Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/business/mutfund/vanguard-mutual-index-funds-growth.html <comment><USER4> As a Vanguard customer, I can understand why people are so enthusiastic about their products, and have known for a while that passive investment, and Vanguard in particular, was growing while active management was on the decline.

At no point did I think the difference in inflows was anywhere close to 8.5x. And it does worry me.

I'm familiar with the contention that even having some active players in the market will arbitrage the prices back to fair value, but when they compose such a small share of such a large market that's no longer a trustworthy assumption to make.

There's no law that I know of that prevents active players from exploiting the knowledge that passive money will go wherever the market tells it to. There have got to be a lot of opportunities here for profiting, legally, at the expense of those passive investors, that goes beyond simple margin arbitrage.

My point is, the less active money there is around, the less accurate our concept of a correct value can be. This situation has the potential to de- stabilise the economy sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER5> > the less active money there is around, the less accurate our concept of a > correct value can be

The problem is deeper than that. Active shareholders actually give a shit about corporate governance. Collectively, they put honorable and competent people on the board of directors, and make sensible decisions when other issues are put to shareholder votes. Vanguard and other indexing funds could barely care. Their incentive to care is so small, we may as well call it nothing. Whereas the employees who control these voting blocks at Vanguard can easily make decisions that cause 10,000x more financial impact than their total compensation. And whenever someone is endowed with such power, human behavior throughout our existence has shown most people will be corrupted by it (e.g. see government employees).

<comment><USER6> Talking about honorable and competent people on the board of directors. I recently realized that Apple's board of directors includes Al Gore. He's certainly a honorable man, but what does he know about making and selling iPhones? Why is he on Apple's board of directors?

<comment><USER7> > Talking about honorable and competent people on the board of directors. I > recently realized that Apple's board of directors includes Al Gore. He's > certainly a honorable man, but what does he know about making and selling > iPhones? Why is he on Apple's board of directors?

His job isn't to make and sell cell phones. His primary function is to make the C-suite accountable to shareholders. The C-suite's job is to make and sell cell phones.

Frankly, Boards function mostly on business metrics and people skills that are generic to any business.

<comment><USER8> Al Gores real job on the Apples board had been to have Steve Jobs back. Jobs wanted a card blanche to lead Apple (and never be fired again) so he picked a respectable board loyal/friendly to him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> With index funds so big, who determines prices? An index fund tied to the S&P 500 just buys stocks in the proportion that they're in the S&P 500. The price of the stock plays no role in that decision. At some point, this has to create problems, but so far it hasn't. It does mean the active traders, who are basically moving the same money around all day, have an outsized influence on prices.

Index funds are so successful because managed stock funds, as a class, underperform the market indices. So do hedge funds, which are a net lose for their investors. People are finally aware that Wall Street's stock pickers mostly aren't very good.

<comment><USER10> > With index funds so big, who determines prices? ... At some point, this has > to create problems, but so far it hasn't.

Any active trader remaining in the market. Fortunately, active traders still make up a large part of the market. And the bigger indices grow, the larger the opportunities for active traders to profit. It's not a real problem — it's self-correcting.

<comment><USER11> > And the bigger indices grow, the larger the opportunities for active traders > to profit.

I'm having trouble understanding why this is the case. Care to clarify?

<comment><USER12> Index funds buy or sell blindly, at whatever the prevailing best price is. Naturally, if there were only index funds in the market, the price would vary randomly.

That being said, consider what would happen if stock prices did start to vary randomly - if you had actual research suggesting the price was too high or too low, you could trade accordingly. This would net you a profit, and also help push the price in the opposite direction, towards whatever a reasonable price is.

The larger the deviation from the "correct" price, the larger the potential profits are to be had. So if the problem ever starts to be significant (i.e. a few cents of deviation caused by index funds), this means a very large potential profit for any active funds or traders out there. And so we would expect the system to reach an equilibrium - where there are just enough active funds and traders to snatch up the profits that arise from tiny price errors and distortions caused by index funds. In effect, the index funds are paying those remaining active funds and traders a tiny "management fee" (in the form of exploitable trading behavior) to figure out the appropriate price of stocks for them!

<comment><USER13> stock prices Do vary randomly.

<comment><USER14> Random walk depends on all participants acting rationally based on the same information released at the same time. However, index funds are not rational, they always buy in the same ratios regardless of news.

<comment><USER15> I'd suspect all those HFT firms will have robot agents (trading based on some ratios/logic) as simulations for their testing environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Vanguard seems to have gone a bit too far with cost-cutting in the customer services department. One of my most frustrating recent experiences was dealing with Vanguard's website and customer service. There were all kinds of issues, some minor annoyances, others serious time sinks.

Here's an excerpt from a long and boring story:

... One day, I couldn't log in to their website. Attempting to go through "forgot my password" had me fill out a long form with security question. I filled it out, pressed submit, and was presented with the same form, but blank. No error message, nothing else. I thought their website must be broken that day, tried again the next day with the same result. After doing this a few times, I called them. Turns out, my account got into some invalid state. It took them more than a week after that to figure out what was wrong with the account and fix it.

Then, my account fixed, I tired to buy some eft-s. Website replies: "Cannot perform this transaction, call us for assistance". I think that's a temporary outage, try again the next day. I called them again, waited a while to get an agent, found out they needed some more documents from me. I sent them in, but there was no way to find out if they were happy with the documents on their website ...

<comment><USER17> I don't understand how companies like that can thrive (but many do). If I have to pick up the phone to solve a problem even once, I'm angry. If I have to call them twice, I'm looking at alternatives. I may decide not to switch if the alternatives are even worse...but, I'm looking to get out of the shitty relationship I find myself in with that company. (This frustration is fresh in my mind because Security Metrics just told me to call them about PCI compliance...I refused, and will be going elsewhere for that service.)

Big finance seems particularly bad at user-facing technology. Which doesn't really give me confidence in their back end tech.

<comment><USER18> > If I have to pick up the phone to solve a problem even once, _I 'm angry_.

> If I have to call them twice....I'm looking to get out of the _shitty > relationship I find myself in_ with that company. [emphasis mine]

You are _way_ too sensitive and demanding, IMHO. You're probably a developer: is this how you want people thinking of you when you _inevitably_ push a bug? I can understand looking elsewhere after a pattern of problems and repeated frustration with no improvement, but getting pissed off just because you have to talk to someone one or two times is just unreasonable. Have a little empathy for the people on the other side.

<comment><USER17> I wasn't saying anything about demanding perfection. I was saying that talking to someone on the phone is the worst customer service experience in common use.

It is because I have empathy for the person on the other side that I'm angry at the corporation for making me have a conversation I really don't want to have. I am always nice to the person I speak to, despite being angry at the company they work for for wasting my time and making me interact with them in a way I really don't want to.

My anger is over the fact that I've been given no option but a phone call.

<comment><USER18> > I was saying that talking to someone on the phone is the worst customer > service experience in common use.

I disagree with that pretty strongly. The phone is the second-best method for communicating a complex or unusual problem, only behind a face-to-face meeting.

Anyway, the worst customer service experience in common use is actually the fixed-option support menu (that usually obscures how to contact a real person).

The _real_ determiner of good customer service is how the process was designed and how empowered the representatives are to fix your problem. Case in point: Amazon's famous customer service. I had an unusual problem with an order recently. Their chat support utterly failed to help me after several tries, leaving me very frustrated. Their email support couldn't help me either, but explained I needed to call. It turns out _only_ their phone support is empowered to escalate things to someone who could help, plus the it was much easier to relate my issue to them. None of that frustration had anything to do with the phone vs. chat vs. email, but everything to do with Amazon's (poor) support choices.

> My anger is over the fact that I've been given no option but a phone call.

I can understand feeling frustration at that, but not anger.

<comment><USER17> I may have a more pained relationship with phones than average. I hate talking on the phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The fact that Vanguard is growing faster than everybody else combined is interesting indeed. The article itself, however, reads like one big ad for Vanguard. The fact that the NYT is somewhat affiliated with them ("They number well over 20 million and include New York Times employees: Vanguard runs the company's 401(k) retirement plans.") doesn't help either. What I miss is a critical examination of the situation. They're just drinking the Kool-Aid.

Although negativity on HN is often too high I am glad it is here when it comes to articles like this one!

<comment><USER20> Pardon my ignorance, but how would NYT directly benefit from a boost in Vanguard popularity? Say this article somehow elicits a bevy of people/companies to invest in Vanguard, raising their mutual fund from $4.2 to a $4.5 trillion. Given that NYT stake in this fund remains constant, it's not clear to me how this helps NYT employees - unless $4.5 trillion is the tipping-point for market manipulation (but isn't this fund simply tracking major indexes?). Or would the biggest benefit come in the form of even lower fund fees (<0.1%)?

<comment><USER21> It wouldn't. It's utterly insignificant that Vanguard hosts their 401Ks. That's like saying, "Full Disclosure: Many NYT employees have accounts at BOA!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm fascinated at how Vanguard's essential idea plays out over the long term.

