Andy Grove's Warning to Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/opinion/andy-groves-warning-to-silicon-valley.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0 <comment><USER2> > "There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called "job-centric" > economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the > nation's No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and > arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses > operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the > interests of "employees, and employees yet to be hired.""

Although a valid concern putting "job creation" as a goal for governments can (and in a lot of occurrences in recent history, did) backfire spectacularly.

In the most reductive analogy it creates incentive for the government to create "hole diggers" and "hole fillers" type of jobs that, in aggregate, generate very few useful work while fulfilling this basic goal of job creation.

I believe this "job creation as priority" approach is inferior to both the "laissez-faire" capitalist alternative and the "basic income" social democratic one.

As an example of its dangers it suffices to see the kafkaesque process of fund allocation (and sourcing) for the public funded aerospace industry, both the military procurement (fighter jets, bombers) and the civilian NASA one.

<comment><USER3> I think there is a significant confluence among those who find prosperity and purpose through jobs to conflate the concepts of employment and purpose. That to not have a job is to not have a purpose, and vice versa. If we had a planned economy built around peak employment, we would have many fewer entrepreneurs and many more, as you say, hole diggers.

Socially we already do that. We have created a gargantuan advertising industry that has zero net material gain for society, whose sole purpose is to redirect dollars already in circulation to their employers. We have dramatically expanded bureaucracy in almost every industry to micromanage risk at the cost of tremendous overhead in the time of human beings spent on it. We maintain many institutions in the service industry more-so because the marginal cost of having all the participants unemployed (and thus hungry, destitute, and dangerous) is worse than just paying them do to work nobody practically would need done if not for the negative impacts of simply dropping people out of the workforce.

But this is entirely the wrong way to approach economics. It is absolutely antithetical to the human condition to start from the presumption that people need to do something for someone else for their life to have meaning. That is where entrepreneurism comes from, and we need more of it going forward, not less, as we systemically eliminate the repetitious work in our lives through technological advancement. To aspire for peak employment is to aspire for the death of aspiration. Rather than seeing a "problem" of unemployment, when the practical cause is derived from the lack of anyone willing to pay people for their time considering the skills that they have, see it as an opportunity. If we have unemployment it means everything worth doing is being done, and we should be trying to enable those who are not needed to keep society running to improve that society through innovation than to fabricate busywork for them to do to keep all the cogs in the machine in tune with one another, even if a large segment of said cogs are redundant.

And probably the best example is how I imagine most people would read that previous sentence - but there is a ton of things _I_ want done! But practically, capitalism does not care what _you_ want, it cares about only what those with the dollars to make their voices heard want. The unemployed should be those free to listen to the wants of people rather than money, rather than those who society condemns to poverty.

<comment><USER4> I am reminded of what George Orwelles wrote in "Down and out in Paris and London":

> Beggars do not work, it is said; but then, what is work? A navvy works by > swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by > standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, bronchitis > etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course — but, then, > many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar > compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers > of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper > proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout-in short, a parasite, > but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living > from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical > ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering.

EDIT: On a side note, I agreed halfway with what you're writing but the second half of your comment seems a bit more unclear/I'm not sure what you're discussing there. Could you clarify what you mean?

<comment><USER5> > but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless

Brings to mind Graeber's article on "bullshit jobs".

[http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Adam Smith was making this same argument the only time he ever used the term "invisible hand." Smith assumed (incorrectly) that capitalists would always prefer their own domestic markets. For Smith, his conception of capitalism was good because it offered the best chance at achieving equality. However, globalization of capital has proven that his underlying assumptions were incorrect, so it may very well be that Smith today would have been seen alternatives to capitalism as better suited to provide equality. I believe Smith's beliefs would have led him to be something like what we call a "market socialist" these days.

The original passage from Wealth of Nations:

"He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

<comment><USER7> I think you may be wrong in your interpretation of the present situation. Instead of concluding that, because modern capitalists are happy to invest abroad, Smith was wrong about their preferences, you could conclude that the world is becoming so integrated that the difference between foreign and domestic is less relevant than ever. In other words, the entire world is "domestic".

