Can the Bloomberg Terminal be "Toppled"? - <AUTHOR> http://mattturck.com/2014/03/19/can-the-bloomberg-terminal-be-toppled/ <comment><USER3> This IS the reason capital IQ started. They've done reasonably well.

There are a couple reasons why it's really difficult to disrupt this industry:

1) An mvp won't cut it. If I'm a trader with 300MM in my pocket, then I need access to information. All information.

2)Reliability. Traders need a highly reliable connection. No room for error. A great counter example is Reuters. I worked on a support desk where I had both Reuters and Bloomberg (at a cost of something insane, probably close to 100k/yr). I imagine that when a major pricing error occurred on any exchange, I would find out within 30 seconds to a minute. Despite all its resources, Reuters proved time and again to have pricing issues. Connecting to hundreds of exchanges with thousands of securities is difficult. When you start to go outside of the US, there's some really bizarre logic. Bloomberg was incredibly reliable on the other hand, and their support team responds to issues within minutes.

2) Network effects. Bloomberg messenger is the way to communicate in finance. Also, Bloomberg leverages its network to constantly monitor prices, so pricing problems are discovered REALLY quickly. It's kind of like open-sourcing security pricing monitoring.

3) Reputation. Even if you create a perfect replica of Bloomberg, would I stake my clients money on your track record? Even with a good track record, why would I not trust Bloomberg when it's the de facto standard?

4) IP? not sure about this one, but I imagine there are a lot of features baked into Bloomberg with legal protection.

5) The cost is insignificant for most of wall street.

Funny story: on a whim I interviewed with capital IQ while I was in college. They asked me to design an interface that would allow people to access financial information quickly. Having never used or seen Bloomberg, I immediately started describing a system of keyboard shortcuts, to which my interviewer responded that I was basically just describing Bloomberg terminal. Didn't get the job.

<comment><USER4> Great points. I think #2 (reliability) and #3 (reputation)are really key here.

I would argue that there is a caveat to #1. Agreed that a MVP for a Bloomberg replacement wouldn't work unless you had everything Bloomberg had and more (in which case, it's hardly an MVP and good luck). That said, I think an MVP for a niche fin-tech data product that Bloomberg does not have would work if the sales pitch is that I use your product in addition to Bloomberg. If you offer me an edge by providing data (or analysis) others don't have, an MVP would be fine. Heck, some traders/funds would pay for just a csv file if it contained unique (but directly useful) financial data/analysis (an obvious example that may have had potential 5 years ago was sentiment, although now everyone and their dog is offering that and it's not entirely clear there's direct value to it). I think the very fact Bloomberg _can_ look like its "from the 1980s" just reflects the needs of the market it serves. Wall Street doesn't put great value on pretty interfaces, ease of use, or anything other than direct value add to their revenue generation process (ie. investing, pricing, selling financial products, etc.). Tell me how your product makes me more money today. I think any fin-tech startup needs to be driven by that philosophy if they want to succeed, I don't see how you'd convince a trader that the fact your app offers a nice interface or interesting but questionably actionable analysis is any real advantage if the other guy offers analysis or data that is directly applicable.

Another thought: while disrupting pricing data would be very difficult (given the speed + accuracy required + relationship with exchanges), what about other financial data like fundamentals/accounting/relationships data? That data is free - it's all on the SEC's EDGAR (and it's far more than just financial documents, there's plenty of data on individuals too). Would Fact Set or Capital IQ, for instance, have more competition if the SEC had API/machine readable data? There has been some effort through XBRL to do this - <USER2> the percentage of filing actually available in that format and the lack of consistency in the format (in some cases, there's at least several hundred 'tags' for the same or similar financial line item) makes any large scale data processing from EDGAR a massive undertaking.

<comment><USER5> "the lack of consistency in the format (in some cases, there's at least several hundred 'tags' for the same or similar financial line item) makes any large scale data processing from EDGAR a massive undertaking."

Izyda, you are absolutely correct on the issues with XBRL. I'm the co-founder of a company called TagniFi that is working on a solution. We have a standardized dataset that makes comparing this data across companies, industries and sectors possible. We are in beta so you are welcome to check out for API for free: [http://www.tagnifi.com](http://www.tagnifi.com)

<comment><USER4> This looks very cool - I will certainly sign up for the beta. I think there is real potential in this space.

The only concern - and maybe you have a solution - I have is that to my knowledge, XBRL has only been required on 10K's and 10Q's since around 2009 (I may be incorrect, 2010?). As someone involved in research with financial data, there's really no avoiding using pre 2009 data. Parsing that from raw text files is even harder than XBRL - is TagniFi able to do that as well? (I've perused your website but haven't found the answer). Unfortunately, without that capability, I'm forced to rely on services like Fact Set at least partially.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback. You are correct that the lack of history is an issue for us but we have to start somewhere and the cost to collect non-XBRL data is really high. The timing of the available history in XBRL depends on the size of the company. XBRL was phased in starting in 2009 with the largest 500 companies filing their 2010 10-Ks in XBRL. These 10-Ks generally had income statement data back to 2007 so that is where most of our data starts on the larger companies. The next largest 1,500 companies started filing in 2010 so their data generally starts in 2008. The remaining 9,000 companies started filing XBRL in 2011 so their data generally starts in 2009. This means we have 7 years of data for the largest 500 companies, 6 years of data on the next largest 1,500 companies and 5 years of data on the remaining 9,000 companies. Since the cost to go back and collect this data manually is really high we are going to focus on building the deepest datasets (footnotes and industry- specific) to offset the lack of history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Funny timing, we are pretty big bloomberg users and just had the Reuters Eikon sales team in.

Things bloomberg does well....

\- Emsx, they have the largest trading network in the world. If you are able to trade, its free and every broker is hooked up to it. You can be up and running in a few days.

\- market Data. To get full market data for just the Canadian exchanges is about $15,000/month. With a bloomberg terminal its about $300/month.

\- excel plugin. You can pull real time data, reference (non changing data like the dividend rate) and historical market data into excel. You can experiment so quickly with the combination of bloomberg and excel. This can't be stated enough.

\- decent api. You can pull the same data you could from excel into your C++/C# or java app with their api. This also really simplifies prototyping and makes it easy to write the basic infrastructure you need at a a hedge fund.

With these three things bloomberg has done something pretty remarkable. They've locked down the lower end market here making it hard for competitors to start from the bottom as the bottom is significantly less profitable now.

 __EDIT __as to what Eikon does better than bloomberg, the answer is not much. They have a bit better discover ability for functions due to their auto complete typing being much better than bloomberg.

Eikon also ranks analysts predictions and then gives predictions as to how a company will do against its earnings, they tell me their predictive model can be very accurate.

Reuters also has reuters news integration which is arguably better than bloomberg's news.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious, what does Reuters Eikon do well/better than Bloomberg?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to lead the BB MSG product lead, I can safely say from the inside the communication aspects were absolutely viewed as the killer feature. Simply all US Bond trading is done over the BB MSG system - this is a trillion dollar per day plus market and you must have the BB terminal to interact - the $20,000 a month is cheap to be able to make daily trades of multi tens of millions of dollars. Whenever we made a change to the code, we were told: if you break MSG, when the Wall Street Journal writes its front page story on why the bond market came to a screeching halt, you name will be mentioned.

To give another example, in an annual product planning session, the metric was asked of product managers: how many of our user base would go if we removed your product area. The Derivative team got up and said 50,000. The MSG/Comms team got up and said All of them. The Derivative team replied, we were taking a guess on our number, the MSG guys are absolutely right, we lose the entire business without Comms.

</comment><comment><USER9> People who haven't used a bloomberg terminal often don't realize that its value is far greater than the data it provides. The article already mentioned network effects due to chat system and other similar features. Another component of network effect is the eco-system of vendors who have built their products assuming access to bloomberg on a local machine (so they don't have to provide their own data)

24 hours a day someone is available for a live chat. If I remember correctly, hit the 'help' button twice and a chat window pops up where an actual live user answers questions. These questions can range from not understanding how to use some feature to help locating data and beyond. If the discussion is getting too involved for chat, the support person won't hesitate to call you.

Bloomberg bundles in several interfaces beyond their GUI. The excel plugin, which updates your spreadsheet in real time is fantastically easy to use. Programmers can use official apis in various languages to query static data or subscribe to real-time feeds (although exchange contracts need to be signed separately).

Bloomberg symbology is hugely important. People outside the industry might find it absurd that it isn't very easy to know the _name_ of the instruments being traded. Are you trading AAPL? Is it the one traded in US, Europe's various exchanges or anywhere else in the world? Are you using cusip? isin? sedol? reuters symbol? bloomberg symbol?

The bbg GUI looks like it belongs to the mainframe era, but the user interface is actually very convenient for people who rely on it daily. Simple commands bring up the data you need immediately, no need to click though a bunch of menus.

Upstarts will have trouble toppling bloomberg for another reason: vendor contracts are a mess. Getting the right to distribute data is very expensive. The contract costs a fair chuck of change, then the distributor must keep track of every single end-user of the data (which associated costs of technology, legal, etc.) This is the case with very standard data feeds, like New York Stock Exchange! A great deal of data comes from markets where deals are done 'over the counter.'