The basic value proposition seems to be that Wall Street is extracting more value in fees than they're making in smart stock picks. Which thus far has been pretty accurate, but is the contribution of stock pickers _actually_ zero? Is it _negative_? Where do we reach a fixpoint, and how? Do the stock pickers, clever scamps that they are, figure out a way to take advantage of the Bogleheads and their naivete? Are they already doing so? _Is_ this going to turn the stock market into just one big house of cards?

I mean, don't get me wrong, I absolutely buy that Wall Street is a bunch of crooks-- it's a hell of a lot easier to extract fees from your customers than it is to beat a market full of highly motivated Ivy Leauge MBAs. But where does it stop? If I've seen any trends in the financial markets, it's that every good idea will eventually be flogged to death, usually with catastrophic results.

<comment><USER23> This may sound snarky, but it's not meant to be. When I've worked in large corporations I was astounded by the amount of... shall we say "irregular" stock activity. For a while I've been struck with the thought that you could probably make a pretty good living simply buying long stock the day before executive stock options are issued and then selling them again when executives are selling theirs (either through planned trades or when blackouts are lifted).

Interestingly (for me, anyway) the very large places I've worked at often let the peons listen to the analysts meetings over the phone system. Again, I was shocked by the complete lack of knowledge that analysts at big investment houses have in the companies they were analysing. They would be completely unaware of large acquisitions, law suits and any number of things that even the casual observer would know about. I really got the impression that their job was literally to attend the meeting and report the company's projections. The company's could get away with murder because _nobody_ was paying attention to what they were doing.

Not sure if things have tightened up since that time in my life. I haven't worked for a big company since the early 2000's, but somehow I get the impression that there are probably plenty of ways to ride on the coattails of less than scrupulous executive compensation.

<comment><USER24> I have an engineering background and worked with a major telco for several years before moving to work as a financial analyst for a while.

Few of the other analysts had an industry background in the companies they covered. Mostly they had an accounting/commerce/economics background. They were good at pulling together financial models from the data and information provided to them in briefings, but they largely missed the implications that even someone with a year or two of industry experience would understand.

I am reminded of the story of Max Planck and the chauffeur and the two types of knowledge [0].

[0] [https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/09/two-types-of- knowle...](https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/09/two-types-of-knowledge/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone who wants to learn more about passive index investing should check out Bogleheads (bogleheads.org). My second favorite forum after HN.

<comment><USER26> You may also want to check out /r/financialindependence on reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Of course. There wasn't a significant recession since 2009. It is psychologically very easy to buy into a rising market.

When the next (inevitable) correction happens, the tide will change and stock pickers will return to the spotlight.

(It might be not rational, of course. But markets are never rational. They are efficient — efficient in projection of our hopes and fears).

<comment><USER28> I don't think market conditions have much to do with it. Whether to invest in the market, or in a certain asset class, is a separate decision from whether to pick stocks or buy a passively managed fund.

Passively managed money has been increasing because there are more low-cost funds available, and lots of education about stock picking versus passively managed funds (e.g. Warren Buffet, A Random Walk).

<comment><USER27> Well, the question is scientifically valid.

My theory predicts that when the next major recession happens, Vanguard and other passively managed funds will become dramatically less popular (which will amplify the fall), and actively managed funds will come back.

Your theory predicts that none of this will happen when recession strikes.

So, I propose we wait and see. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's a question for someone more savvy than me. What happens if the vast majority of stock investments end up in vanguard funds?

In an economic crises, will everyone try to sell the same set of funds and will crash the funds themselves?

<comment><USER30> Here's how it works.

An ETF or Fund like vanguard is a company that issues "coupons" and then buys and sells them (and various related administrative things, e.g. forwarding dividends while combining them).

So when you buy an ETF "share", what happens is that you buy a newly issued coupon from this company. This company gets notified, and as a result will put in market orders for these shares (while combining them in smart ways), and once it has bought the shares, issue the "share". (needless to say there's aggregation happening)

When you sell the reverse happens. You essentially request the company destroy the coupon. In response the company will sell shares. Once the shares are sold, the company will transfer that money (ie. whatever they got) to you.

So to answer your questions, in a flash crash scenario as an ETF owner you'll experience more lag in both cases. Ie. whether you're buying or selling the lag will add to your disadvantage compared to the rest of the market. So simplifying things, if a flash crash happens and you own an ETF or a fund you'll only be "allowed" to sell once the drop is over. If you try to buy at the bottom your order won't be filled for a while. Mind you this will be in the seconds range, or in particularly bad cases a few minutes.

In the US, there is also regulation that allows funds to pause redemptions. So if you own a fund that fears it may be significantly affected by a market drop, it can then block your money (regardless of what a contract you have with them says) for a period of up to months. Given what has historically happened, for small funds this means if there is a large drop, they will block your money making things worse (but somewhat avoiding feedback in the market that would cause individual share crashes). You will lose something like 20-80% of your capital if this happens. The smaller a fund the more likely this is to happen.

So an ETF should only be used for amounts of money that are truly too small to buy individual shares, something under maybe $10k. For everything else you should put in the work to buy the individual shares. If you don't do this, yes there are costs that will be imposed upon you in adverse scenarios.

<comment><USER31> Almost.

When you buy an ETF, you don't buy a newly issued cupon. You buy it from another market participant on an exchange - hence Exchange traded fund. What you're describing is closer to classic mutual fund. Each ETF will have "Authorized Participants" who make sure that the ETF mirrors the underlying assets.

<comment><USER30> I'm leaving that part out, because it obfuscates things. In one interpretation "Authorized Participants" on the exchanges keep the number of available "coupons"/shares at a fixed number.

So the market depth for any ETF should be constant, regardless of the value of the underlying assets (assuming non-extreme values and outside of crashes or rapid movements).

And yes, to be more exact, the market depth for an ETF should be a function of the amount of trading occuring in that ETF, not so much a constant. In any reasonable timeframe it should be constant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wouldn't be surprised if most of the money was coming from people's savings books. With zero interest rates, the next best thing to store one's savings is an ETF.

I feel like the increase in stock prices in the recent years is caused by this demand, not by an increase in productivity. The sinking ROI of dividend-driven stocks is an indicator for that.

<comment><USER33> It's not just the proletariat's savings. It's eveyone's. Some places have negative rates. You pay the bank. This means that money had to go some where. We have it in the market. As a result smart people and dumb people like me have waited for the market to adjust down 25% or more. I lost 2k on a market short ETN.

Given the amount of money just looking for a home the market has no where else to go but up until that money stops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Vanguard is the reason why Betterment and wealth front never made any sense to me. There is no way they can be better than just putting in vanguard funds myself. I still do t understand what their value proposition is.

<comment><USER35> Tax Loss Harvesting. This is the sole reason why Betterment(/Wealthfront) is superior to Vanguard. The benefits of this technique more than offset any fees they charge.

<comment><USER36> That's _really_ debatable. After 10~15 years of investment in Betterment or Wealthfront, in all likelihood all of your investments will be in the black, and there will be no opportunities for loss harvesting. But you're still stuck paying the 25 basis points per year unless you sell (and thus incur the capital gains, anyways).

<comment><USER37> I've got a fair bit of money in Wealthfront and tax loss harvesting has directly saved me quite a bit of money over the last couple years. For instance, the beginning of last year was tumultuous and their tax loss harvesting let me realize around ~55k in losses. The market then shot back up and my investments were right back where they were barely a month later. Because I had a source of capital gains in 2016, I basically earned free money.

So even if my investments were in the black in the macro scale, with tax loss harvesting I can realize additional gains from the inevitable dips that happen on the more micro scale.

<comment><USER36> I'm really talking about what happens after you've been invested with them for over a decade. Wealthfront has not yet existed for 10 years, so I know you haven't had your money invested with them for that long. The fact that tax loss harvesting can be beneficial is not in question.

Once you tax loss harvest once, you lower your cost basis on the investment to less than you originally paid. You can only subsequently tax loss harvest on the same security to the extent that the value of the investment is lower than your new lower cost basis. This will become harder as time goes on and you have previously tax loss harvested many securities.

Their white papers all use a timeframe of 10 years to show that Wealthfront is cost effective. I'm pretty sure they don't want customers thinking through all the implications of longer investment time horizons.

<comment><USER37> Oh gotcha with the cost basis raising over time. I wonder what strategies you could use to mitigate that. Perhaps buying a similar asset, holding that instead of the other, wait for the original to go down, and then re-purchase. Seems fragile and risky of course...

<comment><USER36> > Perhaps buying a similar asset, holding that instead of the other, wait for > the original to go down

If you're presupposing the assets are similar, this is unlikely to happen to any significant degree.

The standard way to increase your odds of being able to tax loss harvest is to own as many different uncorrelated securities as possible. You can take this to mean a fund per industry (as Betterment and Wealthfront do) or even to the extreme of only owning individual companies. That way, some are up and some are down, and you can TLH. The more slices you divide your portfolio up into, the longer you'll be able to do it. But I think realistically (especially factoring in inflation), this strategy will stop giving results before 15 years.

<comment><USER37> What about the effect of a (let's be honest, inevitable) market crash? You'd be able to realize quite a bit of loss as that is happening by selling assets. Then as the market recovers and assuming those assets are actually worth more than the crash-adjusted value, you would be able to harvest losses again on that asset.

