Can't you just turn up the volume? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Amp/cant-you-just-turn-up-the-volume-4ecb7fc422a <comment><USER3> This is nifty.

My father has hearing loss and it's bad enough that not only does he use hearing aids, he is constantly turning them up until they feedback and start ringing. He doesn't hear the ringing, but I do, and I have some hearing damage of my own. And he wonders why his hearing aids go through batteries so fast.

Their description of how hearing loss works gives me some ideas on how I can help my father manage his hearing loss better than just constantly buying batteries.

However, I do have one complaint with the article, and that's their (mis)use of terminology, specifically, dynamic range. Dynamic range is not, as they claim, the range of frequencies one can hear, from lowest to highest (e.g. 20Hz-20kHz). That's bandwidth. What dynamic range is, is the ratio of quietest to loudest sounds possible, often expressed in dB.[1]

For example, as they mention, human hearing has about 120dB of dynamic range. An audio CD can encode a dynamic range of 96dB. The 24-bit files professional audio studios work with can represent up to 144dB of dynamic range.

Perhaps it's a pedantic distinction, but using already existing terms for what you mean to say is less likely to cause confusion than misusing one that means something else.

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

<comment><USER4> It seems to me that a simple way to eliminate the feedback issue is to separate the microphone from the speaker. Hearing loss runs in my family, so I've watched my relatives struggle with hearing aids, and I've decided that when it's time for me:

1) I will build it myself and figure out the details, to hell with the audiologists and their racket.

2\. I will carry the microphone and amplifier in my shirt pocket. No more feedback.

Ironically, with the advent of personal electronics, everybody wears some sort of gizmo on their body, so I think we could just persuade the elderly that hearing aids don't need to be invisible any more.

<comment><USER5> I'm not a hearing aid expert but the microphone and earpiece may currently be tightly coupled because it has to be. That is, human ears are very sensitive to phase shifts and time delays. Placing the microphone in a location that is not your ear may throw off your hearing somewhat (possibly ability to locate from where a sound originated).

<comment><USER6> I can vouch for this. I used to have an FM system - this is a mic that transmits on a very specific FM frequency to a receiver that's paired with my hearing aids. I loved it because I could easily use it to hear people near me in loud rooms, but it sucked in meeting rooms. The reason why is that I would hear someone speaking through my hearing aids and through the mic - <USER2> slightly different times. This is the phase shift Dwolb speaks of. This reduced clarity significantly.

That said, if analog31 wants to wear the mic on his shirt, that distance is actually good enough for most 1 to 1 conversations. Just understand that you're trading off "spatial perception" (no left/right balance if only one mic).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm completely deaf in my left ear, and I wear a hearing aid in my right ear. What's really cool is that my hearing aid has BlueTooth, and starting with the iPhone 5S, Apple supports direct-to-hearing-aid technology. That means when I get a phone call, it streams directly from the phone to my hearing aid -- not out of a speaker, _directly_ to my ear. Very, very cool.

Here's more info: [https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/hearing- aids/](https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/hearing-aids/)

That said, if I had an older hearing aid or didn't have this one, I'd definitely use this app. They are spot on about hearing loss and how it's more than just a volume thing. In fact, most of hearing loss is really an _understanding_ thing. I can hear your voice just fine -- I just can't hear 100% of it, so the words don't make sense to me right away.

</comment><comment><USER8> I once went to a 3h long blackboard talk given by James Hudspeth [1] on the physics of hearing.

It was one of the most fascinating things I've ever heard: it turns out that not only the cochlea performs a Fourier transform of the sounds we're hearing, but it can also selectively amplify some frequencies, by vibrating the very same hair that detect the sounds.

Sometimes the mechanism that amplifies some sounds goes wrong and that's why sometimes old dogs seem to emit a high pitched sound from their ears, and also the cause of some forms of tinnitus.

If you have some time to kill do go read the wikipedia pages of the cochlea and hair cells, it's really fascinating stuff!

[1] [http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/labheads/JamesHu...](http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/labheads/JamesHudspeth/)

<comment><USER9> I have always wondered if that high pitched sound was real! No one else heard it, and it makes so little sense I always figured it was my hearing.

<comment><USER10> Do you hear that high-pitched sound all the time? That's tinnitus.

Or do you only hear it from dogs?

<comment><USER9> It turns out I have really decent hearing. So it's unlikely to be tinnitus; at worst I have a sort of hearing after-image when a tonal frequency suddenly cuts out (and now I'm guessing that's an effect of the ear actively filtering - I can't wait to watch that video).

But yeah, I did hear it on the dog. It's so anomalous to hear a high pitched noise coming _from_ an ear that I was willing to question my own hearing/sanity. The best I could manage to guess was that there was some sort of small gas pocket leaking, which made a little bit of sense since my dog (samoyed) had a bubble on his ear (that eventually gave him a sadly adorable floppy ear when it eventually drained - prolly an aural hematoma); the bump never actually seemed to deflate due to the noise, though. At the time I was an early teen just sort of beginning to learn analytical techniques, so that reasoning was the best I could muster. These days I tend to trust/understand my senses more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article. Thanks for posting, varunsrin! I've been following development of SoundFocus for awhile.

I'm profoundly deaf. This is a technical term classifying the degree of hearing loss; to give you a sense of where this fits, the typical classification range is mild, moderate, severe, profound, total.

Between a combination of hearing aids and lip-reading, I've done a reasonable job of integrating into a hearing society. Not perfect, but ok.

I've often wished for a different approach to correcting hearing. It crystallized for me after I read this article by Jon Udell: [http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont- help-y...](http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-you- talk-to-a-person-with-hearing-loss/)

In that article, what Jon found was that his mom would hear best if you spoke at a low to medium volume close to her ear - this worked better than any shouting at a greater distance could accomplish.

And it should be easy for you to simulate - get a friend to talk to you from 50' away - you can still hear them, but there's some detail loss that wouldn't happen if they're 3' away.

I still benefit - a lot - from MBC, but if someone could come up with a way to make the incoming sound sound as if it were right beside me, man, that would really help me understand people clearly.

One non-technical solution, that people use to ensure that deaf people can understand you clearly is to enunciate consonants audibly. An example of this is is the word "red" \- it becomes "erREDdead". I don't know if there's a name for this so I can't point you to a page describing how to extra-enunciate all the letters. As useful as it is, people speaking to me like that always makes me feel like I'm dumb, because they sound dumb saying it. Clearly I have issues :-)

<comment><USER10> I don't think you have issues. I wonder if they sound dumb because of the difference to "normal" speech, where we typically say words in a daft manner to young children or those learning to speak? We associate them with reduced capabilities (in a sense) because they are children and are still learning. That isn't meant offensively, more that we know the child needs to learn?

But if it helps you hear, I think it's great!

That article you linked to was interesting. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My wife is an audiologist, and she and her colleagues found this excellent. One suggestion if I may (actually that my wife made), is that where you have the soundcloud files demonstrating MBC, you add one demonstrating what a person with hearing loss would hear, before the one with the MBC.

That way a person can judge the improvement that MBC gives to a person with hearing loss, instead of just judging the reduction of quality to that of a person with perfect hearing.

But again, excellent article!

</comment><comment><USER12> My mother as a teenager listened to her transistor radio all the time, it was a new thing when she was young. She held it up to her ear and it was turned up very loud now she suffers from fairly profound hearing loss but only in a specific high range she can hear low bass normally.

If you talk to her and then turn on a tap to get a glass of water the conversation over, the fridge motor comes on conversation over, any non-verbal sounds is noise that obscures all words to her. "What?" is the response to nearly every word from anyone mouth has to be repeated twice except in a dead silent room. She listens to the TV on level 20 and it's very draining to everyone around the person.

But she won't get a hearing aid! She's 70 years-old but refuses to even discuss it. It's odd how if you say to a person who can't see they may need glasses it's OK but if you say to a person hard of hearing the may need a hearing aid it's like you said the most obnoxious thing ever to say to anyone.

<comment><USER10> "very draining to everyone" hahaha that's made me chuckle. Thanks! I think you're right about "it's like you said the most obnoxious thing ever" hahaha

Is there a way of highlighting how often she says "what?" like a tally chart? I would try that with my mum to get a message across. She'd likely be deeply offended, but I think the message would get across.

<comment><USER12> I would have to ask my dad but I know when I am there I swear it's every time I say something except in an incredibly quiet room so tracking isn't necessary since it always occurs from my perspective.

It's probably partly due to hearing loss and also just habit because I know I will say something like "Are you going to go for your walk now or later?" she says "What?" and I repeat "Are you go.." and she interrupts as if she knew all along what I had said ugh! Although context helps many situations.