I don't say all this to discourage anyone from trying. I've thought about this problem a bit and it certainly will be a very interesting project for whoever tries to get in the game.

<comment><USER10> I say this a lot: "You don't know what's customer support until you try Bloomberg's." It's surreal.

One year and a half ago I was involved in an important project which required niche data. I was creating so many help requests I got sent a real person for a couple of hours whenever I needed.

For comparison, this same project required even more data from Reuters and the replies from the support team were so bad things escalated quickly to top managers. It took some time but eventually we had a meeting with top managers from Reuters and then I finally got a real person for a couple of hours.

<comment><USER11> That is all just hand holding so you didn't go back to your boss and say the words "bloomberg didn't have the data", which is their version of a nightmare.

The value is really only in the data and delivering it to you. The server side software might be wizardry as mentioned here but the client software is a joke. Want to render a chart or read a story? It uses internet explorer in as the rendering engine for you and is slower than molasses.

<comment><USER12> That is all just value-added services that protect their reputation and deepen their relationship with customers. That's all.

<comment><USER13> "That is all just value-added services that protect their reputation and deepen their relationship with customers. That's all."

Surely, delighting your customers in the provision of your product/service is what a successful business is all about...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "It would take immense amounts of venture capital money to build a direct competitor across all those niches."

Wait. You don't need to. Niches actually make it easy to take apart. Concentrate on one niche and do it better, faster, and cheaper than Bloomberg.

Having been in finance, there is a lot of unhappy Bloomberg users. The organization itself, however, is pretty top-notch. They have some really brilliant people working there and the customer service is quite good.

That said, I think in a classic innovator's dilemma scenario, one could build a company that has very few features but does it well and don't actually need to provide support. More importantly, do it for cheap.

Then again, "cheap" isn't usually what finance companies look for. The inefficiencies of that industry is staggering. So long as they come out ahead, it might not be worth it for them to save some money but have to live with limitations.

So maybe the right approach is to target some segment of the finance industry that cares only about a niche and has to really watch their bottom lines.

<comment><USER15> Yes, agreed. But the difficulty here is that a lot of those niches are very small, in terms of number of users. Assume for example you're building a product focused on munis, which I don't think is a very well covered niche for now. How many potential users are we talking about here? 20,000? A bit more maybe? Yet you need to build a whole technology platform to serve them. Only makes sense (from a venture perspective) if you use munis as a beachhead to expand into another area, but as it turns out, the next area requires you to pretty much start from scratch on a number of fronts, because it is going to be so specific. So building a large business here requires you to address a bunch of different niches and hire specific teams for each - lots of venture money required, IMHO.

<comment><USER16> But the returns can still be good.

Let's say you do just that, snag half the market and get 10k users each paying you $500/mo for their niche.

That's still a $60m/yr business.

<comment><USER17> As someone who has used Bloomberg's Terminal for 5 years: Bloomberg's sum of the parts product is far more valuable than the parts sold one by one - add to that the immediate top-knotch customer support 24/7/365 and breadth/depth of the data they have, Bloomberg is a killer product. IMHO, I really doubt any product decoupling will be of value to any of Bloomberg's current customers.

<comment><USER18> > to any of Bloomberg's current customers.

I'm not the only person to have thought about this - what about new guys who can use 'a Bloomberg' but can't afford the price? Is there a way forward for these guys to create new customers?

<comment><USER17> Absolutely, there are many customers left out at +$20k a terminal per year. The questions is, which of Bloomberg's services they want the most. I wished I knew the answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reuters has been trying to topple Bloomberg relentlessly for years. Although they managed to reach feature parity with them on the content, data & analytics and communications(BB Chat vs. Reuters Messaging) on most of the asset classes they continued to loose even at FX where they are the strongest: Bloomberg at its core is a communications company and Reuters didn't manage to break into the most valuable part of their community i.e. buy side.

Buy side, asset management companies like hedge funds, pension funds, has be the target audience for any startups so that sell side companies would flock into the systems for creating transactions. The term flocking must be taken literally as buy side doesn't have time to wait around to find their favorite counterparts. The easiest(!) way to achieve this is to create JV's with financial institutions which is exactly what Markit did \- founded in 2003 \- reached $1B and 3000+ employees in 2013

BB can only be toppled by breaking into the buy side community and getting the backing of some of the key players on the sell side. Would they care? Absolutely, as they hate the fact that they have no negotiation power over their data & terminal spend with BB. The cost of maintaining BB terminals is definitely not a noise or a friction of their expenses as some commenters suggested: At every market downturn trading desks are asked to slash terminal costs by deciding between the terminals(BB vs. Reuters) or start sharing terminals. With Reuters banks could negotiate contracts. However with BB they can't negotiate at all as they absolutely own the community.

</comment><comment><USER20> The arguments here sound similar to why Office is still huge.

\- While expensive, it's not expensive for the people that use it professionally.

\- It's got more features than any single user needs, but each user's got their own subset that they care about that it's a big moat to cross for competitors.

\- Network effects. File-format interop with other Office users sells a lot of copies.

\- It's "the standard." You don't need a reason to choose Office over its competitors, but you need a reason to choose a competitor over Office.

</comment><comment><USER21> As a former Bloomberg user (ugh, its so annoying that my new boss does not see the value in $25k/yr for my favorite IM client), I can say that the author has it dead right that most underestimate the caché and value to the actual network (so what if the new product is good, all my clients/brokers/etc are on Bloomberg)

TR's Eikon product shows you how hard hard it is to compete, depending on the package it can be 1/3 the price of a Bloomberg for a great product, but still has trouble gaining traction...

</comment><comment><USER22> Some of my collegaues paid for Bloomber _only_ to access Bloomberg chat. This is not $1/y, this is around $20000/y.

And of all the trading stuff I worked with, Bloomberg had the less downtime of all. Even it's full (FULL) of legacy shit and crazy interfaces (things like some realtime feed has a binary protocol and I had to write the state machine for doing the handshakes, error checking and stuff). Still, it worked 100% of the time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Toppling Bloomberg is kinda like Toppling Google. They are giants. If you go head on, you will most likely fail because you will try to do a lot of things in marginally better (if that) way. I can only think of one way: targeting a very very small niche that BBG handles and do it _significantly better_ (not necessarily cheaper). Keep in mind that the costs of $20,000/yr for a BBG license might sound like a lot to us but for wall st, that is chump change. Ok well lately, firms are getting cost aware but even then, it won't make a dent.

</comment><comment><USER24> First, Bloomberg's code base represents decades of cumulative institutional knowledge. That's both the downside (it looks 30 years old) and the upside (it's been thoroughly tested and users know what to expect).

Second, for Bloomberg's target customers (big banks, big traders, big hedge funds), the price is just noise in their budget. If you had a "cheaper" Bloomberg clone, you might get more customers but less total revenue. The people who have been trading for 10+ years and know Bloomberg terminal by heart will still want a Bloomberg terminal.

<comment><USER15> Yes on both. The second point is particularly interesting, and counter- intuitive. There's something about the necessary learning curve to figure out how to use a Bloomberg terminal that makes it sticky. People end up viewing knowing how to navigate the terminal as part of their professional skillset. Of course, that probably only works as long as there's no serious enough alternative in sight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I once did a technical visit there and the IT Director/VP started trolling me on kernel internals. It took me a bit to figure out he was vetting what someone in L3 had told him.

Bloomberg has driven more kernel tunings on traditional unix flavors than any org I'm aware of. Smartest people in the room.

</comment><comment><USER26> Remember the Bloomberg terminal snooping controversy from last year? Reporters at Bloomberg News had access to terminal meta data that allowed them to view user contact information and monitor login activity.

When the activity was disclosed, Goldman and a few other banks were trying to figure out ways to replicate some of the features (including chat). I'm not sure where those projects stand today but my point is that their biggest clients desired to sponsor the unbundling of some of the terminal's core features.

</comment><comment><USER27> As an ex-trader I always wonder what the right attack vector is, but I agree generally. BB is not standing still by any means.

The flipside is, most of the money managed by firms is not handled over Bloomberg nor is Bloomberg the final point of analysis before trades are made. For example one group at my old firm (in fixed income) used a custom built set of tools on top of excel connected directly to their own bare metal sitting on the floors of all the exchanges where they traded contracts. They pulled in their own prices at their own frequency (which was much faster/accurate than available via Bloomberg). Same was true in our group - data came from the exchanges (though with not as custom/frequent a setup), and bloomberg was used as a quick and dirty way to look up historicals/trends, rather than anything live.

More recently I've thought the best attack vector is messaging. There isn't a Bloomberg messaging app on the appstore. Of all the use cases, this is the most irreplaceable - you can probably pay up for all the data flows (banks all pay exchanges directly for higher fidelity data flows than Bloomberg provides) but aggregating that 500k odd userbase of finance professionals? INSANELY HARD. If Bloomberg had an API though . . .

<comment><USER28> Bloomberg chat/msg is available on iOS, Android and BB devices and app stores. You just don't get it unless you're a subscriber. The entire terminal is available on iPads, even.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I suspect the answer is...not by a direct head-on competitor. There's very little desire for Bloomberg users to switch. It's not overly expensive (relatively), so there's little price pressure, it works really well, there's a broad network effect, information is accurate and timely and reliable.

