Suster: Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/12/27/should-startups-focus-on-profitability-or-not/?awesm=bothsid.es_GkX&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=bothsid.es-twitter&utm_source=t.co&utm_content=awesm-publisher <comment><USER2> I don't think it makes sense to even think about starting a company if you don't have some sort of idea of how you're going to make money. This whole idea of build it first and figure out the money stuff later may work for a few companies, but it's more or less a recipe for disaster. Investor capital is temporary, although many treat it as an endless source of income.

<comment><USER3> It was a great concept 5-10 years ago when ads made a decent amount of money and people didn't spend 80% of their time on Facebook/Google/whatever.

In the present day, we have large dominant sites, so you need a better way to make money than "I'll get the eyeballs and point them to ads eventually". The eyeballs aren't coming in sufficient quantity to make ads profitable anymore.

Either sell them something, affiliate or go mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there any success stories of companies that turned on the "profit switch" and started to make money?

I'm just very skeptical about this. It looks like many companies are looking for the big acquisition and there's no plan "B".

Also this article makes the assumption that companies today are actually making some revenue, but, most of them (at least the ones that get press) are not!

<comment><USER5> Google and Facebook for a start.

If you build something people want and use, _in the scale_ of national TV audience, then you will be able to monetize.

If you have a great product for a niche, then double-check your unit economics before you start.

<comment><USER6> It needs to be said that Google and Facebook are perfect, no-brainer advertising platforms. Mass audiences + natural use behaviors that can be monetized via ads + user analytics and segmentation capabilities = beaucoup advertiser bucks.

But it's a mistake to look at a typical startup and assume there's some sort of magical "monetization switch" that can be flipped when sufficient scale is achieved. If your platform isn't a natural fit for advertising, or for other forms of monetization, then monetizing is anything but easy.

Scale isn't sufficient. It's necessary in a lot of cases, but in and of itself, it doesn't guarantee anything.

<comment><USER7> I'm having a hard time coming up with a case where a platform /product achieved scale (in the age of modern advertising), yet couldn't monetize. Which ones can you think of?

<comment><USER8> Foxmarks/Xmarks and Delicious come to mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How does a startup ever become a business if it doesn't make money, at least to cover itself?

<comment><USER10> Eventually, every business wants to make profits. That's kind of the point of Business. The question is when. If you're a startup, you can:

A) Aim at near-term profitability (say, 12 month horizon) by keeping expenses low and focusing on revenue growth

or

B) Aim at long-term profitability (say, 5-10 year horizon) by raising a lot of money, spending it on sales and marketing, R&D, product, etc.

Each has advantages and disadvantages. My take-away from the article: if a competitor could beat you by raising $30M and focusing on growth at the expense of profitability, B) might be the right option. Otherwise, A) should be the default for most businesses.

<comment><USER9> In your perception, what percentage of long-term profitability startups end up achieving it?

<comment><USER10> Tiny, but the payoff is often bigger. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Clayton Christensen in his great book The Innovators Solution talks about being "patient for growth not for profit" which I think is a great way to look at it.

I recently asked him on twitter this advice would fit into the likes of FaceBook and others and got a reply back that they where looking into that.

It seems to me that the answer as always is it depends.

</comment><comment><USER12> Of course, they should. It is not whether a company should be profitable or not that is the important question, it is when it should be profitable that is more important.

Depending on a variety of factors, companies have runways of differing lengths. Ideally, you should attain profitability as early as possible. In the real world it is not that simple a construct.

</comment><comment><USER13> With subscription SASS services, growth means getting closer to profitability. Maybe that is why i like them so much lately. It is nice when things overlap. If I were in the consumer space where you grow before trying to monetize, I'd feel really nervous about whether that something that will drive profitability even exists.

</comment><comment><USER14> He answers "yes" for 98% of companies, which seems to be a reasonable guess, if not too low of a percentage.

<comment><USER15> But don't forget that almost all of the startups are in the 2%.

<comment><USER14> Nah, just the startups looking to become absolutely huge (most shouldn't).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Profit vs. growth is a false dichotomy.

Of course a growth investor is going to insist that "98% of startups should be growth focused". In this regard, profit and venture investment are two different (and, essentially, competing) sources of capital with their own upsides and downsides.

</comment><comment><USER17> Profitability should not necessarily mean that you are earning more than you are spending, but that you have found a scalable way to make $1 while spending less. Once you have achieve this, you can focus on everything else.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a great article and it reinforces for me, the importance of the concept of "ramen profitable". If you're Ramen profitable, you're putting essentially all of the profits you could be making into growing the business. You're not running at a loss, and thus not in the situation where a lack of ability to raise funds would kill your runway. But you're also in the situation where, if some invested were interested in plugging $10M into the company you should already have the mechanisms to manage that money and financial prudence to give the investor a high expectation that you'll put that money into growth.

Its really easy to spend other people's money and have no profits, and also have that show up as high growth. You can turn VC dollars into revenue thru a variety of ways that are unsound for the business in the long term. A trivial example is taking the VC money and then buying your own products on the open market. This would likely be considered fraud, but there's a variety of "partnerships" and inefficient advertising methods whereby you can do the same thing. If you just want to show growth.

But if you're ramen profitable, and have traction, you've shown the business is viable on its own terms. This is akin to finding product market-fit. They might not happen at the same time, but being ramen profitable is a lot easier once you've found product-market fit.

Of course investors, generally VC types, want to see massive growth and are not as concerned about profits. But as a founder you have to look out for he business... and there might not be as much VC interest as you would like, and in my experience with VCs they are known to drag out deals.

In fact, in several of the deals, during due diligence the VC determined the amount of cash we had on hand. They also made it known that they wanted us to start spending more on certain initiatives, and to not worry bout it, we'd close well before there was a cash crunch. Yet in both times, by the time we did close, they had us over a barrel because we were about to run out of cash due to taking their advice.

So, I think ramen profitability is a good balance. You're not wasting gross margin by banking profits, you're turning it all into, hopefully, an investment in future growth. You're less dependent on VCs, but have also shown the discipline to have compelling examples of how you can turn their money into growth, since you've been doing it with your gross margin so far.</comment>


RIP Solaris - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/webmink/status/904081073256243201 <comment><USER2> Longer piece putting things in context: [https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally- killed-...](https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-sun/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160149)

</comment><comment> ainar-g As someone who only worked with "mainstream" Unix-flavoured OSes, what was the reason, if any, to ever use Solaris over say RHEL? Was there anything that Linux distributions couldn't provide, besides resources from Sun/Oracle?

<comment><USER4> Solaris was technically superior to Linux in a lot of ways, and pioneered a lot of tech that only made its way to Linux later on and often in less elegant versions (if ever). For example ZFS, dtrace, zones, and mdb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We - and a lot of other people in similar boats - moved from Solaris to FreeBSD a while back. That ship sailed a long time ago, there isn't much that FreeBSD doesn't do out of the box in a similar fashion to keep people from making the switch.

The only thing I miss from Solaris is the focus on ABI compatibility. rlib was first-class, and apart from Windows, it's the only OS I know that is fully abi compatible between the x86 and x86_64 kernels (actually even more than Windows. The entire system, drivers and all, will work with either the x86 or the AMD64 kernel booted up without recompiling).</comment>


Don't Waste Your 20s at Google or McKinsey - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140727232741-15381-don-t-waste-your-20s-at-google-or-mckinsey?_mSplash=1

<comment><USER2> The author rightly points out that there is, dare I say, a disruption in traditional career paths. Consulting/Banking/Large Corporate was 20/30 years ago seen as a key entry point for any career. And in that there was an informal contract: start with us, work hard, and we will promote you internally and externally so that you can move into the next big thing. This ultimately depended on said big bank/corporate/consulting house continuing an inexorable growth to support everyone growing.

Today, big banks/corporates/consulting firms now no longer offer that same social contract (they would argue they do, but they don't - with few exceptions). You are expendable and most firms would be happy for you to stay where you are (same role, same salary) and if you want to change, go find it outside the company.

So in complete agreement with the author that a big name brand name won't necessarily move your career forward.

But extrapolating that further, what I am now seeing is that this first choice can irreparably hamper your choices down the road. Following the 'traditional' and 'secure' path of a big company/consulting firm etc is now seen as the safe, risk free, dare I say boring choice. If you have any intention of being in a risky role (ie startup/entrepreneur) the signalling from a big comfortable riskless name on your resume may do more harm than good.

I review candidates for roles in a fast paced tech startup. If I have a choice between someone from say Microsoft and someone from a failed startup, everything else being equal, I will pick the startup man/woman every time.</comment>


Sam Altman on Loving Community, Hating Coworking, and the Hunt for Talent - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-sam-altman-ai-tech-business-58f530417522 <comment><USER2> >They are never dumb, but upper-middle-class, pretty smart people that have grit and drive and creativity and vision and edge and a different way of thinking about the world. That is what I think I'm good at spotting, and that is what I think are good founders.

Pretty sure everyone on hacker news would identify with his description, but would be terrible founders. Like me!