<comment><USER36> Take a look at this chart of the SP500 over time: [http://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart- data](http://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data)

(Make sure to turn off inflation-adjusted)

I think you'll see that in the last 90 years, even the worst market crashes don't take the index down to a level lower than what it was 15 years prior. To put it another way, pick any time in the past 90 years, the S&P 500 is always higher 15 years later than that date and every day afterwards. Maybe slicing up your investments into finer-grained categories than the entire S&P 500 will help ... but I'm very skeptical that anyone can TLH for long periods successfully.

If you want to pay a perpetual 25 basis points per year for Wealthfront or Betterment, go ahead, but it seems unlikely to me you'll come out ahead of a simple index fund if you are investing long term.

<comment><USER37> I suppose there is no harm then in milking the tax loss harvesting for as long as it is profitable and then reevaluating performance in ten or fifteen years to see if it makes sense to switch to a lower cost provider like Vanguard.

Like I said though, I have seen very significant returns from my loss harvesting. Even without a yearly source of capital gains, it definitely does not hurt to collect the losses and use them later in life (for instance if you sell an investment property).

<comment><USER36> There is a harm. In 15 years, if you decide you don't like Wealthfront, in order to move, you will have to sell all your assets and incur the capital gains.

<comment><USER38> This is true any time you move brokerages, is it not? If, at some time in the future, you chose to move from Vanguard to Wealthfront to take advantage of tax loss harvesting, you'd pay capital gains tax as well.

<comment><USER39> > This is true any time you move brokerages, is it not?

No. If you own the assets directly, and they are traded on the exchange (like the ETFs WF/Betterment use) they can be transferred around without triggering a sale event. Target date funds and the like would probably have to be sold.

I have my tax advantage at VG and my taxable has been all over the place finally settling with CS for now.

<comment><USER38> Okay, you have me a little confused now :) I read my parent as saying that in order to move investments out of Wealthfront, you'll need to sell and pay capital gains. I read your comment saying this isn't necessarily the case. There seems to be some disagreement here. What am I misunderstanding? The ins and outs of investments and tax ramifications can sometimes seem very opaque to me, so I appreciate any education on this front.

<comment><USER36> I stand corrected. I thought they had their own mutual funds that they charge an expense ratio on, but I took a closer look at their site and it looks like they put you in third-party mutual funds from e.g. Vanguard and iShares. Since this is the case, you can just do a transfer-in-kind to another brokerage if you want to leave, and this is not a taxable event. (Sorry for my mistake!)

<comment><USER40> Looking further, they don't support outgoing ACATS (what most brokerages do), but do support DTC which I'm not at all familiar with[1]. So hopefully you could do Betterment until the TLH stopped being worthwhile and do a direct security transfer to another brokerage.

Although Betterment offers fractional shares, which is confusing, not sure if they're actually ETNs representing fractional ownership of ETFs. I don't know how that works legally.

[1] [http://support.bettermentforadvisors.com/customer/portal/art...](http://support.bettermentforadvisors.com/customer/portal/articles/1996300-do- you-support-acats-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Total market cap of S&P 500 have increased from $13T to $21T from 2012 to 2017 without having corresponding underlying financial growth in companies. This $8T difference feels tantalizingly close to new investment money flowed in via ETFs. I am wondering if current rise in S&P 500 can almost entirely attributed to new money flowing in to ETFs. If this thesis is correct then we can continue to expect more bull market for next few years as we are very likely not even half way through this cycle of money flowing from active strategies to passive strategies. In other words rise of S&P 500 indexes would become self full filling prophecy for at least next few years.

<comment><USER42> New money into ETFs does not necessarily mean new money into the market. A big part of that is money just switching from actively managed mutual funds to passive index funds, e.g. recently pension funds in some states.

<comment><USER41> Active strategy may be investing in small/mid caps, currency, commodities, bonds, emerging markets and so on. Lot of that money would be pulled in to biggest popular indexes now such as S&P 500.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There's been something I've been thinking about: with so many people purchasing index funds, what happens when there is a major downturn in the market?

What happens when millions of people sell off their shares in say, VASGX (basically an 80/20 stock/bond index fund)?

Would that effectively tank the _entire_ market rather than sectors doing poorly.

<comment><USER44> Really depends on what indexing implies. If you're talking about a world where everyone trades actively but instead of trading individual companies they only trade broad index funds then, yes, swings in the market would be amplified. Although in that world you would imagine that there would be a lot of alpha to be picked off by smart traders and so that should counteract the "dumb money" actively trading indexers.

If indexing _also_ implies passive/"set and forget"-style trading then you would actually dampen market swings. You'd have fewer people selling as the market tanked and fewer people buying the big rallies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Ultimately this is a good thing for the stock pickers that remain - <USER2> dollars spent actively discovering the true value of companies means longer stretches and wider swings of mispricings.

</comment><comment><USER46> I was a contractor at Vanguard around 2007-2008. IIRC, pay wasn't that good but rank and file FTE recieved 30k+ bonuses (allegedly). With this recent growth I wonder if compensation there has grown at a similar rate. I rarely hear people mention it as a good place to work or as having highly competitive compensation.

<comment><USER47> The compensation structure has been significantly revamped since then. Partnership isn't what it used to be, so people don't get the big payments like they used to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> How does control/governance for Vanguard actually work? It's apparently owned by the investors in the funds, but I own some ETFs through Vanguard and I've never seen a proxy form.

Very happy with the service, just curious about that aspect.

<comment><USER49> My understanding is that individual fund investors will never see a proxy form - the fund's decisions on how it will vote are determined by the managers.

Also, take a look at [https://about.vanguard.com/vanguard-proxy- voting/](https://about.vanguard.com/vanguard-proxy-voting/)

<comment><USER48> I was referring more to control of Vanguard itself - i.e. choosing the Board of directors for Vanguard.

I did a bit of digging though, and it seems they are actually elected by the shareholders of Vanguard funds - but they are appointed for lifetime terms, and up to 1/3 of the directors may be appointed by the other directors. So they only need to go to a vote of shareholders occasionally - looks like the last was in 2009.

The proxy form from that meeting: [http://www.vanguard.com/jumppage/proxy/PROXYA.pdf](http://www.vanguard.com/jumppage/proxy/PROXYA.pdf)

<comment><USER50> That is one of the major concerns regarding indexing and Vanguard in general. The process for selecting directors in Vanguard indirectly affects the proxy voting for corporate governance in stocks owned by the fund. Many people think it will lead to lower competition because of the objective of the fund is to keep in line with the market and not beat it.

<comment><USER49> FWIW I can't say I'm terribly happy with Vanguard's environmental proxy voting record...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It makes me a bit sad that such index funds are not available in my part of the world - even though this is one of the shittiest countries in the EU, services like these are needed precisely because all the other services are so bad.

<comment><USER52> which country is that? because there are many options available here in Western Europe (alternatives to Vanguard are iShares, SPDRs Europe, Amundi, ...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> If all vanguard does is buy (not pick) stocks for you, why wouldn't you just skip the fee and buy the stocks yourself?

<comment><USER54> 1\. Most of the people just want to set their allocation and no think about it more than a few times a year.

2\. Without Vanguard(and other index funds), you do not quality for admiral shares.

3\. Vanguard's fees are among the lowest(last time i checked it was between 0.1-0.5%). There is no charge for buying and selling Vanguard funds.

4\. Vanguard is non-profit.

~I am no way affiliated with Vanguard.

<comment><USER12> Admiral shares are a function of the Vanguard mutual funds themselves; if you're buying the underlying companies directly, "admiral shares" don't matter, since you're not paying management expenses at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I seems like there should be an opportunity for active investors to make money off of all the passively managed money.

All I can think of would be to take advantage of the margin of the index. For example buy stock #501 and a discount and sell when it crosses into the sp 500 since vanguard will prop up the price by buying it for tge index fund. Similarly shorting #499.

I'm sure that the market has gotten more sophisticated than this though. So how does it work in practice?

<comment><USER56> Look here: [https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundIntExt=I...](https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundIntExt=INT&FundId=0040#tab=2)

The Vanguard S&P500 index fund currently contains 511 stocks. Even the S&P500 index itself holds 505 stocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This feels like an article that will be shown for irony points in a documentary about Vanguard's collapse a few years from now.

<comment><USER58> Why do you say Vanguard will collapse?

<comment><USER57> Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Articles like this showed up for Enron and MCI/WorldCom and all the others, extolling one virtue or another and showcasing their success. Now we have one for Vanguard, ergo it will fail.

I'm not serious, of course. But pride does seem to come before the fall, and just out of an excess of caution I might move some money out of my vanguard funds next week.

<comment><USER59> You've got to take in to account that Vanguard doesn't actually do much - <USER3> buy stocks on your behalf and charge 0.12% for doing so. If it stopped doing that because some other operator was doing it for 0.08% it wouldn't be a big deal.

The bigger deal would be if the general market collapsed for some reason but that would affect everyone, not just Vanguard.

<comment><USER57> Ok. I'm curious why you're telling me this. What's your motivation?

There's certainly no point in arguing with me, since I'm both reasonably poorly informed and aware of it; I have made no bones about the fact that my post was unserious. Yet you leap to the defense of what should, after all, be a very unexciting thing. And you aren't alone in doing so.