I think this could be a reasonable conclusion given the increase in the strength of property rights for foreigners ("he intends his own security") and the decrease in transportation costs and time, the two things I assume Smith was reasoning about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "All of us in business," Mr. Grove wrote, "have a responsibility to maintain > the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — > and stability — we may have taken for granted."

Thats the money quote to me, and so much of what is overlooked when talking about industry and to a large extent, social welfare programs. I wish the overton window included the concept of the costs required to maintain a useful, stable society.

<comment><USER9> Yes. And not only business leaders, but also the economists who've been giving these business leaders intellectual cover (and advising presidents) for decades now.

It seems that today's high ranking economists, who are highly influential and defend their intellectual turf aggressively, rely on models which ignore/omit Mr. Grove's industrial policy insights.

US consumers get cheaper manufactured goods if the US economy just simply outsources all orders for these goods to factories in East Asia. And that seems to be about as deep as these economic analyses go.

But where is the economic analysis that recognizes and quantifies the cost of losing so much domestic manufacturing capability?

When I see how long it takes Indiegogo and Kickstarter hardware makers to actually create their finished products -- because they have to travel to China to meet with part suppliers and manufacturers -- I wonder how much US innovation has been crippled by the policies top US economists have confidently articulated and defended for the last 30 or 40 years.

<comment><USER10> >When I see how long it takes Indiegogo and Kickstarter hardware makers to actually create their finished products -- because they have to travel to China to meet with part suppliers and manufacturers -- I wonder how much US innovation has been crippled by the policies top US economists have confidently articulated and defended for the last 30 or 40 years.

Yeah, it's actually a bit vexing when we lose one of the members of my team periodically for trips to China or Taiwan to deal with new hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a conflict of values to consider here: Do we we place a higher value on preventing relative poverty in the United States or extreme poverty around the world?

"""Poverty rates started to collapse towards the end of the 20th century largely because developing-country growth accelerated, from an average annual rate of 4.3% in 1960-2000 to 6% in 2000-10... China is responsible for three- quarters of the achievement."""[1]

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion- people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim)

<comment><USER12> I think that Americans place a higher value on preventing extreme poverty around the world.

When faced with picky eaters, before around 1970, parents all over the USA would use the cliche that "children are starving in China."

<comment><USER13> "before around 1970"

You know what happened shortly before 1970? The Great Chinese Famine--where up to 45 million people starved in the span of 3 years.

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

I'm not sure how saying facts out loud indicates a value preference.

<comment><USER12> It was said on a time interval from a very long time before 1970 until around 1970. This was not a direct reaction to the Great Famine ( which wasn't widely discussed in the US ).

If you're not familiar enough with American culture to know what I mean, then don't worry about it.

<comment><USER13> ok, that's interesting. China had a lot of famines though: 7 from 1900-1962: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China)

So I wouldn't be quick to rule out the idea that the phrase started with a famine in China.

I am American btw. But I wasn't alive in 1970.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The mystery at the center of all this is "Why is it so astronomically cheap to do the x in Asia vs the U.S?". Not just cheap as in low wage, but cheap as in finished goods costing less than the cost of materials delivered to the American factory. It's not just manufacturing.

In Thailand you can live in a high rise condo with a gym and maid service and eat out every day and do some traveling for $2000/month. That life style is 8x more expensive in San Francisco. In Argentina before the 2002 crash, the country was very expensive, but it wasn't some luxurious paradise, so it's not just that it's a developing country. AFter the 2002 crash the prices were absurdly cheap. Something just doesn't make sense, and there's an enormous amount of denial that anything's amiss. Prices are a mystical sacred phenomenon it would seem. American companies don't care why prices are cheap, they just build stuff where the prices are cheap and sell it where they are high. They couldn't care less about the mystery, neither could the politicians. It's just the magical mysterious market.

Health care prices are also a mystical sacred phenomenon. Why are they 10x in the U.S what they are in other countries? Other people get sick and die there and are willing to pay whatever money they have to get better. Prices don't necessarily scale with income per capita either. I am sick of pat answers to this question and "just-so" stories. Someone should take some cost accountants and figure out where all the money is actually going for these kinds of things and write some journal articles. It would probably reveal a lot of bizarre and interesting rough edges on the economy and maybe a fair amount of business opportunity.