</comment><comment><USER3> So much in here, so many topics, so many interesting insights. This quote hit me the hardest:

"Where I grew up, no one would ever walk by a person collapsed on the side of the street on their way to work and not do something about it. I hope I never get used to the fact that that happens in San Francisco."

I have a lot of thoughts about attitudes and politics that bubble up as I think about that, but I think I'll just let it stand here in the comments. Read (or listen, I almost forgot that's an option here too) the whole interview, it's pretty thought provoking.</comment>


Ask HN: a 4chan for Hackers and Startups? - <AUTHOR>

Firstly, I'm not referring to a /b/ for Hackers/Startups, or at least the content that community produces.
What I'm suggesting is a rapidly-changing community for hackers and startups. Something where almost everytime you hit refresh new content made by other hackers and startups appear. This news site has this, but it's really more about the news (Content generated elsewhere).
I check Hacker News several times a day, sometimes more than once an hour. This is one of the few kinds of communities I enjoy being around. What I don't like is that it's boring a lot of the time. Actually having conversations with people here other than comments never really happens. Not only is it boring for lack of conversation but boring because there isn't enough going on.
What do you guys think? <comment><USER2> People have conversations with other HNers, they just tend to do it in person. There're several meetups I know of involving HNers; I've met a few of the prominent names on the site.

There're two problems with a rapid-fire, conversational site for hackers:

1.) Good, thought-provoking work takes a long time to produce. If you read a blog-post that, say, features useful benchmarks between popular web frameworks, it probably took dozens of hours to produce. There are very few people willing to spend that time for 15 minutes of fame, certainly many fewer than are willing to post quick memes on an imageboard. Fewer people generating content + content takes longer to generate = a much slower update rate.

2.) Conversation is interesting for the people involved, but it's _boring_ for bystanders. Most lurkers here are attracted because they might learn something; if it just becomes an exchange of social pleasantries (or not ;-)) and memes between an established clique, it'd probably mean the long-term death of the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, good stuff isn't made quickly. But good conversations tend to lead to good stuff. In other words, the community wouldn't be for regurgitating pictures made by other people. It would be having for having good conversation with the right kind of people.

So maybe these conversations could be limited to only a certain group of people, like say 5 people who are contributing to it then nobody else sees it. If the conversation ends, and the person who started the conversation isn't satisfied they restart the conversation and it will be hidden from everyone who saw it. But this is just one possible way of doing it, there are probably better ways than this.

I guess it would be kind of like a meeting place for hackers and startups. That could turn into something along the lines of a dating site, but for meeting co-founders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think there just happens enough here :) If you're doing other things at the same time, a fast community just moves too fast.

I agree on the other thing though. This is not really a place where interesting conversations develop. Generally, after a few comments, a thread dies and fades away because it falls off the front page.

It would be nice if it had some heuristic to keep threads that still have active discussion higher up.

However, wouldn't a faster community make this even worse?

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree. I'm not saying faster as in faster growing. I mean a more active community. Instead of having a 100's of people submitting per day, have 10-30 people actively engaging in discussions with other people of like-minded interests.

What I really like about 4chan is the sheer volume of content. Everytime you refresh the page there's new discussions going on. People are just talking to people interested in listening.

If we can group together just hackers and startups to have a place to go for their questions, meeting people, and talking to people of mutual interest, in an active and engaging way, I think it would be a fun place to be.

<comment><USER4> I'm working on exactly this area at Sparkmuse. We're trying to build -the- startup community including all of the related disciplines (hackers, designers, marketers, etc). Although obvious, 4chan has an enormous community which is why they have so much activity. Successfully growing a community to that scale is immensely difficult.

Our community is based on a mission to help tech entrepreneurs succeed. That includes giving feedback on ideas, helping cofounders meet, providing discussion areas, and hooking founders up with good deals. If that is something you find interesting, I'm actively looking for people to join up with us and make it a reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that good founders will make a good product. The question everyone always hears though is "Where can I find a co-founder?", I'm having that question myself and it sounds like you are too. If that question sounds like something that'd be interesting to answer feel free to give me a call (925)-200-8843, and I mean right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Something where almost everytime you hit refresh new content made by other hackers and startups appear."

I think you just described Github. Follow your favorite hackers/startups and that's exactly what your news feed would be. Also see Forrst and Dribble for design work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't really mean code though. I meant content as in it could be anything. That stuff could be code but it might just be a question, or the individual asking for advice on their startup. I'm not a frequent user of Github but it looks to be just for code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/> ?

irc?

</comment><comment><USER7> Is that much "new content... everytime you hit refresh" distraction a good idea?

If you need this much second-to-second stimulation, can't you just join dozens of chat channels and 'follow' thousands of Twitterers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I have ADD, that's probably a reason why I want something like this.</comment></comment>


Ask a hacker: Top four anti-surveillance apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/ask-a-hacker-top-four-anti-surveillance-apps-7000016566/ <comment><USER2> I think the best apps are yet to be written. I recently wrote a blog post ([http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/06/tangent-design- thou...](http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/06/tangent-design-thougths- about-next-gen.html)) outlining ways I thought the SSL PKI could be tweaked to make it quite resistant to this sort of eavesdropping.

It is still on the HN new feed, if folks want to discuss technical details, but the reason I want to mention it here too is that key management is very hard in a case of resisting surveillance. The current PKI ideas place too much trust in third party certificate authorities (meaning the government can easily pull off man in the middle attacks with the help of network providers if they want, even without your keys), and because each negotiation occurs without context of past ones, there is no way to detect such behavior other than "the CA said watch out" or "this certificate isn't even plausible." Of course you can solve these by enforcing that everyone on your network uses th same local CA that you control but that breaks as soon as you want to talk to someone outside.

Building a PKI that can resist such efforts is not trivial and it involves challenging our assumptions. Until we do so however, we will run into all kinds of problem. I may be being paranoid, but it seems like this is a good time to be paranoid.

One of the things that SSH gets right is that it takes a diachronic approach to key validation. We should be building this in everywhere and alerting on key changes, while providing a way to ensure that keys can be safely and securely changed without having errors.

<comment><USER3> > It is still on the HN new feed

Lazy link: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844621)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember the time, about 6 or 7 years ago when I've asked in front of the whole class to the associate professor of the security course, whether building a text messages encryption app would have been a good idea as project for the course. The answer was a smickering "only a drug dealer would be interested in such a thing".

oh man, that hurt... if I only knew a valid point against the "I've got nothing to hide" argument as I do now...

<comment><USER5> _I 've got nothing to hide_

Got a handy link to that or similar arguments?

<comment><USER6> I keep this one bookmarked, for exactly that reason:

 _Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'_

[http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even- if/127...](http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461)

The problem seems to be, to me it's so obvious that it matters even if you have "nothing to hide", that whenever someone confronts me with that argument I'm a bit dumbfounded :)

<comment><USER7> Your link is broken, but this one works: [http://chronicle.com/article/Why- Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...](http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy- Matters-Even-if/127461&#x2F);

<comment><USER6> Fixed mine. Yours is broken in the same way :) Some weird escaping/encoding quirk going on there that seems to be caused by the trailing slash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Read these "Bugs, Caveats, Side Notes" published on the Onion Browser app's web site:

Major iOS SDK Limitation: Websites using HTML5 <video> tags will leak <video>-related DNS queries and data transfer outside of Tor. This includes YouTube, Vimeo, and any website using iOS-compatible HTML5 video. This is a behavior of the embedded QuickTime player and there is currently no known workaround. (h/t to josyw.)

iOS SDK Limitation: Javascript cannot be disabled in the `UIWebView`, so script-based detection may identify your device even if User-Agent Spoofing is enabled. iOS SDK Limitation: Related to above, the HTML5 Geolocation API cannot be disabled. The browser will ask you for permission to access your location if a website asks for it via the HTML5 Geolocation API. If you allow this, then said website will (obviously) know your actual current location.

That doesn't sound remotely safe to me.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would appreciate if someone went and fixed the title to have the word "mobile" in it. I was expecting something very different than I got :)

<comment><USER10> For the desktop: Tor and Bitmessage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sadly, TextSecure and RedPhone are distributed on the Google Play platform, so, if you don't want to tie a Google account to your phone or use Android without the proprietary Google applications, you're out of luck. (They are not included in the free and open source f-droid repository due to disagreements with the author.)

<comment><USER12> We don't distribute our apps on f-droid because we feel it's insecure, and because it doesn't provide the features we need to develop stable and secure software.

However, we are willing to distribute our apps outside of the Play Store, but we need the following things first:

* A built in crash reporting solution with a web interface that allows us to visualize crashes and sort by app version, device type, etc. This is essential for producing stable software.

* A built in statistics gathering solution with a web interface that allows us to visualize aggregate numbers on device type, android version, and carriers for our users. This has been crucial in shaping support and development direction.

* A built in auto-update solution. Fully automatic upgrades won't be possible outside of Play Store, but we at least need something that will annoy the hell out of users until they upgrade. This is necessary for ensuring that new security features and bug fixes can be propagated quickly.

* A build system that allows us to easily turn these features on and off for Play and non-Play builds. Gradle should make this easier.

