GPS Hacking, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://en.wooyun.io/2016/02/04/41.html <comment><USER2> It irks me that this person stole the comparison chart then had the gall to watermark it. Original here: [http://www.taylorkillian.com/2013/08/sdr- showdown-hackrf-vs-...](http://www.taylorkillian.com/2013/08/sdr-showdown- hackrf-vs-bladerf-vs-usrp.html) Flagged this because of that.

<comment><USER3> Looking through the drops.wooyun.org website, it appears that every image posted is watermarked. It seems to be a blogging platform targeted towards hackers, with lots of authors represented. I imagine that the watermarking is an automated process applied to every image uploaded to the platform.

Of course, the author should have given attribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a technical but pretty readable treatment of the same topic: [https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-15/materials/eu-15-Kang- Is-...](https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-15/materials/eu-15-Kang-Is-Your- Timespace-Safe-Time-And-Position-Spoofing-Opensourcely-wp.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting stuff. BladeRF looks amazing; I might have to grab one to play around with. I might even have a look at the HDL code to see how they built it.

[https://github.com/Nuand/bladeRF](https://github.com/Nuand/bladeRF)

</comment><comment><USER6> I was captivated until "2.1 Search for girls through Wechat People Nearby"

That just pushed the creepy a little too much.

</comment><comment><USER7> Honest question, I assume playing with this is completely illegal in the US?? I guess you can get in real trouble if you are catched faking GPS signals? Does anyone know what are the regulations for something like this?

<comment><USER8> The FCC rules for Amateur radio which is defined in Part 97 clearly states that an amateur may not disrupt radio location services. The frequency for the GPS Signals, high UHF is not close to any privileges available, amateur operators included. In short, don't do this unless you're testing / putting out very low power. Better yet, get an RF enclosure.

Here is a graphic of the spectrum available in the US: [https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/2003-alloch...](https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/2003-allochrt.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Here is a much newer chart (Jan 2016): [https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/january_201...](https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/january_2016_spectrum_wall_chart.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Awesome. Thank you. I didn't realize they had a new version of the chart out now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> RF and all the hacking I see in this domain are nothing short of fascinating. I will never trust my GPS watch again!

Further, imagine all the havoc one of these systems could bring. You could basically forge every Strava segment in your area to be at the top of the leader board. Heck, you don't even have to be in the area. Go to a race and just slightly zap every device that runs/cycles by. These are just the "haha", non-life changing ideas. There are some really shitty ideas too...

Wow... hack all the things!

</comment><comment><USER11> Very interesting.

I wonder if it's possible to detect and protect against a spoofed GPS signal by cross-referencing with trusted/canonical online data (eg. NTP and almanac data from NASA)?

<comment><USER12> Only against imperfect spoofing.

A GPS receiver in Los Angeles sees the same set of signals as a receiver in San Francisco - just the relative arrival times of the signals are different by, at most, a single-digit number of milliseconds.

So an attacker just needs to do a replay attack, and all the almanac stuff checks out fine because it's a perfect replica of the authentic signal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did someone use it with a self driving cars like Telsa ;)

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure the self-driving system wouldn't rely on GPS much, especially considering how inaccurate GPS can be (and that's when you can actually get a signal).

<comment><USER15> I believe there are two places where Tesla's system uses GPS.

One is to slow down for curves in the road. I'm not entirely sure why they don't just sense the curves with the camera, but there are reports of spurious slowing due to out of date maps, and I've seen it myself when the system thinks I'm taking an exit ramp that crosses over the highway and I'm actually driving under it. Not really a problem if this gets faked out.

The other some sort of input to the lane keeping system, perhaps to resolve ambiguity if the camera isn't quite sure where the lanes goes up ahead. The other sensors are by far more important in the calculation, so I don't think this would do much either.

Currently, there's no connection between the route in the navigation system and the autopilot system (e.g. it won't take exits for you if you're going that way) so you can't spoof it to make it go somewhere else. Pretty much the best you could do is confuse the driver with bad directions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> -1 for disabling pinch zoom on mobile devices</comment>


BeagleBoard is nice, but the PandaBoard is better (dual Cortex-A9 at 1GHz) - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/10/4/pandaboard-arm-dev-kit-launches/

<comment><USER2> Well, I wonder if it would be suitable as some kind of low-power all-in-one home server (file sharing, irc in screen, not much more), network router and jukebox and movie player. In theory, specs are ok for that purpose, but from the remark "if you need more than 1GB, you're probably doing it wrong", it seems that, hm, I'd be doing it wrong, because 1GB isn't exactly a lot of memory and it'd be wise to put there more.

(And of course, USB might not be the ideal bus to connect a lot of disk space.)

<comment><USER3> Don't bother.

I got a Lenovo q150 for $200 and replaced the disk with the consumer intel 40gb sad for another $100. It is tiny, quiet, and consumes 17 watts.

<comment><USER4> The Q150 looks amazing (though $350-$399 from their website: <http://shop.lenovo.com/us/landing_pages/ideacentre/2010/q150> \- you can even mount on the VESA bracket)

Any idea how to get it in Australia? Lenovo's au site doesn't list it; and I guess there'd be power-supply (and maybe IP?) issues.

<comment><USER3> I got the one without HDMI (who cares, for a server?) which is a lot cheaper. Not sure what else it is missing. It was $210.

I got it from Amazon. Can you order from Amazon? This is what I got: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003SCI59K>

EDIT: The one I have isn't an nvidia ION-based machine.

<comment><USER4> thanks! unfortunately it says as I feared: _Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150 Desktop PC - Black (40813AU) cannot be shipped to the selected address._ (BTW: most things are OK for us with Amazon.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a few boring projects I'd like to try with something like this, any idea what it is likely to retail for?

</comment><comment><USER4> A boring project would be to regut an old eeePC with it - x2 the CPU and x2 the RAM. Seems like about the only way I'm gonna get an ARM netbook. :-(

The board is 4"x4.5", but I couldn't find thickness, weight or power consumption. Some specs at bottom of: [http://www.omappedia.org/wiki/PandaBoard_Early_Adopter_Progr...](http://www.omappedia.org/wiki/PandaBoard_Early_Adopter_Program)

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome. Looking forward to change on-the-road development platform from macbook to iPad + headless linux computer using a board like that.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's hard to figure out what problems a board like this solves. If you want a cheap file server just buy an Atom board w/ a passive heat-sink. If you want to play around w/ "physical computing" and drive sensors, the Arduino ecosystem is much more open and vibrant.

And IIRC although the BeagleBoard had a nice GPU, it wasn't programmable without signing an NDA.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is all very nice, unfortunately, I couldn't find any information, when a real human with a boring project will be able to buy one.

Only thing I got was that early adopters will get some at the end of October.

Usually, one gravitates toward something inferior shipping(BeagleBoard XM in this case) to something superior, which is unavailable.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very nice, but quite powerful for "embedded"..

</comment><comment><USER10> That looks like a very impressive piece of kit. I was planning to get a Hawkboard Lite for a project, but might wait for this to become available instead, if the price is decent. 8 times the RAM!

<comment><AUTHOR> The different amount of RAM is the last think to notice here. The OMAP L138 on the hawkboard is an ARM9 (+ C674xDSP) at 375/456MHz, the OMAP4 of the pandaboard is a dual core Cortex-A9 at 1GHz.

They are completely in two different class. I too hope for the price.

<comment><USER10> _The different amount of RAM is the last think to notice here._

That depends mainly on the use you have in mind. For my purposes, the Hawkboard's CPU would probably be fine. But yeah, the Pandaboard is quite a beast - twice the computing power of an iPad, if I'm not mistaken. (not counting the DSP)

<comment><USER11> More than twice I would say. iPad's A4 is a tweaked Cortex A8. Cortex A9 is out-of-order compared to in-order A8 and will likely be faster per clock.

<comment><USER12> The A9 is readily 25% faster per clock than the A8 for scalar integer operations. Scalar floating-point is 5-10x faster depending on the exact operations. Vector instructions are mostly the same or slower than A8 due to lack of the limited dual-issue present in A8. I have yet to run a proper benchmark to compare the difference in vector performance in realistic situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How can they give out free ones without coming up with a price? You cannot develop a commercial product without knowing how much it will cost.

<comment><USER14> I believe the purpose of dev kits is prototyping, where cost isn't that much of an issue.

<comment><USER13> They're asking you to invest your valuable ttime into developing a product when they cannot tell you how much it will cost.

What happens if you develop a product and then you find out that the hardware cost pushes it out of the price point for your target demograpic?

<comment><USER14> What I meant was that I don't think PandaBoard itself is meant to ship for your customers, but to allow you to prototype your ideas, and evaluate the hardware needs of your product, so that you can then build your own hardware which you ship to your customers.

And that's why I said that dev kit price is not that much of an issue, as it does not directly affect the price of the hardware you are going to ship.

edit: from their FAQ:

Is PandaBoard a end product or can I utilize it in my end product?

PandaBoard is a development platform! It is not an end product nor do we recommend directly using it in an end product. We encourage you to leverage open & low cost PandaBoard to explore, prototype your software & hardware design and venture into creating your own OMAP4430 based product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And they'll give you one for free if your planned project is 'cool', enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> PandaBoard Request Program:

[https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dG5mcVNXSFF...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dG5mcVNXSFFleVZjVFNtMVVqXzVYY1E6MQ)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ity – A miniscule, depedency free JavaScript MVC - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dcocchia/Ity

<comment><AUTHOR> _Why?_

\- Tiny footprint for mobile networks (~5kb minified).