That, like this breathless article, is mildly troubling to me. These institutions should engender no loyalty, embody no attributes; only then does the market actually work. Evidence of those tendencies suggests the distorting effect of human psychology. And in tone it is too much like what we saw before the collapse for my liking.

<comment><USER59> Well I've known Vanguard for about 30 years and am a fan as it's saved the investing public many billions over that time, certainly if you compare them to normal fund management companies even if just buying and holding shares directly is probably cheaper still.

But I was just pointing out they offer a rather dull, value for money service and are not going to collapse Enron style. They could decline Sears style however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> > The scale of that inflow becomes clear when it is compared with the rest of > the mutual fund industry — more than 4,000 firms in total.

No mentions of ETFs? SPDR is not a mutual fund company.

> Already, six out of the 10 largest mutual funds by asset size belong to > Vanguard, with the largest, Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, now weighing > in at $465 billion, according to Morningstar.

The elephant in the room is ETFs like SPDR. SPY (SPDR's largest fund) has $230 Billion in assets. It isn't quite as big as Vanguard, but clearly SPY needs to be mentioned.

The silence is deafening. "Classic" active mutual fund companies may be dying, but a new breed of investing has already begun... and its competing against Vanguard quite gloriously. Low cost, quickly traded, with large numbers of derivatives: ETFs.

</comment><comment><USER61> I imagine they must have some kind of stop loss strategy; there's a bunch of research comparing various strategies to buy and hold, and buy and hold is pretty much 2nd worst, with the worst being an overly aggressive stop loss (like sell everything at a 5% drop).

</comment><comment><USER62> I would very much like to invest in index funds, but Vanguard need a social security number, which I don't have. Does anyone know of an alternative that doesn't require an SSN, or something comparable to Vanguard in the EU?

<comment><USER63> Vanguard exists in the UK: [https://www.vanguard.co.uk/uk/portal/home.jsp](https://www.vanguard.co.uk/uk/portal/home.jsp)

<comment><USER62> Ah, fantastic, I was just looking for that, thank you. It's odd how little a search turns up, "Vanguard Europe" wasn't very informative.

<comment><USER64> More than just the UK. See: [https://global.vanguard.com/portal/site/home](https://global.vanguard.com/portal/site/home) for a list of countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> q-base Think I may need to dig deeper into this. But a few questions that one of you may be able to answer. Seems like you won't get super large returns but on the other hand you won't risk super large losses either.

But sounds like instead of having cash on a bank account, earning no interest, it may be worth putting them into EFT's? Or have I totally misunderstood? Is it only possible to tie your money up for longer periods for instance?

Any caveats as Dane looking at Vanguard? Fee's, cross rates or other I may have missed in this?

<comment><USER65> There is a risk, but it is averaged over hundreds of equities instead of just a few, as with directly buying shares (unless you can afford to spread a lot; if you do, you can afford a wealth manager).

If just a few equities are decreasing in value, it'll balance out. But if they all loose, like on October 19th, 1987, when the S&P 500 lost 20.47%, you'd be much poorer.

<comment> q-base Thanks a lot. I need to read up on investing in index funds and Vanguard sounds like a good bet if I decide to go that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Bogle, Graham & Buffett are the proletariat's guardian angels.

<comment><USER67> Paul Graham or Benjamin Graham?

<comment><USER15> Sounds easy.. Based on context I'd say it's Benjamin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Lot of posts in here about the inherent problems ahead being "self correcting".

Anyone have thoughts on when getting back into active funds would be smart?

</comment><comment><USER69> Original article (and not behind a paywall): [http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=80267...](http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=802679)

</comment><comment><USER70> Glad to see people finally waking up to the fact that most active money managers are actually terrible at managing your money.

</comment><comment><USER71> Well, now's the time to leave equities or go active. I've never heard of anyone getting rich by following the herd.

<comment><USER72> If your goal is to get rich, sure. But going with the herd isn't necessarily unsafe. The goal of "getting rich" is generally incongruous with passive investing either way.

The risk/reward profile of active investing and index fund investing are completely different, so that will be more than a decision of upside you want to pursue.

<comment><USER71> It remains to be seen how risky passive index investing is now that so much money is in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> ... vanguard being the only brokerage not to offer two factor is a little frustrating.

<comment><USER74> They _do_ support Yubikey, the feature is called "Security Key", not to be confused with SMS Auth called "Security Code".

[https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=205031](https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=205031)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> someone explain "reversion to the mean" I don't understand it.

<comment><USER76> If an average is unusually high/low it will tend to go back to the mean after time.

In the stock market this means that looking over a short timespan one will see large variance in the returns but over a long timespan (30+ years) the returns will be more consistent and nearly all positive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Charles Ponzi would be proud

<comment><USER78> How is Vanguard a ponzi scheme?

<comment><USER79> its not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Could vanguard become too big too fail? Is that a legitimate risk?

<comment><USER81> no, they are an asset manager, not bank or other credit/lending inst

<comment><USER56> And they don't actually hold the stocks in their fund; they are held in trust at JPM depository trust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> If this is not an Enron-like foreshadowing, it says something rather dark. It certainly looks like a 'bubble is about to pop' indicator, though it's generalized to the whole financial sector (to the extent that a blind index fund represents it, at least).

If it does pop, it suggests that an industry that is on average not as good as its own average, is itself overvalued (as numerous other comments strongly imply).

If it does NOT pop, it's speaking a deeper truth. It speaks to a collective, society-wide agreement: those with power should automatically get more power. Those with money should automatically get more money. The mechanism doesn't matter: it's like a moral duty to reverse Robin Hood and fill in the reasons later. If a dumb blind index beats everything and never fails, that means we've gone all-in on redistribution of wealth to 'the winner', defined as whoever has all the wealth.

And the only way to break that loop is pitchforks and guillotines. Some might say in the age of automation, AI and robotics, such disruptive things are impossible. But the original pitchforks and guillotines were in the age of early industrialization, and I'm sure nobody thought machinery and tools could end up turned against the rich and powerful. Everything's a tool eventually.

Vanguard popping is the SOFT option.

<comment><USER83> They don't own the assets hey manage, so they can't overvalue and go pop like Enron did.

Ways to pop Vanguard:

\- Pop the stock market

\- Game their indexes

\- Insider trading

You notice how a lot of people are already trying to do all three so it's not easy to pop Vanguard.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Sign-up Form Usability - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for opinions on whether an implementation detail on my website home page is reasonable or not.
I want users to sign up initially and subsequently login when they visit the site. I am gathering the absolute minimum of data - an email address and a user-generated password.
I figure rather than have a login form and a sign-up form I would instead use the same two-input box form for both functions. In the back-end I check for the existence of the credentials against the Db. If they exist, log the user in. If they do not, sign the user up and log them in. Seems like the simplest possible method, to me.
I am uncertain on this simply because there seem to be no other examples of sites doing this, so I wonder whether I have missed a major usability point here. <comment><USER2> What happens if they've registered before, but upon another visit, they login with typos?

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, and this just showed up in my RSS reader:

[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/04/web-form- design-p...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/04/web-form-design- patterns-sign-up-forms/)

Good read if you're focused on signup forms right now. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> That might be the simplest method, but it isn't the simplest interface.

Problems include typos, past users not remembering which email addy they used to sign up with, messaging (do you put a "forgot your password" under a signup form? That'd feel kinda weird). I think Reddit had some variation on what you're talking about and recently moved away from it.

On the typo front, here's what will happen: I try to log in but screw up the email addy. You create an account and send a welcome email to an addy that may or may not exist. If it doesn't exist (likely), the receiving mailserver might flag you as a spamming domain. In the meantime, I now have two accounts and might be confused given that the new account appears "empty".

By the by, @mooders-- why aren't you replying to people via threaded responses?

<comment><USER4> Side- (or off-) topic

"@mooders"

Does adding a leading @ character to a user name add anything?

Please consider: no Twitter Litter(tm).

:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a reason that the common login process has evolved into what it is today.

While I wouldn't want to discourage trying new things, it's definitely worth it to read the other comments on this page and then decide if the convenience you'd be providing on login is more important than the prevented headaches when a user hits an edge case that is no longer covered.

My point is not to tell you "no, don't do it" because your particular site might be different enough from the usual site that this approach could work. Although I guess that is probably unlikely.

<comment><USER6> Here, here.

Another suggestion: if "Easy login/account creation" is a critical piece to your success, you need a new business model.

<comment><USER7> I highly doubt that's what he's saying...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been thinking about doing something similar. If you'd like to brainstorm on how to make it work let me know.

I think it's possible. Firstly you need to tell people it is different. Secondly drop the email, have the form redirect to their profile. I think you should add a radio button or something that provides the options login/create/lost password. have login be the default.

then show it to someone for usability testing. If it doesn't work make 2 separate forms.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's important to make clear that this form does more things than every other form in the world that looks like it.

Also, there's a reason why "confirm password" is a standard -- unless you're sending them their password plaintext afterwards, you run the risk of locking people out due to typos.

Objections aside, though, it strikes me as elegant.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @tortilla - after n retries, we will lock the account and email a randomly- generated password to them that is valid for 24 hours. On login, they will need to enter a new password.

