely skeptical of Stephen Wolfram's god-genius persona, while simultaneously being generally very receptive to Elon Musk's similarly ginormous ego-tripping.

<comment><USER19> Not sure about Elon Musk, but Apple comes across this way. They constantly talk about how they "reinvented" everything, "re-imagined" everything, "went back to the drawing board" etc while presenting new products. Kinda off- putting. But to be fair these people/companies do amazing work, so I guess some amount of ego is to be expected. Top athletes, musicians and pretty much top people from most industries have huge egos. Comes with the territory, I suppose.

<comment><USER20> At least "reinvented" acknowledges that it was previously invented, Wolfram tends to imply that his is the first system to do the things he describes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Mathematica is very powerful, but it's also very expensive and based on a proprietary code base. For me, this is unacceptable and the only solution in my judgement is to build our own.

I have been working really hard on exactly that, and in the past 3 weeks have made the most amazing progress. I don't want to spill the beans just yet, but this is my second attempt at building a better mathematica, and this time around I am using python, the scipy stack, and sage.

I will be releasing the project quite soon, as free open source software, along with a website that is 100% free for everyone. I am really hopeful that I will be able to find like minded programmers who are excited about working on this project together.

If this sounds interesting to you, please reply in comments below, or else reach out to me @calhoun137 on twitter.

</comment><comment><USER22> What's the business model of Wolfram? Do they make most of their reveue from Mathematica or do other things like Wolfram Alpha and Wolfram Language bring a significant chunk of it?

</comment><comment><USER23> I've been trying to implement a open source version of the Wolfram language for FenixEdu but is extremely hard. For the most part is possible as long you don't use stuff that depends of proprietary data sets. Also, after 30 years working on it, it is quite faster than anything else.

I truly would like to see the community come up with a open source version of it, but with such a huge size, the language would be near impossible for one single individual to implement a compatible version.

<comment><USER24> done! it's based on Macsyma [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma) which is now Maxima [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29)

<comment><USER25> Maxima seems very similar to Mathematica in principle. What does Mathematica have in favor? Far more mathematician/engineer-hours invested due to early (and then compounded) financial success?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Mathematica is adequate for prototyping or detailed Science/Engineering etc analysis provided datasets aren't large and the codebase is small.

Mathematica is very fast for your initial development, but you run into massive bottlenecks when you jump from your small test cases to real world data. In other words you get something up and running quickly, then spend a massive amount of time manually (there is no proper debug environment) debugging edge cases and trying to optimize it for real world cases. The time savings aren't really there for many projects, as you end up spending more time than if you had used something like C++.

The last version of Mathematica (v10) was released over a year ago without an update to the Eclipse plugin, making an already pretty archaic development experience impossible.

The front end debugger isn't a 'fair' debugger. When it works (which isn't often) you are limiting to only running through small code snippets as its impossible to trace anything.

There is no profiler.

The number of builtin functions is huge but many are effectively deprecated in terms of their performance or existing bugs. Many of the functions like Map (/@) aren't optimized. The irony is that once you have optimized your code it ends up looking like that from any other language i.e. you have moved a lot of Wolfram's high end functions.

I totally agree with others comments that code re-use is really difficult. Many of Wolfram's comparisons compare code size with code complexity. Its not always to the case, but 20 lines of Wolfram language can often be very difficult to trace and understand.

Access to curated data is nice, but in many cases there is no information on the accuracy or tolerances for data and it has been truncated (rounded to the point of irrelevancy) or is missing elements. So like anything you still need to verify it or access it directly from other sources. Things like units cannot be used in functions/loops as it slows runtime to a crawl.

But horses for courses, the language is exciting for small projects and maybe a jumping off point for people moving into full development of something.

One of the biggest issues facing Mathematica is simply that Wolfram Research's focus is no longer Science and Engineering but rather the Internet of Things.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd like to use it commercially but it seems so expensive. $300 for only 3000 API calls.

I'd be happy to pay but it would need to be a marginal increment over the CPU + data costs. If that was the case they could get some serious volume and momentum.