\- Extremely fast DOM query/selection engine. No need for jQuery!

\- Mobile first - no legacy hackery for ie < 10.

\- Great for spinning up small, mobile-specific apps.

 _To Do_

\- More useful event delegation. Currently, views must call _setElement() every time they render new DOM elements

-Currently no router for fancy SPA style urls

 _Installation_

npm install ity

</comment><comment><USER2> Just a note as you've made this typo in a few places -- it's "dependency" not "depedency" as you have in your title here as well as Github project description and in your README.md

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops! Fixed in the repo now.

I can't seem to edit the title of the HN article anymore. Must be past a certain time or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is really interesting. I guess the part that confuses me is using the "View" to do traditional controller-esque things. At least in the example, that is how it looked. Would you be able to explain that choice?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I think the example itself is not a great pattern. :) If I were to redo that example, or do another example completely, I'd probably move a lot of that logic stuff into the model.

It's possible I'll add a more traditional 'controller' to the mix at some point, but I mostly wanted a similar structure to that of Backbone, without the need for jQuery/underscore.

<comment><USER3> It's just odd for an MVC framework to not have a 'C'. Generally, your view would just generate HTML, the controller listens for events and responds to them by updating the view and model. Here, your view is taking over that responsibility.

For how small the library is, this is pretty fantastic though. Significantly smaller than Backbone for similar syntax.

<comment><AUTHOR> Calling it an MVC may be a misnomer, definitely. I know backbone often refers to itself as MV*, which is sort of funny. :)

Thanks for checking it out! I'll put some thought into the 'C' aspect of this thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat project! However, in reality I'd probably just use Backbone if I wanted this kind of architecture because of the wealth of knowledge and support for it on the web.

What is the main advantage of this over Backbone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, for sure. I mostly started this to see if I can get a Backbone-like MVC without the heavy dependencies of jQuery/underscore/lodash/etc. The DOM selection stuff is also done relying much more heavily on native calls, so it should be much faster than jQuery at most DOM manipulation stuff. It doesn't have much/any browser support hackery built in.

For most of my work, I'll also be sticking to Backbone or something more supported/fully-featured. But I do have tinsy projects here and there that are mobile-focused one-offs that work really well with something like this. I found myself recreating this thing over and over, so I figured I'd just standardize it for me and see if anyone else felt the same need. :)

Thanks for checking it out and for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> looks tiny. great!! I'll use it in my next toy project to test it out.</comment>


HIV first infected humans about 100 years ago - <AUTHOR> http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/625/1 <comment><USER2> Very interesting.

How did Humans first contracted the virus from monkeys?

Does this findings mean that if we cannot find the cure for HIV, ultimately our system will grow immune or resistant to it? If so how long would it be before Humans can get to that point? 100, 200, 500 years?

<comment><USER3> I'm assume that a human contracted it while slaughtering a monkey for food. Perhaps some of the monkey's blood splashed into the person's eye? Perhaps many humans contracted the virus in a similar manner?

<comment><USER4> Or just by eating said infected monkey.

<comment><USER5> This is completely irrelevant, but _said infected monkey_ would be an excellent name for a rock band.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> HIV doesn't exist, it's science fiction. Nobody has provided solid proof of its existence.

<comment><USER7> What kind of proof would you find acceptable?

<comment><USER6> Purified virus, the proof that it can be transmitted between human and lead to AIDS alone</comment></comment></comment>


Shigir Idol - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigir_Idol <comment><USER2> 11,500 years is such a short time span. It is crazy how close to the dawn of man you find yourself living in.

<comment><USER3> I was going to disagree with you until I broke 11,500 into generations. It's only ~383 generations which isn't as high as I thought it might be.

<comment><USER4> Non developed nation generations are usually closer to 20 years apart [1] and probably would be closer to that for much of human history. So it's closer to 575 generations. Your point still stands though... it's not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things.

BTW: The longest recorded family tree is that of Confucius which goes back 80 generations. [2]

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

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

<comment><USER5> Not bad, almost 20% of generations since dawn of man!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Scholars have proposed various theories about the carvings' meaning. > Svetlana Savchenko, a researcher at the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum, > suggested that the decoration tells the creation myth those who carved it > believed in. Other researchers at the museum have suggested that the > markings could have served as a navigational aid or map. Professor Mikhail > Zhilin, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow, guessed > that the statue could depict mythological creatures such as forest spirits. > Archeologist Peter Vang Peterson, of the National Museum of Denmark, > speculated that the idol could serve as a warning not to enter a dangerous > area.

So are they just literally making things up? This reminds me of Motel of the Mysteries. [http://sultanaeducation.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/06/Motel...](http://sultanaeducation.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/06/Motel-of-the-Mysteries-Macaulay.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Educated guesses would likely be a better term

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of Göbekli Tepe and the fact that it predates agriculture.

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

Yuval Noah Harari in A Brief History of Humankind argues that it the need to feed so many workers could lead to deliberate domestication of wild grains and the agricultural revolution. (All in all, I do not recommend the book).</comment>


Preserving Family History, One Memory at a Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/business/preserving-family-history-one-memory-at-a-time.html <comment><USER2> I have been using this service since it was launched and it is one of the highlights of my week. Every week, my Grandmother answers random questions and shares some part of her life story with me. A few weeks ago, the question was "What do you want to say to your Valentine?" My grandmother shared a heartfelt letter to my late grandfather. These are the kinds of stories that Storyworth facilitates and it is helping to create an even more touching connection between my grandma and me. I highly recommend checking it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm the founder of StoryWorth, AMA.

<comment><USER4> Is there a non-paywalled writeup anywhere?

<comment><USER3> Liz Gannes wrote about our initial launch last April:

[http://allthingsd.com/20130403/storyworth-aims-to-elicit- and...](http://allthingsd.com/20130403/storyworth-aims-to-elicit-and-record- family-stories/)

Alternatively, try opening the NYT link in an Incognito Window in Chrome.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: ViralBees, create viral promotions in mins - <AUTHOR> http://viralbees.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> We tested the idea of degrees of separation in social media to create viral promotion via the platform</comment>


Video on Flickr! - <AUTHOR> http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/04/09/video-on-flickr-2/ <comment><USER2> They look to have done a good job of differentiating themselves from YouTube by being less, how should I say, tacky?

<comment><USER3> They completely ripped off Vimeo.</comment></comment>


Orman: a lightweight SQLite & MySQL ORM for Android (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://alpblog.heroku.com/introducing-orman-framework/

<comment><USER2> A well maintained alternative, also open source: <http://greendao-orm.com/>. Disclaimer: I am affiliated with the company that initiated this project.

</comment><comment><USER3> We used ormlite on Android for at least one project. It worked extremely well and the developer was very receptive/reactive to bug reports.</comment>


My journey to the International Olympiad in Informatics - <AUTHOR> http://sirupsen.com/my-journey-to-the-international-olympiad-in-informatics/

<comment><USER4> I know that feeling of the problems seeming impossibly hard all too well - <USER2> was the same at the Physics Olympiad, which was pushed pretty hard by one of the physics teachers at my high school (in Austria), who also happened to be one of the organisers of the state and national events. It helps to know that the problems are _intended_ to be so hard that nobody gets full marks. I didn't realise this early on, but it's of course obvious in hindsight - <USER3> wouldn't want a draw, you want a nice, clean exponential distribution of scores. (unlike an exam, where a gaussian distribution is usually what you're after)

It sounds as if the IOI organisers (or at least the Danish organisers) provide possible solutions/approaches for the problems. This is great, it always pissed me off no end at the Physics Olympiad that everything was all hush hush and you had to try and find someone to explain the problems you failed miserably on as we never got to see the correct answers (let alone a breakdown of our scores by problem).

I think the national format varies from country to country, but in case it's of interest:

In our case, the Physics and, as far as I know, Maths & Chemistry Olympiads were split into school, state, and 2 stages of national competitions. I think each school sent up to 4 people (selection up to the school) to the state competition, which was standardised across the country and was half a day. The best 3(?) from each state, plus a selection of those with high scores then made it to the first round of the federal competition, which I think was a whole-day "exam". The best 15 or so from that then went for a 2-week intensive course held in different cities each year, with 4 different physics teachers teaching you new physics all day. It culminated in a 2-day competition, from which the top 5 got to go on yet another 1-week intensive course and the international competition.

(much to my surprise, I ended up qualifying for the IPhO 3 times, in 2000, 2001 and 2002 but only ended up participating once in 2001 [Antalya, Turkey] - for these events it helps to live in a country with a small population I guess)

I kind of wish I'd been sufficiently driven to self-study for the Informatics Olympiad at the time. (CS was nonexistant at my school; I'd only vaguely heard of the IOI, whereas Physics, Chemistry and Maths were encouraged - I probably tried the maths one too young, I was sufficiently intimidated not to try it again; the physics teacher was a lot more welcoming and better at keeping all ages making progress) I bet I'd be a better programmer for it now, and I had all the time in the world back then.

In any case: good luck Simon!