I also find she mistakenly interrupts current conversations between people if they are discussing something she interrupts the conversation with a new conversation since she can't hear. She also has a hard time with conversation flow as if on a phone conference call when everyone interrupts each other due to not being able to follow the flow of the conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For people with hearing loss & run Linux: if you have your audiogram and an idea how your hearing loss varies by frequency, you can try to do selective boosts by frequency through a Pulseaudio filter. I discuss it a bit in [https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/32qSkcQP...](https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/32qSkcQPbmQ)

<comment><USER14> Thank you! This is pretty usefull for testing on grandma ☺

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Why can't I just turn up the volume on my iPhone?" is something I ask myself everyday and shake my fist toward Cupertino. Seriously, the gain on the phone is severely limited. Try listening to a voice call on speakerphone in even a moderately quiet environment with just a twee bit of ambient noise. It is maddening that I can't get any more volume out of this device without jailbreaking it.

<comment><USER16> I'm not trying to pull your leg here, but ..

why would you try to use the speaker if there's noise around you? I mean, why wouldn't you - like - put it up against your ear instead?

<comment><USER17> Any scenario where you'd want to use the speaker phone has little to do with noise. Sometimes I want it while driving because I don't have a headset (and don't plan on getting one, since I don't own a car and drive rarely). Or in the shop while drilling, soldering, or whatever. Or outside working on something. It's about using the phone while doing something else, often something that you couldn't do with something blocking one ear or dangling anything from your head. Then of course there's the case where multiple people are listening/speaking through the same phone.

<comment><USER18> Seriously.. just don't talk while driving. It's dangerous for everyone.

<comment><USER17> I would love to not talk while driving. I would also like to not listen while driving. In fact, I would like to not drive while driving! That being said, I'm much less concerned about spending a minute talking to a dispatcher than the guy/gal flying down I-95 while breaking up with someone over the phone. (Speaking of which, at least with a phone you can hang up... but some passengers, man...)

Edit: I would also posit that in some cases, a short phone call can actually do a great deal to remove distraction if it is a settleable matter. The conversation you have in your head while driving may be just as bad as the one you'd have on the phone, except that it may dwell longer.

<comment><USER10> Very true about the conversation in your head. You can sometimes drive great distances and not remember any part of the journey, which is worrying in case you missed dangerous road conditions etc.

This is particularly true if you have a "lot on your plate".

Perhaps putting on an irritating radio station would help?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While I appreciate the article, having hearing loss is not like losing context of an image such as not being able to see the bear on the tricycle. It's more like the image is fuzzy and depending on the factor of loss, it might be a bear or it might just be some fuzz:

[http://i.imgur.com/vKn7oTf.png](http://i.imgur.com/vKn7oTf.png)

Audio compression, especially when using psychoacoustic principles, helps by lowering the noise of the unwanted sounds e.g "probably not a human voice" or "not a bear" in this case and increasing certain frequencies for a person's particular hearing range so they can "see" the image better.

<comment><USER12> I'd agree the fuzzy analogy is better since a hearing impaired person may think they understand but they don't, sometimes totally wrong.

I recall reading that vowels are easier to hear than consonants or maybe it is vice versa? "Hello how are you today" may seem like "Hll hw r tdy" which to the hearing impaired person may seem like "How am I tidy?" or something totally incomprehensible but their brain makes up something close (incorrectly) by filling in the blanks.

The Monty Python sketch "I'd like to buy a hearing aid" feels like what I go through daily when trying to communicate with my mother.

I showed it to my mother thought it was funny, sometimes when she thinks she knows what I said but it's not even close it's like the sketch.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7UqhDs8zj4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7UqhDs8zj4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article would be great if they replaced their frequency-domain 'dynamic range' terminology with the standard word for it, bandwidth.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. This was the word I was looking for, but escaped me when I wrote my own commment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _What's the solution? Multi-Band Compression (MBC), a technique that's been used by the $6 billion hearing aid industry to solve this specific problem.

An MBC uses intelligent design instead of a one-size-fits-all method. With the right data about your hearing pattern, it can mash the full sound into your range so that you get all the information you need._

Audio engineer here. That is patently untrue. MBC is a super-useful technique and is indeed helpful for mitigating hearing loss in relatively transparent fashion, but it does not and cannot bring sounds from outside someone's audible hearing range back within it. It will dynamically rebalance incoming audio in inverse proportion to the degree of hearing loss within a set of frequency ranges, but many kinds of sensorineural hearing loss involve the death of cilia cells (the tiny hairs thatvibrate at particular frequencies, much like the bins of of an FFT) which can result in a total loss of perception at or above certain frequencies.

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

To 'mash the full sound into your range' requires a technique known as frequency shifting, but that's problematic because it destroys the harmonic relationships of the incoming material and sounds disorienting, at best.

In any case, I think the illustration of the bear on the tricycle is absurdly simplistic and makes me wonder to what the degree the pp designers really grasp the underlying concept. A much more appropriate parallel would have been to show an image with a severe Gaussian blur, which more closely parallels the actual experience of hearing loss in terms of both empirical measurement (higher frequencies tend to be more severely attenuated in cases of induced hearing loss) and subjective experience (blurring hinders edge detection, which is analogous to transient detection in audio, and which has a large role in speech intelligibility.

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

If you're struggling with hearing loss, then you should really, _really_ consult an audiologist, work out the basis of your hearing loss (which is sometimes as simple as impacted earwax), and work out a treatment strategy. If you're suffering from degenerative hearing loss then listening to overly- compressed music could actually accelerate it, and listening on headphones or earbuds (many of which bias the sound for increased impact) could also contribute to the problem. It's a truism in the pro audio world that most people are _awful_ at self-measurement and tend to over-equalize in the absence of proper experimental control protocols.

I apologize for the rather negative tone of the post; I appreciate the people at SoundFocus are trying to provide people with something useful and helpful at minimal cost, by leveraging the pretty good audio hardware in their phone. However, hearing loss tends to be a one-way thing, and I think that offering a product to that market without a clinician on the team is a bad idea. There's a lot more to being an 'audio ninja' than understanding the fundamentals of DSP.

<comment><USER22> I was about to question everything until I read this. Thanks AE. My understanding of MBC is more like a crossover (or mix of low, bandpass, and highpass filters) network followed by compression per band within each section of the frequency range.

Now, I want to go test out what it would be like to 'compress' frequencies. Something like a notch filter that shifts nearby frequencies around the target frequency away into regions above and below. It adds noise, essentially, within the compressed range, but maybe it's tolerable and is useful for someone with a narrow band hearing loss. It could potentially be interesting musically.

Maybe such a filter exists, but I am not familiar with it.

<comment><USER21> If you're interested in frequency shifting, Harald Bode was the leading engineer in this area. You can read a gentle introduction here: and if you look around there are some VST plugins that emulate the Bode designs.

I haven't tried using this for precision stuff - over a small range it might well improve intelligibility at the expense of only minor distortion. I tend to reach for it when I want to give sounds an extra weird dimension, it sounds somewhat orthogonal to the normal harmonic distributions we're familiar with.

<comment><USER23> Looks like you were going to paste a link but it didn't stic. . . .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This was an interesting read, but what to me personally is more interesting is how to prevent hearing loss over the years.

I might be wrong on this, but I recall a hearing specialist advising me not to use earbuds at all, or at least limit the use to max 1 hour at a time. A dynamic headphones, such as the good old Superlux HD 681 would be "better" in the long term. (Not trying to advertise for that headphone, it's just one of the few that is cheap, good, and I can rewire myself and even add a plug so I can easily buy new aux cables).

However I cannot wear my headphone longer than 6 hours without it getting annoying. And running with a big headphone is a big no, but than again, I'm nowhere near to running longer than 30 minutes in a row.

Anyone who has his own thoughts on this topic?

<comment><USER25> _I might be wrong on this, but I recall a hearing specialist advising me not to use earbuds at all, or at least limit the use to max 1 hour at a time._

The issue isn't necessarily about all "earbuds," the issue is that many earbuds (including the ones included with Apple iOS products) don't seal the ear canal very well, so a listener is exposed to outside sounds in addition to sounds from the player. Since the outside sounds have a tendency to mask the sounds coming from the earbuds, the listener will often turn up the volume to better hear the audio material and therefore be exposed to SPL's that can cause hearing damage over long exposure times.

The advice to use something like the Superlux HD 681 is that circumaural headphones offer some (not a lot, but some) shielding from outside noise, so a user won't be tempted to increase the volume level as much. Active noise canceling headsets and in-ear-monitors (like Etymotics-brand) provide better sound isolation so that users can keep the volume at more moderate levels.

<comment><USER26> Exactly. With my Etymotics in-canal buds, I can set the volume on my music player to about 25-30%. With the stock buds or even non-isolating over-the-ear headphones, the same subjective loudness requires about 60-75% on the volume control.

<comment><USER27> This is not a good measure, because different earphones have different efficiencies.