If you're interested in seeing Open Whisper Systems apps distributed outside of the Play Store, we'd welcome your contributions.

<comment><USER13> Speaking as a developer who's app is both on Google Play and on f-droid, I somehow share your feeling about f-droid being "insecure"(x), but consider all of the other points very thin.

Crash reports and statistics are great, except if you explicitly want to NOT spy on your users.

Auto-updates are ok, but forced auto-updates take the user's autonomy away, and are only one step short of forced remote uninstalls (which are already documented with Google Play, so far only for malware).

A proper build system is great indeed, but has nothing to do with the distribution medium.

(x) f-droid security: by having f-droid build all the apps from source by default, and signing them with their own keys, two problems appear:

a) you can not switch easily between f-droid builds and maintainer builds

b) you as the user need to trust both the author and f-droid to not be evil, instead of just the author.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you have an Android phone, I'd recommend getting an Open Source ROM (so you can verify it is secure) and removing as much proprietary software as possible. I'd also use Firefox as Chrome for Android isn't Open Source (even though Chromium, Blink, etc are).

<comment><USER15> This suggestion comes up a lot, and yet isn't practical. I can read and write code, like many, but haven't the time or inclination (and arguably skill) to "verify it is secure". I can however watch what an app sends over the wire, which applies as much to proprietary as it does to open source software.

How do you go about verifying an arbitrary app is secure?

<comment><USER16> You can trust that there are a lot more developer eyes on open source software than proprietary software. You personally may not be able to verify every piece of software you have, but if you run free/open software, you know it's theoretically possible to discover vulnerabilities, and that you'll find out eventually if those security holes are found. In the worst case, you can hire a security professional to personally audit a program that is particularly important to you or your business.

You have no such options with closed software.

<comment><USER15> I realise that I'm risking being contrary, but my question is serious.

How would I know that an app has had lots of developer eyes on it or not? It's crazy difficult to uncover the latest known security posture of open source software.

Finding out _eventually_ is the exact same risk I take when I use proprietary software. It requires my trust. And it's theoretically just as possible to discover vulnerabilities in closed-source software (Windows, for example).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For the desktop:

\- Tor

\- Bitmessage

Bitmessage is specially interesting because it's not only encrypted and private, it actually solves the problem of spam and offers 3 kinds of messaging under the same interface: email-like, broadcast messages ala Twitter and chan boards.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think the real question should be is there possibly a back door on your mobile os of choice, because it won't matter what app you use if your os is already capable of capturing that data system wide.

</comment><comment><USER18> No iOS suggestions?

<comment><USER19> If you're jailbroken (which you probably should consider if privacy is a concern), FirewallIP is the reason I still haven't switched to Android: [http://yllier.webs.com/firewall.html](http://yllier.webs.com/firewall.html)

<comment><USER20> Can you expand on why one should jailbreak? Any other jailbroken app suggestions? I was under the impression that jailbreaking also opened you up to be hacked and made the phone less secure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://silentcircle.com](https://silentcircle.com) should have a mention too.

<comment><USER22> Claims that keys are stored locally and not sent to their network. Applications not open source, no way for anybody anywhere to verify such claims.

These are for paranoids, paranoids may not be able to read the source code and verify such things, but the fact the at least someone can certainly helps.

<comment><USER23> [https://github.com/SilentCircle](https://github.com/SilentCircle)</comment></comment></comment>


TLS Lite - <AUTHOR> http://trevp.net/tlslite/

<comment><AUTHOR> Having found no mention of TLS Lite in the last few discussions[0], I thought this TLS lib with just under 10.000 LoC (roughly 1/30 of OpenSSL's) deserves a bit of spotlight.

Written by Trevor Perris of "Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin's TACK."-fame. Summary from the page:

        TLS Lite is an open source python library that
        implements SSL and TLS. TLS Lite supports RSA
        and SRP ciphersuites.  [It] is pure python,
        however it can use other libraries for faster
        crypto operations.

Direct link to the Github-page: [https://github.com/trevp/tlslite](https://github.com/trevp/tlslite)

Now onwards with the arguments ("side-channel attacks?")!

[0] It has actually never been on HN, if Algolia is to be trusted.</comment>


Schema.org API - <AUTHOR> http://schema.maxthayer.org/

<comment><USER2> I am ashamed to ask the question: what is this for?

<comment><AUTHOR> No sweat; still figuring that out myself.

So, [http://schema.org/](http://schema.org/) stores schemas describing a significant subset of all things ever. It's intended to use to mark up HTML so crawlers can more intelligently understand what's on your page. Is `avatar` a movie, a show, or a profile image?

I'm experimenting with using schema.org's schemas in databases, saving myself time modeling my data, and making the aforementioned HTML markup easier. Part of that experimentation is this API, and using it to auto-generate schemas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wish this was a default feature of schema.org. I look forward to pouring over this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice man! Props on the contribution.</comment>


Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002 <comment><USER2> There's a prefessor at umich who studies this. I think I recall her saying that gender disparities in sentencing actually dwarfs the racial disparities that we hear about more often, but I can't find the link.

<comment><USER3> > There's a prefessor at umich who studies this. I think I recall her saying > that gender disparities in sentencing actually dwarfs the racial disparities > that we hear about more often, but I can't find the link.

Is that Professor Sonja Starr?

[https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_g...](https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_gender_disparities.aspx)

> There are other studies that have shown gender disparity in criminal cases, > but not as pronounced as Prof. Starr's findings. This is because she is > looking at "a larger swath of the criminal justice process" in her analysis, > she said. The paper states, "Existing studies have typically focused on > single stages of the criminal process in isolation"—in particular, the > judge's final sentencing decision. These studies compare actual sentencing > outcomes after controlling for the recommended sentence associated with the > defendant's ultimate conviction. The problem with this, Starr explains, is > that "the key control variable is itself the result of a host of > discretionary decisions made earlier in the justice process"—including > prosecutors' charging and plea-bargaining decisions. Starr's research > incorporates disparities found at those earlier stages, and finds that "more > disparity is introduced at each phase of the justice process."

> After estimating the amount of disparity left unexplained by the arrest > offense and other control variables, the paper explores "why these gaps > exist—and, in particular, whether unobserved differences between men and > women might justify them." Prof. Starr explores several potential mitigating > factors, such as the "girlfriend theory" (that "[w]omen might be viewed > as…mere accessories of their male romantic partners"), the role of women as > primary caregivers to their children, and the "theory that female defendants > receive leniency because they are more cooperative with the government." > Although each of these theories found some support in the data, they did not > appear capable of explaining anything close to the total disparity that > Prof. Starr found.

I wish more people were open to hearing this sort of information.</comment></comment>


UCLA group discovers 13-million-digit prime number - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/09/27/state/n043052D04.DTL&tsp=1 <comment><USER2> "Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of "P" minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609."

I think the last sentence is a mistake. If Mersenne primes are expressed as 2^P - 1, then the Mersenne prime is 2^43,112,609 - 1. as it's bigger than P.

<comment><USER3> The textual definition of everything is correct. There's just an error in the formatting of 2^p - 1.

A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form 2^n - 1 for some n. The new biggest Mersenne prime is 2^(43,112,609) - 1. An interesting coincidence is that the power itself, 43,112,609, is also prime.

The definition given by the improper formatting of numbers in the article: (2 * 43,112,609) - 1 = 86225217 = 3 * 13 * 2210903 and so is not prime.

<comment><USER2> 2^n - 1 is the Mersenne prime, not the exponent, right? (Even though the exponent is always prime).

So therefore, the new prime should be 2^43,112,609 - 1, and not just 43,112,609</comment></comment></comment>


Hash function efficiency - <AUTHOR> http://vak.ru/doku.php/proj/hash/efficiency-en

<comment><USER2> The author doesn't seem to understand the birthday paradox. Any hash which gets fewer than ~12 collisions (for his dictionary and hash size) is doing so by pure luck, and there is no logical basis on which to recommend the algorithms he identifies as having "minimal collisions".</comment>


The safest bike on the road - <AUTHOR> http://bikesafeboston.com/post/37594964359/safestbike <comment><USER2> Safe bike, yes-- but in the two shots where you see the rider's head, he hasn't got a helmet on.

<comment><USER3> Do you really want to turn this into a bike helmet thread?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#Science:_measuri...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#Science:_measuring_helmet_effectiveness)

The short version is that for most types of city bike use, a helmet doesn't seem to confer any noticeable additional safety. The analysis is difficult in part because while yes, a helmet can reduce the severity of head injuries, the full cost analysis is difficult. Fewer people bike if they have to wear a helmet, and don't forget that the helmet itself costs money, and must be replaced every few years.