Some researcher should go look at the cost to build an Intel fab in Taiwan vs the U.S and start asking why. Start with why is it 1/5 the price to build the fab in Taiwan: 1. Because the construction company charges that much. Why? 2. Because the labor is 1/2 and the materials are 1/3\. Why? Because the labor's rent is 1/5? Why? Because the land for the apartment building was 1/10 the price? Why? Because there are no mortgages and the land had to be bought with savings from an export business, etc, and follow it all the way down for everything. Depth first search! Piles of fascinating economic nuggets are just sitting there untouched.

<comment><USER15> Any source on "1/5 the price to build the fab in Taiwan"

Googling I found:

"Taiwan Semiconductor, the world's biggest custom-chipmaker, plans record spending on plants and equipment this year. It's lavishing $12 billion on factories -- more than Intel Corp. has ever spent in a year"

Which looks more like Taiwan being enthusiastic for building tech stuff rather than dirt cheap. I'm recently back from Taiwan and I'm not sure the costs are much lower than rural USA.

<comment><USER14> As I said in my other reply, that's just speculation to provide an example as to what they might find. I would really like someone to do some scholarly work on the subject to get to the real answers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's a direct link to the Andy Grove's opinion piece referenced in the article: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy- grove...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grove-how- america-can-create-jobs)

<comment><USER17> From that piece: " Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.)"

I don't claim to have good/better ideas on this issue, but starting a trade war and fighting it to win does not sound very promising, especially since trade wars can develop into, well, plain wars (the decade from 1929 to 1939 had its fair share of protectionism and ended pretty badly.)

Theoretically (very theoretically), a better approach for any two countries, and eventually it might become the only workable approach, is to act to maximize the benefits for the citizens of _both_ countries. How to get there I don't know.

<comment><USER18> > fight to win

What exactly does victory in a trade war look like?

<comment><USER19> ...Consumers are forced to buy your expensive product instead of cheap imported ones?

<comment><USER20> The idea that there are "consumers with money to spend" hinges on the availability of jobs that pay good wages. People without jobs aren't good consumers (most government benefits are parsimonious or heavily restricted to certain items).

Free trade unquestionably allows companies to offshore jobs to countries with cheap labor, no environmental regulation, high corruption to enable bribes, or all of the above.

As a consequence, wages stagnate as more and more of the profit accumulates at the top. Those at the top divert a much larger percentage of their wealth into investments, driving a surplus of capital seeking return. Meanwhile wage earners' purchasing power decreases. This trend can be masked for a time, as marginal people drop out of the labor force, older people retire early, the cheap overseas labor gives wiggle room to drop some prices, and other technological advances make some goods cheaper to produce.

In the long term the consumer class is gutted. Capital is misallocated due to lack of investment opportunities, financial volatility increases, and the concentration of wealth enables a handful of people to command a vastly outsized influence on government.

For the record, this was the Gilded Age in the USA where we jumped from financial panic to financial panic and the monopolists and .01% literally decided entire elections in back rooms. The same old arguments have been reborn (free market, regulation strangles business, etc).

I'm pretty sure things will continue to get worse before they get better. It took the fear of Bolsheviks to force change last time.

<comment><USER19> Your scenario may be applicable in other cases, but in the particular context of semiconductor industry, it sounds rather silly. Intel isn't a family farm raising chickens, and its competitors aren't exactly hiring subsistence farmers to draw silicon diagrams in a dim factory building 16 hours a day.

E.g., even though I'd be the first to say that Samsung is as corrupt as fuck, its fabs aren't exactly spewing toxic gas into the neighborhood (probably not any more than silicon valley companies did in the 60s), and it still (sadly) remains a choice opportunity for job seekers in Korea.

Also you have to factor in that the existence of a strong consumer class in other countries (those pesky workers in Samsung) allows many American companies to hire more people than they could if they only had the American market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The lump of labor fallacy is a pervasive one

Despite all the hype over outsourcing, the number of Silicon Valley jobs is close to the 2000 highs

[http://www.spur.org/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/u168/Screen%...](http://www.spur.org/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/u168/Screen%20Shot%202015-02-10%20at%202.27.13%20PM.png)

Silcon Valley job growth has pretty much tracked the rest of the nation [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/US_Labor_Forc...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/US_Labor_Force_and_Employment_Numbers_- _v1.png)

Job creation and destruction is an inescapable part of a dynamic economy.