And the type of earphone changes the efficiency as well: The sound from the Etymotics all goes to your ear, but the others waste some sound out of your ear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A spectrogram would show what MBC is doing far more directly than the waveform plots.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hi folks,

In order to summarize what I've read so far: This promotion article about SoundFocus is clearly not written with help of a professional from within the hearing aid industry nor from someone with clinical experience. The author shows to be good with language, probably an engineer who makes links with technical terms as if he knows what he is talking about.

I find this article very misleading and not a help for the hearing disabled or their relatives. It reminds me of a very useful course I once followed:'physiology of the ear for physicists'. It would be good if the author or developers find something similar.

I realize that my post breaths some arrogance and of course it is easy to burn something down. But yes, I know better. And yes, I could have written this article that would market SoundFocus properly (in a similar style if you like) with only useful and correct information.

Maybe I should... ?

Cheers -a professional-

<comment><USER29> My bro points out I did not mention a single flaw/example. (I am busy enough as it is)

Besides things already mentioned by others, talking about dead regions, upwards spread of masking perhaps temporal scatter and tuning curves would have made it a lot more juicy.

One flaw: time and volume are NOT self explanatory. Think about recruitment and such. Another flaw: multi-band compression is not doing what is suggested by the picture of the bear where the bicycle is missing. This visual example fits much better to a person with a dead region for whom frequency compression is applied. And this is not a one-size-fits-all method. Different techniques are available for this particular phenomenon (as there is frequency shifting as well).

Anyway... let's mention a positive side. I appreciate the attempt of communicating on the topic and it was a good try to make things clearer for some. Better luck next time.

Happy bro?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wish people would put half the effort into prevention that this article puts into mitigation.

Work beside a machine humming at a particular frequency and you will loose that frequency even if the sound doesn't seem loud at the time. And simply jambing in a pair of earplugs doesn't make you immune. They have limits.

</comment><comment><USER31> I might be wrong here but isn't what you call "dynamic range" usually referred to as "hearing range"? Dynamic range has a bit different connotation AFAIK.

<comment><USER32> A lot of the concepts in this article appear to be deliberately simplified and terminology deliberately abused, and I would argue too much so. Take this paragraph for instance:

> As you look at the waveform, the problem should become apparent. Sound is a > 3-dimensional construct, but we can only represent 2 dimensions on a > textbook or a monitor. In the waveform representation, we see Time on the > x-axis plotted against Volume on the y-axis.

The two axes in most waveform plots are sound pressure and time, not volume and time. The fact that the waveform depicted is nearly symmetrical reflected across the x axis should hint that this is the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > If you know people who have hearing loss, you've noticed that they can't > tolerate loud noises that you're fine with, but they also can't hear some of > things that you can hear perfectly well.

So what is the explanation of why they can't tolerate certain loud noises? I feel like the article was going to address that aspect of hearing loss as well but never did.

<comment><USER34> Hearing is an range. So they have reduced range on both side.

<comment><USER33> Hmm, I'm not sure you understand it any better than I do.

The article says:

> _Well, if you get hearing damage at a specific frequency, you'll start to > lose sensitivity to the quiet sounds at this frequency. However, your > sensitivity to loud sounds remains the same._

If their sensitivity to loud sounds remained the same on the one hand, why would they be unable to tolerate certain sounds on the other hand. Seems contradictory.

<comment><USER35> I don't have an exact answer, but it's a common problem: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis)

Hearing is complex: you have the cochlea acting as both sensor and first pass signal processing. There's a muscle that acts as a built-in gain control that can cut sounds by about 20dB, partly so your own voice doesn't deafen you.

Hearing damage isn't just loss of sensitivity—apparently it can alter the shape of cochlear filters' response too, changing the way masking works. And I'd imagine the brain tries to compensate as hearing loss progresses, which could have interesting effects.

More info:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_reflex](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_reflex)

Edit: Less related, but a similar phenomenon that happens to me: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia). Hearing has odd failure modes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Could you add a "hearing test" to your app, which does at least rudimentary tuning? Call it "headphone calibration" and I bet you'd improve the listening experience of people who don't know they are hearing impaired.

</comment><comment><USER37> There is a drift in the soundcloud audio. Audio goes ahead of visual wave. So I missed the last visual beep in both compresses and uncompressed version.

</comment><comment><USER34> So it's like a CPU can't process fast enough and start to losing signals.

Just like the choppy adobe flash player on OSX!

</comment><comment><USER38> Spatial frequencies in the image might have been a much better analogy instead of simply cropping the image size.

</comment><comment><USER39> I really wish this app was available on OS X, I would very happily pay for it and use it every day.

</comment><comment><USER40> tl;dr "hearing loss is caused by uneven or abnormal frequency response of ear compared to that of normal human"

</comment><comment><USER41> the music world already uses copious amounts of multiband compression, as if all listeners have hearing loss

</comment><comment><USER42> Why is this post on top?

</comment><comment><USER43> > "Sound expresses itself in three dimensions: time (seconds), volume > (decibels) and frequency (Hertz)."

Is anyone else as irked about the authors choice of the word dimensions as much as I am? I can't read past it. Wouldn't "factors" be a better fit?

<comment><USER44> No. "Dimensions" is the right word, because they are three orthogonal scales along which musical notes can be measured[1]. The author could also have suggested timbre and other possible dimensions, but the three stated apply to all sound, including (importantly) sine waves, the simplest type of sound.

[1] Technically, frequency is a function of time too (and timbre a function of the interaction of multiple frequencies and envelope changes, another function of time) but these are all independent uses of time.

<comment><USER45> Technically there are two complementary sets of dimensions: time and amplitude vs frequency and phase. Both are complete encodings of the waveform.

The article is extremely muddled from a technical point of view. When dealing with perceptions it is _extremely_ important to distinguish physics and physiology. In optics we have radiometric (physical) vs photometric (perceived) values: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometry_%28optics%29#Photom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometry_%28optics%29#Photometric_versus_radiometric_quantities)

It appears in the article they are doing some kind of implicit averaging over the ear's response function at each frequency, which may make sense in terms of perceptions but makes very little sense in terms of physics.

A much better visual analog would be a blurred photograph rather than a cropped one. "Turning up the volume" simply increases the brightness of the images, which doesn't do a damned thing to reduce the blurring.

One thing that people with normal hearing don't get is how much information is in the high frequencies, which are where the most loss normally occurs, although there are also "notch" losses that happen to people whose ears are routinely subject to loud noises in narrow bands.

We tend to think of "high frequency" sounds in terms of single notes, but in speech the high frequencies are most important in the unvoiced constants, the "s" and "th" sounds and similar. Losing the high frequencies blurs the edges of speech, often making the shape of it unrecognizable. Frequency-dependent enhancement sharpens the edges and brings it back into useful focus.

<comment><USER46> > Technically there are two complementary sets of dimensions: time and > amplitude vs frequency and phase. Both are complete encodings of the > waveform.

Minor note, the "frequency and phase" is actually frequency and complex amplitude, which encompasses both phase and scalar amplitude as we think of it intuitively.

In the mathematical theory there is also provision for complex amplitude in the time-domain, but this is rarely needed in practice (and never found in real-world signals).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linux Kernel: reclaim the caps-lock LED on laptops without it - <AUTHOR> https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/8/22/310

<comment><AUTHOR> Enables this:

# echo caps-lock > /sys/devices/platform/$your_led_device/leds/$the_led_name/trigger</comment>


Will Switzerland give every adult $2,500 a month? - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/24/news/economy/switzerland-guaranteed-basic-income/index.html <comment><USER2> "a rich country that can afford it" is an absolutely terrible argument.

I agree with tracker1, its better than the bevy of welfare programs in the US for example. Better than this would be a negative income tax tho. [http://economics21.org/html/replace-welfare-negative- income-...](http://economics21.org/html/replace-welfare-negative-income- tax-1479.html)

<comment><USER2> Actually, I take my comment back. As this article shows, the negative income tax and basic income are actually the same because taxes claw back the basic income at higher levels of income (if you have a progressive tax structure): [http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/welfare-pensions/the- negative-...](http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/welfare-pensions/the-negative- income-tax-and-basic-income-are-pretty-much-the-same-thing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not strictly in favor of the idea, but do feel it's better than the number of welfare programs, subsidies and bureaucracies that are often abused it can replace. By establishing an even distribution not open to abuse, it can work out better than the programs it replaces, while being a simpler accounting.

</comment><comment><USER2> Also, "only 10% of voters people said they would consider quitting their job"

Trying to minimize 10% here is strange - that's a massive percent. I'm surprised its so high.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the economics of making mobile apps? - <AUTHOR>

Let's say you're a company like Mint.com, or even Facebook for instance. You develop an app for the iPhone and Android. Chances are you're not gonna recoup the costs of producing the app (paying programmers, man hours, etc) from the app revenue.. I don't use many mobile apps, but I assume the Facebook app is free??<p>So why do companies make mobile apps? is it to protect their "moat"(their actual website where the ads are displayed) so to speak? To appease their users so they won't use a competitor? <comment><USER2> You do it to increase the accessibility to your product. Facebook and Mint don't want you going to other services, they profit because your data and attention is with them. If they can take advantage of platforms like mobile to engage you even more, than thats fantastic for their business and it increases the switching cost of leaving them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Market forces and user demand.</comment>


Show HN: An app to track your reading - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.traquer <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN,

I made an app to track your reading progress. I've tried to use Goodreads for this but their UI is kind of complicated.