@bayareaguy - email offers two advantages over username. 1) it's unique and 2) it can be useful for communications.

<comment><USER9> _it's unique_

What do you mean by that? An email address does not uniquely identify one person.

 _it can be useful for communications._

Indeed, especially for spam marketers.

If you make me provide an email upfront I'm probably going to ignore your site or at best give you a temporary address. The only services that have my real address are ones that have proven their value to me. If you can't do that then chances are all the data I provide your service will eventually end up in the wrong hands anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> bad idea, most people will just get confused because they can't find a "Sign up" or "Register" link on the page. So they will just leave in frustration.

And it won't help to have a few sentences telling them what to do, because the whole concept is so foreign, noone does this.

Do you really want to bother with teaching every user this concept? I mean this is such a trivial thing, and will cause nothing but problems.

And like someone mentioned you'll flood your database with a lot of typo addresses and will frustrate users even further, because instead of them getting into email@example.com account, they ended up in firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER7> actually you could just have one link that says something like login / register

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's pretty elegant in principle, but you might lose whatever usability points you gain with the multi-use form by having to explain to the user that it's meant for both signup and login. I can't think of a really simple way to do that.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why not do what YC News does? The Login link asks you for a username and password. There's no email address required.</comment>


Gnews for Android - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innovative.gnews

<comment><AUTHOR> Please leave your comments here. I'd love your feedback. If any negative feedback, I'd appreciate if you could let me know here, and give me an opportunity to work on them.

Thanks!</comment>


Zoho and others launch their iPhone specific offerings today. - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/06/29/iphone-sucks-oxygen-out-of-room/ <comment><USER2> Read Write Web also talked about this yesterday <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31483>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah ha! I had not seen that.

<comment><USER2> Its pretty cool though. I can't believe that people are not more interested in this.</comment></comment></comment>


Making Banking Boring - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/opinion/10krugman.html

<comment><USER2> Also see: <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice> for a more in- depth article about why we need more regulation and why the government is unlikely to go through with it and discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=534679>

</comment><comment><USER3> The only reform we need is a market shakedown and bankruptcy of failing corporations. Let the new guys pick up the debt and form new banks.

I, for one, would like to see peer to peer banking.</comment>


Gustav III of Sweden's Coffee Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_III_of_Sweden%27s_coffee_experiment <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting, this brings back happy childhood memories :

When I was a kid I used to follow my dad around the farm while he was milking the cows and doing farm work.

He told a lot of stories like this (including the details about the doctors and the king dying first). Other times he told me about scientific studies he had read about etc. I can clearly remember him talking about omega3 in the mid 90ies, way before it became popular around here at least, because I remember asking a particular teacher about it.

(He is now a teacher and enjoys it. I bet his students do too :-)

Edit: I sent the link and he just replied. He read it in a book but sadly that book had less details, not more.

Edit 2: FWIW here is a a page from nih.gov: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5355814/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5355814/)

It to still light on the details though, and I don't have time to check all the references now.

</comment><comment><USER3> As with all drugs, it's not understood the paradoxical drug effects. Stimulants can make people sleepy, and the most potent of benzodiazepamines can make one more agressive. The endocrine system (also the immune system) is so complex and so full of variables and network effects that I think that science has a long way ahead for a precise scientific understanding of all the positive and negative effects of these drug categories.

<comment><USER4> This is a really weird topic! For example, I understand that Ritalin is used mostly as a stimulant and can be used to treat some cases of narcolepsy.

But, according to a psychiatric doctor I spoke to, some people take it to help them fall asleep.

<comment><USER5> I am pretty sure I have undiagnosed ADHD(its pointless getting a diagnose in my country as an adult).

My resting heart rate is pretty high, but if I do any intelectual work wahtsoever my heart rate is around 95bpm.

RItalin analogues(in therapeutic doses) bring my heart rate to 60bpm when doing intelectual work while sitting on a desk -- during my deepest sleep my heart rate is 67bpm.

My own bro-science explanation is that I compensate my ADHD with anxiety -- when I'm anxious, I can focus just fine; some stimulants allow me to focus without the anxiety and that's why I feel deep calm and reduced heart rate while using them.

<comment><USER6> I feel your bro science makes a lot of sense. I'm someone who's been identified as being bipolar and put on Lithium, which I quickly dropped (because it made me feel suicidal) and I instead turn to illegally acquired cannabis, which helps me to not feel the anxiety of not yet having solved a problem, something that these days freak the living shit out of me, if I'm not doped up.

<comment><USER7> Lithium should almost certainly NOT make one suicidal when dosed correctly for Bipolar. You might wish to explore the uses of a micronutritional form of lithium, namely, lithium orotate, which gets metabolized in a very different (and safer) way than pharmacological lithium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading it, I first thought: "Twin study, cool!"

Then I thought, "What? Two experiments, but no control group? How disappointing!" :)

<comment><USER9> Considering the levels of consumption, you could assume that tea drinking is the control!

<comment> blaser-waffle Three pots!

That's almost Fry-Futurama level of consumption. Couple more pots and that test subject would have superpowers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >the tea drinker was the first to die, at age 83;

For being condemned criminals it sounds like they were well cared for.

Also what are the odds of finding condemned twins?

<comment><USER11> If they committed crimes together, not hard. If things like political crimes can be punished by death, even easier. If the king says "get me a pair of identical twins condemned to death" very easy. Go into a poor neighborhood, find a pair of twins and drag them in on an unsolved murder.

<comment><USER12> That's such a nauseating reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This and more stories about origin of coffee was recently discussed in In our Time [1] podcast from BBC.

[1] [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c4x1](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c4x1)

</comment><comment><USER14> > the date of death of the surviving coffee drinker is unknown.

Apparently 3 pots of coffee a day makes you immortal.

<comment><USER15> A simple application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. After the third pot, you're so focused on your velocity that your location can no longer be determined to be in either the land of the living or the land of the dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Twist: The coffee drinker is still alive

</comment><comment><USER17> No control group without tea or coffee?

<comment><USER2> First: remember this is 250 or so years ago.

Secondly you could say that everyone else was the control group as this king taxed tea and coffe and later outlawed at least coffee entirely.

Edit: according to some sources it was his dad who first introduced steep taxes on tea and coffee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is quintessential Swedish sense of humor, the doctors AND the king dying before either of the twins.

<comment><USER19> Questioning the value of coffee leads to death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great Article!

You know, arguably (and I'm sure historians will differ on this!), but arguably, this is sort of like the Swedish version of Prohibition ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States)) -- _except with Coffee_ , and except occuring in 1794, some 126 years or so before Prohibition...

Ya know what I want to see?

Somewhere, somewhere in obscure Swedish history, there has to be a version of the U.S.'s Boston Tea Party (1773) -- except occuring with, and solely on behalf of, you guessed it: _Coffee_...

<g>

(Oh yeah, and to any detractors out there in the HN Community without a sense of humor, feel free to downvote! I have enough HN Karma, I can take it! Hey, _I_ thought it was funny! <g>)

Hmm... Maybe there should be a political party, U.S. and/or Swedish... "The Coffee Party"... (ok, that was overstepping my bounds, yes, that would deserve a downvote! <g>)</comment>


Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Wants Biology to Manufacture Physical Goods - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-06/ginkgo-bioworks-ceo-wants-biology-to-manufacture-physical-goods <comment><USER2> People sometimes ask why there's so much discussion of Lisp on HN. It's because so many times when you scratch the paint off a trend, a language, or a prominent person in computer science you find Lisp right below the surface.

One of the founders of Ginkgo, Tom Knight, was one of the inventors of the Lisp Machine.

<comment><USER3> I knew the name ringed a bell, thanks for filling in :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > We have a partnership with a large Canadian company called the Cronos Group, > a $100 million deal. We're basically programming cells to produce > cannabinoids. It's very similar to what we did back in the fragrance > industry. You get cannabinoids—THC, CBD, and so on—by extracting the oil > from the flower of the cannabis plant, and then that goes into things like > vaping and edible products. The process for doing all that growing is > extremely expensive and requires big greenhouses. What we're doing is > reading the DNA of the cannabis plant and finding the part that encodes the > cannabinoids. We then move it into brewer's yeast, brew it up, and instead > of beer, you get CBD.

I noticed he mentions CBD but not other parts of the plant, they also mention CBD on their homepage. Hopefully they don't spend too much resources on the quack science stuff which a lot of CBD stuff is being marketed with (outside of epilepsy).

The other stuff they are working on sounds truly fascinating. The amount of money going into it is pretty crazy, I guess they've made a proven model with mint oil / brewers yeast and are now scaling it up like a tech startup. Or rather like YC for bio startups but more hands-on with IP ownership and providing resources.

</comment><comment><USER5> These guys have been on a major PR push for a little while. The business model and technology sound fantastic, and the potential applications really are numerous.

I find the notion that 'anything' can be commercially produced by synbio dubious (think gold or uranium) but the range of applications in the organic space seem vast.

Does anybody have the relevant background to reliably comment on the cost efficiency/R&D timelines/scalability of these kinds of projects?

<comment><USER6> I work in bioinformatics, not syn-bio, but I have friends working in syn-bio.