</comment><comment><USER22> If the U.S. really had a shortage of prosperity then this would make sense. The problem is that the U.S. already has more wealth than it knows what to do with, it's just that it's completely misallocated.

And given the fact that sending our designs to China to get manufactured is basically the only thing stopping them from going to war with us, I'm not convinced it really makes sense to give up this benefit in order to 'fix' domestic problems that don't really have anything to do with globalization.

Certainly there could be more domestic manufacturing than there is currently, but just because the current system is causing some problems doesn't mean we should discount the benefits.

<comment><USER23> The article IS about the misallocation of wealth?

The concern is there will be a class of highly paid individuals in the US and a class of unemployed (replace with underemployed, low income) because we're sending all our manufacturing jobs overseas.

Grove's argument is whatever benefits you're getting for sending jobs overseas, there's a societal cost (increase inequality), as well as unforeseen future costs when innovation and technical excellence is located elsewhere.

No idea about the rest of your views.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the rise of Trump reflects the reality of a declining middle class and the overall problem of political stability in the face of declining opportunity and economic security for most people. In business it is easier to focus on the short term win. Corporations have profited from being stateless, from offshoring and outsourcing. But it remains to be seen what the long term cost will be. I suspect the backlash will be strong because when people have their backs to the wall they lash out.

<comment><USER25> We already HAVE seen what the long term cost is. It's great for corporations, shareholders, and board members, yet terrible for the middle class, and thus a net negative on the country as a whole.

It will only continue. That is the "long term effect".

This guy is basically telling everyone from the grave to vote Trump, or Trump- like economic policies... but never utter such a thing around these parts!

<comment><USER10> >This guy is basically telling everyone from the grave to vote Trump, or Trump-like economic policies... but never utter such a thing around these parts!

I know this is going to sound tiring, but: why not Sanders?

* He's not as blatantly evil as Trump.

* He's not at all a bourgeois globalist.

* He's constantly banging on about what trouble the working class and middle class are in.

I don't see why everyone's supposed to consider Trump the default vote for people who care about class issues, since he's actually an objectively terrible candidate.

<comment><USER25> Because he's smart, and thus not a socialist

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Consumers will pick the best cheap gadget regardless of origin. Investors want maximal profits in a 1-3 years time frame. The system unfortunately does not afford much wiggle room for ethical and national duty when working with those constraints.

Grove's outlook also colored by difficulties of semiconductor industry. Asia in addition to having cheap labor, governments would prop up barely profitable fabrication companies as national champions, give them subsidized loans and regulatory favors. American investors & management, perhaps rightly, balked at trying to compete on that front.

<comment><USER27> _> The system unfortunately does not afford much wiggle room for ethical and national duty when working with those constraints._

This is strictly true, which is one of the reasons I think the onus of long- term thinking has sadly but rightly shifted to regulation over altruism.

Whereas in the past you might have had a titan of industry decide that dumping chemical byproducts of manufacture into the water supply of surrounding farms was "wrong", now the CEO will be voted out if he or she fails to make the profitable choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is supposedly some reshoring in the US but I don't really see it from hardware startups unless they have something bulky/specialized/low volume. The bigger question is not whether we should employ in one taxation region or another to concentrate wealth as we see fit, but rather how quickly generalized arms, machine vision and new manufacturing processes will impact our ability to rely on labor as a source of societal stability.

<comment><USER29> The concept of a revival of American manufacturing is a myth promulgated, for the most part, by one company: Boston Consulting Group.

(pdf warning)

[http://www2.itif.org/2015-myth-american-manufacturing- renais...](http://www2.itif.org/2015-myth-american-manufacturing- renaissance.pdf)

<comment><USER30> Questionable revival or not, the fact remains the US manufactures more in terms of dollars than it ever has -- it just does it with dramatically fewer people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe I've been around Silicon Valley too long (born here), but the key paragraph of the whole story really is this --

Mr. Grove acknowledged that it was cheaper and thus more profitable for companies to hire workers and build factories in Asia than in the United States. But in his view, those lower Asian costs masked the high price of offshoring as measured by lost jobs and lost expertise. Silicon Valley misjudged the severity of those losses, he wrote, because of a "misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create U.S. jobs."