</comment><comment><USER5> What is amazing about the IOIs is that the high school students who participate have a more broad and deep understanding of algorithms in graphs and networks, combinatorics, dynamic programming, recursion and number theoretics than pretty much any CS student in a college/university with exception of perhaps PhDs. Indeed, you don't find many CS students devouring Knuth's TAOCP just for fun!!! However back in the day when I also participated in Nationals and this sort of competitions I always favored Cormen's Intro to Algorithms over Knuth's, but that was just a matter of personal preference. Overall kudos to this young man and I hope he keeps it up. And I also encourage everybody to take a look at past IOI problems (they are online) and their solutions and even attempt solving them, it is an amazing feeling when you are able to crack even one!

</comment><comment><USER6> Everyone can take a bite at this type of problems for free, with online results evaluation on topcoder, interviewstreet and probably a few others.

Worth a visit a couple times a week, unless you are actually working on a hard problem yourself.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have tutored some high school students in programming/algorithms, and I find it is definitely better to explain "NP-hard" after they take a crack at the problem. Classically educated CS students tend to see the true difficulty of the problem at hand, which typically results in their not being able to see potential solutions, and many times abandoning the problem completely. However, students without that level of "training" tend to come up with more novel solutions. I am always anxious to see what they come up with.

Overall, classic education just seems to put people into boxes. Even PhD candidates don't seem to deviate much from standard techniques. I just wish I had done something like IOI in my past; I feel it's much more effective at opening up your mind.

</comment><comment><USER8> I participated on the National Olympiads in Informatics in Portugal, where I live. There was a first phase online, and then a second (final) phase in Porto. From the ~60 participants, only 30 qualified for the final. I got 10th.

At the final qualification though, I got 19th, and only the first 4 get to go to Italy this year, for the International Olympiads in Informatics. I can still participate next year, for a chance to go to Australia.

Even though it didn't go out that well this year, I learnt a lot, and it was a very amusing experience. Oh, and I learnt lots of stuff, like Dynamic Programming, Divide And Conquer, Kadan's Algorithm, DFS & BFS, etc. Highly recommend it!

</comment><comment><USER9> I didn't try to participate in olympiads, but I started participating in competitions when I was 20. I practiced for ACM ICPC for 3 years, which was arguably my most enjoyable days in my life.

I stopped participating in programming competitions when I was about 24. But now I am 27 and I have started doing them again. I am not as strong as I was (or even close to it), but I am aiming to become strong again. One of my goals is to qualify to the GCJ finals next year (this year I was in Round 3, but couldn't make it to finals).

Joy of solving problems is the greatest joy I've ever experienced.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow, I'm so surprised to read this, just last week I got the news that I ended first in the Nederlandse Informatica Olympiade (Dutch Informatics Olympiad)...

My story is kind of the same except I started with knowledge in Python, C# and PHP. I will be participating in the CEOI <http://ceoi.inf.elte.hu/> and the IOI.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thank you very much for your article. It brought back lots of fond memories of my younger days, spending hours and hours solving past year olympiad problems. I eventually got a silver medal in the Singapore National informatics olympiad. But it was not good enough to qualify for the IOI. I am 26 years old now, have my own startup and I still think about it :(

</comment><comment><USER12> I was on the Irish team of the IOI in both 2003 and 2004. I wasn't good enough to actually win anything :-( but the experience was amazing and I met some very very smart people!

Some of the problems were fiendishly hard though!

</comment><comment><USER13> Having participated in one informatics olympiad, not as a contestant but as a service engineer for the duration of the contest, I spent quite some time observing the contestants. It appeared to me that different teams had different preparation levels. I could see contestants from a few countrlies starting to type immediately after seeing the subject, when most countries teams struggled. My guess was that some countries had a more organized approach, when others were more based on personal effort and talent for the preparation.</comment>


Weld: Accelerating numpy, scikit and pandas as much as 100x with Rust and LLVM - <AUTHOR> https://notamonadtutorial.com/weld-accelerating-numpy-scikit-and-pandas-as-much-as-100x-with-rust-and-llvm-12ec1c630a1 <comment><USER4> "the first implementation was in Scala, which was chosen because of its algebraic data types and powerful pattern matching. This made writing the optimizer, which is the core part of the compiler, very easy. Our original optimizer was based on the design of Catalyst, which is Spark SQL's extensible optimizer. We moved away from Scala because it was too difficult to embed a JVM-based language into other runtimes and languages."

There is an important "contemporary history of computing" article to write about the evolution of the Spark project from "let's build a distributed filesystem for MapReduce in Java because we read those early Google papers" to "SQL is the right model for working with data so DataFrames" to "meet data scientists where they are: Python (and R)" to "make machine learning easy" and now to "LLVM, but for crunching big numeric arrays".

<comment><USER5> Not that you should replace Rust with Haskell, but Haskell would've been a better choice than Scala.

It has its own runtime, but it's not difficult to call Haskell code from C or ATS or whatever.

<comment><USER6> Not difficult to call from C? How does that work, exactly? Wouldn't you need to properly setup the whole runtime (incl. GC) first?

<comment><USER7> Yes but I think the parent meant its 'just' an #include and ghc_init() away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> See also this interesting talk on Weld at RustConf 2019: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZsgdCEQjFo&t=1430s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZsgdCEQjFo&t=1430s)

</comment><comment><USER9> There's also RustPython, a Rust implementation of CPython 3.5+: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20686580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20686580)

> > _[https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython](https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython) > _

<comment><USER10> Why didn't they call it Rython

<comment><USER11> Or RytOn ;-)

<comment><USER12> Or IronPython...oh, wait. ;-)

<comment><USER13> Fe2Py3

<comment> 0-_-0 FeOPy3

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also worth checking out OmniSci (formerly MapD), which features an LLVM query compiler to gain large speedups executing SQL on both CPU and GPU: [https://github.com/omnisci/omniscidb](https://github.com/omnisci/omniscidb) . And here's a link to a blog post giving a high level overview of the advantages of JIT compilation of queries over an interpreter: [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/mapd-massive-throughput- database...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/mapd-massive-throughput-database- queries-llvm-gpus/) .

<comment><USER15> That tweetmap is impressive

</comment></comment><comment> adrien-treuille This post combines pretty much every technology I'm obsessed with right now: Python, Rust, Pandas, Numpy, and LLVM. Yess!!!

<comment><USER16> Just a word of caution, always obsess with product and customer needs first :) In ML/data science tech first normally won't end up well

<comment><USER17> It's important to enjoy your work, which is - among other causes - <USER2> having right tools. Also, some of us actually get to have some influence over what language we write our projects in.

<comment><USER18> I think you misunderstand the parent. The obsession to always focus on tools is I think, what they described. In the end of the day what matters is what you produce, not what tools you used. Nobody cares about what you used, apart from engineers.

<comment><USER19> _You_ care.

<comment><USER20> Are you coding as a hobby or a profession?

If you are a professional, you will use the most effective tool for the job - to get results. What tool will produce the best results - schedule, budget, quality, maintainability, scalabi, portability, etc.?

Other than outliers that will crush your productivity, or multiply it, your feelings are pretty irrelevant.

Similarly, when you get into a racecar, your feelings about your preferred driving style are irrelevant - if you can change the setup to accommodate your style without slowing jt down, great = but if not, your job is to adapt to the situation and reliably get the best possible result.

Either way, you have fun and produce a crap result, you will not be congratulated (or re-hired), and if you have little fun and produce a great result, you'll get both.

If it's a hobby, do whatever you want.

Obviously, in terms of professional development, you want to use more forward looking tools, but what is the best measure of that - your feelings or results?

<comment><USER21> I sort of disagree with your main assertion. I do big data for a living and what I have seen is that our architecture is dictated to us from above for reasons of "fashion" not really for any reasons of practicality.

I'm actually looking for a different job for that reason.

We are required to used Java on K8s, Kafka & Cassandra for every single solution big or small because it is fashionable, not because it gets the job done well or for any other reason. I can even demonstrate how a couple of Python scripts and Pandas could do all the same work with far less overhead and achieve the same results. Crickets. Python is not sexy where I am, it is the language of peasants, apparently. Not sure what to make of it all, but that is my reality right now.

Also, I don't think you know anything at all about driving race cars. The driver has a tremendous amount of input into the car's setup because it's his life on the line out on the track. "Adapting to the situation" gets finishes, not wins.

<comment><USER20> Looks like we agree more than disagree. Seems like whoever is deciding on the tools, are failing to do so based on the job/project, instead opting for 'fashion' or whatever.

Good reason to seek a new situation, since you have neither appropriate tools selected for you nor input to select better ones.

Racecars? Yeah, I've only won some SCCA super-regional championships. Yes the driver does have a very large inptut into the setup, BUT it is within the constraint of the combination of the setup change and the improved driver feel must make the combination of car/driver faster. And yes, sometimes a change that makes the car technically a bit slower but gives the driver more confidence will result in faster net lap times -- and those are OK. But whatever the setup is, at the end of the test sessions, whether the car feels great or feels like crap, it's the driver's job to get the most out of it.

And I've had many situations both in the racecar and in international alpine ski racing where something felt weird/odd/unfamiliar/scary, but was fast as heck, so it was my job to adapt, rather than go back into my comfort zone.

Better to keep pushing outside your comfort zone, use tools/setups that get better results, and change your 'feel' to appreciate the better setup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This project has similar goals to the MLIR project:

[https://github.com/tensorflow/mlir](https://github.com/tensorflow/mlir)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzljG6DKgic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzljG6DKgic)

Exciting times for the future of parallel computing!