I personally think most people wear bike helmets as a talisman, given the number of improperly worn helmets I've seen. I also think that people don't know if/when it's supposed to be replaced.</comment></comment>


Unclogging Toilets at $400k a Flush Hits Navy's Costs - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-24/unclogging-toilets-at-400-000-a-flush-among-navy-cost-overruns <comment><USER2> >the ships' sewage systems must be cleaned periodically with specialized acids

Where do the acid go? To a holding tank and not the sea I hope. Anyone know what these floating cities do with sewage?</comment>


Make Music With Gravity - <AUTHOR> http://balldroppings.com/js/

<comment><USER2> Amazing variety from such a simple setup.</comment>


New MacBook Air Released – $100 Cheaper - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html <comment><USER2> FYI if you're unfamiliar with the previous specs, a writeup from MacRumors:

[http://www.macrumors.com/2014/04/29/updated-macbook-airs- fas...](http://www.macrumors.com/2014/04/29/updated-macbook-airs-faster- haswell/)

> _All standard models of the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air now come with a > faster 1.4 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor along with the same 4GB of > RAM. Both entry-level configurations of the 11-inch and 13-inch models now > sell for $899 and $999 with 128GB of flash storage, while the higher-end > 11-inch and 13-inch models now come in at $1099 and $1199 with 256GB of > flash storage, respectively._

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is this news? I am a proud Apple fan, but I don't think a slight bump in their cheapest laptop needs to make the front page of HN. I feel like I am missing something.

<comment><USER4> Because people browsing [https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) decided to click on the upvote button. It seriously only takes 3 upvotes for something to end up on the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I totally missed some events, or Apple just "dropped" those in the store without any writeup/presentation?

Even if this is a minor upgrade (price cut and slightly faster processors), it still feels very weird to me.

<comment><USER6> They're just minor bumps to specs and a reduction in price, they normally don't do big announcements for something like this. Now if/when the retina MacBook Airs come out you can be sure there'll be an announcement for that...

</comment></comment><comment> saint-loup The non-retina 13" Macbook Pro seems less and less relevant.

<comment><USER7> It has a slightly faster processor (don't be fooled by "1.3GHz", the MBA's top CPU speed is 2.6GHz) but there's a 500GB non-solid-state hard drive, it's heavier, the graphics are older, and it has a lower-resolution screen. Why would anyone want it?

<comment><USER8> It's probably a diminishing use-case, but I personally still need an ethernet port. There's a surprising number of times when I visit somewhere (offices, universities) and they can't figure out how to get me logged onto the guest wifi, but I can just plug in to the wired network without a problem. Also some hotels have only ethernet, though that's getting less common.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, go and buy a thunderbold ethernet cable, they are really cheap and work fantastically.

The only downside is on Linux you have to reboot if you unplug the ethernet, but apparently that's being improved in 3.15.

<comment><USER10> What happens if you don't reboot?

<comment><USER9> It doesn't work :).

<comment><USER10> I see :-)

RHEL 7 will be a problem then, I assume, as it seems to be based on 3.10?

<comment><USER9> I run the 2013 on Arch, and apart from the thunderbolt issue it actually works very very well. Totally silent laptop with incredible battery life is a major winner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> except for the price and 100mhz faster processor is there anything else different than on model from 2013 (i am asking since i bought 2013 model couple days ago :))

<comment><USER12> I think you can call Apple and get a free upgrade to the latest model if you bought yours within 30 days of release of the new ones.

<comment><USER13> Yep, they'll upgrade you. It's the same as returning the product and buying a new one. I think the return policy is 14 days though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My 2012 is fine! I think the only upgrade that will make sense is to the Retina version.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone know if new MB AIRS still make a ton of noise with their fans? (BTW ton = any noise) I have a 15" MB Pro and love the fact that it's dead silent, unless I'm rendering video in Adobe Premiere or After Effects.

I'd like to get an 11" form factor for all my pogramming stuff, and migrate the 15" into some form of desktop computer.

Edit: Probably what I'm looking for in a non-existant 11" MB Pro.

<comment><USER16> I have a slightly older (ivy bridge) 13" MBA and it is totally silent. The only time I have ever heard fans was while rendering some high definition video in iMovie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 1366x768 in 2014?

<comment><USER7> I imagine Apple are optimising for battery life and cost here, rather than for sheer resolution.

Edit: Also, that's the 11", I doubt they can squeeze many more pixels in there before it becomes unreadable. The 13" is 1440x900, which is more reasonable (I'm using it as we speak, actually!)

<comment><USER17> This argument won't stand. New phone displays have significantly lower battery consumption than the old ones and substantially higher resolutions. And you can always employ tricks like reducing refresh rate to lower the consumption even more.

<comment><USER18> New phones are also not tied to the x86 platform, and generally run software that has been optimized from the start for performance.

There are other considerations too. Phone usage patterns are way different to computer usage patterns. The vast majority of phone usage occurs in small blips of activity during which execution can be optimized for the CPU to race to sleep state as soon as possible. Computers don't have the same usage patterns at all, and have a legacy of first and third party software (on all major platforms) that have not yet been optimized for performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Suddenly I don't regret buying a 13" Retina MBP at all.

</comment><comment><USER20> Consider all prices to still be +249 because owning one without the extended warranty is at times worthwhile, it can help resale if you sell it within the warranty period

</comment><comment><USER21> I thought Apple was waiting for new chips from Intel before the laptops would be refreshed. I'm surprised.

</comment><comment><USER22> No Thunderbolt 2 upgrade. I was going to pull the trigger on a couple of these, but I'm not sure now.

</comment><comment><USER23> Now I can only buy three decent chromebooks for the price of one MacBook Air instead of four.

</comment><comment><USER24> I guess this means they won't be announcing Retina MacBook Airs at WWDC in June.

</comment><comment><USER25> I still wonder, how well is windows 7 or windows 8.1 supported ?

how fast does xcode runs on it ?

<comment><USER26> Windows is supported. I imagine Xcode is almost completely unusable with that CPU and the tiny amount of RAM.

<comment><USER27> I use XCode on the previous generation, it's fine. Interface Builder bogs down on large Storyboard situations but aside from that it more than happily runs XCode, Photoshop, Simulator and all the usual expected tools (iTerm 2, Chrome, Sublime, Spotify/iTunes/whatever music player) without much complaining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Still, no 16 GB memory. The only thing left tying me to the MBP.

<comment><USER29> Really ? With an SSD you can even go with 2GB of RAM you won't see any difference.

<comment><USER26> You completely misunderstand memory. 4GB is the bare minimum for Mavericks, any less and even on an SSD you're delving into swap hell. 8GB is really skimpy to have just as an upgrade option, I'm constantly hitting my limits on 16GB (though admittedly my workload isn't typical).

<comment><USER29> yeah with 4GB you'll swap a lot, but as an SSD is really fast (no as fast as RAM of course, but still..) you won't notice it a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anyone heard if you can upgrade the SSD on these?

</comment><comment><USER31> Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the top line MacBook Air had 8 GB of RAM before, now it is 4.

<comment><USER32> When you select a model to order you can choose 8GB as a $100 upgrade.

<comment><USER31> That was my point, Apple reduces the price by $100 but reduces the memory to 4 GB. Which you can get by paying the $100.

It would have been better if the price stayed the same but with 8 GB instead of 4.

<comment><USER32> The $999 price (now $899) was always for the 4GB model. That did not change. Your initial assumption was wrong.

<comment><USER31> I wrote "top line MacBook Air"! Also I asked a question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Put another way, 7.6 - 10% price reduction</comment>


Default File Manager with Unity8 in future desktops - <AUTHOR> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2014-January/004414.html I'm pleased to see that they're working on a better file manager. <comment><USER2> I have been using Linux for a long time, Gnome since v. 1.4. While I am enthusiastic about the platform as a whole, I feel let down by the Desktop teams as a whole.

While a few aspects of the UI are greatly improved (anti aliasing, localization, FX, etc.). In terms of functionality, applications have not gained much.

Nautilus especially has a history of removing features for the sake of "Design" that people depend on. remember the time when nautilus always opened new windows when navigating the file system tree? Or the gnome project announcing to remove the middle-click paste? Ubuntu moving the menu out of the windows into a mac-style menu bar on top of the screen, a behaviour you could not revert as a non-admin and menus were invisible (in favor of the window title) when not hovering over that top-of-screen area?

In general I do value thoughtfully designed user interfaces and I see that care has to be taken to avoid clutter and keep them clean and sanitized. But with the linux desktops, it just feels like the designers have lost their focus and just harp on _abstract_ principles.

As a linux enthusiast it saddens me that Gnome has not even come somewhere near to a functional GUI that could compete to MacOS or Windows 7 in terms of ease of use and functionality.

To me, the CLI ecosphere will always make me want to choose linux. Yet with the linux desktop I have more than ever the feeling that I have an inferior piece of software in front of me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Canonical have an interesting challenge. The people who are most aware of their product are not their target market, and seem to actively dislike the direction their product is headed in. Worse, those people seem to be under the impression that they are the users that Canonical are targeting.

In my opinion, this phenomena might sufficiently explain why "desktop Linux" never went mainstream. No previous "desktop Linux" company was so willing to ignore the desires of existing Linux users in order to make a product that would be good for their target market. Canonical do seem to be bold enough to have a good chance at pulling it off despite their critics, though.

<comment><USER4> Meh. I think you are seeing more in the vocal minority than anything else. For myself, ubuntu has been fine and remains the distribution of choice.