MBAs and money people look at immediate costs, managers look at engineering costs, lost in the off-shoring debacle is...you actually aren't saving money in the long term.

There are specific exceptions in the case of leveraging specific expertise -- for me, looking for a WinMo optimized two way DH key handshake in assembler, send the code and email Dec 23, receive the results Dec 25, was great. But most outsourcing isn't targeting specifics, it's the generalities and that is a big issue. Costs are masked.

</comment><comment><USER32> This makes no sense from a global perspective. Why was Andy keen to reduce job growth in Asia and also reduce technology growth in the whole world? Did he think Americans were more deserving than Asians? That should have been clearly unethical from a humanitarian point of view considering the higher poverty levels that are still present in Asia.

If local=better then perhaps he should have focused on job growth in California and worried about companies that export their growth phase jobs and expertise to other parts of the US - especially underdeveloped parts which won't contribute much back except cheap labor. That's also costing Californians their jobs. What makes Iowa or Arkansas more important than a booming megacity in China?

</comment><comment><USER33> Germany sets a great example here with its local industrial production base and culture.

<comment><USER12> I have to wonder what other price is paid for that state of affairs. Is that the result of some sort of ... rigged game?

<comment><USER34> Not at all. However Germany has a massive trade imbalance because it's exporting all these products. There are only so many countries this can work for.

Recently-ish Germany is also aided by the fact that the rest of the eurozone isn't doing so well economically keeping the euro lower in value than a German currency would be.

<comment><USER35> You're saying that Germany doesn't control the ECB I think. So I guess it's just coincidence that ECB policy has been consistently and primarily in favor of German economic interest, and has been an unmitigated disaster for everybody else. The trade imbalance is in part a symptom of this.

<comment><USER34> The primary ECB objective is to maintain an inflation of 2%. Everything else is secondary to that.

The ECB is currently making cheap money available. That's exactly what they're supposed to do and the only thing they can do, to reach their primary objective.

This happens to help Germany economically but I don't see what else the ECB could possibly do that wouldn't help Germany economically.

Also the German Bundesbank - famously paranoid about hyperinflation that definitely occurs any day now and starts the apocalypse - is strongly against the current ECB policy. So clearly the Bundesbank isn't controlling the ECB, not as much as they want to anyway.

In any case focussing on monetary policy alone and maintaining a inflation of 2% can cause issues economically but is nevertheless agreed upon to be good policy. That's why the ECB is independent, to prevent people from influencing or controlling it at times like these. It's operating exactly as designed.

Unless you're entertaining conspiracy theories, I don't see how one could argue that the ECB is controlled by Germany to somehow screw everyone else over for Germany's benefit.

Disclaimer: I'm German.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I majored in circuits because back then that's where the money and talent went in _Silicon_ valley. Many of my classmates have since switched to software. The few remaining IC and fab people make pennies compare to the programmers. They also have PhDs to our BS and Master degrees.

Software seems more robust but I don't trust myself to make predictions.

<comment><USER37> I'm starting a PhD in circuit design this Fall. What I've read and noticed is that there will be a shortage in strong hardware researchers in a few years due to the rising popularity of AI and ML. What do you think about this?

However I also have working experience in software dev, just in case this prediction doesn't pan out in the long run.

I'm actually going to work on a small business idea (likely SaaS) before my PhD starts, with the aim of scoring a modest source of income.

<comment><USER38> My advice is to find something you enjoy doing, rather than what you think is marketable. You might guess incorrectly and have neither money or job satisfaction. But, don't stress too much about choosing a path. Your career will evolve over the years.

<comment><USER37> I agree. I enjoy both fields (CS and EE), so I think I should be OK in that regard. I'm going for a PhD because I'd like to teach eventually, but I'm not sure about what I want to do in between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Another way to view what Andy Grove was saying was we neither have capitalism, socialism, or central planning. Rather we have a toxic mix in many industries like Health Care, Defense, Drug Development etc. i.e the comment that what we have is inferior to "lasssez-faire" or free market.