The basic functionality is quite close to what you'd do with a spreadsheet. The only difference is that the app is quite simple to use and doesn't try to stand in your way.

You can also export all your data to a json file.</comment>


Docker and the PID 1 zombie reaping problem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.phusion.nl/2015/01/20/docker-and-the-pid-1-zombie-reaping-problem/ <comment><USER2> I know this will cost me a lot of karma, but surely this is the point that you say, lets just use a hypervisor?

yes, I know its much easier to just use docker, but at the point that you have to write a new INIT, doesn't that strike you as time you used something thats not easy anymore?

Things like "make sure we don't loose syslog" make me shudder.

Yes supposedly there is an argument that docker is faster. However as a buildeng i've seen little evidence of that.

We use VMware with throwaway build disks. This means that a Dev can destroy a machine, once rebooted its back to a known default state.

the best part is that we have collectd on the vmware host, and the in the guest to collect metrics on CPU, mem and IO.

Because we have decent disks, and lots of memory, we don't hit any limitations. For heavy build we have NFS root'd servers with non persistant disks. much faster, and requires almost no thinking about.

<comment><USER3> This is actually why we all need to support systemd. It is already an init system, and a sophisticated one; now that it has integrated container support it's only a matter of time before systemd's pid 1 assumes zombie reaping duties for the host and all container images.

People who criticize systemd fail to realize that it provides solutoons for many problems under Linux, and even problems with the Unix model itself, and has widespread support from companies, distributions, and other stakeholders.

<comment><USER2> Yes, its provides a supervisord type mechanism, thats great, so is dependencies but outweighed by the following:

The horrid shite that is the journald. whoever thought it was a brilliant idea to smoosh grep tail and vi together is someone who's never had to debug anything hung over.

seriously why in living fuck do I have to use your shitty tool to look at system logs? The whole point of linux that you are supposed to be able to use anything to open anything. Sure its a stupid idea to use most tools, but thats not your decision.

Seriously do I have to learn a completely new syntax to find all things that happened at 10:23:04 three days ago? Everywhere else I can use vim/nano/emacs/awk/grep/sed.

but here? no I'm to stupid to understand those tools, here use this one. We've thought of every use case, if you're having trouble its because you're either a hater, idiot, sysadmin, or too old.

you can tell that the people who write this shit are not the poor fuckers who have to tune/support/debug/migrate or use it.

So no, I'm not going to "get behind systemd" until journal is fit for purpose.

<comment><USER4> If you're running a syslogd then the logs also get stored there, so you can continue to use the tools you are familiar with if that is more important to you than possibly considering different tools that may work better.

<comment><USER2> Much as I like the inference that I've not tried journal, or that I'm immune to new ideas, thanks, thanks very much.

Look, my job is to implement new ideas. I run a datacenter that has 15pb on tier 1 storage, and 28,000 CPUs.

The one thing I care about most is this: getting home to see my children.

The only time I look at logs is if something terrible has gone wrong. Everything else is done by sourcing metrics directly from the components directly (collectd + graphite)

We do ship logs, and yes we have elastic search, but thats far to heavy and far to higher latency to be useful.

So the only real time that I look at logs is when something is horrifically broken, or we cant figure out from the graphs what has gone wrong.

At that time, I do not want to have to remember new syntax to get at what should be text files. (yes signed logs, but lets be honest thats why you ship logs.)

If I got _more_ functionality, then yes I'll be onboard.

However I can't use bash to talk to journal, It only has a C API, which smacks of it being designed for phones and super integrated HPC, not the 95% use case.

Because it uses binary blobs, (And yes, I do love binary, just not for logs) Its a pain in the arse to inspect using a scripting language.

if journalctl _COMM=sshd | tail | grep "something" then;

really nice. also what the fuck is with starting a switch with an _? underscore indicates hidden function. seriously, why is it different to every over log inspection tool?

<comment><USER5> It's not a switch, it's a match argument, and the underscore prefix indicates that the field is "trusted": the kernel retrieved the value and the logging application is unable to provide "fake" data for the field in case it has been compromised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi, Docker author. Just wanted to say that we are aware of the problem, understand the underlying mechanics, and plan to fix it. In the meantime application-level fixes like this can definitely help.

One slight difficulty is that some applications _do_ want to be pid1. While 99% of the ecosystem wants the problem of being pid1 to be handled natively by Docker, the remaining 1% (people who write init systems, or platforms tied to a particular init system) emphatically wants the opposite. So we need to make sure both modes of operations are available, and deal with a dilemma: do we change the default behavior, potentially breaking images expecting to be run as pid1? Or do we keep a default which breaks 99% of applications, requiring an explicit setting to opt into the correct behavior?

Anybody with opinions on the matter is welcome to voice them on #docker-dev / freenode, or the dev mailing list, we'd love to hear from you.

<comment><USER7> Having a config option is a good idea. I vote for changing the default behavior because Docker has so much growth potential left. Leaving the default as-is is problematic for the majority of people, both current and future. I think that breaking it is acceptable because a lot of the people who use Docker in production -- especially those that are expecting to be PID 1 -- are early adopters and will forgive you for the slight breakage.

<comment><USER8> Yes, change it now, before it's everywhere. The longer you wait, the worse the problem becomes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure writing yet another pid 1 tool is such a good idea. I have been using Docker in production for a few months now and I use supervisord as pid 1. I am able to hook it to most app servers (python,rails,etc) as well as rsyslogd . logging is a big pain on Docker, and you should think of your logging strategy before the pid 1. How are you rotating your logs and is your pid 1 restarting your app on failure? For us, supervisord does all that.

We run syslog and logrotate inside the container (using a volume) and it works fairly well for us. Plus supervisord comes with a pretty kickass tool - supervisorctl - and the conf file is fairly well documented.

Optimizing the RAM/CPU usage of supervisors and rsyslogd is not very critical - it doesn't use too much.

I actually learned a lot from baseimage - but dont know why they went with runit rather than supervisord.

Would really,really,REALLY love to learn to do thus with systemd.

EDIT: ahh.. forgot that their script was based on runit. My mistake - but dont think I will change over from supervisord anytime soon.

<comment><USER10> Supervisord docs say explicitly that it is not meant be used as PID 1. Does it still perform all the necessary functions?

<comment><USER9> yes - we use django, rails, postgres, redis, syslogd and cron. In general it works very well - we use puma for the rails server and gunicorn for python and we are able to control them very well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Surely writing a minimal init in C (or Go if you like) is better than using Python... it is not a lot of code, and frankly I would trust it not to die and kill your container more. Plus Python has a chunk of dependencies you don't need in a minimal container.

<comment><USER7> Lots of system tools are written in Python nowadays. If you use a Debian, Ubuntu or CentOS base image then there's a good chance that Python is preinstalled because some system tool depends on it.

It was also much easier to write the tool in Python than in C. Writing it in C would have taken much longer, and at the end of the day we wanted to get work done instead of worrying about a few MBs, which only take 1 second to download and which cost $0.001 of disk space.

<comment><USER12> It's trivial to write this program in C and it is a waste of memory to load up 50 MB of Python just to accomplish this simple task.

<comment><USER7> Actually, the Python process eats less than 5 MB of RAM. Most other stuff on the system eats more RAM.

Writing my_init took much more time than you think, and I do not regret choosing Python. My_init not only handles process reaping, but also environment variable handling and bunch of other stuff. Writing text parsers in C is a huge pain (libc has no regexps that are as easy to use as Python).

I do not oppose rewriting it in C, but given limited manpower and the tiny benefits it's not high on my todo list either. If you are worried about resource usage, then I would very much welcome contributions for rewriting it in C.

<comment><USER13> Why not use already existing init? runit seems small enough: [http://smarden.org/runit/](http://smarden.org/runit/)

Or if you want small have a look here for minimal PID 1 "So how should init be done right?" [http://ewontfix.com/14/](http://ewontfix.com/14/)

<comment><USER7> Baseimage-docker _does_ use Runit. my_init calls Runit.

<comment><USER13> Why not use [http://smarden.org/runit/runit- init.8.html](http://smarden.org/runit/runit-init.8.html) and run my_init _from_ runit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think needing to run an init system with Docker is a solution to a problem you've created for yourself. From reading this post and other posts on your blog about Docker it sounds like you are `docker start`-ing containers that have been `docker stop`-ped. In my experience, using `docker start` isn't a best practice and I design my containers in a way that I won't need to restart a stopped container.