I will confess I have considered toying with arch. I do build quite a few things from source, already. Still, I have found very little to fault ubuntu for. (And, really, I just want a high res laptop. Which I will quickly put ubuntu on.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I bet it's gonna be a file manager useable by power users with built in terminal, full copypastable path shown by default, ability to navigate inside of zip files as if they're directories, tree view, directory bookmarks, etc...

Ah wait, no, that are the features of file managers of 10 years ago, after that they only got dumbed down to target regular joe. Yay progress.

<comment><USER3> Ubuntu have made it really clear that they want to be a competitor to Windows and be very different from typical Linux operating systems. If you're using Ubuntu and expected it to be like Debian, you made the wrong choice of operating system. In my opinion, Ubuntu and Debian are both great, but they are targeting massively different types of users.

<comment><USER5> A competitor to Windows?

I'd say even Windows 98 has a better UI than what Ubuntu has become: at least Windows 98 has a taskbar that can show multiple instances of the same program.

(And fortunately, so does KDE still, for now, for long I hope)

<comment><USER3> Whether they're succeeding or failing isn't really the point. The point is that if you're in the IT industry, the Ubuntu UI isn't even trying to cater for you. It is Canonical's expectation that you will prefer some other operating system rather than Ubuntu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is Ubuntu replacing everything above the Kernel one piece at a time?

<comment><USER4> Would that necessarily be a bad thing?

<comment><USER7> Yes. See my earlier comment here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7083763](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7083763)

<comment><USER8> Are we really going to fault Canonical for developing new open source projects, or for those projects not being adopted outside of Ubuntu? I don't have a need for another file manager any more than I needed another init system, but if this was being done by anybody besides Canonical, the comments would say ~"So stoked to see a new option disrupting the file manager space".

They're betting they can provide a better UX with their own tool. If they fail, or can't maintain it, or whatever, then that's on them, and people will shift onto other distros.

I'm looking forward to seeing what they do better, in the hopes that other projects can benefit as well.

<comment><USER7> If Canonical wants to develop a new file manager, power to them! I, too, am looking forward to seeing what they do better.

My comment was specifically in regards to the idea of 'what's wrong with Canonical reinventing everything', e.g., discarding Wayland for Mir. Sorry if that was unclear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't like the NIH syndrome, but I like using what's probably the most popular distro and especially the software variety in the community PPAs.

So what's the best way to get a more vanilla Linux desktop experience without losing the convenience of the Ubuntu PPA ecosystem? Use a Ubuntu remix? Can you use PPAs with Debian? Or do you not even need them with the cutting-edge Debian variant (whatever it's called again)?

edit: NIH, not NIMBY, thanks kudu for the correction.

<comment><USER10> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY)

I don't understand how it applies in this context?

<comment><USER11> I think the OP meant NIH (Not Invented Here), rather than NIMBY.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unity is already moving from Gtk to Qt, so the move away from user-visible GNOME elements is natural. The question is what they're going to do with the GNOME "plumbing". To fork and maintain a mixed Gtk/Qt legacy codebase, or to reimplement everything from scratch...neither seems attractive.

</comment><comment><USER10> I liked the days when Ubuntu was a nice, simple distro that I could recommend to beginners. Nowadays, every desktop distro is becoming more and more of an "island". The main "alternative" to Ubuntu, Linux Mint, is also replacing pretty much every piece of the OS with its own (NIH).

I would actually like for there to be a nice, simple distro that anybody could use, with only general, vanilla Linux software.

<comment><USER13> Try elementary OS.

<comment><USER14> Elementary is amazing but isn't it one of the most NIH-inflicted distros? Custom DE, app manager, dock, I think every app it ships with is theirs, etc. I guess it's a bit more vanilla than the Ubuntu it builds on, but it's all very NIH.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but I recommended elementary OS because the person I was replying to wanted "a simple, nice OS anybody could use". I've used a lot of Linux distros over the years (I have a "Linux computer" and I often install different distros just for fun) and when someone asks me the same question my answer is usually "either install Xubuntu or elementary OS". I could be considered a power user, but even I'm using elementary OS right now because it's so hassle free and it just works. Xubuntu is the same, but it's a bit boring compare to elementary OS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the Tech Press Forces a Narrative on Companies It Covers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-narrative-on-companies-it-covers-5f89fdb7793e#.51vjvdpvs <comment><USER2> Thank you for sharing, really enjoyed this story.

Feels like the mnemonic & advice can be applied to all manner of stories, not just about a startup.

I've, also, seen similar arc play out with individual contributors that are superstars one instance and then fall down to the level of "mortals".

The advice at the end is fantastic, too. The first two items: Don't get angry and Don't force anything (doing nothing is doing something).

Are key in all kinds of difficult situations. Doing nothing is not always a bad thing, I tend to forget that part.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you plan to work on this weekend? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Starting on some beginner kaggle competitions</comment>


Matlab–Python–Julia Cheatsheet - <AUTHOR> https://cheatsheets.quantecon.org/ <comment><USER2> The second example in the first section is a bit misleading. They say that to create a column matrix, ie. an (n, 1) matrix, the syntax is

        [1 2 3]'

but that will give you the (lazy) hermitian adjoint of the column vector, not a column matrix.

        julia> [1 2 3]' isa Matrix
        false

Instead, if you really need a true (n, 1) matrix you should 1) not use adjoint because that will also take complex conjugates (unless that's what you wanted) and 2) use collect to turn the lazy transpose (or adjoint) into a true matrix

        julia> collect(transpose([1 2 3]))
        3×1 Array{Int64,2}:
         1
         2
         3

However, you almost never need to do this sort of thing and you should be fine using either transpose on a row vector or just using a real column vector.

Also, near the end they talk about closures but don't actually show any closures unless one is to assume the code snippets they're showing are actually inside a function body themselves.

<comment><USER3> That python "closure" is a big fat lie too due to python's late binding. Depending on the context in which that code is being defined it may or may not work as expected.

The only guaranteed way to ensure that a free variable in python function scope (it's not a closure) does not change is to pass it explicitly as a default value.

        a = 1
        def function(x, a=a):
            return x + a

That will work in loops. Otherwise what you are really writing is

        a = 1
        def function(x):
            return x + the_last_value_a_obtains_in_this_scope

        a = 2
        assert function(1) == 3

<comment><USER4> > That python "closure" is a big fat lie too due to python's late binding.

What? It's not a big fat lie, it's the exact truth. The same truth you'd get in any language, even Scheme:

      > (define a 1)
      > (define (f) a)
      > (f)
      1
      > (define a 2)
      > (f)
      2

That's just how closures work...

<comment><USER3> Fair enough, I think my complaint is more about the fact that closures and python are not accompanied by a safety net the way they are in some other languages, that doesn't make them not closures, it just makes them a less useful abstraction (I've basically given up on using anything other than full objects and list comprehensions in python due to the countless subtle and often silent irregularities in how a form behaves when used in different contexts).

Your example is true at the top level in scheme, but semantics in top (REPL) are different (at least in Racket [0, 1]). In a source file you have to explicitly use set! to mutate a so it is harder to shoot yourself in the foot. In theory the implementation of closures is the same, but in python's case you are free to mutate yourself into unexpected situations. Whereas I'm actually not even sure it is possible to construct a situation in scheme (not at the top level) where you could induce a situation similar to the one in python.

0\. [https://gist.github.com/samth/3083053](https://gist.github.com/samth/3083053) 1\. [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/racket- users/0BLHm18YUkc/BwQ...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/racket- users/0BLHm18YUkc/BwQdBlnmAgAJ)

<comment><USER4> In all brutal honestly I think you just need to realize this is just you being upset at having shot yourself in the foot at some point (don't worry, we've all done it) and then trying to blame it on closures somehow, in this case by saying this makes them a "less useful abstraction". In all honesty, no, it just doesn't. It makes them more useful. If I can make an analogy, it's a bit like saying bicycles should only have fixed gears as a "safety net" because you've broken or slipped your variable gears in the past and now you've just learned to take a car or train if you want to go faster than first gear. I mean, that's definitely _one_ way to live your life, but most people don't do it that way... they just realize their mistakes are a natural artifact of being in the learning process and instead of abolishing gears, they keep practicing more so that they eventually get the muscle memory to use their vehicle properly and don't have to think about this problem every time. That's the way to solve the problem for good -- so you can avoid the downsides while reaping the benefits at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, looks like Julia would be an easier transition for a lot of academic scientists. What am I missing? I mostly use R and Python. Can anyone tell me briefly why I should use Julia over Python?

<comment><USER6> The whole development experience is so much better than Python.

<comment><USER7> Right?!

Not having a packaging system that is a stapled-on-afterthought is so nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The final MATLAB example of "Inplace modification" is not correct.

      function f(out, x)
           out = x.^2
      end
      x = rand(10)
      y = zeros(length(x), 1)
      f(y, x)

What happens here when you call f(y, x) is:

1\. The arrays x and y are passed to f (no memory copying done yet, since MATLAB uses copy on write)

2\. When we have `out = x.^2`, this will allocate a new array in memory and store in it the result of `x.^2`, and will call this `out`. The original `out` which was passed into the function can now be garbage collected (although it won't be, because it's still in the parent scope as 'y')

3\. When the function exits, the new `out` goes out of scope and can be garbage collected.