</comment><comment><USER23> Very bizarre there is no discussion of numba here, which has been around and used widely for many years, achieves faster speedups than this, and also emits an LLVM IR that is likely a much better starting point for developing a "universal" scientific computing IR than doing yet another thing that further complicates it with fairly needless involvement of Rust.

[https://numba.pydata.org/](https://numba.pydata.org/)

<comment><USER24> I'm one of the developers of Weld -- Numba is indeed very cool and is a great way to compile numerical Python code. Weld performs some additional optimizations specific to data science that Numba doesn't really target right now (e.g., fusing parallel loops across independently written functions, parallelizing hash table operations, etc.). We're also working on adding the ability to call Python functions from within Weld, which will allow a data science program expressed in Weld to call out to other optimized functions (e.g., ones compiled by Numba). We additionally have a system called split annotations under development that can schedule chains of such optimized functions in a more efficient way without an IR, by keeping datasets processed by successive function calls in the CPU caches (check it out here: [https://github.com/weld-project/split-annotations](https://github.com/weld- project/split-annotations)).

Overall, we think that the accelerating the kinds of data science apps Weld and Numba target will not only involve tricks such as compilation that make user-defined code faster, but also systems that can just schedule and call code that people have _already_ hand-optimized in a more efficient and transparent way (e.g., by pipelining data).

<comment><USER25> Although to be fair, there is no reason why numba couldn't gain those capabilities, it just hasn't been a focus of the project. It should be possible to build a lightweight modular staging system in python/numba similar to Scala's ([https://scala-lms.github.io/](https://scala-lms.github.io/)) or Lua's ([http://terralang.org/](http://terralang.org/)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have said multiple times that Rust has an incredible potential in the data analysis world. And Weld is a great example.

<comment><USER8> Weld is a compiler/JIT/runtime though, something Rust is very well suited for, and which is very different code from data analysis/ML.

I think Julia is a more interesting language for this space, with the built in matrix support, easier prototyping, a REPL, etc...

<comment><USER24> Rust is great, but this is an important comment! We used it to implement Weld's compiler and runtime, but we don't expect data scientists who use languages such as Python, Julia, or R to switch over to it; the idea is that these data scientists continue using APIs in these languages, and under the hood, Weld will perform optimizations and compilation for decreasing execution time (and these "under the hood" components are the ones that we wrote in Rust).

<comment><USER27> Would Weld be able to do a better job if these scientist were using a Rust library instead ?

A lot of people would like to use Rust for data-analysis / machine learning, but there are not really any good batteries-included frameworks for getting started with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sounds a lot like Gandiva (part of Apache Arrow) as well. [https://www.dremio.com/announcing-gandiva-initiative-for- apa...](https://www.dremio.com/announcing-gandiva-initiative-for-apache- arrow/). Cool!

</comment><comment><USER29> So... this requires cooperation from the underlying libraries (numpy, pandas...) - what is the likelihood of said libraries adopting this upstream vs Weld having to maintain their own shadow implementations for the foreseeable future?

Numpy et al of course already have N python acceleration frameworks hammering at their doorsteps to integrate more closely...

<comment><USER30> How much cooperation is needed though? It seems to me that all that numpy pandas etc. need to do is maintain a stable API, which they already do AFAIK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I saw a performance comparision with XLA, and it's interesting that Weld is faster, because XLA is supposed to optimize the code using the known tensor sizes during compile time.

Weld and XLA seem to have similar optimization steps though.

<comment><USER24> XLA and Weld do have similar optimizations -- at their core, one of the main things they do is removing inefficiencies like unnecessary scans over data, common subexpressions, etc. _across_ many operators. The speedup in the benchmark you're referring to actually involved some NumPy code too for pre- processing, and the reason Weld outperformed XLA is because Weld could perform those kinds of optimizations _across_ TensorFlow operators and NumPy functions (whereas XLA only optimizes the TensorFlow part of the application).

I also want to mention that this benchmark is from a while back (around 2017 I believe), so its possible improvements in both XLA and Weld will make the numbers look different today :)

<comment><USER32> For what it's worth, Jax (github.com/google/jax) now lets you use XLA to compile Numpy code. It'd be cool to see how that would stack up in a modern comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> whats the benefit of rust over julia or C for computation?

<comment><USER34> Not to sound like a member of the Rust evangelism strike force, but after using Rust for a couple years, I don't have any desire to go back to C - <USER3> types alone are worth the switch to me, not to mention iterators, concurrency story, etc.

<comment><USER35> C++ has sum types as of several years ago with std::variant.

<comment><USER36> The way Python has macros, sure :)

You would have to keep everything in variants, or wrap/unwrap manually all over the place to get similar functionality.

And C has tagged unions.

<comment><USER35> Can you elaborate more? What do other languages have over std::variant/visit?

<comment><USER27> That would be like explaining C++ Concepts to an assembly programmer from the 60s that had never used a "function" as a way of abstracting code.

If you really want to know, spend one afternoon learning any programming language with built in support for that (Rust, Ocaml, Haskell, ...). ADTs is one of the first things one learns.

In Rust, the features you'd need to learn are enums, patterns, and pattern matching.

But be warned that using C++ variant and std::visit will feel like you are being forced to only write C instead of C++ for the rest of your life, knowing that life could be much better. Once you learn this, there is no way to un- learn it.

<comment><USER35> I know how these things work in Rust, and I'm still failing to see your point. It's not at all as complicated as what you are saying given that you can find many blog articles that explain it succinctly in a couple paragraphs.

It's not at all helpful to say that there's something so complicated on these other languages that you can't possibly get the idea across without using them.

<comment><USER27> Try doing any of this with variant and visit

        enum A { Foo{ x: i32, y: f32 }, Bar(B), Baz([u32; 4]), Moo(i32), Mooz(i32) }
        struct B { z: f32, w: (f64, f32) }

        let b = B { z: 42.0, ..}; // create a b with z == 42 and default w
        let B{ w: (first, _), .. } = b; // get B.w.0 field
        let a = A::Foo{ x: 42.0, ..};
        if let A::Bar(Bar { z, ..}) = a {
          // if a is an A::Bar, get b.z field of A::Bar(b)
        }
        if let A::Baz([0, 1, 2, 3]) = a {
          // if a is an A::Baz containing an array
          // with value [0, 1, 2, 3]
        }
        match a {
            A::Moo(1..3 @ v) => {
               // if a is an A::Moo where x in A::Moo(x) is in range [0, 3) and put the value in the local v variable
            }
            A::Moo(x) | A::Mooz(x) => {
               // Either A::Moo or A::mooz, gives you the value of x
            }
            // ERROR: I forgot to match some patterns
        }

        foo(b);

        fn foo(B{ z, ..}: B) -> f64 {
          // get the z field of the first function argument
          z
        }

What in Rust are one liners, and can be used anywhere (let bindings, constructors, match, if-let, while-let, function arguments, ...) is a pain to write in C++ using `std::visit` and `std::variant`. The error messages of `std::visit` + `std::variant` are quite bad as well. And well, then there are also other fundamental problems with variant like `variant<int>` having two variants, `variant<int, int>` having 3 variants, but you can't reach the second `int`, etc.

You can translate all the code above to C++ to use std::visit + std::variant instead. I personally find that C++ is unusable for programming like this, and almost never use std::variant in C++ as a consequence, while I use ADTs in Rust all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > The motivation behind Weld is to provide bare-metal performance for > applications that rely on existing high-level APIs such as NumPy and Pandas.

With regard to Pandas this makes me pause slightly, since, while pandas contains lots of high quality and high performance implementations, the API of pandas in some places doesn't feel well-designed (the most obvious example is indexing of data frames via square brackets and the various properties like iloc).

</comment><comment><USER38> This is awesome. The quality of work behind it it's incredible.

I think there might be something interesting for this strategy also in the WebAssembly space :)

</comment><comment><USER39> Can anyone pls tell me if there are any other tools out there to increase performance of pandas?

<comment><USER40> Modin is an alternative pandas implementation for distributed processing using Ray or Dask:

[https://github.com/modin-project/modin](https://github.com/modin- project/modin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Interesting. It looks like Rust and Swift will be competitors in this field.

</comment><comment><USER42> This would have made so much of my work so much faster

</comment><comment><USER43> you had me at keras

</comment><comment><USER44> Interesting that initial implementation was in Scala but then they switched to Rust because of minimal runtime, language embeddability, functional paradigms, community and high quality packages. The hype bandwagon is so real in here. So basically one could say the same for several other well established languages, e.g. Haskell. Also what saddens me is that everyone forgets about D which has the same benefits and a syntax that does not make scratch your eyes out, especially when it comes to FP. Also D has not actually "skipped the leg day" ;)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you keep work logs, and if so, how do you use them? - <AUTHOR> It comes up every so often on HN "how to keep a journal" or "use this Vim alias to keep work notes". I'm curious, for those who keep a work log, do you review your notes? Or do you use them to optimize your working habits? And if so, how do you do this? <comment><USER2> I do loosely keep a log. I use a sublime plugin called plain notes (or simple notes? I don't know).

I used to think it's a great idea to log _everything_ , but now I've resorted to trying to only add to the logs whenever I think I can benefit from the knowledge later.