With only 3000 API calls any cool little prototype you made would hit the limit within minutes of hitting the HN front page.

</comment><comment><USER28> At first I balked at a computer language being so "big" instead of being, say, a functional language that can import yont of functions in a standard library.

But then I realized, this bridges the gap between computer languages and human languages, which we all use to communicate. Although "keeping things organized" in a regular computer language might be done more neatly in some "computer oriented" way, when it comes to actually USING IT to EXPRESS YOURSELF you'd need a professional to write he program for you.

Well, there still has to be clear, unambiguous documentation.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if a purely functional language would have been more appropriate, given the fact that programs written in such languages are more amenable to automatic rewriting and reasoning.

</comment><comment><USER30> The "Language" seems like a big kit of built in functions with dubious utility, with some awkward syntax thrown in to tie them all together.

<comment><USER31> > The "Language" seems like a big kit of built in functions with dubious > utility, with some awkward syntax thrown in to tie them all together.

Having used it, I can assure you that, for people doing certain kinds of analysis, those built-in functions are often of great utility.

(But think what you want about the syntax. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> In case you don't know, there's "Tweet-a-program":

[https://twitter.com/wolframtap/](https://twitter.com/wolframtap/) some incredible Wolfram examples live here.

</comment><comment><USER33> A cloud based open source organic language. That's it.

That's the greatest invention in the history of computing, and it is the final step in cracking AI's nut.

Kudos Wolfram. You finally made it.

</comment><comment><USER34> I expected something new in the area of natural language processing.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's proprietary.

Next.

<comment><USER10> It may be proprietary, but it shouldn't be dismissed for it. It being proprietary is a drawback, but it still brings great things to the table.</comment></comment>


Google+ Cost $585 Million to Build - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/07/01/google-cost-an-estimated-585-million-will-it-live-up-to-the-bill/

<comment><USER2> Misleading to the extreme. It's not like the employees who built Google+ aren't producing value on other projects—now through code reuse, and in the future more directly.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, it is a bit extreme. However, they did say it was a 'ballpark'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why did they include the On2 purchase? Does Google+ have WebM/VP8 features I didn't hear about?

<comment><USER4> The Hangouts part where you video chat with many people I suppose.

<comment><USER5> Supposedly that's still using Vidyo as it requires the google talk video plugin right now. The WebM stuff is coming down the road.

<http://gigaom.com/video/google-hangouts-technology/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The North Face Abuses Wikipedia to Increase Google Ranking - <AUTHOR> https://adage.com/creativity/work/north-face-top-imagens/2174261 <comment><USER2> Considering how hard editors work to keep Wikipedia clean, this is beyond insulting. Who at North Face seriously thought this would pan out without attention? And to brag about it too...</comment>


Britain's 'concentration camp' in Russia - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-41271418 <comment><USER3> Britains' Gulag is a tough read about the British colonisation of Kenya in the 50s (?60s?).

<comment><USER4> Britain had concentration camps for Boers (Dutch settlers) in South Africa during the Boer War 1899-1902. Around 30,000 died of disease in these camps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The involvement of Western powers in the Russian Civil war (Temporary occupation of the Far East, aid to the Whites in the West) was a large contributing factor to the USSR's wretched relationship with the West - <USER2> after 'Communism in all countries' was forgotten.

As it turns out, backing the losing side in a civil war does not ingratiate you with the winner.

<comment><USER6> There is a reason why the Western powers (especially France) supported the White Russians. The Bolsheviks had indicated the possibility of not paying back foreign loans that were taken out by the Russian Empire (they followed through on that promise and defaulted on all foreign loans; USSR was basically cutoff from the Western Financial system until WW2). France had provided most of these, but the other powers were involved as well. This was probably the most important reason for their opposition: if they let the Bolsheviks get away with not paying loans, not only would their bankers lose a shit ton of money, but what was to stop other foreign powers (possibly communist ones) from doing the same?

Most foreign wars have surprisingly banal reasons for taking place...