So all this example does is allocate a new array, assign x.^2 to it, and then throw that result away again. There's no in-place modification.

You can't really pass a matrix by reference in MATLAB like you can in Python, however in some cases you can write your function in a specific way which will ensure in place operations are done and prevent a huge matrix copy. For example (pauses are just there so that you can watch task manager memory usage):

      function x = inPlace()
          x = rand(100000000, 1);
          pause(3);
          x = doSomething(x);
          pause(3)
      end

      function y = doSomething(y)
          y = y.^2;
      end

Conditions required are:

* Input and output variables must have same name in caller

* Input and output variables must have same name in callee

* Callee must be inside a function, not a script

Look here for a more detailed description: [https://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2007/03/22/in-place- operat...](https://blogs.mathworks.com/loren/2007/03/22/in-place-operations- on-data/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I hate these 2x2 (or nxn) matrix examples. You never know what is considered column and what is row.

<comment><USER10> Julia takes after Matlab, where matrices are defined by enumerating each row followed by a semicolon. Personally I prefer Mathematica's syntax, but the Julia/Matlab syntax is still way better than Numpy syntax (though to be fair most of that is due to the lack of native matrix support in Python).

If it helps at all, this is exactly what you'll see when you create a matrix in Julia:

        julia> mat = [1 2; 3 4]
        2×2 Array{Int64,2}:
         1  2
         3  4

<comment><USER11> FYI you can also do this

        julia> mat = [1 2
                      3 4]

<comment><USER10> Oh that's neat. Thanks, I wasn't aware of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great to see Julia gaining more exposure. I worry that it will languish as an obscure research language without strong corporate champions.

<comment><USER6> Juno is developed by Uber.

<comment><USER13> any source for that? the github of the juno project have 4 people, and none of them are working for Uber

<comment><USER2> I think that's some misconception coming from the fact that the package in the Atom repository is called Uber-Juno. I don't think the Juno devs have anything to do with Uber.

<comment><USER13> Ahh, yes, that is a plausible explanation. It adds to the fact that not a lot of people know that Uber is a german word, indicating high hierarchy

<comment><USER14> Über just means above. So "über dir" is "above you". Urban dictionary has uber in english to mean superior, but that is not the original German meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Last week I converted a simple side project in Python to Julia. It's a sequential Bayeisan estimation problem. A pleasant surprise that the Julia version runs 30x faster than the Python counter part. I am sure the Python code can be improved using Numba and various tricks. But the Julia version simply works with minimum effort.

I also feel the language really is built for people doing numerical computing. I smiled when I find out that randn(ComplexF64) gives you circularly-symmetric complex normal random variables. It feels like Julia understands what I want.

<comment><USER16> Is the randn(Complex64) used in your Bayesian estimation project? I'd be curious to know how if so!

<comment><USER15> Yes but not directly. It is used in the Monte Carlo simulation part. In communication systems everything is complex :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The feature that sets Julia apart from any other language is that it is a dynamically typed, optionally interactive language that is statically analyzed to compile to efficient machine code. [http://aptronnoida.in/best-python- training-in-noida.html](http://aptronnoida.in/best-python-training-in- noida.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Are there analogs to Simulink or some of MATLAB's toolboxes in Julia? I know of a few shops that use Octave because developer pricing for MATLAB isn't enough when we have an alternative, but there's still a need for a roving license or two because there are a few things lacking in the ecosystem.

<comment><USER19> For Simulink the closest you'll get is probably OMJulia[1] which is a set of Julia bindings to OpenModelica as opposed to a stand alone library

[1] [https://github.com/OpenModelica/OMJulia.jl](https://github.com/OpenModelica/OMJulia.jl)

<comment><USER20> For simulation there is also a library that reimplements the Modelica language in Julia using macros:

[https://github.com/ModiaSim/Modia.jl](https://github.com/ModiaSim/Modia.jl)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Julia is missing from the Ubuntu 18.04 repos for some reason. 16.04 is stuck at v0.45.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, the Julia community for better or worse seems to have an attitude of "don't get julia from a package manager, download a binary from our website or built it from source." No doubt this has to do with the fact that releases happen quickly and it's a giant pain in the ass to go and push binaries to all these package managers.

<comment><USER22> This is because LLVM has bugs (like all software) and Julia carries around patched versions of LLVM. Those fixes are being upstreamed over time, but it takes time. Julia is a very hardcore test suite for numerical libraries, so it happens to find things that only show up when numerical stability is pushed to the edge, and Julia Base will have some tests fail if you don't build with the patched LLVM. That said... a lot of users might not notice a difference. But if you want what is known to be the most correct, then you should use the patched one. However, Linux package managers require that you use their LLVM, which in some cases is the wrong version, and in all cases is not the patched one.

<comment><USER2> I didn't know that the package managers require you to use Linux's LLVM. That's a shame.

Do all the major package managers do this or is it just apt? I have a relatively new version of Julia from pacman on Arch, I wonder if it has a patched LLVM or not...

<comment><USER23> And rust does the same, as they also need their own LLVM version.

<comment><USER24> We don't _need_ it, we just prefer it. You can build with stock LLVM if you want. (And that's how distros treat Rust as well; they use their own version instead of ours.)

<comment><USER23> What about the bugs that required a patched LLVM?

<comment><USER24> You get the bugs. No way around that. We try to upstream as many of our patches as possible, but we'll always be a bit farther ahead. It's just the nature of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> how did numpy manage to override `@` in python ?

ps: ohh this was introduced in python 3.5 [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27385633/what-is-the- sym...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27385633/what-is-the-symbol-for- in-python)

pps: [https://pastebin.com/s751DRDi](https://pastebin.com/s751DRDi)

</comment><comment><USER26> Are there good Tensorflow and Pytorch alternatives in the works writen in Julia?

<comment><USER20> Yes, there are already a couple.

The most well known is a 100% Julia neural network library called Flux.jl [1], which aims to become what Swift for Tensorflow wants as well (to make the entire Julia language a fully differentiable language) through Zygote.jl [2], and even without it has already great integration with the ecosystem, for example with the differentiable equations library through DiffEqFlux.jl [3]. Plus the source code is very high level (while being high performance, including easy GPU support), so you can easily see what each component does and implement any extension directly on your code without worrying about performance.

There is also another feature complete native library that allows some very concise code, Knet.jl [4], and the Tensorflow bindings [5].

[1] [https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl](https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl)

[2] [https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl](https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl)

[3] [https://julialang.org/blog/2019/01/fluxdiffeq](https://julialang.org/blog/2019/01/fluxdiffeq)

[4] [https://github.com/denizyuret/Knet.jl](https://github.com/denizyuret/Knet.jl)

[5] [https://github.com/malmaud/TensorFlow.jl](https://github.com/malmaud/TensorFlow.jl)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like it.</comment>


Coding Starter Kit - <AUTHOR> https://www.humblebundle.com/books/coding-starter-kit-no-starch-press-books <comment><AUTHOR> Posted this in case there are kids out there that need something to do in these times of social distancing.</comment>


OS X ring notifier for iPhone? - <AUTHOR> http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=976390

<comment><USER2> I found some software that does just this and a lot more. Unfortunately, it hasn't worked terribly consistently, and the voice quality when using my MacBook Pro as a mic/speaker isn't passable. I really love the ideas presented in the app though and am holding out hope that he continues to develop it.

<http://www.sustworks.com/pa_guide/index.html>

<comment><USER3> This is due to the Bluetooth Headset Profile (HSP) using a terrible codec[1]. There's nothing you can do about that.

[1] 64K PCM or CVSD <http://www.swedetrack.com/images/bluet03.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tiger had built-in support for that (also for SMS sending) over bluetooth. Worked with my ancient Ericsson T39. Still remember how impressed I was when bought my first MacBook. I have no idea why it's no longer supported, anyone knows?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is just such a hilariously classic geek forum entry I couldn't resist! Has it all: mystery, hope, humor, wonder, passion, aspiration, disappointment...

</comment><comment><USER5> A ring notifier would be kind of pointless, unless the call could be routed to an app within OS X in order to be answered.</comment>


Working Remote: How We Successfully Run Clarity as a Completely Remote Team - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/claritydesignsystem/working-remote-how-we-successfully-run-clarity-as-a-completely-remote-team-273e5880896b#.ks1pnqh50 <comment><USER2> Thanks. I wish more people were accepting of this.</comment>


Seen everywhere in last U.S. crisis, moral hazard is nowhere in this one - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN21U0GV <comment><USER2> The statement about the lack of inflation from QE and other stimulus programs from 2008 is pretty questionable. There's been little inflation as measured using usual consumer price indices, but the construction of those indices is typically fairly focused on consumer goods and underweights the assets that rich people tend to invest in (stocks, real estate, bonds, etc).

The QE and stimulus programs from 2008 were significantly more targeted toward the upper and upper-middle classes (arguably without that much trickle-down), and so there wouldn't be much significant inflation as measured by consumer price indices.