I first wanted to go into syn-bio during my undergrad days (about 13 years ago?) since then all the exciting things were happening, logical gates, fine- grain control of E. coli etc.

When I look at what my friends are working on nothing much has changed? We can have simple AND gates in plants now, not just bacteria, but that's where it already stops. Anything more complex still doesn't work.

A lot of progress has been made in DNA synthesis, creation of new DNA instructions, 'printing' DNA?, we can write entire chromosomes now.

Delineating 'synthetic biology' from good old biotechnology is hard though :) A lot of the progress I see that gets chalked up to syn-bio feels more like regular biotechnology: getting known genes together into bacteria to produce chemicals. We've been doing that for a long time in insulin, washing powder, all kinds of medicines, all on industrial scale, it's where your insulin comes from.

To me syn-bio means to create entirely novel genes/pathways, not just re-using what nature has to offer, there was lots of fun progress here (artificial genetic codes, for example), but nothing that has made it out of the lab.

So Gingko's success happens in (to me!!!!) good old microbiology, taking genes that already exist and putting them into bacteria: 'Our first customers were in the fragrance industry. You get mint oil from mint leaves. We would take the genes from mint by reading the DNA code of the mint plant, find the part of it that encodes the mint flavor, print out the code from the mint plant, redesign it a little bit, move it into brewer's yeast—like you use to make beer. ' That's not different from insulin production, and we've been doing that (well!) for thirty years or so. Same goes for Gingko's CBD production, we know a lot about that pathway already, and moving it into bacteria for easier production isn't impossible, I'd say feasible within the next 5 to 10 years.

Now making truly artificial synthetic biology, new genes, new pathways, logical switches, I'd say that's another 40-50 years until yo use that on industrial scale.

<comment><USER5> >Gingko's success happens in (to me!!!!) good old microbiology, taking genes that already exist and putting them into bacteria

My intuition suggests the same... although it's based on high school AP bio plus conversations/reading.

Any thoughts on cost efficiency? Is there some Gibbs free energy or other principle that would prevent it from ever being commercially feasible?

<comment><USER6> Regular biotech is already very cost-efficient, it's just a matter of putting the gene in, not breaking anything, and then optimising the hell out of the protocol (optimising temperature, pressure, nutrient mix etc. in your bioreactors).

For synthetic biology, I have no idea why this is not commercially feasible. We probably oversimplify the cell's system too much, so that introducing a multi-level computer breaks things we don't know about? But I'm purely speculating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are zero profitable syn bio companies in the world because even simple projects are too slow and costly.

Ginkgo doesn't value it's employees, and doesn't have secret sauce. I think the next company, that Ginkgo diaspora found or flee to, will be the one that starts making these claims real.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if you might expand on your assertion that Ginkgo doesn't value its employees -- I have a friend that joined Ginkgo not too long ago, and I hope things work out for them.

<comment><USER7> It resembles academia. The company is very penny wise and pound foolish, toxic behaviors aren't managed, the (5!) founders are basically dead weight, and hours are expected to bleed into evenings and weekends. There's an inversion of resources- the more work you have, the less you will be supported by the company. The people who flourish tend to have academic backgrounds and this perpetuates the cycle. Good luck to your friend!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Having spent years working at a startup, you can confidently divide any and all claims made in the article by a factor of at least 2, if not 10. Remember that you're reading the most generous interpretation of what _could_ _potentially_ happen at some point in the future, and aren't reading about the failures and things that did not pan out. It's basically concentrated confirmation bias maximally generously extrapolated into the future. Think Elon Musk and "full self driving" for a calibrated reference. TL;DR: when a startup CEO or founder says something, don't believe a single word until you can actually verify the claims.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://web.archive.org/web/20191109035053/https://www.bloom...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191109035053/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-06/ginkgo- bioworks-ceo-wants-biology-to-manufacture-physical-goods)

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know if Ginko Bioworks has a replicable process? Or is each synthetic organism built ad-hoc? Whats their special sauce / unfair advantage over others, like universities?

</comment><comment><USER12> Weren't DNA computers that could store petabytes in a thimble-full of material supposed to come out a decade ago? Biology is not easy harness, even if you "want" it...</comment>


Liberland Accuses Croatia of Invasion and Releases Video of 'Citizen' Abduction - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/article/liberland-accuses-croatia-of-invasion-and-releases-video-of-citizen-abduction?utm_source=vicenewsfb

<comment><USER2> I can't see them actually keeping this land as an independent nation. Someone people in my home state own more than then their country. I can't imagine them getting UN backing, however I do wish them luck. I am a fan of this micronation movement thats going on. I hope seasteading and micronations eventually provide an alternative solution to individuals who feel that their government overreaches.</comment>


Show HN: A site to improve Reddit's /r/photoshopbattles experience - <AUTHOR> https://www.editedimages.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a longtime fan of Reddit's /r/photoshopbattles, but I was frustrated with having to scroll & click through all the comments to see the edited images. So, I decided to tackle the problem as a hobby project. Through the process I learned a lot about making a scalable web app. The site uses postgresql, elasticsearch, redis, aws lambda, s3, and react. I'd love to get feedback & answer any questions about the project!</comment>


What would the taxes be if I exercise my startup options? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jaredcohe/what-are-my-taxes-if-i-exercise-my-startup-options-1a36e0c3b401#.tzzg52o1b <comment><USER2> I can hear all the non-US persons reading this article and laughing about all the insane idiocy that we put up with from the US tax code and IRS.

All US persons have to put up with at least this amount of calculation _every year_ (otherwise pay more than is strictly necessary, or possibly suffer penalties and fines later), and the details constantly change with the political tides.

This is why tax reform crops up as an issue every 4 years, though it somehow never manages to survive past primary season to the general election.

<comment><USER3> Tax reform never survives because there is no consensus on how it should be fixed. Some folks think we should "simplify" by eliminating deductions - things like home mortgage interest, child care expenses, medical expenses & health insurance premiums. Other folks think we should "simplify" by eliminating corporate tax breaks & subsidies, and change how we tax things like stock trades & financial instruments. Still others think we should scrap the whole system and just impose a flat tax. Everyone benefits a little under the current system, and no one wants to trade the devil in the details of a "reformed" system for the deal they've got now.

The ideas that are tenable can't be popular enough to succeed (since we're all just temporarily disenfranchised millionaires, and it could always be worse), and the ones that are simplest aren't palatable once all the details are worked out. So we do nothing, because that's easy.

<comment><USER2> Here's an idea on how to simplify.

The IRS sends you a summary from all your various W-2s and 1099s for the year. It has two numbers: what you earned as income, and how much you already paid for income tax this year.

And it sends you your tax form. If you earned less than the median annual income for this year, you owe zero. If you paid anything already, you get all of it back with the enclosed check.

If you earned more, you see the result of the automatic calculation, such as tax( income ) = max( income - median_income, 0 ) x tax_rate . That's an easily-calculated, slightly-progressive income tax, with only three computation steps. If you paid more than what you owe, you get a refund. Otherwise, you could, at that point, file the forms for additional politically-motivated deductions or credits, or just pay the difference and be done.

This has the notable advantage, thanks to using the single, easily-determined statistic of median income, of cutting the number of tax filers in half-- specifically the half that would otherwise pay the least amount in tax. And that half can gleefully vote for the reform! Them along with the median-plus- one person constitute a simple majority in favor.

Anyone can sit down and come up with a better way to collect income tax from the perspective of the tax-payers. Anyone. Yes, even that guy. The problem is that the tax-payer perspective is not a factor when it comes to implementation. At that point, it is the perspective of the tax- _collectors_ that matters. And from the perspective of the collectors, a system that offloads all the work onto the payers, and where any mistake at all could generate more tax revenue, is simply perfect. And the more confusing, the better, because unclaimed deductions increase revenue, and honest mistakes generate penalties.

<comment><USER4> you are describing the 1040EZ which approximately already works as you described, for low-income wage-earners.

People who have stocks and mortgages and etc -- non-wage income and deductions, have to go through a more complicated process.

<comment><USER2> If you think the 1040EZ filing process is in any way similar to what I attempted to describe, I fear that my description was grossly inadequate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How concerned should I be about my employer (sizable company, ~300 employees) being reticent to divulge our 409A valuation with me? I've had a hard time (read: never did get; only got my options' fractional ownership in percentage terms after long nagging email chains) in the past getting any information to this effect, and we just raised another round a few months back, so I would like to estimate my tax burden, but they don't seem keen on sharing.

<comment><USER6> If you're eligible to exercise any options, I would be concerned; you can't make an informed decision without knowing the tax consequences. You might want to phrase it as you'd like to exercise some options, but you need to know the 409a valuation so you know how much AMT you can afford.

If you're not yet vested and there's no early exercise provision, you don't need to be super concerned, since you can't take any action anyway; but I would be sure you're getting the compensation that you want in a form you can value (salary).

<comment><USER7> Would I be accurate in restating your last point as "if they won't tell you what the shares are valued at or how big the pool is, and they just give you a percentage, you have no clue how much the equity is actually worth?"

<comment><USER6> Yes, exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If they're worth any real money, you need to consult a CPA, not get advice on the internet. Following bad advice can cost you plenty.