It has _definitely_ been very useful, I now have tons of notes on useful regexes I can use to search for very specific code patterns, tons of details about sql-injection preventions, optimizations, language features, etc...

I love the idea of working on a base of knowledge that gets sturdier and more reliable as more time goes on. It is a materialized kind of growth.

<comment><USER3> Oh cool, I use Sublime also. I actually made a slightly customized fork of this to help out: [https://github.com/unqueued/sublime- notelink](https://github.com/unqueued/sublime-notelink)

Most people would probably want the more powerful extension[1] which also has wiki link navigation, but it also has some incompatibilities with my setup.

I use a wiki-ish repo. A Journal.md that is my primary work log, but I also make little subpages when I want to expand into something specific or reference something previous.

So, I might do [[2018-10-11_issue_cron-aws-replication-issue]]. If the issue is more complicated, I would just roll it into a more general [[issue_cron- aws-replication-issue]]. I usually don't need to do this, and I try to not let it grow to be too complicated. But having it be somewhat structured has been really helpful. The links can act as tags, and I occasionally use symlinks as redirects. My Git.md page has lots of things I've learned at this job in it.

I keep it synced with my private git repo[2], where the Markdown wiki syntax works seamlessly with the Gollum wiki[3]. This also works if you want to access your wiki hosted on a private github repo.

[1]: [https://github.com/SublimeText- Markdown/MarkdownEditing](https://github.com/SublimeText- Markdown/MarkdownEditing)

[2]: [https://gitea.io/en-us/](https://gitea.io/en-us/)

[3]: [https://github.com/gollum/gollum](https://github.com/gollum/gollum)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't needed my notes that often but on occasion I do and that's usually when I'm glad I took the time to keep a engineering journal.

I accomplish this with a jupyter-notebook inside a git version controlled repository. I'll usually write my notes down in markdown format. Markdown is nice for me because it forces me to write clean/formatted/organized notes versus just writing random stuff down in a word doc. Jupyter-notebooks work great for me because much of my scripting is done with python. So I can include snippets of python code if I want as well as share it with my friends/colleagues.

Our company has an internal server that hosts the atlassian tools such as confluence/bitbucket/jira/cruciable. Each of us in the software department have our own company bitbucket account. Therefore, I keep my jupyter-notebook hosted on my bitbucket account.

For personal use I have moved away from paper/pencil journals. I usually collect my notes in the same way or sometimes just in a text file that I organized in their own dedicated git repositories on my GitLab account. Usually it's a project per project basis. For example, I version control many things in my home directory on my Linux computer like my bashrc/bash_profile/vimrc/zshrc and files alike. This gets consolidated in a "My_Linux_Setup" with other notes of mine of what packages and libraries I need to install should I need to reimage my computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> How often do you review these notes? And do you use any tools besides grep to search through them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I keep several logs (I'm a product manager):

1\. a "Weekly Notes" file where I track meetings or other notes that come up 2\. a separate 1 on 1 file for each recurring 1 on 1 meeting that I have 3\. a "Customer Meetings" file for tracking notes from customer meetings 4\. a "[customer name]" file for notes from meetings with important/key customers 5\. a Pomodoro Google Sheet file that I use to log my daily tasks and how much time I spend on them- each task is categorized and feeds into a "Summary" sheet that tells me how much time I'm spending on specific categories of activities month to month.

My usual workflow is to track meeting notes in my "Weekly Notes" file and review all notes in that file at the end of each week. I either delete information that's not valuable, move "valuable" information to specific files from #2-4, or create tasks in my to do list (which then feeds my Pomodoro sheet), so at the end of each week the "Weekly Notes" file is completely empty.

</comment><comment><USER6> I work in aerospace where the computer systems are heavily locked down and I can't just install org-mode.

So I began keeping a bullet journal for productivity reasons. However I discovered it makes a great work log if you actually use it. I can flip back and find notes on exactly what I was doing on any given day.

</comment><comment><USER7> Daily summary of things I did the day before in morning. Both work and personal.

So I can see what I did 3 weeks ago and gauge my progress over time, and critic myself effectively

Also throughout day I try and capture important details / thought processes as they happen _(I try to do this every few hours)_

</comment><comment><USER8> I started using Notational Velocity ([http://notational.net](http://notational.net)) years ago and still use it pretty effectively. I try to label things and keep them searchable. It's the repository for anything I might need to remember.

To be honest, I don't really review them but I do occasionally have to search back through them to answer questions like, "what was that feature I promised on that phone call?"

1 out of 10 notes ends up being useful, the others are pretty much trash.

</comment><comment><USER9> Moleskin journal, quick list of items and mind maps of more complex topics.

Cheap, reliable and easy. I keep them available for 2 years and toss them in a box after that.

</comment><comment><USER10> For personal learning: I use a personal wiki and update it ASAP whenever I learn something new, be it via a meeting, reference, news story, link. A collage of references. I use pmwiki but the wiki always-editable concept is more important than the software.

For meeting that are more formal/have deliverables, these are always minuted and shared. It's surprising walking away from a meeting with a seemingly clear conclusion the interpretation others can have several weeks later unless this is done. Stay on one page, literally. This could range from a photo of the agenda and notes made with highlights, to typed, depending on what's allowed/information security policy.

For notebook, I have a bull clip with loose paper which may include blank paper, templates, etc. When something's not needed, I shred it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Whenever I work at a job I have a text file. Each day I write the date, and I use it as both a scratch pad and a log of bugs fixed with their IDs, features implemented, relevant meetings attended, etc.

The files tend to be pretty incoherent but very good for searching for relevant keywords and dates.

</comment><comment><USER12> I usually keep a simple text file with names like 'notes.txt' or 'notes- project_reboot.txt', especially for projects that I work on intermittently. Many times these notes files disappear into the past, as these projects get abandoned.

But when I want to revisit a project that I'm going to prioritize, these notes projects are really helpful. They let me quickly get back into the mindset I had when I was last working on the project. They're usually a mix of technical notes, a really simplified collection of issues, and notes about where I might go with the project. When I do revive an old project, one of my first steps is usually to start up a new notes file and copy over only the most useful notes from the old file.

</comment><comment><USER13> I took the idea of rapid logging from Bullet Journaling, and keep a plaintext rapid log in nvAlt. I use Keyboard Maestro macros to generate daily templates that I log under, one plaintext file per month. A KM macro also seeds the month file with a bullet key.

The two basic sections per day are "Agenda" and "Journal."

Agenda has planned meetings noted, things I bring in from tracking (OmniFocus or JIRA depending on external visibility), and things that carried over from the prior day (marked with a leading ~ so I know I've been carrying them). I indent notes beneath them.

Journal has anything that opportunistically comes up, including ad hoc meetings or new adds, notes and tasks not directly relevant to something in Agenda.

At the end of each day (or beginning of next because I'm rarely perfect about this) I'll copy unresolved tasks from the previous day to Agenda of the next, then mark it with trailing ~ once moved. Moving to a tracker is considered resolution, so ideally I either finish the task or track it within the same day.

Finally there's a Highlights section where I cherry-pick stuff to later put in a weekly status report. All together, you get something like:

      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
      2018-11-05 -- Monday
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

      Highlights:

      -	Met with Bob, etc. re: proceeding with Widget tests
      -!	Learned something surprising from Carol

      Agenda:

      o	1-2pm		Git and Onboarding w/ Alice
      o	2-3pm		Widget Tests
    	  -	https://docs.google.com/notarealdoc
    	  -	Requirements vs. Tests?
    	  x	Reach out to Ted re: followup
    	  *~	Schedule meeting w/ Bob
      c	3-4pm		Yak Shaving
    	  -	Cancelled, moved to Wednesday

      >	Goal I brought in from tracking

      ~x    Task I copied from yesterday
      x	Write status report

      Journal:

      o	Watercooler discussion with Carol
    	  -	Some salient thing I didn't already know
    	  -!	Surprising or urgent note
    	  <	Send followup document to Carol

      x	Sent helpful aliases for working with the code to Alice
      <	Some task I moved to tracking
      *	Some task I still need to resolve or copy forward
      *?	Some task I'm not sure I need to do, explore further

      -	Alice working on diagnostic information for whatsit module

The biggest challenge was not going too nuts with bullets while still putting together a dialect that was personally meaningful. At this point I can log pretty quickly in realtime, whether on plaintext in an app or in a field notes book I also carry around for capture.

</comment><comment><USER14> I keep useful notes in one note. I don't log time anymore. Hallelujah! Was logging time from 2012-18 in various jobs and boy it sucks. The code quality reflects the clock watching too.

</comment><comment><USER15> Written notes, but it's mostly write-only or for very short-term things. I still keep all my notes and from time to time open them just to relive great memories.

</comment><comment><USER16> Some people really like emacs org-mode for this purpose.

[http://orgmode.org/](http://orgmode.org/)

<comment><USER17> Yup, my entire life is driven into org. Project schedules get driven in with specific tasks, the daily agenda view shows me what I've committed to, clock in/clock out, and biweekly reports for payment. I keep varying degrees of notes as I work through the tasks. The whole thing is kept on Dropbox with a my-org-config.el so that I can use the same functionality on my various computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For one project I keep notes in a git repository so I can grep them for stuff later. At the beginning of every month I create a 2018-11.md or whatever and keep the notes going there all month.