So say you duplicated all that, maybe even with a slicker interface. Who cares? Charge 1/2 the price. So what? Just because the guy down the street sells Pepsi for $1 doesn't mean I feel any pressure to go walk all that way when my $2 Coke is just fine.

I suspect that coming in from some other angle, doing something entirely different, and slowly bringing on-line some of the Bloomberg terminal's attributes and winning over users is the only way. But even that would be tough. If I'm spending all day looking at my Bloomberg terminal, do I really want to fuss around with some other machine and yet another monitor? How can the space on a trader's desk be physically won?

At this point, it's like winning over corporate America's reliance on Microsoft Office products. It's almost not worth the effort. Just build a different app that does something else entirely that helps with productivity that Office doesn't cover...rather than produce yet _another_ word processor, spreadsheet, presentation suite.

</comment><comment><USER29> the big underlying question: why does financial data cost so much? why does it cost 20.000$/year to subscribe to the NYSE feed? because banks and exchange build their own network and profited from standing in between. this will change. new structures will replace large parts of banks and exchanges. it starts with payments but it doesn't stop there.

<comment><USER30> Exchanges are natural monopolies. As such, they really ought to be regulated in such a way that they cannot be exploited to create unnatural monopolies. But they aren't, and so someone has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The only way to topple bloomberg would be to provide a service that they can't match and that most financial participants want desperately, then build out the capabilities bloomberg already does later. What is that service? I have no idea.

There is at most a very small chance you can beat them with the same product at a lower price.

</comment><comment><USER32> Very interesting article. I think they capture the way to beat Bloomberg - latch on to it. Add analysis on top of it. Bloomberg's support is solid, but they don't do advanced analytics.

The challenge is Bloomberg is locked in to the hearts and minds of all 320,000 users. Most don't want to change their ways. If you want to sell a trader on a technology, you have to dazzle them in a minute. And these are people who haven't had to change their keystrokes in years. They like the DOS-like interface.

And Bloomberg has billions to toss into R&D every year. Every competitor is nervous about "Is this the year they come for our space, and take us out because the marginal cost of the asset class is 0, since they're already paying for the terminal."

</comment><comment><USER33> I worked at Bloomberg my first job out of grad school. At the time, I had a great time programming desktop apps using the pure Win32 API (anyone remember that?) and even selling some of them on download.com -- in short, I was pretty close to that time's version of an app store dev and deeply cared about consumer facing UX.

Bloomberg has new recruits go through 3 months of training, where they teach you basic computer science and C and C++, all the concepts underpinning their crazy codebase on the back end. Throughout this whole time, I kept remarking how outdated the Bloomberg front end seemed to be, how reminscent of DOS. One thing I kept mentioning the most is how I wish Bloomberg would take a page from web browsers of the time and introduce Autosuggest as you type.

Anyway long story short, I got lucky. I got placed on exactly the team I wanted - the one responsible for the main Bloomberg front end. Most people were working on a backend function, and I got to work on user facing stuff that all our users dealt with. And lo and behold, exactly the project I kept talking about came down the pike, and I was placed on it.

As a junior programmer it was very rewarding - I wound up building about 3 different modes for reacting to various keyboard/mouse combinations. I kept campaigning for the one that was closest to desktop browsers but they went with another one. I remember them specifically asking me to take away any newfangled transition fx, making it all match the rest of the DOS-like look.

I had a counterpart in another team, working on the backend and sending me the actual data to display. This guy was with the company for a couple years already and probably did way more awesome work than me. My biggest challenge was wrestling with the legacy codebase on the front end. We kept going back and forth under major time pressure - Bloomberg is quite agile - to iron out all the kinks and edge cases. In the end the feature was slowly turned on for internal employees and then our clients.

I gotta say, it felt awesome to have the opportunity to make such a big difference at a company straight out of grad school. To this day I imagine I saved Bloomberg millions of dollars in Help Desk calls (there's a dedicated button on the terminal) where people would just call to ask what they should type.

And yet, after all that, it's just a line on my resume and a story I can tell in interviews. You don't know for sure if I didn't make it up. Don't get me wrong, I am proud to have made a difference and I'm glad to have had such an opportunity. But having my own businsss means I can build on my work year after year, and show that I did it. The value I create can increase over time, and I have the option of hiring others to help me bring it to fruition. Having hundreds of thousands of people use the products that I designed for them, and knowing I can continue innovating on top of this and build more of my dreams year after year definitely makes me even more excited.

<comment><USER34> That was a good story and quite interesting. But it didn't really give much perspective to the question "Can the Bloomberg Terminal be 'Toppled'?". Do you have any insight on that?

<comment><USER35> Who cares? I upvoted his comment because it entertained me and gave me some insights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The cost is immeterial here, i think the way it should be done is priority/exlcusive contracts for certain data and price the tool ridiculasly like 1 million type and get few high worth brokers to use it. Add some thing like AI stuff or only sold for ferrai/lamb/bugatti owners. Then it gets word of mouth and trader will make the client/companies buy these.... make some money out of these idiots (BTW, i have no experience in trades but i personally beleive the trade messages time should be regualted across the world so everyone gets the mesage at the delivery and based on your connection you can pickup may be slightly faster)

</comment><comment><USER37> Literally, absolutely. I've seen them hurled through sheet-rock walls by furious traders, and have fond memories of a chap whose monicker was "Elvis" launching an entire monitor tree, bloomberg term and all through a 13th story window.

Figuratively, probably not, it's basically considered a standard. It'll only go away through attrition as a result of other trading tools providing the same functionality and better, but as this is already the case and the groundswell isn't happening - anyones guess. We probably have to wait for the folks who cut their teeth in the 90's and before to retire, for the culture to shift.

</comment><comment><USER38> The problem with trying to 'top' Bloomberg isn't so much in making a better (all encompassing) product; it is more in trying to convince the legions of users and financial companies to make a change.

The world of finance is terrible slow at adopting new technology (I know a lot still use XP, sadly). So first, you have to convince people to upgrade. Then the next fun part: actually doing it. 1) fund the change. 2) get the gigantic IT departments to implement the change. Not so easy.

Then, will users even want to use something else? The finance world still uses Blackberry!

<comment><USER39> As well whatever solution you come up with must pass muster with the compliance officer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Another tricky part to competing with high priced financial services like this is that often the decision maker doesn't bear the actual cost. In a large bank spending another 20K for core services isn't going to affect a trader's or salesperson's bonus and on the buy side (hedge funds or institutions) these are often taken care of by the prime broker.

When it's someone else's money, you're likely to pick the highest quality and not really care if 80% of the functionality/quality is available for 25% of the cost.

</comment><comment><USER41> Nope.

(edit):

\- Massive network effects

\- User base has the (excellent) UX hard-wired in muscle memory [1]

\- Cost is immaterial to the audience

\- Absolutely superb, market-standard analytics [2]

[1] One older gent I know asked me why his Outlook wouldn't send mail. He said, "I keep hitting <1><Go> and it doesn't send!"

[2] Many folks don't realize that Bloomberg is way more than just IM and market data. In fact it has a comprehensive set of extraordinarily usable and precise analytic tools that are simply unmatched by anyone else's offerings, including the internal tools of nearly every bank and most hedge funds.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is a topic that is of deep interest to me, as someone who works in the finance and tech space. I think the key is not to think about how to replicate the BBG Terminal experience - but how to chip away at things that it does well. The IM part is key and theres a consortium of big banks and others who are trying to replace that with their own IM network. Im open to discussing ideas with people in this forum - let me know if there is any interest.

</comment><comment><USER43> Hi, I'm an engineer at Kensho (mentioned in the linked post). As the author mentioned, we're targeting the analytical insights space to start. We're ~25 people[0] who aim to revolutionize access to complex, meaningful financial analysis in a way that is intuitive, fast and meaningful. We also read HN, and I'm happy to answer questions.

Matt

[0] [http://www.kensho.com/#team](http://www.kensho.com/#team)

</comment><comment><USER44> Most startups in the financial sector focus on trading and institutional investors nobody thinks of the little guy, the individual investor.

We are trying to build a poor man's Bloomberg for individual investors and simplify the world of financial analytics.

[http://craytheon.info/](http://craytheon.info/) (Its in Beta)

<comment><USER4> I think the reason the largest startups focus on institutional investors is because these are by far the largest users of financial data and are willing to pay for it (just look at Bloomberg's subscription fees). With just a few customers, you could have a million dollar business. How much would an individual pay for access to similar data? Given they could just give their funds to a professional to manage, probably less than that professional costs them.

That said, your startup looks cool and could be very useful if you're able to extract data all historical financial data from annual and quarterly filings (something that is very difficult right now) but it's worth noting that there any many startups in the space of making investing easier for retail investors (many of whom frankly aren't passionate about or interested in anything to do with investing beyond growing their personal funds) probably the most notable ones are maybe Wealthfront [https://www.wealthfront.com/](https://www.wealthfront.com/), Robinhood [https://www.robinhood.com/](https://www.robinhood.com/), and most related to your startup, Quandl.

<comment><USER44> Thanks for the feedback

There are plenty of retail investors who want to do their own fundamental analysis which is our target market for now. If it works out well then probably we would think of scaling up.