If you use Docker containers as a form of lightweight immutable infrastructure you won't care about zombie processes because you won't be restarting stopped containers. Instead you just `docker run` every time you want to run a new container. The example of a corrupt file is moot because your containers shouldn't be writing to the file system with the intention of that file being around for long. This also applies to databases, which I'm not fond of running in containers at all (setting aside highly distributed databases, perhaps).

<comment><USER15> The problem isn't when your main docker process is dying (in this case I believe dockerd itself reaps the process), the problem is when your service spawns child processes as part of normal operation.

As an example, suppose we have a simple web server that executes CGI scripts written in bash (I know this is kinda contrived but it illustrates my point). I do a request to the server, it runs a bash script. The script runs grep. While grep is executing, the web server decides bash has taken too long and SIGKILLs it. Then grep is adopted by your PID1, in this case your webserver. But the webserver doesn't know its there, and so never calls wait(). You now have a zombie process that will last until you stop the container.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> FWIW I have written a very, very small /sbin/init replacement for docker containers. It runs one script on startup and another on shutdown, supplied by the container author: [https://github.com/jre/dinit](https://github.com/jre/dinit)

</comment><comment><USER17> The terminology used to describe children processes can often seem comical. I recall my systems programming classes and the professor would shout "The parent must kill all the children!" \-- was good for a few chuckles.

More seriously, the issues raised in this article are real, and I do believe the author has done a fine job breaking down the UNIX process hierarchy and defined responsibilities.

I'd say it's a shame as this is yet one more important stability/scalability/security/performance item the Docker team has not thought of (or maybe their busy writing more eco-system apps), but I do believe this is a container problem at large seeing that the official App Container Spec has not addresses it.

For those criticizing the need for "yet another pid 1", well, there doesn't seem to be any way around it that can guarantee the same outcome. Yes, it's understandable having reservations about Python being the tool of choice for such an init system, and perhaps C would be a better choice allowing more fine-grained control and guarantees. My guess is the article author was most familiar with Python and wanted to have a POC for the write-up, which is satisfactory.

</comment><comment><USER18> as I posted on reddit:

A simpler and better solution for this problem is: do not let apps run in background (double-fork/detach) in containers. Most applications that background by default can override this with a command-line flag. And certainly don't run programs that execute other programs that background. Keep it simple, and try to limit yourself to 1 process per container. Sure there might be situations where this cannot be avoided, but in 99% of the situations - this is not a problem. Yes you have to be aware of this potential problem, but I am currently running tons of containers, of which only a few run supervisord (which handles reaping too) to run multiple processes within one container because it was the sane thing to do. Stale zombie processes on my docker hosts? None. These precautions in my opinion are only required for badly behaving software. And yes - there is software like that.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there a ticket in the docker project? I would like to follow the progress on this one.

Everything I could find was this ticket: [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/5305](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/5305)

</comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this effectively a non-issue? It's literally just a tiny entry in a table that is held no? Or does it just cause Docker to behave oddly?

<comment><USER7> There are two issues. First is Murphey's law. 1 zombie process is probably harmless, but if the amount grows then you'll fill up kernel limits and the container cannot create further processes.

Second, zombie processes that don't go away can also interfere with software that check for the existence of processes. For example, [the Phusion Passenger application server]([https://www.phusionpassenger.com/](https://www.phusionpassenger.com/)) manages processes. It restarts processes when they crash. Crash detection is implemented by parsing the output of `ps`, and by sending a 0 signal to the process ID. Zombie processes are displayed in `ps` and respond to the 0 signal, so Phusion Passenger thinks the process is still alive even though it has terminated.

<comment><USER21> > Crash detection is implemented by parsing the output of `ps`

Would there be anything to be gained by actually rooting around in /proc yourselves, rather than relying on ps?

<comment><USER7> Ps is implemented by parsing /proc, so the results you get are the same.

Having said that, /proc/xxx/status does contain a flag that tells you whether a process is a zombie or not. So on Linux, Phusion Passenger parses that file as an extra check. But not all software does this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How does this compare to minit or runit ?

</comment><comment><USER23> Why write your own mini-init instead of using something like supervisord?

<comment><USER24> Supervisord is not an init and must not be run as pid1, that's explicitly mentioned in its documentation[0]:

> It shares some of the same goals of programs like launchd, daemontools, and > runit. Unlike some of these programs, it is not meant to be run as a > substitute for init as "process id 1".

There are micro-inits you could use instead though, s6 should be runnable as pid1 for instance.

[0] [http://supervisord.org/index.html?highlight=init](http://supervisord.org/index.html?highlight=init)

<comment><USER23> I'm a little confused here. Especially considering that the docker site lists supervisord explicitly with instructions on how to use it ....

see: [https://docs.docker.com/articles/using_supervisord/](https://docs.docker.com/articles/using_supervisord/)

<comment><USER24> There's no problem with running supervisord, inside or outside of docker, there's a problem running supervisord as an init (pid1). You can run openrc or systemd or s6 or runit or minit or whatever and use supervisord on top of that, you just shouldn't use supervisord directly as pid1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sysv heavyweight?

<comment><USER26> It's got a reasonable amount of stuff in it. The Debian version of sysvinit (v2.88) is about 10,000 lines of C code. Probably not a huge deal, but it does more than just reaping zombie processes, if that's really all you want.

<comment><USER27> The actual init command is only about 3000 lines, the rest is for auxiliary programs that you probably wouldn't need for Docker. And 10k lines is still tiny compared to Python :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >"As long as a zombie is not removed from the system via a wait, it will consume a slot in the kernel process table, and if this table fills, it will not be possible to create further processes."

To the author->

Do you know how many processes a kernel can handle ?

root@lisa2:~# cat /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max 32768

fyi.

<comment><USER15> Suppose a service has a timed routine that spawns a child every 10 seconds. Unfortunately, this child has a bug and starts leaking zombies to PID1. Congratulations, you now have approx 9 hours until your entire system stops being able to spawn new processes.

<comment><USER28> You could have a nuclear war near the datacenter where you host that broken software & container. I think it has a better probability to exist in a real world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord This is nice and all, but the way the authors wrote this article gives off this feeling of hubris that they've uncovered some critical yet technically obscure problem.

They haven't. This is Unix programming 101 right here. Even if the Docker community has been generally ignorant of this, the problem is not any less glaring or basic.

I'm not sure if my_init is really an "init system", though. I'd call it an "init daemon", since it handles the bare minimum of waiting on its children. A system would imply greater complexity.

<comment><USER7> Author of the article here. Of course it's a basic Unix programming 101... from _our_ points of view! You and I think it's basic because we're so knowledgeable in this area. But this does not hold for the rest of the world. 99 out of 100 people that I've spoken to have absolutely no idea about this problem. I used to link to the Wikipedia article and thought that people would get it. They didn't. People started getting it once I gave 15 minute talks about the problem and describing things with diagrams. Lots of people gave me the suggestion that I should blog about it, and so I did.

<comment> vezzy-fnord There is no relative point of view here. This is simply an egregious educational failure where application developers have failed to understand the underpinnings of how their platform handles processes at a high level.

Then again, this is how the industry works, I suppose. You rediscover an old paradigm or basic property of your system that has been abstracted out, present it as new, deliver it in a shiny package and reap the fame.

Sorry, I was mostly ticked at how you presented this issue in such an alarmist and "problem-reaction-solution" tone. It's just humorous.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you pick stocks? - <AUTHOR>

I don't like my savings to sit in the bank and being eaten by inflation, since for now my only source of income is my salary. So I usually invest my savings in long term stocks, the kind of investments that you do once and forget for at least 10 years.
My problem is that it requires me a lot of time and energy to pick some stock, and even when I manage I always feel uncomfortable and feel clueless on which stock to pick.
I studied some basis on reading balance sheets and income statements, but it always requires me a lot of time and since I don't do it frequently (it takes a while to have enough money worth investing) I forget everything I know and I have to go through it again every time. Add to it that this is something I really don't like doing.
So, how do you pick your stocks? Do you analyze each company every time? Do you follow some investors advice? Do you follow some website? Usually I refer to Fortune's "retire rich" of "investment guide year 20XX" guides, but picking one stock is different than allocating the full portfolio they recommend and I don't fell comfortable to pick a stock just because they recommended it.
Any recommendation? <comment><USER2> There is more out there than just stocks but since your question mentions stocks explicitly, here is a practical suggestion:

Pick an index fund. Boom, you're diversified. Now, keep an eye on developments, read newspapers (I recommend FT, NYT, and Economist), something will start to tickle your fancy. When you feel like something looks interesting or resonates with you or your background, dig into it. Allocate, if you can, at least 2 full days, for example a weekend. Do on-the-side reading beforehand, gathering all sorts of material (reports, statements, articles, interviews, customer opinions, etc.), just read superficially, the goal is to get an idea and to narrow the sources down so you can do your final research in the 2 pre-allocated days. When after a while, your interest is still there or better yet growing as you find out more, and only then, pull the trigger and invest those 2 days. If you can't stomach the risk at the end of them, forget about the opportunity. If you feel good about it, pull the trigger again and take a position.