But if we look at the assets that rich people invest in (since it's mostly wealthier people who benefited from the 2008 stimulus programs), then I'd say there's been a significant amount of inflation - P/E ratios for stocks have been historically high in the last few years, real estate in desirable cities has gotten significantly more expensive, and bond yields have been low.

We seem to be already seeing some of the same, with the stock market being pushed up by the Fed's commitment to 4T+ in stimulus this time around and ever lower interest rates.

<comment><USER3> Every HN thread on economics has a bunch of comments like these that are earnestly misinformed about economics. When commenting on something outside of your wheelhouse, please recall Socrates from the Apology: "I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom."

I'll point out just two deficiencies in these threads and leave the rest to you. If P/E ratios in the US are "too high," then people would invest their money elsewhere for better return, right? Maybe international stocks or bonds or whatever. And why don't they, if they have every incentive to seek a better return? Because there are no better returns, even in countries with higher interest rates. So how could P/E ratios be too high? The more likely explanation is that this is the "new normal" \- savings outpaces investment opportunities for many reasons (aging populations, growth in countries with stronger saving cultures, etc.), which pushes up the premium on assets.

Second, on the subject of interest rates and QE, a little international perspective would make you reconsider the effect on the overall economy. All other developed economies have lower interest rates, more QE, and slower growth than the US. Look at Europe, look at Japan. The issues of "why are asset prices rising" and "why is inflation low" are much larger than just US policy. We are talking global trade and demographic factors that influence these things. The current stance of fiscal and monetary policy is the symptom, not the cause. And in fact the US has been significantly more successful than our counterparts on that topic, as a fast and strong response in 2008 pre- empted the kind of drawn out economic malaise seen in Europe, where the ECB waited years before easing policy to the degree that we had. Now Europe has lower rates, more QE, lower inflation, a worse labor market, and less growth than the US. And that's before factoring in the coronavirus crisis. Policy may have increased inequality in some ways, but if you're going to make that claim you have to also answer the corresponding counter-factual: potentially the poor would have been even worse off (relative to the rich) if there were no policy interventions and the labor market collapsed. There have been some papers on the topic, and it is not at all obvious that inequality is worse now than it would have been if there was less policy intervention.

<comment><USER2> I never said that P/E ratios in the US are "too high". I said that they've been higher in recent years than in past history.

This is, as you said, because the amount of money chasing investment opportunities is increasing. I agree that the reasons for this are complex, but one significant reason that the amount of money chasing investment opportunities is increasing is central bank stimulus (not just in the US, but worldwide).

The rise of asset prices definitely is a much more complex issue than just US policy, but I'd still argue that stimulus by the US is one of the causes, not only a symptom.

I agree with you that the US has been more successful in managing the 2008 crisis than the ECB, and that part of that was because we recognized that we needed stimulus earlier on in the crisis. But this doesn't contradict anything else that I said.

I also never made the claim that the counterfactual of no stimulus would have been better - I personally believe it would have been worse, since the economy and labor market would have likely went through a longer and more serious collapse. But again, this does not contradict what I said about central bank stimulus being one of the significant causes in the rise of prices in financial assets.

<comment><USER4> > I also never made the claim that the counterfactual of no stimulus would > have been better

To be fair, that wasn't the only option. There was the debate in 2007/08 about how much of the stimulus should be monetary vs handouts directly to taxpayers vs infrastructure. There's some who believe that the "infrastructure" portion was too small of the pie, hence the stomach for things like "Infrastructure Week" from Trump or "Green New Deal" from the left wing of the Democrats.

<comment><USER5> In the abstract, I liked the idea of spending it on infrastructure, but over the ensuing decade I've become deeply skeptical of the ability of the US government to effectively spend more money. California high speed rail and the NY subway are exhibits a and b.

<comment><USER6> I agree with you (to your point) about California high speed rail: a solution looking for a problem. But NY subway is arguably something that could generate huge returns if the capex was committed to modernizing and automating the public transport of the biggest city in the USA and a major financial capital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, not really: bailouts punish people and business who incurred costs to operate in a way that would allow them to pause their economic activity for months (cancellable supply/rent/employment contracts, cash reserves, etc.), and favors those who did not do so.

In general, a society where it is possible to pause all economic activity at any time is going to be much more robust than one that doesn't, and is going to reduce the impact of an apocalyptic event that the government cannot bail the society out of, possibly avoiding human extinction in the most severe cases.

For instance, if everyone stores several years worth of food and water at home, then even the most catastrophic events are much less likely to kill the vast majority of people in the world.

So, there is a moral hazard, and it may be wise to either minimize the bailouts or to make such resilience mandatory.

<comment><USER8> Businesses were never expected to be able to totally shut down for months at a time. It's not reasonable to suggest that businesses who can't handle that have been irresponsible or are less deserving of help.

<comment><USER9> Wimbledon took out a pandemic policy year after year. Turns out they were stupid to do so, they could have invested the insurance premium in the stock market and waited for their bailout.

<comment><USER10> Think in risk terms. When they were assessing the risk to their business posed by a pandemic then they could not foresee the govt response. An insurance policy is (almost) certain to pay out. Risk assessed and mitigated. "turns out" is not a method I use for business planning.

I'm not sure what sort of bailout they would get either. My firm does not expect a loss of earnings style bailout. I would venture that they did the right thing.

<comment><USER11> Insurance is most certainly NOT certain to pay out. Case in point Star Cinema Grill; albeit this is an egregious case where the insurer is blatantly arguing and bluffing a lawsuit. Insurance will fight tooth and nail to not pay out.

[https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/hospitality/llo...](https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/hospitality/lloyds- of-london-underwriters-hit-by-lawsuit-from-pandemiccovered-cinema- chain-219185.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were > much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. His > prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at > the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, > losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful > misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked > everything and open every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, > the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled > everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to > run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man > who owed his lack of success to nobody."

Catch-22

<comment><USER13> Thank you. It's been too long since I read this, putting it in the 'to read' pile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like these reporters have missed the entirety of reddit, there is plenty of criticism there, from what I'm assuming amounts to thousands or millions of people.

<comment><USER15> The article seems to be about how the political response from conservatives seems to be muted, making the point that all their talk about small government, no regulation, and the evils of socialism appear to vanish the moment the people who need government assistance are millionaires and not common folk.

<comment><USER16> While I definitely don't make a habit of defending conservatives, when they were concerned about the fed "picking winnners" the winners the fed picked were generally the millionaires.

<comment><USER17> But if the government picks winners, they might pick the wrong millionaires, instead of "all millionaires".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The moral hazard overlooked here is the fact US govt policy being dictated by congressmen, hedge fund managers and "investment" bankers who see it terms how they can profit from a long bull run, and profits to made from shares in the companies who have quasi-monopolies on the the products that will eventually "save" us from coronavirus.

And the fact that you can't expect a health system run for profit to prepare properly for a pandemic which may never happen.

By the time the products ordered for the crisis have been delivered the crisis will be over, and whether they will be stored in preparation for another pandemic is questionable.

</comment><comment><USER19> _People are undertaking sacrifices for the common good. We need to make them whole. To the extent we have the ability to make them whole we should be doing that as a society," Powell said. "They didn't cause this. Their business isn't closed because of anything they did wrong. They didn't lose their job because of anything they did wrong."_

Why is it important if anyone did anything wrong or not? The world is experiencing a massive calamity and a lot of wealth is being destroyed. It's not obvious that you can make everyone whole without causing unintended consequences.

<comment><USER20> It matters because after this crisis, in a few months time, we want them to go back to doing what they did before. You want people to go right back to opening businesses and getting jobs and buying houses, as quickly and enthusiastically as possible. More so if we can manage it. That's what prevents a crisis from becoming a depression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd argue that's in part because of the protection racket that's partially at the heart of the moral hazard: the poor regulation of healthcare services, at least in the US.

What this should be laying bare is the failure of federal regulation, how this got in the way at a critical moment, and when it was too late, things only got better when they got out of the way. Or what about a healthcare system oriented toward protecting the hospitals, those at the top of a hierarchy, the rent seeking, and so forth, rather than oriented toward public health? What about an artificial reduction in the number of providers to increase their salaries, a lack of competition in provider models and delivery of services?

There was a Slate article about how one side-effect of the pandemic is how much it has exposed bullshit everywhere, how easily so many rules are set aside when the cards are on the table. Some of this is happening now with healthcare, but few are asking what else could have been different, other than single payer care.

To me this all feels like some kind of abuser-victim relationship, where people are subject to some broken system, and then when things go wrong and are failed, they're made to be dependent on their broken system and start cheering it on.

I realize this all sounds bleak but to me there are so many things that could have been avoided, from the highest levels of the government all the way down, and there seems to be little introspection about this. Instead we just blame the virus, rather than what caused our systems to be so vulnerable in the first place.

<comment><USER22> I agree with criticism of governments in these instances but in order to be more thoughtful we should be critical of _how_ the governments ended up in this state. In other words: I do not think that the government (as a concept) is the issue here. I think that the current (and decades past) American government is the issue. They are 100% corrupt and culpable but it is not inherent to every government.