<comment><USER7> A few more reasons occur: Bolsheviks nationalized all foreign possessions in Russia (which were very substantial - foreigners owned 90% of the railways for instance).

Also they appealed to the proletariat in the world and showed the potential of revolution to be real.

Lastly they simply weren't integrated with the western global financial and economic system. Really the source of the friction, more so than ideological reasons. For centuries before Russia was a virtual colony of the West, sort of like the third world today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that this _B_ BC article doesn't mention that the concentration camp was arguably a British invention in the first place -- certainly this Russian camp followed the model developed by the Bitish in the Boer war.

<comment><USER9> As I've understood things the more I read, the vast majority of mass deportation and mass executions enacted by the USSR and Nazis were largely inspired by the actions taken in the US vs the large native populations.

How those two entities went about pursuing those goals varied, but both were needlessly and mindlessly brutal, just like the act that inspired them.

It can be amazing how awful the acts you commit look when you see another entity perform them on another.

<comment><USER10> Not to detract from what the U.S. govt did to natives, but a more likely explanation is that concentration camps are... the obvious thing to build if you want to isolate a population. I don't think the internment camps in the U.S. during WWII were modeled after Nazi concentration camps, and certainly they weren't in that there were no extermination facilities in the internment camps, thank goodness. A "camp" is just too obvious to suppose it's modeled on some past "invention" of the camp.

<comment><USER11> "Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity." \- John Toland, _Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography_ [1]

[1]: [https://books.google.com/books?id=ZzBkAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT1096&dq=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=ZzBkAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT1096&dq=%22Hitler%27s+concept+of+concentration+camps%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjUjfrAnYrXAhUENI8KHcFaBx8Q6AEIQzAF#v=onepage&q=%22Hitler%27s%20concept%20of%20concentration%20camps%22&f=false)

<comment><USER10> That's not a quote, and there's no footnote or reference of any kind there. Got a better source?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Lenin had come to power promising supporters not only bread to eat and a > share of the aristocrats' land

Timeless lesson. Always beware of a politician coming to power promising free stuff. It never works out in the best long term interest of the people/country. There are no magic tricks in this world, things have to be earned and paid for. Hopefully citizens of the west learn this sooner rather than later

<comment><USER13> That's the lesson you took from this!? This is an article demonstrating the brutality of Britain's colonialism and how we backed the losing side in another country's civil war and your take-away was "Socialism is bad"?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Disrupt Housing? - <AUTHOR> This may be a dumb question but why is housing so expensive? Or I guess to rephrase that question more correctly why DOES IT HAVE TO BE so expensive??<p>Do you think in the near future with improved robotics, materials, building methods that an average size home might cost $25000 instead of $250000? <comment><USER2> Several issues drive typical home prices. Among them are increases in buyer expectations and the cost of entitlement.

Before modern development regulations, the infrastructure costs of greenfield development such as roads, schools, parks, and emergency services could be passed on existing residents. There were few or no environmental regulations to deal with either.

As these costs are tied to entitlement upfront development costs rise, and thus the development of higher market segment products makes more economic sense - one feature of real-estate development is that it takes about the same amount of time money and effort to do a small budget project as a large budget one.

To see how far consumer expectations have changed imagine the 800 square foot Levittown floor plans being marketed for growing families today. <http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown/building.html>

Of course the other piece of the puzzle is that housing in the US has been disrupted several times over the past 150 years, from balloon framing with dimensional lumber (factory production), the development of the mobile home (again, factory production), to modern large subdivision development such as the aforementioned Levittown (economies of scale using mobile production crews performing repetitive work).

The problem with robotic production is that the capital investment is high, the demand for the product cyclical, and the end product is not transportable in an assembled state (except for mobile or modular housing).

</comment><comment><USER3> "Supply and demand" is the obvious answer, but it doesn't answer the follow-up questions: what's fueling the demand, or lowering the supply? The answer to those is: easy borrowing, and foreclosure stickiness. Actually, easy borrowing _fueled_ the demand in the past, and the bubble is still deflating, slowly because of foreclosure stickiness. If people had to pay cash for houses I'm confident house prices would be half or less of what they are today, in most areas. If banks got rid of their non-performing mortgage loans in short order, I'm confident that would cut house prices in half in most areas.