Start with a small position, shifting some of your index fund into the stock. Maintain and see how it feels to have the position "on". If it feels good, take more (long _or_ short). If it feels wrong, get out, whether you're ahead or behind.

Forget all about diversification too. Your goal is to iterate this until you have a portfolio of perhaps 4, 5, 6 positions. You are substituting "diversification" (you can't be better diversified than a broad index fund) with knowledge or insight or whatever you call it.

Just my 2 cents (har har, I know... ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> _There is more out there than just stocks_

I mentioned stocks because they are the only investment I was able to find that gives a decent return against inflation _and_ is possible to do without huge amounts of money (like real estate).

But if you would like to elaborate, I am interested.

<comment><USER3> Options, warrants, futures, currencies, bonds, ETFs, et al. Check out: <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_instrument>, but obviously, these are often or the more advanced (with the exception of ETFs, which are traded as stocks, or bonds).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In his book "Rocket Boys", Homer Hickman tells how his mother saved a little from her household budget and invested it in stock of companies that made bandaids, and eventually used the proceeds to buy a summer house in Florida. Her children needed bandaids requently, and she could tell which were the ones that really worked, so she invested in those firms.

Lesson: invest in companies where you have a good/deep understanding of the product/industry.

<comment><USER5> Don't miss the important bit in that anecdote: save a little money, consistently, over a long period of time. Do that and your stock selection scarcely matters. (Indeed, you'd probably do better with index funds.)

<comment><AUTHOR> _Lesson: invest in companies where you have a good/deep understanding of the product/industry._

I already invest in a company that I know well, Apple. Being a hacker, a Mac/iPhone/iPad developer and a fan (no so much lately) I know and understand the company quite a bit. I bought some stock in 2009 and it's performing quite well. But I know the risks of falling in love with a company, that's why I'm trying to differentiate.

 _save a little money, consistently, over a long period of time_

I'm lucky that I have learnt this a long time ago, coming from a family that had economic problems since I can remember. My parents taught me the importance of saving with bad examples.

Regarding index funds, I don't live in the USA and I'm trying to figure out how I could invest in them (it does not seem so simple, from here).

<comment><USER5> If you can invest in stocks like Apple, you can invest in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). Take a look at what Vanguard has available in index funds with an ETF equivalent, then buy that symbol as a stock. For example, VTI is their total market fund. You get basically the performance of the US market (Wilshire index) minus .07 basis points (i.e. 7 hundredths of a percent) minus whatever your trading costs for the shares are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't pick stocks if you are not a trader.

Some rules I love-

1\. Buy a house that you want to live in and after that stop speculating on houses.

2\. If you need to pick stocks, pick ones with trustable management and with low p/e ratios.

3\. Also buy some gold as a hedge occasionally. (not more than 10 pct of your net worth)

4\. Don't get obsessed about your savings. Invest in yourself, invest on your skill sets so that you can earn more later.

Good luck

<comment><USER7> _1\. Buy a house that you want to live in and after that stop speculating on houses._

That's a truly terrible idea right now, at least in most parts of the US. Houses, apart from "distressed properties" (read: people who need liquidity and must accept market price) are still wildly overvalued due to an irrational market. Additionally, many states will be raising property taxes in the near future, which would make the house into a potentially large and uncontrollable liability.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm leaving in Amsterdam and here the housing situation seems a little different. There is a really high request for rooms and a big scarcity of them, so I was thinking of buying a house with many rooms and rent them (while leaving in the house).

But for now I can't afford to buy one, so that's why I'm looking at the stock market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recommend that you read the book "A Random Walk Down Wallstreet" before you invest in individual stocks. The book argues that you will be better off investing in broad index funds.

<comment><USER9> And after that, read Mandelbrot's "Misbehavior of Markets" to understand the limitations of the random walk model.

<comment><USER8> What are the limitations described by Mandelbrot? Does Mandelbrot show that active investing produces better returns than passive investing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're worried about inflation, consider TIPS (US treasury inflation- protected securities) or an index fund that consists of them (e.g. TIP or VIPSX). That way you're less likely to lose a lot of your savings suddenly. The stock market can be flaky so the usual advice is not to invest money in stocks that you might need in the next 5 years or so. Also you might try going to the Bogleheads forums and ask for their advice, they are a helpful bunch: <http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=1>

</comment><comment><USER11> You do not need to read balance sheets or dig into financials (you can find general info) about nearly all listed stocks on financial websites and message boards.

Then think about your risk profile. If you are relatively risk averse (hoping to beat inflation) then it is more prudent to diversify into some ETFs. Not necessarily the broad market but maybe some macro strategy.

I prefer to look at the Risk/Reward profile. More akin to VC investing: I look for 20x based on macro trends or interesting opportunities (scalable growing companies in a huge market).

One really basic way of looking at this is something like Baidu and Google.

Baidu (BIDU) is the Google of China. The market cap is ~ 25b while GOOG is ~130b.

With the growing middle class in China and the sheer market size, it would seem more likely that BIDU would become the size of GOOG rather than go bankrupt.

This is just an example, but I have owned BIDU, based on this principle for 4 years (it was under 100 and it recently split 10-1)

Another sector where this strategy works is in biotech. I have already commented about a similar investment in ARNA -- feel free to check out my past comments.

</comment><comment><USER12> i typically recommend Magic Formula Investing to people who don't want to spend a ton of time looking into/maintaining stock portfolios but want a reasonable chance at outperformance.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Formula_Investing>

A lot of the literature around this, including the website sound really gimmicky, but the book itself is very well reasoned and presents a rational, easily udnerstandable case for outperformance and is backed up by historical performance.

One metric i found compelling was that, over one test period, the author ranked 100 or so companies by the magic formula criteria. the top 10 performed the best, and each successively lower ranked set of 10 performed progressively worse.

The author is a fairly well reputed hedge fund manager and has written a few gimmicky sounding titles, but for the most part the principles are fairly sound and compatible with general "buy and hold" investment strategies a la "intelligent investor", but rely primarily on easily attainable quantitative data and can be parsed very quickly with minimal effort.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was going to write a big long explanation - but if you don't _like_ investing in stocks - then DONT. Put your cash in the bank, maybe a few currencies (long term, I don't mean currency trading) - and different banks, possibly some offshore (not to dodge taxes - but to avoid banks going under - foreign banks have different rules, some much stabler than the US banks)

Sure, inflation is there, as will be deflation and all that jazz - but one bad stock pick will do more damage to your finances than inflation will.... and if you're thinking you can head off, like, financial collapse by investing wisely when you admittedly hate the process... it's a no brainer.

Put your cash in the bank, leave it there, and built up a big nest egg. If you ever want to start making that money work for you, there are lots of ways to do it - save it up until you have lots, then take the time and make really good decisions - you'll be in a far better position to take advantage of real opporutniteis if you are liquid - and nothing beats having cash in the bank when you watch the stock market tank and all those who were pressuring you to invest are freaking out.

<comment><USER14> _Put your cash in the bank, leave it there_

That guarantees a negative real return. If you can accept short term fluctuations, you'll be much better off with an index fund.

<comment><USER15> That's true if and only if, by "short term" you mean 15 years in nominal terms, and 20 years in real terms.

That's from history (1929 to 1944-49). Perhaps this time it might take longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I personally think its best to think short term with stocks. Who knows what will happen to a company 10 years from now. If your careful, you can continually buy stocks when the're at a low and sell at a high. Here's some guidelines for doing this:

buy stocks only from the large stable companies, because they pretty much never do radical or unpredictable ups or downs. The're are also the most liquid so you can buy or sell them pretty much instantaneously any time.

Buy the stock when you see the markets moving up, and sell the stocks quickly, before it goes back down. Don't try to sell at the peak because it's almost impossible to know that point. Quit while your ahead.

If the stocks goes down just sell it right away to minimize your loss. if you always do this you won't run the risk of significant losses, but you will have modest gains, which will add up in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sure, I really don't believe in diversification. Here are my thoughts, maybe someone else will come along and cut me down or whatever, but that's ok.

Diversification to me is like shooting a shotgun. Most stocks are profitable(they'd be delisted otherwise) so the scattershot(shotgun shot) is a nice way to handle that, and that is diversification.

I kind of like the sniper rifle, where you invest in one stock which when you boil it down to what you're buying is a share in the company. If you are into stocks. They are pretty liquid, and you aren't managing a physical asset.

So after typing all of that, there are other avenues of investment aside from stocks. How about tax-free muni bonds?, vacation rentals? buying land and lobbying to get it re-zoned(from agricultural to residential(house density per acre)) etc.