> (something that is very difficult right now)

I agree, our parsers sometimes have a tough time extracting the data so we have to modify the parsers accordingly. Our data acquisition expenses are ridiculously low since we don't have to buy it from third parties.

We already have the service up and running for Indian retail investors with paying customers (craytheon.com). Some of those customers asked us if we can start a similar service for US markets.

<comment><USER4> It's an interesting concept, thanks for the response.

Speaking of parsing, I was made aware of [http://www.tagnifi.com/](http://www.tagnifi.com/) I think elsewhere in this thread (I have no affiliation with them whatsoever). They appear to parse XBRL - probably in much a similar way as you do (although, I think they offer just raw data rather than the screening tools you do, so slightly different purpose/target). Just thought I'd share in case you found in interesting/useful.

<comment><USER44> I did not know about tagnifi. You are right they just offer the raw data while we go one step further by creating the financial charts from the raw data but I would be keeping an eye on them from now on.

As you pointed in your comment that they don't appear to parse pre xbrl data while we do.

In your earlier comment you said most startups in fin-tech space are not passionate/interested about actual investing, I completely agree. I have seen many startups claim that their users by using their service will get above average returns.

So if their service provides above average returns why are they even selling the service, just trade/invest your own money and you will be rich in no time.

The reason we started Craytheon because we wanted a service which would help us make better investment decisions in the stock market. Which is why the first US company we added to our database was Enron.

Check out this link, I think you will like it

[http://craytheon.info/articles/enron_fundamental_analysis_ac...](http://craytheon.info/articles/enron_fundamental_analysis_accounting_gimmicks.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The problems with getting software onto traders computers are simpler than this article leads you to believe.

Insurance. Getting insurance to install a .exe as part of a banks trading process is insanely difficult. The banks aren't interested in going down that route.

</comment><comment><USER46> If a start-up can figure out a way to provide the mass financial information that Bloomberg provides and charge even 1/10th of what Bloomberg charges ($20,000 per year), it would disrupt the monopoly that is Bloomberg.

<comment><USER47> I'm not so sure... given the (apparent) network effects, and the fact that (I assume) Bloomberg users aren't going to be too price sensitive, you're unlikely to make a big dent their user-base anytime soon.

What you _are_ likely to do though is bring in new users who were price sensitive or who couldn't justify $20,000 for their particular use-case. For those who wouldn't spend $20,000, $2000 is a lot easier to swallow.

So instead of taking Bloomberg's market, you'd be more likely to create a second tier of service.

<comment><USER48> For a bond trader who does billions of dollars in trade per year, $20K/year doesn't even show up in the roundoff errors. Maybe a $2K/year service could find its way into the world of people who do day trading from their homes. On the other hand, those people are probably already using a lot of the information that's available free on the internet or from their brokerages, so it could be an uphill battle convincing them to shell out $2K for proprietary financial data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> key takeaway for me is so many fin-tech startups are asking the question by trying, the only real way to find out. personally agree that this is not a fight you tackle head on - need an angle.

</comment><comment><USER50> Honest question - why do financial data feeds (stock data) cost so much? Ideally, this is public information, so they should be available for free (or a nominal cost), no?

<comment><USER51> They are. You pay for the guarantee of getting them in real time. Or you can get them on Yahoo, lol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> As a former Goldman Sachs Invesment Banking analyst, we used SNL for bank and insurance data and Bloomberg. CapIQ is pretty unreliable and so we never used it.

</comment><comment><USER53> Perhaps not. The big plays have been fixing weak and outdated, yet vital, industries.

</comment><comment><USER54> one i-bank manager called bloomberg a $2000/month instant messaging service. most of its users probably don't know how to do much besides email. but it's a status symbol to have a bloomberg email address.

</comment><comment><USER55> Many points have already been covered, but there's one really important one: the data.

It's not just about implementing a niftier interface to look at financial information. You must have the information itself first. Bloomberg has been aggregating so many different sources (hundreds, if not thousands) and they have been doing it for many years now. There aren't that many companies out there that are good at this. Only Reuters comes close to Bloomberg, as far as I know, and they aren't really that close. For individual data sources there are alternatives, but nobody else has such a comprehensive offering. There are all kinds of issues related to each data source that you would have to tackle one by one. Of course, anyone can subscribe to the different data sources, the costs are not going to be prohibitive for a well-funded startup. But regular licences would not allow you to display the data to your customers for free. You'd have to strike deals to be able to resell subscriptions to your customers and make the process easy for them. All of the data providers will want to get paid, data is not free. Once you start processing the data, you have to start archiving it because history is important. Bloomberg has been collecting data for decades. In some cases, they have data that the data providers themselves don't have because they were not so good at archiving in the past and many of them are still focused on providing real-time data only. So, if you wanted to buy historical data, it's going to be hard to get it. Often your only choice is to buy it from Reuters or Bloomberg and they are not going to give you licences for reselling the data. Note that even if you archived a lot of data from real time feeds over time, you still might have problems with the original data providers not letting you use the data for commercial purposes. And last but not least, even you got your hands on all the data that your customers would expect you to have, you still need to process it. Every data source has it's idiosyncracies that you'd have to master (not to mention that data formats have been changing over the years and documentation is often non-existing). This is very tedious and time consuming work, not the kind of stuff that excites most young startup founders. Bloomberg has been very good at processing, normalizing, and storing financial data from a multitude of heterogeneous data sources and they have decades of know-how.

Off the top of my head I can imagine only a couple of possible lines of attack that might have a chance: \- Start with a niche solution, then expand slowly year after year, market after market, data source by data source. Your product will have to be relatively cheap though, so that customers would be willing to buy it in addition to Bloomberg. \- Buy the data from Bloomberg. Develop your own UI. Get acquired by Bloomberg.

<comment><USER28> One of the problems is that most things are pretty "connect-the-dots". Getting acquired by Bloomberg has historically not been a valid exit, as we will simply build the functionality people want and fully integrate it into the product in a fraction of the time it would take to fully integrate a company (if it is even possible).

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Is there an API where one can consume latest ticker price info and news updates?

<comment><USER57> yes, you have to pay the $20,000 bloomberg subscription.

<comment><USER24> Trying to buy each feed indvidually will set you back MORE than $20k. For example, you want stock feeds? Do you want the NASDAQ feed or the NYSE feed? What about the CDNs? And if you want the RAW feed you're also going to hire someone to parse it for you.

<comment><USER58> And then hire five more people to fix data errors.

Most people don't realize that clean and correct data is really, really, really expensive to make.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's Behind the Crash in the Gold Market? - <AUTHOR> http://business.time.com/2013/04/16/whats-behind-the-crash-in-the-gold-market/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised Cyprus's bailout plan isn't mentioned in this article. As part of it's bailout package, Cyprus was forced to liquidate it's gold stores. While this amount (~14 tons) is negligible to the world gold balance- the amount of gold that other troubled European nations have (Italy, Spain, Portugal) is massive. If they are forced to go through similar plans, the flooding of the world gold market would greatly increase the supply.

<comment><USER3> It was mentioned "... Cypriot central banks' need to sell off some its gold reserves to pay for its bailout ..."

What wasn't mentioned was Japanese selling of gold since it has risen to all- time highs vs. the weakening yen.

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732382030457841...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323820304578412283865306950.html)</comment></comment>


Subscriptions: Braintree vs. Chargify/Recurly, etc. - <AUTHOR>

The US-based internet company I co-founded is getting ready to expand to a more typical SaaS setup and include paid monthly/yearly, tiered account plans. We plan to include automated recurring billing. Currently we do our basic banking through Wells Fargo, and do not have a Merchant Account (or payment gateway) established.
While doing research on the best options for this whole process I read a lot of articles on HN and elsewhere. What I found is that there does not appear to be a concrete consensus on the best options. The only thing people seem to agree upon is that it is best not to create your own account plan and recurring billing management setup. I couldn't agree more due to the complications, security issues, and overall time investment.
Currently, two main options are leading our discussions:
1. Braintree (http://braintreepaymentsolutions.com/) for our payment gateway, merchant account, and recurring billing. The features described for their recurring billing fit our needs (and more) and the overall prices of using Braintree for everything, while correctly described as "Premium" by others here on HN, appear competitive with Authorize.net + WF merchant account + Chargify/Recurly for recurring billing. We like Braintree's in-depth and extensive support, docs, and dev resources. And we "think" we like the fact that everything (payment gateway, merchant account, and recurring billing) are tied into one system so we don't have to try to work with three separate entities to work out issues.
2. Third party payment gateway, third party merchant account, and Chargify/Recurly for recurring billing. This option has the proposed benefits of potentially reducing overall costs and separating the components, which may make future changes to individual components of the overall setup easier.  For a third party payment gateway we're considering Authorize.net.  Third party merchant accounts are a little bit of a tougher decision, but we've considered simply going in house with Wells Fargo to reduce complications or another organization such as SVB.com.
At the moment we're leaning towards Braintree. One reason for this is its benefits (ease of setup going through a single company, extensive dev resources, competitive cost, quality customer support) outweigh the benefits we can come up with for the other option(s).
Does anyone have experience in this field and suggestions on the matter? Does it make sense to use Braintree for everything, or are there other benefits of going with separate entities for the payment gateway, merchant account, and recurring billing that we are overlooking? <comment><USER2> I just went through this. I integrated Chargify, intending to use it with Braintree. Oops. Chargify doesn't yet support Braintree's new API (which I discovered after getting a merchant account with Braintree). So I dropped Chargify and redid everything with Braintree's API.