For another project I keep notes in a wiki. It's not as easy to search as git, but I still refer to it for things I did months or years ago.

</comment><comment><USER19> At work, I use JIRA and labels to track most stuff for my team.

At home, I still prefer to use a notebook to write things down. If I upgrade my phone, have a harddrive failure, or lose a service, I do not have to worry about losing my notes.

</comment><comment><USER20> I keep logs using Windows Notepad. I keep track of the time, what I'm working on and, at the end of the day, a note that says "Next:.." so I'll be able to pick right up where I left off.

I have a program to add up the hours for me.

Once I became a consultant, I started keeping a log for each client.

<comment><USER21> Just press F5 in Notepad to insert the current date and time.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I know. I think the cat showed me that when it walked on the keyboard. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since tha HN post a while ago, I have been using a simple event log (did file) with some did.sh and todo.sh scripts:

[https://pastebin.com/5vQewzyY](https://pastebin.com/5vQewzyY)

It is MVP.

</comment><comment><USER23> I keep logs on individual tickets I work on and separately also a daily wrap- up.

</comment><comment><USER24> I blog. It's not perfect (doesn't contain everything that I learned) but it had helped "future me" out periodically.

</comment><comment><USER25> I really like the taskwarrior for linux. Syntax like: task add xxx task list

Makes it super easy to do from terminal

</comment><comment><USER26> I have never heard of any such practice before.

<comment><USER27> Seriously? I've kept daily logs (on and off) since around 2002 when I first discovered John Carmack's .plan files.

[https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack- plan/](https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/)</comment></comment>


The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - <AUTHOR> http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/

<comment><USER2> I started off thinking this was going to be an intelligent article. But this line pretty much sums up all of it:

"I have a friend who went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically mediocre public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid people."

That could have been the whole article.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree. A lot of thought went into this very well written essay. Some of the author's criticism even applies to the new wave of dot-ly Silicon Valley startups.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best online communities for learning architecture? - <AUTHOR> Outside of work and classic software architecture design books, what are the best resources online for learning about design patterns, architecture, etc? <comment><USER2> [http://aosabook.org/en/index.html](http://aosabook.org/en/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks incredible. I've been really curious about how Nginx was written, so I'm excited to dive into this and others.</comment></comment>


Why I Use Psychedelics as a Tool for Self-Realization - <AUTHOR> http://news.bitofnews.com/i-trip-on-psychedelics-for-self-realization/ <comment><USER2> > They can introduce you to God, bridging for a time the seemingly > unbridgeable gap between the human and divine spheres of existence.

Well, they can give you an experience where you think you've met God. Any relationship to a God who actually exists in reality is purely coincidental.

> Perhaps more importantly, they can help you get to know yourself. Your real > self, defenses down, moat drained, drawbridge lowered. Because they > encourage such ruthless honesty, these molecules are ideal mirrors for the > art of self-reflection.

They can show you the truth about yourself. Or they can show you a lie so vividly that you believe it.

Psychedelics as a way to find truth is a sucker's game.

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone once said to me: "I don't smoke weed to enhance my trip. I trip to enhance my weed."</comment>


The IPO is dying – Marc Andreessen explains why - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5837638/the-ipo-is-dying-marc-andreessen-explains-why <comment><USER4> I have enormous respect for Andreessen when he's talking on topics of his expertise, as in the first half of the article. And it's not just his talk, either; A16Z is a deeply impressive operation. But so far I find his take on Piketty shallow and unpersuasive; it strikes me more as the view that is convenient for him to have, rather than one of deep study and experience. I'd rather he stuck to what he knows.

<comment><USER5> I follow Andreessen and a few of the other a16z folks on twitter, and every day they are tweetstorming what appear to be very insightful opinions and predictions on a whole slew of industries. And then I wonder if these guys are actually orders of magnitudes more intelligent than me and others, and have truly valid and well thought-out opinions, or if a good amount of what they say is nothing more than speculative bullshit that's hardly contested due to their reputation and success.

I've got enormous respect for them, too, but I'm beginning to think that the breadth and depth of expertise and foresight they display shouldn't be taken too seriously.

<comment><USER6> no doubt andreessen is smarter, both in raw intelligence and financial wisdom, than you or i or the next guy, but the billions of dollars at his command to assist in manifesting his will helps quite a bit.

and so does being at the nexus of the tech industry and seeing the entire ecosystem from the inside-out, "behind the curtain" so to speak. they have a lot of insider information, not the least of which is basically every single pitch that comes across every other VC's desk in town, and the actual financial health of funded companies operating in the marketplace. they all share information, that's why they don't sign NDAs.

<comment><USER7> > no doubt andreessen is smarter, both in raw intelligence and financial > wisdom, than you or i or the next guy

Nope nope nope. Money does not make you instantly smarter than everyone else.

Not sure why this is my craw... but everytime I see andreessen mentioned I always end up thinking of the crazy "Snowden is a traitor" bit. ah well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's an interesting presentation with some statistics: [http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/acsec/acsec-090712-ritter-s...](http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/acsec/acsec-090712-ritter- slides.pdf). Here's the associated paper: [http://fisher.osu.edu/supplements/10/12092/Where%20Have_Apri...](http://fisher.osu.edu/supplements/10/12092/Where%20Have_April_3_2012.pdf).

Section 6-7 of the paper are most relevant. Section 6 analyzes the question of whether SOX is causing a decrease in IPO's using estimations of SOX compliance costs. It concludes that: "[w]e find the effect of paying the compliance cost on the profitability for small firms to be limited." They also look at whether SOX compliance is driving U.S. companies to other countries that don't have such a regulatory regime: "[i]f SOX is an important reason for why companies, especially small companies, are not listing in the U.S., we might observe many U.S. companies going public abroad." They do not find that effect to exist.

They present the alternative hypothesis: that there is an increasing benefit to being part of a large firm (being acquired via M&A) than there is to being a small, independent public firm (doing an IPO). They analyze this hypothesis in section 7, by looking at the post-IPO behavior of companies. They hypothesize that if the burden of regulation is the driving force, we might see many companies go private after IPO-ing. Alternative, if it's the increased advantages of scale, we will see companies be acquired post-IPO. They find evidence of an increasing number of companies being acquired within three years of an IPO.

They conclude: "We posit that there has been a fundamental change in many sectors of the economy whereby the importance of bringing products to market quickly has increased. This hypothesized change has resulted in lower profits for independent small companies relative to the potential profits generated as part of a larger organization that can realize economies of scope and rapidly expand production. If this explanation is correct, fewer firms are going public and staying independent because value is being created in a sale to a strategic buyer in the same or related industry."

<comment><USER9> This is why so many networking companies sell to Cisco, and why Cisco's business strategy depends so much on M&A: Cisco's great asset isn't IOS, but instead that it runs one of the world's most powerful enterprise sales operations. If you sell network equipment, the basic concept of comparative advantage almost guarantees that Cisco can do a better job extracting value from it than you can.

<comment><USER10> "If you sell network equipment, the basic concept of comparative advantage almost guarantees that Cisco can do a better job extracting value from it than you can."

Doesn't take into account branding, sales, and marketing of a new organization which are always able to drive business purchases. Even in face of a formidable competitor.

Of course if you want to look at things at a point in time you could also be correct. But roll back to when Cisco started and see if there were companies that also had "one of the world's most powerful enterprise sales operations" that lost out to someone else. Like Cisco.

So while you could be correct it's also possible that "many networking companies sell to Cisco," because it's a "pay window".

After all wouldn't that be one of the reasons that you sold your company?

<comment><USER9> Not so much, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Marc Andreessen is being true to form when he attacks regulations, attacks Piketty and suggests that IPOs will flourish if we remove (what he describes as) "burdensome" regulations, "Regulation Fair Disclosure" etc.

However, he seems to be totally glossing over the fact that IPO regulations have already been weakened in recent years. This has resulted in less transparency and increased secrecy and that is exactly what people like Andreessen have been asking for.

It is questionable whether this increased secrecy actually benefits the economy or the average investor (of course, it is clear that the lack of transparency does benefit powerful interests in the country and that is why a bipartisan majority in our dysfunctional congress was able to miraculously come together and pass a bill to reduce regulations and cut down on IPO transparency). [http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/the- twitter-i...](http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/the-twitter-i-p- o-investor-beware/) touched on this topic in the context of Twitter's IPO.

</comment><comment><USER12> """ It's technically illegal to manipulate the market. But there are hardly ever any cases [enforcing these laws]. Basically the hedge funds run absolutely wild and do whatever they want."""

There's your problem right there. There is a great TED podcast from one of the regulators on savings and loans ("how to rob a bank from the inside") that said basically "we failed to stop either crash but we jailed 9,000 people the last time - this time not one got prosecuted."

I think we have lost our willingness to prosecute big business. I mean Madoff was prosecuted because he was just nakedly fraudulent, but an entire industry pretended liars loans was just a phrase.

So, want a better stock market, want smaller IPOs, want stronger financial system. Hire cops and let them do their work. We don't prevent murder or robbery - we prosecute it. Same here.

<comment><USER13>
      I mean Madoff was prosecuted because he was just nakedly
      fraudulent

Close, but not quite.

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html)

      Here's a "class struggle" example: name one Wall Street type
      who went to jail post 2008, everyone picks Bernie Madoff. Now
      name one person you know who was harmed by Bernie Madoff.