House prices are also a hot political issue; namely, each generation wants future generations to pay excessively for their houses when they retire, so they support the gov't borrowing heavily to fuel house prices. (Of course they want future generations to pay for the gov't debt too.)

Improved robotics, materials and whatnot will have limited effect on house prices. A lot of the savings would be absorbed as greater profit for construction and renovation. You see this happening in the pre-fab industry. For the next decade at least, nothing beats buying an existing house, financially. Most houses in the US are selling for less than replacement cost.

</comment><comment><USER4> > This may be a dumb question but why is housing so expensive? Or I guess to > rephrase that question more correctly why DOES IT HAVE TO BE so expensive??

That's easy to answer -- housing is expensive because in an open market, prices rise in response to demand. More demand, higher price. Less demand, lower price.

> Do you think in the near future with improved robotics, materials, building > methods that an average size home might cost $25000 instead of $250000?

Possible but not likely. The cost of a house includes the cost of the land the house sits on, and persistent rumors have it that they're not making any more land.

To see the sense of this, compare the cost of a house, with land, versus a similarly equipped mobile home, with wheels. The mobile home costs less because it has no land to call its own.

</comment><comment><USER5> "why DOES IT HAVE TO BE so expensive"

It doesn't have to be. I live in a large city and all of these new apartment constructions are popping up.

The thing about new apartment constructions is that they come with gyms,parking spaces, roof top decks w/ bbq grills,movie theaters,etc. All things that I and many others don't need.Yet my option is pay for it or pay half and move into a 100yr old building with "vintage old world charm".

It would be nice to see a trend of new modern buildings with out the frills so people have some place affordable.

</comment><comment><USER6> Lowering house prices in Silicon Valley by 70% would be trivial: Let developers build what they want to build, where they want to build it.

Those with $1MM+ houses, however, oppose this for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER7> Yes, sewage treatment and treated water supplies are completely optional for successful development, and unnecessarily increase the price of the house that is serviced by them.

You can provide you own protection, so you don't need the police (I'm actually half-serious on that), and firefighting is just a scam. Why, I bet that you could find an insurance company that would insure your house without it being protected by a fire district. Heck, you don't need homeowners insurance at all! Just buy your cheap house outright, and there's no need!

And zoning laws? Who needs them! People can live just as comfortably downwind of a sewage treatment plant or an oil refinery as they can by a lake! It's a scam, front to back!

And to answer the poster's original question, why is housing so expensive, read Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations." Even if you just pick it apart, and read the chapters you want, it's a fascinating description of .. well, the wealth of nations. Rents are part of that equation, and he covers it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One factor that increases housing prices is that people are competing on houses near good schools, because of the importance of education.

But education might become less dependent on geography(by using remote ed tech) or in some scenarios(better AI) much less important, which will indirectly reduce housing costs.

Another option is a growing availability of remote jobs and better remote social lives( remote telepresence and video conferencing, access to great and varied food through sous-vide, generally better digital experiences) might also decrease the demand for city life.

<comment><USER9> _One factor that increases housing prices is that people are competing on houses near good schools, because of the importance of education._

It's interesting that people who are in the business of selling houses and lots will tell buyers that they are selling a place "in a good school district" even in states like Minnesota, where there is statewide public school open enrollment, so that anyone can live anywhere in the state and send their children to schools anywhere in the state.

[http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...](http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.html)

In my public school district, which aggressively seeks open-enrollment students, there are students enrolled with residence addresses in the territories of FORTY-ONE other public school districts. We happen to be homeschoolers who live in this school district for other reasons, but it amazes me how many families think they have to live in this school district to have their children in the schools here, when the law has been otherwise in Minnesota for more than twenty years now.

Agreed that decoupling work choices from residence address constraints will help change the market for housing. Having public school open enrollment in all states, with public school funding rules more like Minnesota's

<http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf>

might also help rationalize the housing market, but the example here shows that will be a slow process as families readjust their habits in shopping for housing.