Braintree's API is pretty darn good. But it's not up to Charigfy's standards. Chargify has some pretty great features that are really simple to implement (like metered billing, and others of similar complexity). Not going with Chargify has slowed down my iteration speed when it comes to billing changes. It's just not as easy to do certain things when you have to write all the code yourself.

That said, you can do a lot with Braintree, and their customer support is fantastic. Their API is continually being improved. I also have a slight sense of relief that I won't be dependent on Chargify. Chargify, as we know, is a startup in search of a long term business model, and there are no guarantees that they'll be able to do what I need 6 months from now. But that security comes at a price - writing my own code.

What I would not do is use Chargify with a gateway with a crappy API. If something happens to Chargify, you could be stuck using something horrid.

In the end, most of what you get with Chargify is increased development speed if your billing gets complicated. But I wouldn't sweat the decision too much. It would be nice if Chargify supported Braintree V2 - as you'd have the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER3> Prophetic. Now that the prices have changed I think we are going to jump ship on principle alone.

Ahoy..

<comment><USER2> I still like the service, and I think they're getting a bit of a bad rap - they have a business to build, and this is the best way forward for them. Did anyone really think that such a great service would be so cheap forever?

But yeah, had I stuck with them at the beginning, I'd be madly coding to get rid of them now, as I can't justify the cost at this point in my business.

I bet in the long run, this will be seen as a good and bold move for Chargify, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've done a good amount of research in this space and I don't think I could be more emphatic when I say go with Braintree. In one way or another, just about every payment provider I've come across has this underlying "we're going to screw you" feel to it. With Braintree's emphasis on education and openness, I just don't see it with them. What may cost you slightly more now will save you boatloads down the road.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As I've continued my research, talked to representatives and users of all the initially mentioned services, I definitely agree with both of your comments ABrandt and damoncali. Braintree and Chargify seem to be leading the pack. Chargify has a more feature-rich, and developed recurring billing platform than Braintree, but Braintree has a lot of other benefits and seem to be quickly expanding their recurring billing quickly.

If we already had a merchant account or payment gateway Chargify would definitely be the right fit, but I too am apprehensive about their longevity. It remains a tough call, though, since the field still feels in infancy with no clear winners. At the moment it feels as if we're leaning towards Braintree, which appears to be more secure in the long term, professionally managed, and offers a nice set of quickly growing features to their already rock-solid service. Next step will be to start playing around with both platforms and see if either one stands out in practicality.

<comment><AUTHOR> As a result of how Chargify handled their price and policy changes (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780348>) we are no longer considering them as a viable option. Regardless of whether they're cheaper, have better features, etc., the fact that they would make this change without any real warning to their existing customers is beyond sketchy. I'm pretty much amazed that they did this without at least emailing their existing customers a few weeks in advance to prepare and warn them before making the public and official switch. If they are the type of company that would do this, what else would they do? Not worth the risk in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm having the same dilemma with a SaaS startup. Up until now we've been using Quickbooks online's gateway and recurring payments capabilities, but the process of setting up new payments is manual and tedious and we want to go with more of a self serve model.

We are considering Braintree and Authorize.net's ARB. Another option is PayPal's Website Payments Pro gateway service. Here is a comparison of the two:

PayPal Website Payments Pro w/Recurring Payments: Discount Rate: 2.9% $0-3k; 2.5% $3k-10k; 2.2% 10k+ Transaction Fee: $0.30 Monthly Fee: $30/mo Recurring Billing Fee: $30/mo Monthly Minimum: $0

Braintree: Discount Rate: 2.29% qualified; 2.89% non-qualified Transaction Fee: $0.30 Monthly Fee: $35/mo Recurring Billing Fee: $0.10/transaction + $20/mo and $0.01/card for the Vault service Monthly Minimum: $75 (does not include monthly fee)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the more important questions to compare are the level of service, API development and status, available feature sets, and other such factors like whether you can easily transfer your account information elsewhere if you ever decide to change services. Everything I have read and heard, both in passing and first hand accounts, suggests to me that PayPal is not the route to go for handling payments and recurring billing for established startups. It is, however, a potentially viable option for those interested in simply setting something up quickly without much concern for long term growth and expansion of their own company.

<comment><USER6> I agree. Too much time worrying about fractions of a point. Get your business running to the point that the 1/2 a percent makes a recognizable difference.

We use Paypal and Chargify and they work well together. It saved us the time and additional expenses of setting up multiple payment accounts.

One observation, AMEX really doesn't play well with Paypal. We've had $25K payments and the next nothing from a $17K day. Amex is spotty in what they'll accept from PP.

If you have heavy AMEX usage then go with something else. The fees are also high for PP acceptance of AMEX (3.5%).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you considered FreshBooks recurring billing? I ask because I am interested.

For the record, we are currently using Chargify -- had the same issue with Braintree (Chargify does not support v2) so switched to Auth.net

<comment><USER3> Now with the new pricing we are 'free agents' looking for a recurring billing platform. I really wish I had more information re: FreshBooks...

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no experience with and have heard nothing regarding using FreshBooks for recurring billing. It is my understanding, however, the FreshBooks primary focus is handling invoicing (physical and digital). This would lead me to believe that additional feature sets, such as recurring billing, would be, by default, prioritized lower for the company and therefore have a lower level of future support/expansion. Mind you this is all guess-work, but unless you're already using FreshBooks and/or interested in their invoicing solutions, they don't provide much of a draw from Braintree for recurring billing purposes in my mind.</comment></comment></comment>


Congresswoman dared Zuckerberg to spend an hour as a FB moderator. He declined - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/a-congresswoman-dared-mark-zuckerberg-to-spend-an-hour-a-day-policing-the-same-murders-stabbings-suicides-other-gruesome-disgusting-videos-as-facebooks-moderators-he-declined-/articleshow/71730502.cms <comment><USER2> Zuck is too busy taking over the world. He does not have time to mingle and work with the peasants.</comment>


U.S. considers cutting Huawei off from global chip suppliers - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-huawei-tech-tsmc/u-s-mulls-cutting-huawei-off-from-global-chip-suppliers-with-tsmc-in-crosshairs-idUSKBN20B1YO <comment><USER2> What are they going to threaten TSMC with? Banning it's products? So you kill the smartphone and most of the SoC industry in one fell swoop?

TSMC has way more bargaining power than Huawei. The US won't be able to bully it around that easily. They could easily find enough buyers for their wafers in Asia and Europe.

Any tarif would be directly passed onto TSMC's clients too, so it'd be straight up taxing 80% of the things that have silicon in them. I don't see what leverage the US govt has on an entity with as much global relevance and few competitors as TSMC.

<comment><USER3> > What are they going to threaten TSMC with?

Its a Taiwanese company. The US is pretty much the only country that helps Taiwan to continue to exist as an independent country (not officially, but in practice). If the US tells Taiwan to stop supplying Huawei, that's what they will do.

I an still not sure though what the motives if the US are in bashing on Huawei so much.

<comment><USER2> You do realize China thinks and claims it owns Taiwan. If Taiwan refused to do business with a Chinese company on behalf of the US, you'd be guaranteed to have the Chinese army there within the week. China-Taiwan relations are nothing to fuck with, unless the US is willing to spill major blood.

To China this is no different than the US demanding a Tibetan village stop trading with China.

<comment><USER4> The analysis says that China would "spill" plenty of blood in that situation too, and the outcome might not be as predictable as you think...

[https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war- wi...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-with-china)

<comment><USER2> The whole point of the preceding paragraph is stating that china is absolutely willing to spill blood over Taiwan. We're asking if the US govt has enough political capital to fight a war against a country with an actual army over literally nothing at all. The US hasn't fought one of those since World War II, and it hasn't had a war with major casualties since Vietnam IRC?

China doesn't care if half its army comes back home in body bags. Their country is built on extreme nationalism and Taiwan going off script is an existential threat to their model. Could the US population tolerate a casualty rate much much higher than Vietnam, especially over an economic dispute?

Nobody is disputing the US would beat China in a war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice article on TSMC in the Christmas edition of The Economist:

[https://www.economist.com/christmas- specials/2019/12/18/a-lo...](https://www.economist.com/christmas- specials/2019/12/18/a-look-inside-the-factory-around-which-the-modern-world- turns)

</comment><comment><USER6> Won't this just cause them to set up their independent supply chain?

As I understand things, part of the reason for encouraging international trade (esp. post-WW2) was/is to tie different countries together so that it would disincentivize conflict between them.

<comment><USER7> The only advanced semiconductor foundries are TSMC and Samsung; if Huawei was locked out of both they would be stuck with inferior technology.

<comment><USER8> What's your definition of "advanced"?

Intel, UMC, GlobalFoundries don't make your list??

<comment><USER7> At this point Huawei is looking for 5 nm and 3 nm capacity so no, Intel, UMC, and GlobalFoundries do not make the list.

<comment><USER8> What does 5nm mean to you? It's all jargon. Intel's 7nm is comparable to TSMC's 5nm. Go do some research instead of making arbitrary classifications based on marketing terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> God, it's like some giant running amok, staggering around stepping on markets, how can anyone do business in the world these days?