      That's weird.

      Note he didn't cause the crash, his criminal
      empire was a "victim" of the crash. What got him jailed was
      stealing from the wrong people-- that the media coded as either
      "celebrities" or "pension funds".

<comment><USER14> Dear Reader, 30th June 2014

It is true that Madoff did not cause the 2008 crash but don't tell me that the public at large do not know one or some of the hundreds of thousands of VICTIMS from the fallout of the 2008 crash, which Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford and other fraudulent financial institutions and bankers were party to. As usual the media looks after itself scandalising the truth to sell copy. As a Madoff class action lead plaintiff these past 5 years who has followed most aspects of Madoff related litigation together with cause and effect, I know that it is a misrepresentation to promote the idea that only celebrities or pension funds were defrauded. Indeed pension funds were attracted to Madoff and Madoff related investment schemes as their track record was in fact conservative, showing a consistent modest profit over a long period of time. To wrongly believe that individuals where not harmed is because the silent majority do not have the money to hire lawyers to fight their case. Many of the INDIRECT VICTIMS were pensioners like myself, having worked hard all their lives in order to provide for themselves and their families and then duped by bankers and unscrupulous financial institutions who had jumped on the Madoff money making merry-go-round. The US Justice Department has received over 51,700 Claims from 119 countries for more than $40 Billion US dollars. When you understand that Irvin Picard the Trustee for the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC (BLMIS)has distributed nearly $10 Billions to Madoff Direct Victims and taken nearly $1 Billion in expenses and legal fees and that there are still claims for over $40 Billions from INDIRECT VICTIMS outstanding, gives one an understanding of the enormity of the crime and the complicity and involvement of the 'Established Financial Institutions' For verification check the Madoff related web sites. [http://www.madofftrustee.com](http://www.madofftrustee.com) [http://www.madoffvictimfund.com](http://www.madoffvictimfund.com) Sincerely NevilleSeymourDavis email@example.com

<comment><USER14> Correction: The figure quoted for distribution from the Madoff trustee. It should have read that the Madoff trustee has recovered nearly $10 Billions and distributed over $5 Billions. firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd love to ask Andreessen, (or anyone here, really) a question informed by a book on pg's reading list:

I, too, am dubious about Pikkety's thesis. But I'd like to call out a distinction between the concentration of wealth, and the static nature of the oligarchy. One will continue to happen, the other Pikkety could be dead wrong about.

Andreessen says (paraphrasing) in the interview, 'Pikkety says wealth and oligarchies will happen, but look at the Forbes 400 and you see lots of churn, where is this supposed stability that will happen with rich people cementing their gains'.

It's true that Pikkety presents a view of social mobility becoming increasingly static, and reverting to a supposed historical norm.

But one lovely book I have pg to thank for reading, "The World We Have Lost", talks about how things were in England according to an analysis of actual data (county records etc). One chapter, 'The One-Class Society' ('gentlemen' were the class, the only class that mattered), speaks of how there actually _was_ a large amount of 'churn' in the gentleman class -- even outside of cities and the merchant classes, it was possible for a father to become a substantial yoeman, and his heir to become a gentleman. Families went up, families went down.

But despite a certain amount of mobility being possible, all effective wealth and power that mattered was still very concentrated, as it has been for much of recorded human history, for many reasons.

This was momentarily interrupted by the usefulness of humans as wet robots that were briefly able to exert the political and economic leverage necessary to drive hard collective bargains about their compensation.

That was temporary. (Offshore wet robots, and eventually dry robots, taking the place of the less-needed troublemakers).

Wealth, even if mobile, will inevitably become more concentrated due simply to better technology and efficiency -- how can this not be so? It seems self- evident.

So, I guess the question is:

If technology magnifies individual differences in productivity, and if we accept as a given that attempting to tax away the resulting fruits of that productivity is on the whole economically injurious to an economy, how can wealth not become more concentrated over time?

(Yes, of course, there will be churn and disruption, and wealth will change hands. Even as it did among the gentleman class in England in the 1500s; families came up and families went down. But because of technological magnification of productivity it should tend to go to fewer people. This just seems like a natural law.)

<comment><USER16> >and if we accept as a given that attempting to tax away the resulting fruits of that productivity is on the whole economically injurious to an economy

I wouldn't accept that.

Obviously 100% confiscatory tax rates would remove personal motivation. But there is a great deal of room below 100%, that would both allow for redistribution of wealth and for plentiful motivation for the overachievers.

Consider a scheme where typical capitalist is 100 richer than typical worker - still plenty of room for motivation, don't you think?

Besides that, inheritance tax does a lot to redistribute wealth, without necessarily destroying the motivation.

Another thing I can imagine is that wealthy individual will have to spend the money he made, or have it taxed heavily. All the lavish consumption is still a good motivator for working hard and getting rich, but without as much long term inequality.

Bottom line is that motivating best performers is not necessarily incompatible with redistribution.

<comment><USER17> > there is a great deal of room below 100%, that would both allow for > redistribution of wealth and for plentiful motivation for the overachievers

Indeed. The _lowest_ top marginal tax rate in the U.S. between 1940 and 1980 was 70%, and it went as high as 90%. That didn't exactly kill innovation or growth.

<comment><USER18> No, it didn't, did it?

It always amuses me to reflect that the time that we were most afraid of communism was also the time that we were closest to accepting it, at least if the marginal tax rates are any indication.

Anyway I don't think I could support 90% or even 70%, but I could definitely get behind 50%.

<comment><USER15> I agree with the gist of these comments; all I meant by that bit put that bit was to make the argument about the inevitability of inequality's increase a more conservative one. It seems obvious (to me) that redistribution, maybe in the form of basic income, is an inevitable result of this 'natural law' of increasing inequality.

That said: people did not pay those rates in the 50s[1]:

      The Internal Revenue Service reckoned that the effective rate of tax in
      1954 for top earners was actually 70 percent.

      Or lower. Marc Linder, a law professor at the University of Iowa, has
      shown that a more comprehensive interpretation of income that
      includes capital gains suggests the real effective tax rate for millionaires
      was 49 percent in 1953. The effective rate dropped throughout the
      decade, reaching 31 percent by 1960. That 31 percent is just slightly
      higher than the 29 percent level a Congressional Budget Office report
      figures the average effective tax for the top quintile will be in 2014.

\---

[1] [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-01-02/1950s-tax-f...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-01-02/1950s-tax- fantasy-is-a-republican-nightmare)

<comment><USER18> Just to be clear, lisper and I were talking about _marginal_ tax rates, not overal effective rates. Only for the very highest earners does the effective rate approach the top marginal rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it just a little disingenuous to suggest that the public is prevented from enjoying the benefit of company growth because they aren't allowed to invest in venture capital funds? They can't, of course. But they can invest in other vehicles that can.

Individual investors can't _directly_ benefit from Facebook's appreciation the way they could Microsoft's. But their retirement fund sure can.

Meanwhile, there's probably a strong case to be made that in the large, individual investors _shouldn 't try_ to hit these kinds of home runs, because they're outgunned by institutional investors and they don't have the capacity to diversify as well as institutional investors can.

<comment><USER19> Are there many funds from Vanguard or Fidelity that are regular participants in Series D/E rounds of funding? Or do you mean that an entity like CALPERS can invest some amount in the various VC funds? In the latter case, I think its been shown that VC as an asset class (invested in that manner) significantly underperforms the public market.

<comment><USER9> Not only _can_ pension funds like CalPERS invest in VC firms, but they do, often by design --- they have asset class requirements that militate for VC. Entities like CalPERS are actually one of the engines behind VC funds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are a few genuinely odd statements about the stock market, including pretty much all the bits that involve the word "growth." I wonder if he knows about the Fama-French model and that value usually performs much better for investors. Maybe acknowledging that would mean acknowledging that for a while there, valuations were just nutty.

I never know what to make of that kind of complaining about shorts.

The "The returns degrade down to S&P 500 levels" statement about investment managers was strange. Often those guys don't match S&P 500 returns and so that level wouldn't be a degradation...

The whole thing has a feel that makes me wonder if he was misquoted or something.

</comment><comment><USER21> He does make excellent points about the public market, it is in a tough spot and something does have to be done. SOX was a nightmare reaction in the wrong direction and we can see the effects a decade later. Crowdfunding might even be a side effect of this sideways investment market.

Maybe the stock market needs more risk tiers with differing levels of regulation, even a growth market where regulations are relaxed for smaller companies, essentially private investment open to public. One size fits all of the public market will regulate all the growth out, it is not even really an option for small-medium business to even try anymore like he says.

</comment><comment><USER22> He blames the SOX act for decreasing the number of IPOs but they were already down from 100s/year in the 80s to 80 in 2001 (before sox) and this trend continued. He seems to be performing the slight-of-hand anti-regulatory BS that accompanies the right these days: "over here there is a problem - <USER2> there is some regulation; wink wink nudge nudge".

<comment><USER23> Are you seriously taking the post-dotcom-bubble crash as the boundary to compare the 80s to?

I still agree with you, even with your own sleight of hand. :)

<comment><USER22> No, just two end points to draw a negative correlation between that keeps going today. It isnt hilly. So the introduction of SOX as an explanation for decreasing IPOs is BS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Whether or not you agree with Marc, I'm always impressed at how persuasive he is and I come away with new data and new additions to my reading list.