<comment><USER10> Open enrollment doesn't mean that your child will have the same experience as living in the district of the school. For example, your kid would likely be unable to walk to school, and would have a hard time hanging out with friends from school. School is important from a social perspective too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, yes and YES. I think there's huge possibilities here, but the challenge isn't in designing or construction, but of re-education. Some people think owning a traditional home (and cars etc) will make them happy.

We know that's not the case. Materials possessions and keeping up with the neighbours does not make people happy. That reality needs to be more widely accepted for a true disruption in the housing market.

My .02.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. If people changed the way they looked at what housing traditionally is I think it would allow for some new and innovative ideas.

<comment><USER3> It would take more than half the people changing. I'd love to buy a lot in my city and put a yurt on it, but the city / voters won't let me live in a yurt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Supply and demand. A house which is 60 years old and has changed hands many times doesn't cost X because the owners are still paying off the materials. It's because demand is driving up the cost. Even with cheap materials, the land the house sits on may still be scarce (depending on the location.)

<comment><AUTHOR> So in a sense housing will always be expensive because of scarcity of land and demand for housing?

<comment><USER12> Again, it depends on demand vs supply. Land in the middle of nowhere in Alaska is abundant with little demand, so land there isn't considered scarce. In Manhattan, New York, demand causes increased living space to be created by building upwards. In San Francisco, city restrictions on building heights limit supply (can't stack as high vertically as you can in Manhatten.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When it comes to real estate the 3 most important things are location, location, location. Most city centers do not have options to allow more housing as they are fully built.

The improved materials already reduce the house building costs compared to 10-20 years ago but this mostly applies for rural areas....

<comment><AUTHOR> So what about increasing supply by building more?

<comment><USER13> most of the highly desirable areas are either fully built or land costs a fortune.

this is exactly the problem for housing prices: supply can't increase while more and more people want to live there(world population keeps growing and migration is at peak levels)

opposed to that there are countries, cities or neighbourhoods where you can buy property cheaper than the price of building it

<comment><USER14> For example: a lot of Detroit, Michigan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not exactly the direction your question was heading, but check out <http://shelterpub.com/> \- they have a few books about building your own house (for considerably less money than buying one.) You still have to get the land somehow though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting TED talk on Automated Construction

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdbJP8Gxqog&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdbJP8Gxqog&feature=player_embedded#)!</comment>


Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial – and Kerry is wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/30/daniel-ellsberg-snowden-fair-trial-kerry-espionage-act <comment><USER2> > John Kerry's challenge to Snowden to return and face trial is either > disingenuous or simply ignorant that current prosecutions under the > Espionage Act allow no distinction whatever between a patriotic > whistleblower and a spy. Either way, nothing excuses Kerry's slanderous and > despicable characterizations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done > more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his > patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us > swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I admire both Ellsberg and Snowden for serious thinking about what that oath means. In contrast, the NSA seems to be practicing a policy of destroying the Constitution to save it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_had_to_destroy_the_village_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_had_to_destroy_the_village_to_save_it#Vietnam_War)</comment>


Phoenix.LiveView: Interactive, Real-Time Apps. No Need to Write JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://dockyard.com/blog/2018/12/12/phoenix-liveview-interactive-real-time-apps-no-need-to-write-javascript <comment><USER2> I must say this is the first time I've been really impressed by a client-side, real-time implementation. The API is simple and I can imagine building something real-time without thinking about the translation from one protocol to another like I would with web-sockets for example. I've never written a line of Elixir, but this is interesting enough for me to try it.

<comment><USER3> Aside from Scenic ([https://github.com/boydm/scenic](https://github.com/boydm/scenic)) and Nerves ([https://nerves-project.org/](https://nerves-project.org/)), Phoenix LiveView is the new Elixir thing I'm most excited about.