Given past experience the result will of course be a domestic Chinese fab industry that out competes the rest of the world .... when what we want is real competition in this space

<comment><USER4> It would seem that the US view is that CCP state sponsorship of companies for surveillance purposes is not conducive to "real" competition in the market

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is the end game here? I can't figure out if they want to cripple Huawei, which seems unlikely to succeed, or if this is some sort of negotiatong tactic as part of some bigger geopolitical game.

<comment><USER11> Both. It's meant to be punitive for past transgressions related to trade (which is a complex issue beyond the scale of a single thread) and send a message for future interactions.

<comment><USER12> > punitive for past transgressions related to trade

You can take the morality out of it. This is simply two adversaries in a power play.

<comment><USER11> IP and patent theft is a legal, not moral, issue. Examples of theft of Western intellectual property by China is trivially available, and requires no enumeration here.

<comment><USER12> Property rights _are_ a moral concern, though of obvious financial import. But as far as I'm aware, the trade war is not premised on increased enforcement of property rights in China, but on the trade deficit.

<comment><USER13> A trade deficit that people believe was created using unfair trading practice which includes the violation of Property rights among many other

<comment><USER12> As far as I'm aware, at the behest of it's trading partners, China had already made strides to implement IP laws prior to the trade war. Once again, the goal of the trade war isn't to improve China's engagement with it's trade partners, which can be achieved through bi-lateral trade agreements, but to address the growing power of China.

Edit:

To clarify my own opinions, I'd be really happy for a trade war if it's objective was to change China's policies. If China grows unimpeded with the same human rights, and lack of enforcement of IP laws, it means the whole world would have to compete on the same terms. This would mean a degradation of human rights in first-world countries in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As Julia Roberts says in 'Pretty Woman'.

'You guys work on commission, huh? So I went elsewhere!!'

'Big mistake! Big!! HUUGGE!!!'

When you say 'But there is no elsewhere.' you're right. _FOR TODAY!!_

Tomorrow, China will now have to produce its own chips. And those chips will be cheaper and put the US's chip manufacturers out of business. (Just like the US paper manufacturers, and the furniture manufacturers, and the small-item manufacturers, and the tools manufacturers, and the clothing manufacturers, and the ... but you get the point.)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is quite fascinating. Trump and his cronies are now willing to burn his own house down, and burn everyone else's house down, in order to not let anyone play.

Blocking TSMC from selling to Huawei, might very well kill TSMC. I don't know the specifics, but TSMC rely on the sales from Huawei to sustain their R&D and manufacturing investments. This is why it is economical for Apple and Qualcomm to use a contract manufacturer, since only they (TSMC) can sustain the economy of scale. If TSMC falls apart, then where is Apple and Qualcomm going to manufacture their chips?

By doing this, Trump has now painted a target on every other Chinese company: DJI, One Plus, Xiaomi, Lenovo, Alibaba. Although I am sure they have already drafted up contingency plans.

At some point, if it hasn't happened already, these companies are going to band together, and create their own platforms and technologies. The Chinese market is massive enough to sustain these companies internally, while they mature and build out their technology, for later export to the rest of the developing world.

The key tool here is the photolithography machines from ASML. Once China's scientists builds a replacement, then there is no further dependence. So if Trump wants to get the maximum effect, then he should pull the trigger on this, right now.

Five years ago, a lot of pundits kept saying that Chinese tech companies were only competitive because they had the China government backing them up, and blocking the Chinese market from American domination by Google and Facebook. Well, today, that decision seems prescient. Nobody back then, ever thought that an American President would do such a thing, but today, here we are.

<comment><USER16> >Blocking TSMC from selling to Huawei, might very well kill TSMC.

Um. NO. They either continue to sell Smartphone using chips from TSMC, or they retreat the Smartphone market where other maker will continue to use TSMC's chip.

<comment><USER15> I think you read my sentence backwards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The US wants to stop a Chinese company buying chips from a Taiwanese company?

The problem the US has is that it has blatantly conflated national security with economic interest. Now we've got no idea whether Huawei is a genuine threat or whether America would just prefer you buy American. The UK was a great example - even one of the US's closest allies isn't excluding Huawei from 5G infrastructure.

If there was actually a clear national security threat and the US was acting reasonably, its allies would be backing it and we might actually see a unified resistance to potential Chinese espionage. Instead the world is pretty much unified in seeing this as another one of Donald Trump's _fantastic negotiating ploys_ where he alienates all his allies, sacrifices key objectives needlessly and then claims victory anyway.

<comment><USER18> Its bipartisan. [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-pelosi-warns- nat...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-pelosi-warns-nato-allies- against-integration-into-huaweis-5g-networks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder who shorted TSMC, it seems to be a recurring pattern for Trump</comment>


The Economist on parallel computing and functional programming languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/18750706

<comment><USER2> this article could have sparked some interesting discussions...</comment>


Federal Reserve Pledges to Supply Cash for Bear Stearns - <AUTHOR> http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080314/fed_credit_crisis.html?.v=20

<comment><USER2> This isn't the first time.

If you want to learn a little about this world, read Liar's Poker. It is enormously entertaining and somewhat enlightening.</comment>


Running Git on a SSD Speed Comparison - <AUTHOR> http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2010/12/git-ssd-speed-comparison.html <comment><USER2> It would be nice if axis' were labeled, to give some sort of idea as to what the scale of things is.

<comment><USER3> Obligatory: <http://xkcd.com/833/> (today's xkcd)

<comment><USER4> Wow, epic timing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When dealing with a large repo, an SSD really helps, no doubt about it. When dealing with the Chromium repo on OS X, the difference is night and day noticeable, especially when grep'ing and traversing history (blame, log -S). It also especially helps when compiling large projects as the rest of the system stays usable.

That said, git isn't terrible with large repos on an HD, but you'll want to make sure your repo is well packed and you'll also notice a big difference between the cold-cache and warm-cache cases.

BTW, when benchmarking git, it's helpful to have the output of "git count- objects -v" to understand how the repo is packed. It's also good to take the best of 3 runs to eliminate the cold-cache case.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have the same experience. SSD's are really great when you have to access many small files. The absence of seek times speeds up some things enormously, and if you're a developer, you'll see a boost in compiling and version control jobs.

</comment><comment><USER7> I never noticed myself "waiting" for Git to finish any kind of local operation until after I switched from an SSD to a HDD. (My SSD ran out of space...)

Good article.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to see something like this for compile times, especially comparing multiple SSD's...anyone seen something like this?

<comment><USER9> IIRC, Joel Spolsky tried this and found no noticeable speedup.

It's not really surprising that the bottleneck in compilation is the CPU rather than IO.

<comment><USER8> I'm surprised :)

My disk seems to get hammered during compiles...</comment></comment></comment>


Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals - <AUTHOR> http://ideas.4brad.com/why-teslas-autopilot-and-googles-car-are-entirely-different-animals <comment><USER2> Tesla has stated publicly they believe that within three years their cars will be capable of full autonomy, and expect it to take another two years to receive regulatory approval. By fully autonomous they state you will be able to walk outside, have the car approach to meet you, it will open and close the door for you, you can fall asleep, and several hours later wake up at your destination.

Yes, Tesla is taking an incremental approach to releasing the feature sets that are required to have a fully autonomous vehicle, but no, the end product goals for Tesla and Google are not different in kind.

What certainly is different is the manufacturing approach the two companies are taking. Google is seemingly aiming to release a fully autonomous vehicle at version 1.0, meaning every system of the car, such as manufacturing process, sales, customer support, will be at version 1.0 at the same time. In contrast, when Tesla releases its version 1.0 of the fully autonomous driving feature set, they will already have very matured versions of the other components, such as their manufacturing process, battery and drive train technology, sales and marketing, customer support, etc.

Plus, the Google cars look like something one buys for their four year old niece or nephew.

<comment><USER3> "...the Google cars look like something one buys for their four year old niece or nephew. "

You have to stop thinking like some guy from Mad Men and more like somebody buying AWS instances.

Imagine that instead of buying a single car that you drive everywhere you instead reserve a car for your daily commute, you might get various options, eg:

      $500/month - Tesla Sports car, 30min journey, unshared occupancy
      $300/month - 2 seat Google-Car, 30min journey, unshared
      $125/month - 8 seat van, 40min journey, shared, up to 1 vehicle change

Now if you are a go-getter gunning for VP you'll pick the sports car. But others might not see the extra expense as being worth it.

<comment><USER4> > $125/month - 8 seat van, 40min journey, shared, up to 1 vehicle change

This is interesting -- it's basically a little autonomous bus, for essentially the same price as a regular one, that might pick up/drop off at a more convenient location, minus someone there to supervise. I kind of like having a bus driver.

<comment><USER5> But would you rather walk 3 blocks in the rain (or snow) to a bus, wait at the stop for it to come, then walk another 3 blocks to your office, or would you rather have the minibus pick you up at your door and drop you at your office? Point-to-point travel is where self-driving cars excel - even if you're sharing the vehicle with others so you don't have a direct trip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Doing many thousands times better will not be done by incremental improvement

This assertion isn't obvious to me. In my experience incremental updates are often exponential in their impact (especially if enough resources are put into a problem). Moore's Law is an excellent example of this: at any given time, researchers are working on a fixed number of solutions that will generally make a fixed % impact. This is why we can see a doubling in transistor density without a huge increase in the size of the industry.