He talks about the drop in the number of US public companies being caused by the lack of new IPO's. It's also fueled by private equity delisting public companies, Dell being a prime example in October of last year.

The benefits of staying private are not just due to the onerous regulatory requirements. Delisting has tax benefits. It also concentrates ownership and provides flexibility in executive compensation - and both of these resolve some conflicts of interest between public investors and the exec team.

Staying private or going private also provides you with defensibility against takeover - one less thing for the exec team to worry about so they can get on with the job.

There's also less transparency in the organization which can give you a competitive advantage.

</comment><comment><USER25> In general, predictions from influential people can be translated as "My life will get a whole lot more convenient if x happens."

<comment><USER26> Agreed. Not sure why more people don't question when someone says something will benefit the "middle class" are they just saying that out of their own self-interest?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> These are some great points about the challenges of going public, but I wonder how much of it is just a deliberate logical decision to reap the most benefits. There's an incredible amount of capital flowing around (to the extent that in many cases it doesn't seem to be the limiting factor as in classical economic theory. And remember when YC decided to decrease the investment for practicality reasons?) so why would you IPO as Facebook at 1B when you get both more attractive private offers and also you can get enough new investment until the IPO value is at 100B.

</comment><comment><USER28> Erm, he is claiming that companies don't go public due to unchecked market rigging and that somehow regulation rather than lack of it is to blame - <USER3> doublethink is strong in this one.

And I've no idea why somebody who is in investment wouldn't be well aware that secular bear markets are typically longer than 10 years ([http://www.tradingonlinemarkets.com/Articles/Trend_Following...](http://www.tradingonlinemarkets.com/Articles/Trend_Following_Strategies/History_of_Stock_Market_Cycles.htm)).

He seems to be a complete buffoon from this interview.

<comment><USER18> He is arguing that the force of that regulation falls unfairly on public companies, against whom it can be enforced effectively, and not on individuals starting rumors, who are numerous and hard to track down. That's not a silly claim.

<comment><USER28> The problem he is talking about is market manipulation. Let's be clear, disclosure is precisely to prevent market rigging by insider trading and indirection (as the notion of a free market depends on all participants having equal information). He's in fact advocating going back to an insider's club and trying to dress it up as the opposite. I don't know if he's just stupid or he thinks the readers are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some data points for the discussion.

There were more IPOs in the first quarter of 2014, than in the first quarter of 1999 (which makes sense given the market highs):

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-ipos-partying-like- its-1...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-ipos-partying-like- its-1999-again-2014-04-02)

And this year is tracking to be the best year since 1999 / 2000:

[http://www.renaissancecapital.com/ipohome/press/ipopricings....](http://www.renaissancecapital.com/ipohome/press/ipopricings.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER30> "It suggests you're going to have a gigantic productivity boom. Isn't that the world we want to live in?"

Depends. If the future is like the last 30 years, we'll see another "productivity boom" but zero rise in real wages.

<comment><USER31> There were rises in real wages from 1980 until 2000 - but they weren't in all the places they were looked for. You had large populations of high-wage earners wiped out - steel, autos, that sort of thing.

In 1980, being an IT worker was basically a $10 an hour job.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, that person was talking about the sum total of real wages, and you're talking about a sector by sector comparison...

<comment><USER31> How would you go about even comparing them, really?

<comment><USER32> Often what people quote is the median real wage, across the whole economy. There are other measures as well, but it's one fairly simple one that gives a trend for whether the middle portion of the workforce is seeing wage growth. Rather than looking at wage changes within sectors, shifts between sectors, etc., it just looks at the aggregate end result: do all these changes add up to the the 50th-percentile American wage earner getting more or less money?

<comment><USER31> That is indeed one way. I am just unsure it's all that meaningful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wished these articles concentrated more on the solution. It is easy to say what is not working. He mentions that public company is not going to grow as much, but then where should we put our retirement money in?

<comment><USER34> I think he hints at the solution: reduce regulation (he names Sarbanes-Oxley as one problem).

<comment><USER35> If we did that, wouldn't people just run more Enron-type scams?

Fraudsters and con men have been engaged in a Red Queen's race against investor intelligence and government regulation since there has been economies.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_Hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_Hypothesis)

These regulations might be messy but they contain valuable information that has been learned from this arms race. They're patches to try to prevent the same thing from happening again. It's much like computer security, where OSes and network protocols are constantly patched or re-engineered to be resistant to newer attacks. "Attacks only get better."

It may however be possible to improve Sarbox by reducing its complexity, thereby reducing the complexity tax that harms smaller companies and discourages growth IPOs.

<comment><USER34> > They're patches to try to prevent the same thing from happening again.

Prevention by regulation IMHO creates as many problems as it solves because it punishes everyone involved, not just the guilty. I'm more in favor of prosecution (for fraud or insider trading, for example) as a method of prevention (where you just get punished for breaking the law after the fact).

<comment><USER8> The problem is that there is little will to prosecute people when things go really wrong. In terms of domestic politics, Arthur Andersen-ing a company and putting thousands of people out of work is untenable. And in a globalized economy, you don't want to develop the reputation of being the country that puts rich people in jail.

<comment><USER34> > And in a globalized economy, you don't want to develop the reputation of > being the country that puts rich people in jail.

If they've broken the law and are found guilty, that's exactly what you want (rule of law, equality before the law and all that). Otherwise, I agree with you.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that "[i]f they've broken the law" is not such a clear-cut question. Sometimes it is (WorldCom), sometimes it isn't (Qwest): [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-10-ceos-in-prison-whyd- they-...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-10-ceos-in-prison-whyd-they-do-it). This is especially true with white collar crime, where the difference between legal and illegal activity often revolves around intent. There is definitely the potential for the government to use white collar laws to keep meddlesome rich people in line.

<comment><USER34> In the US, isn't that what a jury is supposed to decide? In other places, it's the judge's decision.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but a jury trial is in itself a pretty disruptive thing. And it's very easy to bias juries against rich people, for obvious reasons. Even if the person is acquitted, it can be an effective way of keeping people in line.

Consider the investigation of Mark Cuban for insider trading, which didn't even result in an indictment or prosecution. I don't think it was politically motivated, but the mere possibility of that made a lot of people nervous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Maybe someone who's read piketty book can explain something to me ? From what i've read, It claims that wealth growth is superior to economic growth, in the long term. But how can this be possible, since wealth growth is a part of economic growth ?

I mean, if a big family own a lot of real estates, and that real estate gains value, then doesn't this increase of value also makes the general economy grow as well ?

It can't be as trivial, so there's probably something i'm missing in the definitions. Anyone ?

<comment><USER37> What is economic growth here?

Piketty discussed the return on capital versus earnings. He doesn't claim one is superior to the other, or even that in the long run one will certainly trump the other. He simply argues based on the evidence that it is likely that in the long run, because it appears that the long trend is negligible economic and demographic growth, there is no intrinsic law within capitalism that ensures capital returns will not become so important that inequality can reach massive levels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There is a good LSE podcast of a Pikkety lecture - hard to follow in his accent but interesting. Anyway, he mentions Europe has the greatest accumulation of wealth yet, but does not mention the massive tax windfall that will be inheritance tax after the baby boomer generation pass on - it may be that instead of using income tax to adjust inequality we simply uE inheritance tax to redistribute the wealth

"each generation should earn their own way" could be Pikkety new and less attractive call to arms

</comment><comment><USER38> Today's late stages financing rounds eclipse IPOs of yesterday's. One reason is inflation - more than 2 times during the last 10 years. Another is that the game has moved one step upstream. In the first boom people inside were caching in at the IPO thus leaving IPO buyers to hold the bug. These buyers think that they have learned the lesson and now they are getting in at the late stages before IPO - thus letting the inside people to cache in and leave these buyers to hold the bug.

</comment><comment><USER39> Marc Andreesson, the same person that believes Snowden is a traitor. Just cant get past his logic

</comment><comment><USER34> My favorite part (pure gold): _This is so powerful in the conventional wisdom right now. I love the Daily Show like everyone else does. But literally [Jon Stewart 's] answer to every issue is Congress should pass a law. [People think you can] solve any problem by passing enough laws._

<comment><USER26> People generally applaud things they already agree with, be it Jon Stewart's audience or Marc Andreessen's.

<comment><USER34> I don't get your point. The relevant part of that quote is _[People think you can] solve any problem by passing enough laws_ , not the Jon Stewart reference. You can be a member of both audiences.

Edit: I think this is an interesting discussion well worth having. From my experience talking to people, many believe that if government introduces exactly the right laws, we'll wind up with a utopia, which is IMHO very naive. Very few people consider the drawbacks and unintended consequences of each law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is a bit of a flippant dismissal, but the interview reads as if it's Mitt Romney answering the questions, not someone in the tech community.

<comment><USER32> It's been many years since Andreessen's day-to-day concerns have been tech- related, rather than finance-related. Not too surprising he would have opinions common among people in the finance sector, considering that's what he lives and breathes (this doesn't mean they're right or wrong, just that they are unsurprising for someone coming from finance culture).

It probably doesn't help that he's in business and daily contact with Ben Horowitz, who is even more sucked into the norms of that culture (check out the comments on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7191642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7191642)).

<comment><USER41> Can you give examples of which opinions you consider "finance sector norms" rather than a more neutral or individual viewpoint?</comment></comment></comment>