I mean, I already 'bought in' to the ecosystem for many other reasons, but these are / could be huge extra reason because 1) they solve problems I'm facing, and 2) the potential popularity might alleviate the mild nervousness I have about investing so much into what is still a very young and small ecosystem. As it is, I still hesitate to use Elixir/Phoenix with many of my clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> LiveView looks like a game changer. Can't wait to play with it.

</comment><comment><USER5> An alternative to this is [intercooler.js]([http://intercoolerjs.org](http://intercoolerjs.org)). Not sure if it is quite as powerful or robust (as an Elixir backend) but if you don't have the time or inclination to learn Elixir (which I do think is a cool language, but at this time in my life I really don't have the time to learn), intercooler is a nice alternative!

</comment><comment><USER6> looks similar to server side blazor (razor components) added to asp .net core 3.0 [https://codedaze.io/introduction-to-server-side-blazor- aka-r...](https://codedaze.io/introduction-to-server-side-blazor-aka-razor- components/)

<comment><USER7> That does look similar! One thing they say though:

> We don't really know yet how well server-side Blazor (Razor Components) will > scale with heavy use applications.

I don't think that's a concern with LiveView, as it's built on Phoenix Channels, which in 2015 could already handle 2 million connections on a single box: [https://phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million- webs...](https://phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-websocket- connections)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool! Anything similar for Golang?

<comment><USER5> @kim0, See my comment about intercooler js. Not quite as powerful but it is a similar concept that is back end language agnostic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No need for java, but need for another language kind of markup script..

<comment><USER10> Also to be clear, if you are already in the Elixir web ecosystem, EEx (Embedded Elixir) templates are what you currently write for regular server HTML rendering. LiveEEx allows you to take those _same templates_ and support the diffing optimizations the post shows off, so labeling it "another kind of markup script" isn't accurate in this context.</comment></comment>


Why there's a Media Temple logo on my site. - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/why-media-temple-logo/

<comment><USER2> Our experience with MT was absolutely terrible. We suffered from days-on-end outages. Literally 5-7 day outages due to issues with storage clusters. I understand that everyone makes mistakes, but I've had three times the number of VPSs with Rimuhosting since 2007, and I've not had a single moment of down time. I'd feel better if I could justify it by saying that Rimuhosting is some how more expensive or less convenient, or offered lousy service, but none of that is true. It's more convenient, the service is absolutely incredible, and we've had (literally) 100% uptime for the last 4 years.

<comment><USER3> It sounds like you were on a (gs) Grid-Service with us. This is not a VPS hosting solution, which is what it sounds like you have at Rimuhosting. I'll admit that our (gs) hosting has had its fair share of stability problems. However, our VPS solutions, such as the (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server and the (ve) Server are incredibly reliable and have virtually zero downtime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "My site recently got a virus."

No it didn't. Wordpress was hacked.

<comment><USER5> True. However, it's been pretty well documented that it was Media Temple's fault, not a random WP vulnerability. [http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system- inciden...](http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system- incidents/1026-gs-security-advisory/)</comment></comment>


Startups Worry that Twitter and Facebook Are Blocking Their Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428691/startups-worry-that-twitter-and-facebook-are/ <comment><USER2> duh

</comment><comment><USER3> What is this fluff piece doing here?</comment>


NY Times on Evernote and Freemium - <AUTHOR> http://ploneglenn.blogspot.com/2009/08/freemium-revisited.html

<comment><USER2> Freemium is a compelling business model when clients are more likely to buy the longer they use the free service. That's the case with Evernote, since users become more invested in the service when they have sizable collection of notes. To continue using the system when they've reached the free storage limit, they have to pay up.

My question is, can the same effect be achieved with a limited time free trial? In the case of Evernote, instead of giving 40MB free and 500MB and some premium features, they could offer a full account for 6 months, and then start charging. This way you don't have to continue supporting deadbeats indefinitely. What are your thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounds like you're saying replace the space limit with a time limit. Obviously you would not want to do that because your competition could shut you down pretty quickly. Perhaps you mean to add a time limit in addition to the space limit. You would have to tell that to prospective users in advance and that might increase their hesitation to register. I don't use the service but, if there was a publishing component to it, then you would want free content as a way of attracting others.</comment></comment>


Android gaining on Apple, says report - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/android_gaining_on_apple_says_report.php

<comment><USER2> Though this report mentions RIM numbers may be slightly low, looking at Gartner's data (<http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1372013>), their numbers are excessively low.