In the case of reducing accidents, I could see a similar exponential pattern. The first incremental step maybe took the accident rate from 10% to 1% by eliminating 90% of the possible sources of accidents. In the second step, researchers will again shoot to eliminate 90% of the current causes of accidents, bringing the rate to 0.1%. This could repeat every couple years until the accident rate is sufficiently close to 0.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Tesla "autopilot" is comparable to what BMW[1] and Mercedes[2] have been shipping for years.

Self-driving is much harder. The first-order problems of driving on a empty road were solved by the DARPA Grand Challenge, ten years ago. The second-order problems involve dealing with other road users. That's hard, and that's what Google is working on, with considerable success. So is the CMU/Cadillac consortium, which has demonstrated their self driving car to politicians in Washington traffic.[3] Nobody seems to pay much attention to that effort, although they may be closer to a production product than anyone else. (Or not; Uber hired some of the people involved away from CMU.)

Self-driving cars need and have a lot more sensors than semi-auto cars. There's a lot more sensing to the sides and rear, and more forward sensing than just being able to detect the next obstacle ahead. Vision processing is far more elaborate. Google's vision system explicitly recognizes humans and bicycles.

Google's little 25MPH driverless car is a way for them to enter the market. At 25MPH, slamming on the brakes is a good solution to situations the system can't handle. Those things are going to be all over senior communities in a few years. Google already has higher-performance cars on the road; they can be seen all over Mountain View most days.

[1] [http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/connecteddrive...](http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/connecteddrive/2013/driver_assistance/intelligent_driving.html) [2] [http://www.mercedes-benz-intelligent- drive.com/com/en/1_driv...](http://www.mercedes-benz-intelligent- drive.com/com/en/1_driver-assistance-and-safety/7_active-lane-keeping-assist) [3] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/dri...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/driverless- vehicles-even-in-dc-streets-an-autonomous-car-takes-a-capitol-test- run/2014/08/25/6d26baa8-06a4-11e4-8a6a-19355c7e870a_story.html)

<comment><USER8> I'm surprised the article didn't mention Mercedes' history with drive assist systems especially. This is very old tech for them. For instance, I recall seeing a Mercedes S class with dynamic cruise control in 2002.

<comment><USER9> Because Mercedes isn't making absurd claims about autopilot systems and because "everyone knows" that innovation only comes from Silicon Valley. OK, that was a bit snarky but assistive driving systems, however useful and safety-enhancing, don't get people all wide-eyed and excited the way promises of autonomy in "just five years" does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > A full robocar product is only workable if you would need to correct it in > decades or even lifetimes of driving.

I had a conversation about this with friends in Germany a few months back.

In most societies, a mistake that causes suffering to another individual is usually 'blamed' on the person causing the suffering. In many cases where causality is obvious, this assignment of blame is fairly straightforward. Example: Bob fell asleep, which caused him to lose control of his car, which hit the bus, which killed a child. Bob is now culpable for the child's family suffering. Bob remains one of many others who share culpability at this point, assuming others are also falling asleep at the wheel. FWIW, 103M people fell asleep at the wheel last year in the US, so Bob will likely have company.

Now put an autonomous piece of software written by company X into Bob's car. Bob engages the autopilot, falls asleep, the autopilot software experiences an error, the software fails to alert Bob, the software loses control of the car, which hits a bus, which kills a child. Who is culpable for the family's suffering now? The software? Company X?

The only way for company X to both a) allow Bob to fall asleep and b) bear the culpability for a family's suffering is to get the software to the point it only makes mistakes in a timeframe that is, at a minimum, several orders of magnitude greater than Bob making the same mistake.

The logic goes that, once a company's software kills a child, it's going to be pretty hard to keep the public from reacting negatively, even though overall suffering will decrease. The only option company X is to require Bob to accept he is "driving" the car and bear the culpability of any suffering the car's software may cause, or alternately, be ready to pay a substantial settlement that offsets suffering.

<comment><USER9> It's an interesting question in that properly maintained and properly driven automobiles do have accidents that are clearly no one's fault--skidding on a patch of ice, deer running into the road, etc. Perhaps a more skilled or more cautious driver could avoid such an accident--or not. I'm hard-pressed to think of many other examples where a product used as intended will nonetheless cause harm to the user or others with some finite probability--but aren't considered the fault of the manufacturer. Pharmaceuticals and other types of medical equipment probably come closest. (Though drug companies certainly face lawsuits for side effects all the time.)

<comment><USER11> Chainsaws and handguns are probably other examples.

Fast food is another. (Alcohol, tobacco?)

Side note: I would argue that your patch of ice example is not nearly as good as the deer one. Skidding on a patch of ice and crashing is, IMO, simply driving too fast for conditions.

<comment><USER9> Fast food etc. though is more "stuff that's bad for you taken to excess" as opposed to something that can randomly get in an accident though.

I agree the deer is the better example. You can have patches of unexpected black ice though. I've skidded a few times though never had an accident.

There's certainly gear one uses in activities that have some inherent danger like your chainsaw example. I guesxs things like skis and helmets could be another. The difference with an AI though is that it's the machinery itself that is making the decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've always wondered how autonomous cars would handle the first and last quarter mile of the journey. I'm talking specifically like portions of the trip like the driveway, getting out of the parking ramp, or navigating small alleyways where the car could be parked (where GPS could be weak in the city). Things like even knowing which entrance to go to. Will fully autonomous will ever be able to take us from A to B 100%? Will humans always take over the last tiny bit where the maps aren't detailed and to park? Humans love to drive around the lot to park at exactly the "perfect" spot. Cars can parallel park now, but how will cars decide where to park exactly? Will we ever be able to have the car take us through the drive-thru?

I personally think autopilot-like auto-cruise just on the highway and more established local roads would be good enough. The convenience afforded by having the robot take us from A to B parked to parked may not be worth the insane price it must have on its tag to get there.

<comment><USER13> The car can drop you off at your destination and then go park wherever it's convenient. It can take as long as it wants since you're no longer waiting on it, so it doesn't have to worry about navigating "unparkable" areas. It could go to a networked garage where the cars stack side by side without space even for the doors to open. If your visit is short it could just drive around the block a few times. Alternatively, it could go pick up another passenger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If Google's 25mph car is able to slam on the brakes and avoid an incident without swerving or taking other action then it could be argued that once we move to a fully autonomous society, 25mph (example; may not be accurate but for the sake of debate, 25mph is what I'll stick with for this scenario) may end up being the max speed for safety reasons.

This isn't to say that now trips will take longer and that will adversely impact our lives because I think what will end up happening is we will rearrange our lives so that we use these longer driving trips to sleep or work, converse with friends, do homework on the way to class, etc. and thus the time it takes to get from point A to point B becomes moot as we are now able to be orders of magnitude more productive in our vehicles.

Granted, this will not only reduce accidents as now the vehicles can communicate with each other and will instead know what the intentions of the other car are and adjust accordingly instead of trying to anticipate what the other car is going to do, but it will also reduce or eliminate speeding tickets and DUIs. Due to speeding tickets and DUIs being a large source of revenue for municipalities, I'd expect this to evolve as well, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER15> The thing the author is missing is that Google _can 't_ incrementally improve, since they're not in the car business. Tesla, on the other hand, has the option of either incrementally introducing autonomy to their cars or taking the Google approach of shipping a 1.0 in a big release years down the road. That they've clearly chosen the former is telling.

The author pretends that both companies have a choice and have chosen different strategies, but it's clearly not the case. Unless Google was planning on building a traditional car business first (a fairly ridiculous proposition), or partnering and integrating with the supply chain of a major manufacturer (a stretch, if just to introduce fancy cruise control), they were never going to be able to iterate towards a robocar.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Tesla's autopilot isn't even particularly new."

Guess what... Apple didn't sell the first smartphone either.

Someone takes a small step into car driving automation, tries to create some buzz around it, then I've got to read about how it's not a big deal. The nuances between autonomous and auto-pilot need to be discussed. We need a taxonomy.

I guess writing these sorts of articles is a million times easier than adding any autonomous features to any vehicle.

Forward progress is extremely important. It comes technically and socially. Let's hope everyone demands a car with "that stuff" they have in a Tesla. We'll get a little arms race that'll pay for further development, lives will be save (in total), and we'll asymptotically approach the vision.

</comment><comment><USER17> "This is not a difference of degree, it is a difference of kind. It is why there is probably not an evolutionary path from the cruise/autopilot systems based on existing ADAS technologies to a real robocar."

Really interesting. I did not realize that.

<comment><USER18> The author didn't justify that statement at all. If we have gone from an error once per minute (cruise control) to once per 30 minutes, and think that level of improvement can be repeated twice more, we will be at one error every 450 hours. A third time will put us at one error every 13500 hours.

Is continuous, gradual improvement the best way to fully autonomous cars? I don't know. But the author's argument is simply that we aren't there yet.

<comment><USER19> The trouble is that if they're not continually involved in the driving process, drivers can't actually concentrate well enough to be able to step in quickly when something happens that the automated systems can't handle. If I recall correctly, there have been studies on this and it takes tens of seconds for drivers to be able to respond to an unexpected situation sensibly if they haven't been actively driving. Mostly-automated cars that rely on drivers to step in when something goes wrong are probably not an option.