<comment><USER15> > Diversification to me is like shooting a shotgun. Most stocks are > profitable(they'd be delisted otherwise) so the scattershot(shotgun shot) is > a nice way to handle that, and that is diversification.

That's not true. Continuous loss is not a ground for delisting. Going below a certain per-stock value (e.g. $1 or $0.01 depending on trading value) is, and that can be fixed by a so called "reverse split", without making the stock any more valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you haven't already you need to check out the StockTwits community. They tend to be more traders (short term) than investors (longer term), but a lot of their discipline and decision making process will apply regardless of the time frame.

There can be a bit of noise, but I think there's a recommended stream of quality posters you may want to start with.

Personally I lean more towards the trading timeframes. Mostly use options to limit risk and sell time premium. Actually had a fantastic day on Friday with a position in SPY (S&P 500 ETF) and AAPL (yes that Aaple). Made ~20% in 24hrs and ~9% in 4hrs respectively. By no means happens all the time, but nice when it does.

Either way, very successful investing or trading is a buttload of work. Stay on it and you'll get better over time. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER19> The easy answer is to index it.

The hard way is to make your own portfolio. Playing around with fewer than 30-50 stocks exposes you to unnecessary risk, however. At least according to modern portfolio theory.

The way I would pick stocks (if I didn't just buy an index) would be to calculate a reasonable, rational value for the security based on its financial performance - sort of simplistic discounted cash flow model. Then you just repeat, over and over again with lots of stocks, observing trends and buying when the market gets out of whack. There is judgment involved, so you can't fully automate the process. Done right, it's a full time job and takes a good chunk of change.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm trying to learn value investing, which means analyzing various companies (most recently, I've been looking for candidates by setting google stock screener to a strong current ratio and low-ish p/e) and then looking for advice on them to see if it matches or why it doesn't. One place for advice that my grandfather recommended is "value line" which you can probably find at the reference desk of your local decently-sized library.

The other alternative that always gets recommended is using an index fund. These will always have average performance, so you can only (reliably) beat them by being more above-average than everyone else is.

</comment><comment><USER21> Right now we're in a bear market which I see lasting for a loooong time aka the Japenese Nikki market where it didn't go anywhere for a while (also known as the lost decade).

I'd recommend putting most of your money in a safer place like low risk bonds just get past inflation _instead_ of losing it in the market. You can allocate maybe at most 10 to 20% in some ETF funds of your choosing though just to have some stock market exposure.

</comment><comment><USER22> <https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/vanguard/core>

</comment><comment><USER23> Investing seems to be a regular topic here, you might search for similar threads.</comment>


Toyota invests $50M in Tesla, will jointly reopen NUMMI plant - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_15127946?source=rss&nclick_check=1 <comment><USER2> OBTAL: "This American Life" produced an interesting (even to a non-car-guy) history of the plant about two months back:

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/all/play_music/play_fu...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/all/play_music/play_full.php?play=403)

<comment><USER3> Seconded. I loved that episode (though it made me mad at GM and their unions...)

<comment><USER4> Yes, the union doesn't come off very well except for one interesting bit: the same workers and union went from crap to good when _management_ changed.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the NUMMI workers really improved. But that was only after they were fired and could only come back to work if they accepted the change.

In all other GM plants, both the unions and management blocked the changes for something like 15-20 years.

<comment><USER5> The part I found most interesting is the focus GM had on what you could see. NUMMI worked because they could get the type of parts they needed etc but they needed to infect the rest of the organization with the idea before GM could really benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to me that Toyota recognizes that government is among their biggest threats. To avoid this, it tries to make itself an insider by hiring citizens. This makes it hard for government to hurt Toyota without hurting its own citizens.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great news both for the future of Tesla and also the workers at the NUMMI plant!

<comment><USER8> I have been skeptical of the whole electric car movement because of 6 reasons. 1) Running the AC heat or cooling really sucks that longevity. 2) Car wrecks could become more horrendous because of the acid. 3) Battery pack replacements are extremely costly. 4) Need more tow trucks fitted with charging kits to help out. 5) The entire economics of the thing just isn't worked out. 6) Are these cars actually green, or would they, in whole, including their destruction, cause more harm to the environment then help?

However, I believe in Elon Musk, an incredible guy, have a desire at least to see this company succeed, and Tesla's goals are noble goals. So, I'm very happy that Toyota saw the benefit and decided to invest. This means that Tesla will succeed for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Point 2 isn't really that big of a deal, unless you're using old flooded-cell lead-acid batteries. Newer lead-acid batteries have the electrolyte absorbed in fiberglass mats, so it won't spill or splash, even in a collision. An lithium-ion electrolyte is about as harmful in terms of skin and eye contact as petroleum fuels, except that it won't catch fire nearly as readily.

All in all liquid fuels are _much_ more hazardous than batteries. In an alternate reality where electric cars were the norm, I doubt you could get a liquid-fueled car past the safety regulators.

Point 6 is a valid question. An electric car is still a car, and comes with all the negative externalities of a car, with the exception of local air pollution and petroleum dependence. Greenhouse-gas-wise, they are somewhere between "about the same" and "much much better" than internal combustion powered cars, depending on your assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> still on the homepage:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366138>

twice:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366106>

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what makes Toyota feel that car manufacturing in the U.S. is now attractive again?

Even though the technology is new and different, you would still think that the economics of mass production remain the same.

<comment><USER11> Toyota has a lot of manufacturing the US; the NUMMI venture with GM was not the only toe-in-the-water. See:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toyota_manufacturing_fa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toyota_manufacturing_facilities#United_States)

<comment><USER12> And of course Toyota wants some GOOD American press for once.

<comment><USER13> I agree and $50M isn't that much to Toyota. Also, there may have been lease or shutdown and cleanup costs of the NUMMI site that probably would have exceeded $50M if no one took it over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how the love triangle between Tesla, Daimler and Toyota will play out. Does anyone know if Toyota and Daimler have ever collaborated before?</comment>


Formulating Science in Terms of Possible and Impossible Tasks - <AUTHOR> http://edge.org/conversation/formulating-science-in-terms-of-possible-and-impossible-tasks

<comment><USER2> So, a vague idea that might possibly turn into a testable theory someday…

Talk about wasting people's time.</comment>


Scientists Settle centuries-old debate on perception - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-scientists-centuries-old-debate-perception.html

<comment><USER2> Here's the classic reference to the problem in Locke (which vindicates Locke's speculative answer here):

[http://books.google.com/books?id=vjYIAAAAQAAJ&dq=essay%2...](http://books.google.com/books?id=vjYIAAAAQAAJ&dq=essay%20on%20human%20understanding&pg=PA83#v=onepage&q=molineux&f=false)

> To which purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and > studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molineux, > which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since; and it is > this: "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to > distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the > same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the > cube which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, > and the blind man made to see; quaere, Whether by his sight, before he > touched them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the globe, which > the cube?" To which the acute and judicious proposer answers: "Not. For > though he has obtained the experience of, how a globe, how a cube, affects > his touch; yet he has not yet attained the experience, that what affects his > touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle > in the cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it > does in the cube." I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to > call my friend, in his answer to this his problem; and am of opinion, that > the blind man, at first sight, would not be able, with certainty, to say, > which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he > could, unerringly, name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by > the difference of their figures felt.

</comment><comment><USER3> The physorg article mixes up, at first, the nature/nurture question and the cross-modality of perception question (whether internal representations good for tactile perception are also good for visual perception). Those are very different fundamental questions.

</comment><comment><USER4> These results were expected by neuroscientists. Different senses are encoded differently in the brain. So, the subjects were unable to link them at first. The surprising thing here is the speed the association between tactile and visual encodings happened, and the article makes that clear.

</comment><comment><USER5> Did I miss the link to the original puplication, or did they actually fail to include it?

[http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.27...](http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2795.html)

I find a study with 5 subjects a bit sparse, but I guess they are quite hard to come by...

<comment><USER6> Why would you need more than 5? This isn't a drug trial trying to pick up some subtle difference in results between taking a drug and not taking a drug. Is it really plausible that a theoretical person born blind and sighted later in fact can distinguish between the two but we just happened to get unlucky to find the five dunces in the world who can't?

Based on what we already know about how the brain works (aka "the prior probabilities") the chances of such an outcome are pretty much insignificant, far lower than a naive sample-based argument that ignores what we already know would show.

<comment><USER5> > Why would you need more than 5?

because humans are quite diverse

> Is it really plausible that a theoretical person born blind and sighted > later in fact can distinguish between the two but we just happened to get > unlucky to find the five dunces in the world who can't?

We don't know which percentage of blind people can distinguish objects by sight once they start to see. We don't know if it's all-or-nothing or not.