Where AdMob has RIM below 2%, Gartner has RIM above iOS, and just below Symbian in numbers.

Anecdotal: Our company was using RIM as our corporate provider until last year's "complete outage" fiascos, at which point our CEO decided it was iPhone time. It seems like many other companies who aren't as agile would still be stuck with RIM at the corporate level, so these numbers seem pretty far off- base.

<comment><USER3> This is really a snapshot of Admobs ad-network traffic, which is really low on RIM devices that don't support a particularly robust app market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Android is a "commodity" OS, if you will. That is, anyone can build a device and put Android on it. Given that Android isn't complete shit and that people ARE building devices and using it, this trend is rather expected.

<comment><USER5> It's the Windows OS effect, this time in the smartphone market. Except that Android is free, so it could potentially gain an even vaster userbase.

<comment><USER4> This is an interesting point, though what we have with Android is something slightly different in that there's a certain degree of individual vendor responsibility to provide updates for your device as needed. Thus vendors will compete on a few different fronts:

* Hardware. I.e. design, reliability, technical specifications * Commitment. E.g. providing firmware updates * Marketing. * Icing. By this I mean the vendor's "above and beyond" software offerings, such as a more polished UI, add on software packages, etc.

I have to admit that I find Android exciting as an economical experiment. I am not, however, an Android device user. For me Apple's relentless attention to detail has kept me captive (for now).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looking at the raw numbers from Apple and Google (not AdMob's!), Android's supremacy is looking increasingly inevitable.

At the Droid X launch, Google claimed 160,000 activations a day, which translates to a run rate of almost 60 million devices a year. More importantly, the Android growth rate looks like an exponential curve up at this point. Google's announcements show a 60% growth in Android over the past 3 _months_.

In the long run, Apple simply can't match those numbers. Their install base will give them the lead for another year, and their total unit sales will continue to grow, but the marketshare future looks like it belongs to Android.

<comment><USER7> "but the marketshare future looks like it belongs to Android"

That's fine with Apple. They don't mind having a smaller market share than someone else, as long as they have a big share in that subset part of the market that actually makes money.

How much does Google make on each Android phone sold by someone else?

<comment><USER8> Google makes $0 on those sales directly. But I don't think they're losing sleep over that. They don't want to make money selling hardware. They think hardware should be a commodity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm kind of tired of AdMob numbers being trotted out to show Android is gaining. As others have pointed out, AdMob is primarily an Android thing, so of course they'll see growth. I love to see Android growing and succeeding, but these numbers are basically useless as a comparison. Perhaps once iAds is out, comparing the iAds numbers and AdMob numbers could explain some stuff, but for now they can't paint a good picture of the numbers for Apple.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am not sure if this data is right or wrong, but I think AdMob has a severe conflict of interest reporting on this issue.

Even if they were not acquired by google, the upcoming existence of the iAd system (and its restrictions) means that they have a strong incentive to downplay vendors like RIM and Apple.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. Title ought to be: "Android Gaining on Apple, Says Report _From Google Acquisition_ "

I can't believe this isn't in the first bleeding sentence. Unprofessional, ReadWriteWeb!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> AdMob report on market share will not be as representative from July 01 when iAds goes live. Since AdMobers are now Googlers, expect to hear from them monthly that 'Android is gaining market' when many iPhone developers are expected to move their ads to iAds and out of AdMob radar. To me its meaningless data even though its common sense that Android is gaining market share due to its commodity nature with multiple vendors, and a recent version that is finally competitive. Tech blogs should publish reports from independent source with better data.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's my question. This really feels like a platform wars flashback to Mac v. PC, and the coming numerical advantages to Android combined with the fact that it's arguably on or close to the same level of iPhone for performance, usability, etc (or is getting close) really do make it seem inevitable that it should swallow whole much of the smartphone market.