</comment><comment><USER9> I recently talked to a CFO who put it like this:

 _For the sake of planning_ : The difference between what you paid (you have to exercise options for this to matter) for your shares and what the are worth (see the company's most recent valuation) is counted as income for the current tax year.

If you hold the shares for more than a year, the money you make on a sale is subject to capital gains tax. This is indeed affected by WHEN you buy shares, so make sure to take monthly purchases (if you vest monthly) into account.

 _When you file your taxes_ : Hire someone; don't try to do this yourself.

<comment><USER10> I hired a certified tax professional; he had never handled ISOs before and got it wrong. I did it myself, and it wasn't really that bad. Hired a different CPA to double check it, and he said it looked fine.

That being said I still suggest to everyone who has never been through it before to get a professional involved.

<comment><USER9> "I hired a certified tax professional; he had never handled ISOs before and got it wrong."

OK, don't got hire just _any_ professional. Maybe check on their experience first. ;-)

<comment><USER10> Ha, yeah, now I know not all tax professionals are created equal. He of course acted like he knew how to handle it right up until the end and only let it slip once that this was the first time he'd actually handled them. His advice ended up being "they're not taxed, just ignore them until you sell the actual shares" which I knew was wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It completely depends what type of options you have.

If they are incentive stock options then you will need to report the value of the bargain element (fair market value of the options less the amount you actually paid) as AMT (alternative minimum tax) income. The AMT tax rate is ~27%.

Say your stock is worth $110 and you pay $10. Your bargain element is $100 and your AMT is ~$27, federal. Your state could also have tax reporting requirements on the exercise of your options.

This assumes you exercise and hold. If you sell the shares after exercise a whole host of other issues come into play.

Fairmark.com is a good resource for the tax implications of equity compensation. [http://fairmark.com/execcomp/index.htm](http://fairmark.com/execcomp/index.htm)

Good Luck!

<comment><USER12> Would it be fair to say that, if one was set on exercising, that they do so for whatever amount has vested after their one year cliff, and then exercise the remainder (13/48-48/48) each month over their 4 year earn out in order to have as much of the stock covered under long term capital gains tax when it comes time to sell?

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

<comment><USER11> This assumes your shares are worth more than your exercise price. :)

In order to get long-term capital gain treatment you will need to hold the shares for 1 year + 1 day. And more than 2 years from the grant date (this part usually isn't an issue).

By exercising every month after the 1 year cliff you essentially dollar-cost averaging your purchases. You might also want to use a similar strategy when it comes time to sell.

Also keep in mind that the long term capital gain rate is currently 20% plus 3.8% net investment income tax. (Again this if federal only).

<comment><USER12> Thank you for following up. Off to get my 409A valuation docs from HR :-P</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Latest Android phones hijacked with one-shot Chrome exploit - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/12/mobile_pwn2own/ <comment><USER2> Am I alone being amazed that we still have not experienced an Android worm or virus shutting down all mobile networks globally for a few days? I remember Slammer, which brought down many corporate networks and severely impacted all internet traffic. With all these unpatched phones and so many vulnerabilities it seems a matter of time before something like this happens on a grander scale in mobile networks.

Would it be that the bad guys have become smarter and there is more money in silently p0wning devices? Or is network management able to stop such events from happening nowadays?

<comment><USER3> Corporate Networks 10-15 years ago are like the Canadian US border, where as today they're more akin to the North Korean South Korean border.

10-15 years ago everything was on the same LAN except for the handful of web servers you might have plugged into the DMZ port of your firewall and every client was implicitly trusted. Today we have VLANs for everything and segmentation is done purely for organization aesthetics. Switches can dynamically provision ports based on the client connected. Wired clients and wireless clients reside in different segments with different restrictions. Open network ports in unsecured areas, like conference rooms, are on highly restricted VLANs. I've even seen segmentation based on client MAC addresses where unknown devices were just routed back to themselves for everything.

Back then Email servers accepted connections from anyone and would relay just about anything no questions asked, today email servers are locked down and very suspicious of one another with DNS records (SPF, PTR) for verification.

There are security appliances sitting on the edges of network monitoring all inbound and outbound traffic as well as appliances in the network watching the too and fro. We have software clients sitting on desktops monitoring traffic and blocking malicious or harmful requests as well. Software firewalls are now standard and turned on by default.

On top of all that, Mobile Networks are distributed with each cell tower being it's own insular network with a secure WAN connection over an ISP back into the central network with all manner of port filtering in place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why you should use Firefox for Android: it's a great browser (even offering extensions such as uBlock Origin), but it has very little marketshare and is thus unlikely to be attacked.

This is also part of the reason a frequently updated Android distribution (Nexus or CyanogenMod) might in fact be more secure than iOS, where you are forced to be vulnerable to Apple's Webkit engine.

The same reasoning also applies to such updated versions of Android: the vast majority of people use outdated Android versions, so it's less likely that people would bother developing exploits for the latest Android version, as opposed to the latest version of iOS.

Obviously this is a self-defeating prophecy, but hopefully a proper securely isolated mobile OS will become available before things change.

<comment><USER5> So, are there more exploits for iOS out there? I had the impression that Android has more. Also, this particular one is a browser JavaScript problem that affects multiple android versions, is it not?

<comment><USER6> > So, are there more exploits for iOS out there? I had the impression that > Android has more.

But that was his point - he was referring to _Nexus-only_ (or CyanogenMod), not "Android", where 87% of the devices are vulnerable to least one of the 11 vulnerabilities tested below, because of their lack of (fast) updates:

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

<comment><USER5> He said:

 _a frequently updated Android distribution (Nexus or CyanogenMod) might in fact be more secure than iOS, where you are forced to be vulnerable to Apple 's Webkit engine._

I took that to mean that Apple devices are more vulnerable because they are infrequently updated, as compared to Android. Google and its partners do release fairly frequent (every 3-4 months) dot releases of webkit, Chrome, and the entire OS, to add features and address vulnerabilities.

By contrast, Apple's release schedule is rather monolithic and their superior security is based on a more tightly controlled platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Play Services have a way to install applications in the background ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23695170/how-to- install-a...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23695170/how-to-install- applications-programatically-without-opening-play-store-as-googl)) that does a signature check, and refuse to work if the request didn't come from a Google App. Maybe they found a way to call that from Chrome's v8?

What makes me think so is that they claim to have installed a "BMX Game" (which I guess is on the Play Store), and I don't see any claim of it being automatically launched after the installation (Android >2.3 should block that).

That would be much better for Android than the alternatives. As far as I can tell, applications can only install stuff in the background if they are system applications (live into some /system subfolder, which Chrome does when preinstalled/installed from a GAPPS package) AND declade the "INSTALL_PACKAGES" permission in their manifest (Chrome doesn't).

That should be the only way, apart from getting root (but I guess they would have just said "we got root" then).

EDIT: Obviously all of this is just a guess. I'm just happy that there is no Chrome on my phone :) (but the WebView on Android 5.1 is based on Chromium - so i wonder if that's exploitable as well?)

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't Chrome be able to auto login on the play store website and click the install button there? There have been XSS attacks on the play store website allowing this before.

Edit: I had this in mind [https://jon.oberheide.org/blog/2011/03/07/how-i- almost-won-p...](https://jon.oberheide.org/blog/2011/03/07/how-i-almost-won- pwn2own-via-xss/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> i never understood why even tech ppl are OK using phones like clueless people used computers in the 90s.

vendor toolbars and bundled applications? check. saved logins on banks and everything else? check. no firewall? check. ads everywhere? check.

get your crap together, everyone.

<comment><USER10> Do you know people who actually do this? I'm deeply uncomfortable when I get a new phone that doesn't have a CM / custom ROM out yet, because I need to be able to lock everything down myself. I assumed other tech literates did the same.

<comment><USER11> Really? I am the exact opposite. Few years ago I would always run a custom firmware on my android phone, now I wouldn't touch a rooted phone with a bargepole. Mostly because none of my bank apps work on rooted phones, but also because CM was always an unstable affair for me - fantastic at the beginning, more and more annoying the longer I use it. The "customization"(which I used once to change some icons) is simply not worth the loss of stability.

<comment><USER12> you run your devices without any care for all the background datamining, constant analytics, access to your PII, facebook social graph etc.? you oughta'be ashamed of yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even by Android standards, this is pretty shocking.

Being that this a one-shot exploit that the author believes will work on any Android with the latest Chrome makes it doubly so.

I'd also be more concerned that the exploit is described as targeting V8 specifically, considering how widely it is being used out of the browser these days.

<comment><USER14> Browsers are likely the only place people are using v8 to run arbitrary hostile code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not too surprising, considering the level of complexity in a modern browser and javascript engine I suppose. I wonder if the next generation of phone operating systems will have something more akin to a true exo or micro kernel to help mitigate these sorts of attacks.

<comment><USER16> iOS and Windows Phone architecture are already much better than Android in this regard.

Also Symbian had a relatively good security architecture, with its micro- kernel and the permissions model introduced in S60 v3.

Android security lags behind, because Google doesn't want to force OEMs and providers to provide updates. Additionally the OS architecture makes it pretty easy to extract an APK and reverse engineer it, even if written with the NDK.