If half of blinds can, there's still a 3% chance to get the published results from five subjects. If it's 30%, the chances grow to 17%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find this very interesting. If I understand this correctly, the suggestions are: (1) the "slate" is relatively "blank" to start with (abstract objects, for instance, do not "exist", in the sense that they are inheritable); (2) a generic _ability_ to abstract could very well be inheritable; (3) the "slate" remains in a "writeable" state longer than previously expected - the right "nurture" can enable the unfolding of potential abilities even relatively late in life (abstract objects can _become_ "real", even though they don't "exist", in the sense that they can become "meaningful").

</comment><comment><USER8> It sounds like they didn't actually test Molyneux's question at all, or prove anything about perception. It sounds more like an additional data point to nudge our understanding of the brain toward greater plasticity.

<comment><USER9> Molyneux's question: Could a man, blind since birth who can tell the difference in shapes only by feel, given suddenly the ability to see be able to distinguish by sight those shapes?

Pawan Sinha's test: They took five people who had been blind since birth, performed the surgery to restore the sight, and performed the test which indicated that they could connect the tactile experience with a visual one no better than chance.

It's a very small sample size, to be sure, but to claim "they didn't actually test Molyneux's question at all"? Not sure which part of the article you missed.

<comment><USER8> The article says the subjects were given similarly-shaped objects, not a sphere and a cube (as noted by comments on the article). This gives the impression that the question whether very rough differences in shape, e.g. sphere vs. cube, can be distinguished immediately after sight is restored is still unanswered.

<comment><USER10> I was going to say the same thing. I'd really like to see what objects exactly they used.

I have a variation on the original question. Suppose someone blind has never touched a cube. However, he knows that a cube is an object with 6 sides of equal dimensions and 8 corners. Then his blindness is suddenly cured. If he sees a cube would he be able to associate it with the description of a cube that's already in his head?

<comment><USER5> > I was going to say the same thing. I'd really like to see what objects > exactly they used.

They used 20 sets of shape pairs, some examples of which can be seen in the original publication:

[http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.27...](http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2795.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Project Natal - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDvHlwNvXaM&feature=player_embedded

<comment><USER2> There was a talk at TEDGLobal 2010 about Milo, given by Peter Molyneux.

 _Molyneux ended the demonstration with the shocking truth that all the world's Milos are going to form a Borg-like hive mind, with the AI data "in the cloud" (as Wired puts it), continually learning from individual interactions_

[http://www.joystiq.com/2010/07/13/milo-meet-ted-molyneux- dem...](http://www.joystiq.com/2010/07/13/milo-meet-ted-molyneux-demonstrates- milo-at-conference/)

Very interesting...

<comment><USER3> Molyneux is insanely brilliant, but he tends to hype his games so much that the end result falls short of expectations. He's made similar claims about Fable - then known as Project Ego - that never materialized.

<comment><USER4> What an apt project name

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are at least 4 things in that video that give it away as 100% staged. Bonus points if you can spot them.

<comment><USER6> \- Too quick reaction to the "that is if you have finished your school project part", to soon during the "that is..." part?

\- The camera starts to zoom-in (in game) at the exact time to react to the future time of her finishing the drawing, although it would be very hard to predict the correct time of that happening?

Am I close?

<comment><USER5> Another one is her reflection on screen, during the fishing, moving before she does at one point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is from 2009-- I guess the relevance again is the TED talk reported this week? [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-07/13/peter- molyneu...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-07/13/peter-molyneux- milo-and-kate-xbox-kinect-preview)

The Microsoft product for interacting with Milo is now called Kinect as of E3 2010: <http://www.xbox.com/en-US/kinect>

</comment><comment><USER8> _Microsoft's Xbox PR chief Aaron Greenberg has said that Peter Molyneux's Kinect-controlled virtual boy Milo is a tech demo, and that Microsoft has no plans to release it as an Xbox 360 title._

[http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/microsoft-says- molyneux...](http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/microsoft-says-molyneux-s- milo-is-only-a-tech-demo-699668)

As nickelplate already mentioned, Molyneux is an awesome marketer. Almost all of his games fall short of the hype he builds, though all of his games are also semi-revolution and unique.

</comment><comment><USER9> Even if this weren't faked, this sounds 100 times more boring than an asteroids game. Oooh, look, I put my hands in the water and the fishes go away!

Show me gameplay.

<comment><USER10> You overestimate humans. Milo is the ultimate tamagotchi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Was that scripted or did Microsoft finally get voice recognition working?

<comment><USER12> Natal has working voice recognition. It was shown at E3 this past year to control accessing media content. It looks pretty cool. Voice control is perfect for the living room.

<comment><USER13> _Voice control is perfect for the living room._

I'd be wary of it being too easily triggerable, though.

<comment><USER14> "We want popcorn!"

"Searching for: Porn"

<comment><USER15> Hey, they said it was voice detection. They didn't say they mastered prediction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1) understands emotion? Do i need british intonation?

2) why don't they put up a website where you can interact with the character?

<comment><USER4> In regards to #2, I can't imagine they have the desire or resources to offer something online freely to the public that requires the kind of resources this thing is bound to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh cool, an update to the old Seaman game for Dreamcast.</comment>


Ask HN: Economic Recession and Executive Salaries - <AUTHOR> In respect to the current situation where the economy is starting to slow down and will only get worse, do you think that we have been living in an age of 'luxury' where executives are paid exorbitant sums and the future sustainability of businesses are not thought about through the lens of survival but through that of profiteering? <comment><USER2> Yes, I don't think that's even debatable.

The preservation of power right now is just egregious beyond comprehension. The Fed & Washington, for the service of the banks & corporate America, are going to add an immense amount of fragility to hold up an already fragile system with all of the Fed actions so far + $6 trillion in spending.

Ultimately, I believe how Central Banks operate these days cannot be sustained because to sustain them would defy the Laws of Thermodynamics. Their goal is perpetual low vol, but thats obviously not how volatility works. Vol suppression just leads to more explosions of volatility that are now having dangerous implications in the real world.

The latest actions by Congress & the Fed, if they pull it off, I suspect will lead to the next wave of volatility in violence, in a country with 400 million guns. Even if they pull this off, they're exposing the US to just an immense amount of pressure on the inflationary side. The political fallout of these actions I suspect will be a true rise in authoritarianism because violence will lead to chaos which leads to more violence, which leads to authoritarianism to suppress violence. Hitler rose to power as a reactionary force to the hyperinflationary failures of the Weimar Republic. The big difference now is that the tools at the hands of the government have never been more powerful.

This is not a moment where everyone is sacrificing, the managerial class of America & the executive class can maintain their pay, while 30% of Americans probably go unemployed, and every single small business in America has lost everything. The idea of America, this idea that anyone can make it, is totally lost in these circumstances. That is a far more powerful effect on society than anyone even realizes right now. So while these executives don't make a single sacrifice while so many do, I predict their lack of awareness to such extreme selfishness will ultimately be their downfall.

<comment><AUTHOR> This makes a lot of sense, not just for the American case but across the world. How would you suggest that us (common citizens) push for change or change our behavior to change this?

<comment><USER2> Well, for one, I recently heard a podcast from a guy named Charles Marohn, he runs this organization called Strong Towns, and wrote a book by the same title. I haven't read it yet but I think he's onto something. His thesis is we need to do a bottom up rebuild of America, not a top down one. It's all about advocacy for a return to localism as a way to solve America's problems.

This is off their website:

The Strong Towns approach is a radically new way of thinking about the way we build our world. We believe that in order to truly thrive, our cities and towns must:

\- Stop valuing efficiency and start valuing resilience;

\- Stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and start taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn;

\- Stop fearing change and start embracing a process of continuous adaptation;

\- Stop building our world based on abstract theories, and start building it based on how our places actually work and what our neighbors actually need today;

\- Stop obsessing about future growth and start obsessing about our current finances.

Otherwise, as an individual, I think it's about maybe insulating yourself from the impacts from what you can't control. I recently thought about growing my own vegetables, building a home hydroponics system. Had me thinking too about investing in solar power. I think the idea of teaching resilience is a better way to go, because we clearly have a way too fragile system that is susceptible to forces we can't control. As individuals it's up to us to build communities of people at the more localized level to create the world we want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Shareholders are to blame for lack of oversight on executive compensation.

<comment><USER4> I only half agree with you. I think the real problem is the board votes for people who are not in attendance. How many of you have been to a stock holders meeting? Nor have I. Nor do I want to. I think rules need to be put into place:

1) where if stock holders do not send in proxies, there shares are not counted.

2) if you are on a board for a company. The other members and CEO cannot be involved in any other company that you are a CEO or board member of. I feel it has become too much of a 'I will give you a raise, if you give me a raise'

3) proxies to member cannot have open ended 'and other issues as they occur' clauses. Typical proxy lists a bunch of things, but mostly 're elect xyzzy', with a clause at the end allowing the board to vote your shares as they seem fit. Like #1 above they do not need this.

Maybe they should have the shareholder meetings online so the people can vote.

You know for crazy salaries, do you ever see not public companies (privately held) paying such ridiculous salaries?</comment></comment>