Question next. If Android : PC :: iPhone : Mac, where does that put Apple? I'm not convinced that that will be the case, since Apple's margins will shrink once it moves past exclusivity and, all things aside, smartphone prices remain quite high; I don't imagine that there will be a serious need to have the kind of per-unit pricing differentials seen on say, a PC laptop vs. a Macbook.

<comment><USER14> Apple is on target to become #3 and quite possibly #4 in the next couple of years, with Nokia #1, Android #2 and #3 unclear, but one of RIM, Microsoft or Apple.

Either way, the iPhone will soon be as marginal a phone as Macs are to personal computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised by the domination of Western Europe by iOS, and that Symbian's share there is so low. Even Android's numbers are double that of Symbian. Compare East Europe, where Symbian is roughly half the market. Was I just naiive?

Also, one annoyance: why did they have to switch around the colors between graphs?

</comment><comment><USER16> I would love to know break down by the actual phones . . . I bet there are radically different downloads per device eg that would be hugely useful for app devs to figure out where to target their efforts

</comment><comment><USER17> Considering Google has only paid out approx $30 million to Apple's $1 billion in app sales, that's pretty sad considering how many android devices are out there. An app developer might make more money on BREW than on Android.

<comment><USER18> Do you have a source on that? I'm sure this is a "lmgtfy" kind of thing, but I'm not an app developer so I'm not sure the particular jargon to Google.

<comment><USER19> You must've missed out Larva Labs's article on it. They develop for both Android and iOS.

[http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/android-market-payouts- tot...](http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/android-market-payouts-total-2-of- app-stores-1b/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Whither Research in Motion?

It seems to me like Blackberry Messenger is the only thing keeping that company alive from a consumer perspective. I hear all the time "I would buy an I phone, but I love BBM so much!"

</comment><comment><USER20> look at the end of the original link [http://metrics.admob.com/2010/06/may-2010-mobile-metrics- rep...](http://metrics.admob.com/2010/06/may-2010-mobile-metrics-report/)

Generated by "Harsh S" AdMob Marketing this explains everything</comment>


Americans Have Spent An Estimated $5.9 Billion Repairing Their Damaged iPhones - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/191579/americans-have-spent-an-estimated-5-9-billion-repairing-their-damaged-iphones/

<comment><USER2> Nonsense. About 85 million iPhones have been sold in the USA to date. $5.9 billion would be $70 in repair costs for each and every phone sold. In my experience, it costs about $50-$150 to repair a (reparable) iPhone, so this would suggest -- conservatively! -- that approximately one in every two phones is repaired. I call BS. They're probably counting replacements, many of which would happen anyway. For example, I didn't bother to fix a slightly cracked screen on my 3G, but simply waited until the 4 came out and upgraded then. This "study" would probably regard the entire price of the new iPhone 4 as the cost of the damage to the 3G, but of course I would have upgraded even if the 3G had been pristine.

</comment><comment><USER3> This really comes down to whether you put your iPhone in a case or not. If you don't, you're either very careful or it's a matter of time before your screen breaks. If you put it in a case, your phone becomes 50% thicker and much uglier, but it becomes basically indestructible (at least 25 drops from waist- height onto concrete).

</comment><comment><USER4> Sorry to say, but as a customer that's what you get for buying a glass phone.

<comment><USER5> According to the last actual study[1] SquareTrade published, accident rates for the iPhone 4 were only 15% greater than for comparable Android phones that aren't "made of glass," so unless other high-end smartphones are significantly cheaper to repair (maybe) or replace (no), the headline is mostly just saying "in the past five years, Americans have broken a shit-ton of expensive smartphones," using the iPhone as an example because it's the most recognizable brand.

Link bait? Of course it is. Of exactly the sort one might expect from, say, _the PR department of a company selling smartphone insurance_.

[1] [http://www.squaretrade.com/cell-phone-comparison-study- nov-1...](http://www.squaretrade.com/cell-phone-comparison-study-nov-10)</comment></comment>