<comment><USER9> This interaction of computer and human decision-making is actually the subject of a fair bit of active research. e.g. at Duke [http://hal.pratt.duke.edu/](http://hal.pratt.duke.edu/)

To your basic point--yep, at some point you need to stop automating unless you're willing to hand over control entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another interesting article about Tesla's Autopilot is this: [http://electrek.co/2015/10/30/the-autopilot-is-learning- fast...](http://electrek.co/2015/10/30/the-autopilot-is-learning-fast-model-s- owners-are-already-reporting-that-teslas-autopilot-is-self-improving/)

It's learning. That is an interesting approach. I wonder how far they get by that.

I guess Google's car will also collect data and help Google to improve the performance. My impression so far was that it's mostly engineered work however, and not so much learned (in a machine learning way).

<comment><USER21> its self reported, most likely placebo effect

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another way to improve the accident rate is the other side of the robocar argument wherein we, as humans, do a better job of driving and of watching/educating our kids.

I understand there are rules of the road and rights-of-way but a right-of-way for a pedestrian in a crosswalk with the walking signal is not going to stop a bus from running the light and killing the pedestrian.

Not that I'm blaming the pedestrian but it surely doesn't hurt to think defensively, look both ways and judge if that bus is going to be able to stop and act accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm always wondering how Google's car will certify when new releases are made. Consider that an autonomous car will need X hours/miles of driving before it will be certified. Now, if Google updates 1 line of code, the whole certification process has to start all over.

<comment><USER23> I would think the certification might not exactly look like that. At least, they aren't going to release every revision if the certification is like that.

I sort of think they are collecting the super detailed sensor data so that they can play it back into new versions of their software and see if it notices things earlier and makes better choices and such. A mass market version needs to be able to function on environmental data (like a tree across the road), so I don't think they are building a perfect map to have as a crutch.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I thought about replaying the information too. But the problem is that every different reaction by the car will lead to new input from the environment. And you can't store what you didn't anticipate :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A hundred thousand times better is only seventeen doublings.

Which approach has the fastest exponential growth curve? The one with thousands of cars on the road, learning from each other, or the one with a few but more capable cars? We'll see. Just remember to think exponential not linear.

</comment><comment><USER25> The point everyone is missing is the reaction time of a driver compared to a computer is so different. A computer have millions of cpu cycles to estimate the best decision during the time a human haven't even understood there will be an accident.

<comment><USER26> You're comparing # of cpu cycles to time taken to "understand" something. If the CPU can make a wrong decision REALLY REALLY quickly it's still gonna be wrong, whereas the human will have a continuous gradient of moving towards decision making.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Google's car is an attempt at full autonomy.

Tesla's Autopilot (mostly) keeps you within the lines and regulates your speed to match the car in front of you.

Does this really need a full article?

</comment><comment><USER28> You people crack me up. Self driving car was never anything other than an elaborate PR ploy for Google, the company which derives the vast majority of its income from its advertising business. Who would you rather work for: a company that is "building a self driving car" or a company that tracks the living shit out of everything you do on the web and ruins the web with mostly irrelevant ads? That's what I thought.

And they want these PR gravy trains running as long as humanly possible, so launching a real product isn't even a goal.</comment>


UK Comedian Mark Watson is doing a 24-hour livestream raising money for charity - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitch.tv/watsoncomedy <comment><AUTHOR> Like the title states, Mark is raising money for several charities affected by the COVID-19 situation. I know it's slightly off-topic on what's usually on HN, but the pandemic has affected society on all levels and this is for the better of our society.</comment>


Turn an ATX Power Supply into a Bench Power Supply - <AUTHOR> http://jaygoel.com/projects/powersupply/

<comment><USER2> Hi all, I made this! Neat to have my dream of being on the front page of HN come to fruition.

To use HN parlance, one might say that I have launched! (Any VCs out there want to discuss other ideas I'm working on?)

This kit look me about 6 months to put together, from prototyping the PCB to iterating over an enclosure design. Waiting for components to arrive in the mail (PCBs, laser-cut designs, resistors) was what took the most amount of time.

When I started, I was fully convinced that I would have a working product within just one or two iterations. Putting together a polished hardware kit (and I'd say that this has some degree of "polish" to it, though far from perfect) is much more difficult and time-consuming than I would have ever imagined. Quite different from the agile! lean! iterate! that we talk about in software-land.

Oh. So I have 4 or 5 PCBs from the first few iterations. If you end up ordering one (and I encourage you to do so!) then send me an email and I can throw one in the box. You know, as a collector's item.

If you have any questions or anything, do let me know. Be on the lookout for a post describing some numbers behind this traffic spike.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the SVG box generator script that you wrote is a neat by-product of your production.

<https://github.com/poundifdef/SVG-Box-Generator>

<comment><USER2> If you're interested, there are two things I've been meaning to update about this script (I promise I will merge your pull request!)

1\. The measurements do not take the laser's kerf into account. That is to say, it does not account for the thickness of material burned away by the laser, so the resulting faces are a bit loose.

2\. If you look at the design, the tabs (where the faces fit into each other) go straight across. It would be better if the tabs were smaller, and then have several of them fit together across the length of the box, rather than one long tab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> While this is fine for the home tinkerer, an ATX power supply doesn't provide any of the basic safety features that are one of the main points of a professional lab power supply: protection against over-voltage and over- current. You really don't want your power supply to be damaged by a faulty circuit. And who knows how clean the power is.

Most people who have a use for a bench supply should also be able to figure out how to make this box for $2 instead of $45.

<comment><USER4> Can you make a power supply recommendation for the casual hobbyist?

Edit: I mean a variable voltage variable current bench/lab power supply.

<comment><USER5> For the voltages here any used ATX power supply will work.

Instead of this box you could just clip the appropriate wires for the same effect.

What I really want is a variable voltage supply easily made from any old ATX PSU. As an amateur that would be an invaluable tool.

<comment><USER2> One gentleman has done a writeup on creating a variable supply from an ATX.

[http://hackaday.com/2010/12/09/atx-psu-turned-into-an- adjust...](http://hackaday.com/2010/12/09/atx-psu-turned-into-an-adjustable- voltage-bench-supply/)

It might be a good starting point for a kit which doesn't require a modification of the power supply itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey memset,

I bought the fully assembled product because I felt the kit version was significantly overpriced compared to the bare PCB and the $5 savings was not worth having to assemble it myself. I hope you're making a good margin on it! :) Regarding comments from others about the possibility of poorly regulated PSUs: you are absolutely correct! I verify the performance of the (higher quality) PSUs that I use before I hook them up to my projects. I've already created an integrated version of this that has worked wonderfully and I am excited for this more versatile solution. [0] Still, when I need a verified good, current controlled bench supply I use a 40+ lb (18 kg) HP bench supply.

[0]: [https://picasaweb.google.com/100509155963341533738/BenchSupp...](https://picasaweb.google.com/100509155963341533738/BenchSupply#5217516826120840482)

<comment><USER2> I just received your order. Thank you!

The margins on this are not bad, but I wouldn't say they are stellar either (for some definition of "stellar") You can look at all of the components/PCB/acrylic and back-of-the-napkin estimate its unit cost, not to mention shipping+assembly (hand crafted!)

You raise a good point in terms of the non-assembled version only being $5 cheaper, which is further confused by not wanting to undercut distributors' (okay, one distributor thus far) prices.

It's interesting, because I've never really had to worry about _these_ kinds of issues (pricing, distributors, expensive unit costs) in the past; it is kinda fun to look at a project from these other angles, orthogonal to the pure engineering component!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This thing looks great.

I love the trend of people making well-documented kits that I have a good chance of fixing if they break. I'll have to scrounge up an old ATX supply-- I think I just threw my last old one away a few months ago.

<comment><USER2> Thanks so much!

The documentation took a _long_ time. I went from no documentation, to a 30 megabyte PDF I created with OpenOffice (not recommended), to borrowing a friend's light box and buying InDesign to create a pretty neat assembly guide.

Incidentally, the Adobe Suite might be the first proprietary software I have ever purchased (well, besides an occasional video game.) I have not regretted the purchase and it runs well enough for my purposes on a VM.

<salespitchmode>You never know when an old ATX supply will come your way, or when you'll get the urge to work on a neat electronics project. Better to have the tools on hand, order today!</salespitchmode>

<comment><USER7> The photos are great-- I think the lightbox was worth it.

I'm not sure about InDesign. Wouldn't it have been pretty easy to make a web page that had roughly the same appearance as the PDF?

<comment><USER2> This is true. I wanted the flexibility to attach PDFs, print them out, let people save them to their computers, change my URL, etc - without breaking anything. Plus, it is much easier for me to update the document via a GUI rather than trawling through HTML+imagemagick just to resize an image or something.

But it is a good point; I may change this in the future?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Make sure the ATX power supply is actually outputting 5v and 12v first!

</comment><comment><USER9> I use a poweradaptor from a dead external disk. They output a steady 5v and 10-12v. Just cut the cable and add some banana clips. Great for powering a breadboard for a hobbyist.</comment>