But in any case, the best exploits are social and there isn't any help there.

Most of the users get p0wned trying to find stuff for free in dubious sites, and installing it, instead of paying for the real deal.

<comment><USER17> > Android security lags behind, because Google doesn't want to force OEMs and > providers to provide updates.

What do OEM updates have to do with a security hole in _Chrome_? Despite all the merger chatter, Chrome isn't an OS-level part Android the way it is with ChromeOS.

The exploit sounds serious, but once the Chrome team understands it and comes up with a fix, all Google needs to do to deploy it is publish a new version of Chrome on the Play Store. I suppose they could add a nudge or two via Play Services (or otherwise) if people aren't installing the new version, but, in any case, that's nowhere near the effort required to get an OS update out (and neither OEMs nor carriers can block the fix).

<comment><USER16> First of all, I was replying to " I wonder if the next generation of phone operating systems will have something more akin to a true exo or micro kernel to help mitigate these sorts of attacks."

Second, most mobile users use whatever app is labeled as "Internet" on their phones and tablets. Only savy users get to install Chrome.

Third, anyone using an Android system older than Lollipop won't get WebView updates.

So on those devices a Chrome update is indeed an OS update.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does Google Chrome have a sandbox on Android?

<comment><USER19> Also does chrome auto update on Android?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Will this impact NodeJS which is built on the V8 engine?

<comment><USER21> I doubt it. It likely requires running a specialized script, and if you are running arbitrary JS on your NodeJS server/app you are already in trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Happy Android and Firefox user calling in.

My Nexus is still safe :)

<comment><USER23> I'm also using Firefox on Android (because it is the only mobile browser that supports extensions).

However, the desktop Firefox regularly tops my 'Apps using significant energy' list, even when idling.

<comment><USER24> Fwiw, the significant energy usage list on OSX corresponds pretty poorly with real world results. Safari is the most efficient, and Firefox is actually slightly better than Chrome.

What does the OS X Activity Monitor's "Energy Impact" actually measure? | Nicholas Nethercote [https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/08/26/what- does-th...](https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/08/26/what-does-the-os- x-activity-monitors-energy-impact-actually-measure/)

Chrome vs Safari vs Firefox web browser efficiency [http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most- ener...](http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-energy- efficient-chrome-vs-safari-vs-firefox/)

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the links, especially the Nicholas Nethercotes' blog is very interesting.

To be fair, Google is working on the Chrome efficiency: [https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/GpL63A1K2TF](https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/GpL63A1K2TF)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: GitHub Action for Deploying Helm Charts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/deliverybot/helm <comment><USER2> Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, if anyone's wondering (like i was).</comment>


Cinematic rendering – an alternative to volume rendering for 3D CT (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5110476/# <comment><USER2> It's not an alternative to volume rendering as the title suggests. It's a kind of a brand name the manufacturer wants to establish for their admittedly very impressive volume rendering implementation

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough - it's an alternative implementation of volume rendering. How about: "exposure rendering - an alternative to ray-casting"?

Ref'd in the submission - Kroes T, Post FH, Botha CP. Exposure render: an interactive photo-realistic volume rendering framework. PLoS One. 2012;7(7):e38586. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0038586. ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3388083/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3388083/))

Generously there is also code available (last commit 2013), although I haven't tried it yet... [https://code.google.com/archive/p/exposure- render/](https://code.google.com/archive/p/exposure-render/)

I was curious about any overlap with an earlier post today "How Voxels Became 'The Next Big Thing'" [[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17169209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17169209)]

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems like these guys added lighting to the visualization of CT volumes and decided to call it "Cinematic Rendering" or "CR" for short.

I'm not sure what possessed these people to take 40 year old techniques and decide that they could come up with a hyperbolic name and a new acronym then not have everyone just roll their eyes.

<comment><USER4> Welcome to the field of medical technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are there any physicians on here that find these renders useful? As a radiology resident, I often prefer reading from the source images, as the whole point is to see inside a patient, rather than provide some partial surface rendering.

Non-radiologists seem to love these sorts of images, but I don't think they are all that helpful.

<comment><USER6> They are where form and contour matters, which you can't always deduce from a orthographic 3 Panel view. In my current case the form and thickness variation of nerves in Parkinson's patients is looked at and analyzed. Since nerve curve through space like worms, looking at curvature in raw image data is unpractical, especially since it's not always apparent whether you look at the cross section at an angle.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if it's a language issue or a research vs clinical practice issue, but this sounds like something that diffusion tensor imaging would used for with special analysis packages for analyzing the volume and spatial relationships of neurons.

The software shown is for CT data, which is abysmal for evaluating white matter bundles. Any links to your research? Always useful to learn about other applications of imaging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very interesting, the amount of rendering complexity they pull from volume data is nothing short of impressive. Having never ventured beyond Orthogonal projections for pseudo 3D in my work, this is some fresh air. But it's rather useless as a standalone technology. Much of the appeal comes from pulling color and using it to render from segmented volume data, which is rarely the case in the field. "Scattering effects are modelled using a local gradient shading model" This can mess with perception, if done incorrectly, especially where precision is spares like Volumetric data pulled from Ultrasound, not to mention such a rendering model in non segmented data sets is questionable. But one hell of a tool to convince a board meeting of whatever.</comment>


South Africa: Getting your slice of Uber's success - <AUTHOR> http://www.moneyweb.co.za/news/industry/getting-your-slice-of-ubers-success/

<comment><AUTHOR> The comment by Uber South Africa's spokesperson shows that Uber is sensitive of the perception that poor labour is being exploited by capital-rich wannabe taxi kingpins (which this article is aimed at):

 _Asked about the prospects of investing in Uber vehicles, Uber Communication Associate for Africa, Samantha Allenberg told Moneyweb that Uber is currently focusing on the empowerment of drivers to build their own small businesses. Uber is trying to secure a financing solutions for drivers to enable them to buy their own vehicles._

Until Uber actually does this, they'll just be entrenching the existing massive inequality in South Africa.</comment>


Indic Keyboard version 2.0 is out - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smc.org.in/indic-keyboard-version-2-0-is-out/ <comment><USER6> these are the languages (and layouts) are supported. Awesome .

        Assamese Keyboard (অসমীয়া) - Inscript, Transliteration
        Arabic Keyboard (العَرَبِيةُ)
        Bengali Keyboard (বাংলা)- (Probhat, Avro, Inscript, Compact
        Burmese Keyboard (ဗမာ) xkb
        English
        Gujarati Keyboard (ગુજરાતી) - Phonetic, Inscript, Transliteration
        Hindi Keyboard (हिन्दी)- Inscript, Transliteration
        Kannada Keyboard (ಕನ್ನಡ) - Phonetic, Inscript, Transliteration (Baraha), Compact, Anysoft)
        Kashmiri Keyboard (کأشُر) - Inscript, Transliteration
        Malayalam Keyboard (മലയാളം) - Phonetic, Inscript, Transliteration (Mozhi), Swanalekha(beta)
        Manipuri Keyboard / Methei Keyboard (মৈতৈলোন্) - <USER3>
        Maithili Keyboard (मैथिली) - <USER3>
        Marathi Keyboard (मराठी) - <USER5>
        Mon Keyboard (ဘာသာ မန်;)
        Nepali Keyboard (नेपाली) Phonetic, Traditional, Transliteration, Inscript
        Oriya Keyboard (ଓଡ଼ିଆ) - Inscript, Transliteration, Lekhani
        Punjabi Keyboard (ਪੰਜਾਬੀ) Phonetic, Inscript, Transliteration
        Sanskrit Keyboard (संस्कृत) Transliteration
        Santali Keyboard (Devanagari script)-(संताली) Inscript
        Sinhala Keyboard / Sinhalese (සිංහල) Transliteration
        Tamil Keyboard (தமிழ்) - Tamil-99, Inscript, Phonetic, Compact, Transliteration
        Telugu Keyboard (తెలుగు) - Phonetic, Inscript, Transliteration, KaChaTaThaPa, Compact
        Urdu Keyboard (اردو) - <USER5>

</comment><comment><USER7> Vernacular computing is a blocker for the complete roll out of computers and Internet to the world. Projects like these are welcome patches to fix that issue.

Typing on touchscreens can be rethought. Especially when it comes to Indic languages which have about double the number of characters compared to English. We shouldn't constrain our minds to think in traditional layouts. Transliteration is a very good idea. But it puts the dependency back on English. We need radicalize the input methods for non-English languages and avoid the dependence of English altogether.

സ്വഭാഷ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് നീണാല് വാഴട്ടെ (Malayalam for: "vernacular computing, ftw!")

</comment><comment><USER8> This keyboard supports even more indian languages !! Also, checkout [http://indicproject.org/](http://indicproject.org/) (the initiative that made this app)

</comment><comment><USER9> Awesome application. Simple and supports all Indian languages. Perfect.

</comment><comment><USER10> My favorite app just became more awesome by supporting more languages and layouts.. It also satisfied many of the wishlists.. Well done developers..

</comment><comment><USER11> Awesome application :) Must try for those who're still finding it difficult to type Indian languages in their phone.</comment>