Note: I am NOT saying you are ignoring what I've said above. I have just seen many people make poor generalizations about government because of their experience with the American government's inability to prioritize citizens over the networth of the elite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The biggest moral hazard is in colleges. The boards of colleges justified higher expense structures in the name of trying to win a zero sum rankings game.

The best case for them is a lot of people wondering why they are paying $30k a year to watch online lectures while inflation wipes out the debt.

The worst case for schools is a total restructure due to lower revenue and donations due to students unwilling to overpay to sit at home and alumni not having the funds.

The future is no college degree at all.

<comment><USER24> > The biggest moral hazard is in colleges. The boards of colleges justified > higher expense structures in the name of trying to win a zero sum rankings > game.

That's not what "moral hazard" means.

<comment><USER23> For clarity:

"In economics, moral hazard occurs when an individual has an incentive to increase their exposure to risk because they do not bear the full costs of that risk"

In this case, the risk is the increased cost structure in order to get the benefit of accolades from winning the zero sum rankings game.

If it were their money instead of the universities' money, they likely wouldn't have increased the cost structure

</comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude In The Netherlands, our government reserved a special € 100 million for startups, because they are not eligible for the normal relief program because these startups have no revenue and "their succes is measured differently".

In the grand scheme of things, € 100 million is peanuts of course. Still I found it baffling. I should also mention these are loans, but if the startups fail the government is still holding the bag.

<comment><USER25> There is no default in the Netherlands, so the entrepreneur is always holding the bag.

<comment><USER26> There is. [https://business.gov.nl/starting-your-business/choosing-a- bu...](https://business.gov.nl/starting-your-business/choosing-a-business- structure/private-limited-company-in-the-netherlands/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I see so much talk here on about how companies should be left to go bankrupt because of their "shitty decisions", that "the weakest companies should be allowed to fail", and "shareholders have to hold the bag" (all from comments here).

This fundamentally misunderstands how businesses work.

If your business has a 5% profit margin, and you're supposed to have enough savings to weather, say, six months of essentially full fixed costs but zero revenue... that means you would need to save a full _ten years of profits_ before ever returning them to shareholders, and if your company is less than ten years old, goodbye.

That's ludicrous.

It's also against the "accumulated earnings tax", where the IRS virtually requires companies to return their earnings to shareholders (via dividends/buybacks) yearly, because they're financially penalized otherwise.

Good management teams aren't supposed to save for pandemics. It's not normal business. Companies in general are _unable_ to buy insurance against it (because there's no insurance company with enough money to pay out). Capitalism is about weeding out the better companies from the worse -- not ones that are arbitrarily more or less hit by an unpredictable global catastrophe.

Letting swathes of companies go bankrupt through zero fault of their own is economic disaster, and neither is there anything remotely fair or capitalistic about it whatsoever.

<comment><USER28> I find your implied assumption that starting a company should in normal circumstances be seen as a get rich scheme that pays out in under 10 years as completely toxic, but that's an aside.

The point is large companies shouldn't be hurting for money, they have two big options on the table to generate money right now: issue stock or bonds. However, there are a lot of really stupid large companies that decided to max out their credit cards in the good times to pump up their stock price via buy backs. They can't issue bonds, but they could still issue stock. However, that would cause the price to crash, and Trumperino in Chief can't allow that to happen.

<comment><USER29> Of course, the Fed is implicitly at fault here too for keeping interest rates too low for too long. They tacitly encouraged borrowing with low rates. If rates had been higher, companies would be thrilled about lowering rates due to covid and would start to issue bonds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There seems to be little talk about it on main stream media but it doesn't feel like that's the general sentiment.

The narrative has been mostly contained. It's scary times, really.

</comment><comment><USER28> This article is no way reflects reality. There's a reason the "money printer go brrr" meme is blowing up. There is already significant outrage about the moral hazard of what's being done by the fed, and the sentiment is growing. This article reeks so badly of blantently trying to control the narrative to the advantage of the elite that it's disgusting. Rather than let companies that made shitty decisions die and let capitalism operate, we're creating a horde of zombie companies that are going to plague our economy for decades.

Welcome to the beginning of the lost decades. With these policies, it's going to decades before we see any true economic growth in the US.

<comment><USER31> Who needs economic growth when we can just lower interest rates to make The Line keep going up? It's been working over the past few decades...

<comment><USER22> In a sense if we can collectively agree that the future will be better... we're all fine. We are in a crisis but there is really no reason that if the world stopped improving _today_ we would not be fine as a species. Good, even, if we redistributed wealth from hoarders.

Alas, said hoarders are the ones who make everyone else believe that The Line means more than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't understand this stuff. Politicians have directly ordered closures. If your bottom falls out from under you because you were playing fast and loose that seems inherently different than being told from above "you just cease your main method of generating revenue until we tell you otherwise."

<comment><USER33> You're asking me,(general tax payer) to give you money to ride out the storm, but you get all the private gains in the future while I take the risk now.

There is a much more fair way to do this. Firms simply issue new stock and sell it to the market. Firms get the capital they need, the general tax payer isn't holding the bag.

<comment><USER34> I find it interesting that this entire thread seems to be about fairness. Whether something is fair to corporations/people really shouldn't be the point. It should be about keeping people alive and having a functioning/prosperous economy. I'd much rather have that than a "fair" economy.

<comment><USER35> A propped up fake economy that continues to grow income inequality?

Fairness matters in an economy and government. If less people have faith in its institutions it will begin to break down.

There needs to be a trade off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This was incredibly frustrating to read because, intentionally or not, it perpetuates and normalizes the actual moral hazard of this crisis. It conflates the correct notion that if the government is forcing people not to work, it should make sure they don't starve to death, with the false notion that, in a capitalist society, businesses who were so balance sheet reckless that they couldn't last a month without government loans ought to be bailed out simply because it's "not their fault" that an economic crisis exposed their irresponsible planning.

That's not how capitalism works; the weakest companies should be allowed to fail. The government can still lend to keep their workers alive, but what it's really doing in this crisis is keeping their stock price alive, which overwhelmingly benefits corporate insiders and rich people who own stocks. That's the opposite of how the corporate form is supposed to work—equityholders get all of the upside on a sunny day, so they're entitled to ZERO protection on a rainy day. It's risky to buy stock. Buy bonds if you don't want to shoulder risk.

The most frustrating thing to me is that the same companies who are asking for buyouts could have simply held excess cash, or raised their employees' wages, or invested in profitable assets—all things you expect companies to do under capitalism! But instead, they invested in stock buybacks, which means literally spending retained earnings on inflating their own stock price. Apple is a classic example: earnings has actually been flat since like 2015, but earnings _per share_ has gone up because Apple has bought back $250B of its own stock in the last eight years or so. But at least Apple is solvent! The airlines, for example, are asking for a bailout in almost _exactly_ the same amount that they have spent on stock buybacks in the last several years. It frustrates.

<comment><USER37> I don't think the problem is "a month" of inactivity, although clearly there are no shortage of people and businesses who can't survive even that.

The real problem is that we're a month in and there's no genuine end in sight, optimistic politicians notwithstanding. The actual end of the crisis could be two months away or two years.

<comment><USER36> That's a fair point. It doesn't make me feel any differently about the proposition that, in a society that preaches values like rugged individualism and fiscal responsibility to its poorest members, it's strange to me that 99% of the government's per capita expenditures are going to places other than the people. Literally 99%. And by blindly subsidizing every single business, including like hedge funds and other speculators who partially caused the liquidity crisis, the government in sowing the seeds for the next meltdown and disguising insolvent firms as economically viable ones. All of which is bad for society and the economy.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, I've definitely been in the UBI camp for a while, and I'm hopeful that if nothing else positive comes out of this that we'll rethink how we're structured as a society in that regard.

So it's safe to say I think more of the money should be going directly to the most vulnerable, but I'm also sympathetic to the point that, at least as far as the way we've structured our economy, public companies aren't _allowed_ to prepare for a 100% loss of business for months at a time. How much grief did Apple get for sitting on a pile of cash when it could be "better spent elsewhere"?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Request Submission of Engineering Post of Stack Adoption - <AUTHOR>

I am building StackBus (http://www.stackbus.com/) for users to share their stacks (languages, frameworks, tools, etc.) and about reasons of why to choose it and what they build with it.
I was thinking it would be better if we could archive articles on how certain company or product adopt certain stacks, such as: - https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/learn-stop-using-shiny-new-things-and-love-mysql - https://code.facebook.com/posts/745068642270222/fighting-spam-with-haskell/ - http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/01/netflix-likes-react.html
If you know of any articles of company or product adopting a certain stacks, do share it here :) thanks <comment><USER2> pardon me if it's obvious, but what's the difference between this and stackshare.io ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Similar but different.

stackshare.io like one liner, where I prefer people to be more descriptive on why and how they use it.

It show Company XXX use this and that, but didn't show why they choose it, and to do what.

StackBus also double up as your tech resume :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you set up your work day, schedule/life to maximise flow states? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Can you prefix your question with an 'Ask HN:'? That way HN users can easily see what is a question vs. an article or link.</comment>