China has used central buying/orders to drive up artificial demand/buying and as a result has a massive over capacity and debt problem that appears to actually be stickier and worse than ours.

I think the best learning is it's better to make a clear choice on the system to allocate resources rather than hybridize it. US Example? Healthcare-- Either go completely public like those in Europe which spend 4-6% of their GDP to cover health or go 100% provide and move government out of it . These hybrid systems have us spending 20% of our income on healthcare so we get the worst of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER40> Note he didn't provide a solution to scaling companies domestically other than taxing offshore products.

That type of protectionism may work domestically but it means that American companies cannot compete overseas if they are being undercut on price.

It looks like technology will fix the problem in time. American companies will start manufacturing in the US but there will be no jobs, just automation.

The focus should really be: how can we increase the intelligence of the average worker so they can compete in the new economy and not just "live life on basic income" or "get an overseas job waiting to be automated".

</comment><comment><USER41> "that the free market is the best of all economic systems — the freer the better." - the US is following this principle only until "too big to fail" guys have problems.

</comment><comment><USER42> It is the biggest flaw of the existing instantiation of Capitalism in the USA, that major non-financial factors are simply left out, ignored, or simply unrealized in the calculation of value. There is massive damage being done to the USA by not just Silicon Valley, even though it plays a major roll, that is very short sighted and trades of massive profits and gains and power in the future for short term gains that are primarily financial. It's very much a kind of monopolistic system that is leading to and not many people realize the astronomical cost of the deadweight loss to the American people. To put it in other terms that Silicon Valley types may understand, we have nothing even close to market fit and are operating at negative gross margins if you take all factors into account. It is easy to fool oneself that all things are well when you cherry pick your parameters and measures.

</comment><comment><USER43> Technology can help us to make the fundamental economic structures more sophisticated in order to handle more complex goals.

The problem with running everything with simple money is that it is like running a body on doped water alone. I can't even say blood because money is one dimensional and blood has many useful components.

I think something like Ethereum is going in the right decentralized and high- tech direction. If we can have a common information platform then we can wire up our systems to be more decentralized and also have the capability to do holistic calculation and goals as well as evolve the system.

So I think having society integrate common information platform is key to turning this from a bunch of monopoly games into more like a wired game of Eve Online, or at least something where we can keep track of more than one stat ($) per entity.

</comment><comment><USER44> Very simple, in the short turn as others have mentioned, the US's infra is absolutely shit and we need to poor money into that. In the long term, automation will break the Keynesian feedback loops that underlie such new-deal programs, and we should switch to basic income instead.

</comment><comment><USER45> Often find it troubling that people find it so easy to cast an opinion on a topic they so poorly understand. Yes, this topic is important, no, I don't understand it. What is the best way to understand the current situation?

</comment><comment><USER46> Well, most people need employment, so of course that should be a priority of a government for/by/of the people.

The article skipped what he meant by "priorities" and "forces". Presumbly, it's not forcing companies to make up jobs, but by things like lowering employment transaction costs and making the people more valuable.

Education is the obvious one, but it needs to be education that actually does make one more valuable. Also make sure the people are healthy. Better infrastructure - pretty much all those "government" things.

</comment><comment><USER47> I love Andy, but it can be difficult to reconcile this article with the pro- globalization message in his book "High Output Management".

Had Intel outsourced the manufacturing of their memory chips during their "scale-up" phase, it's conceivable that they may have established more "partners" and less "competitors"... similar to what Apple has accomplished today with iPhone manufacturing.

<comment><USER48> "High Output Management" was released in 1983. The article referenced here is from 2010. Maybe he has just changed his opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Dear Hacker News - after scrolling 3 pages I still haven't seen the 2nd comment. Can you please implement collapsable comments? Please!?

<comment><USER50> There are a bunch of plugins that provide collapsable comment threads.

<comment><USER51> They don't work on numerous browser options, including Chrome on Android (which AFAIU doesn't support extensions), or, last I checked, Android.

It's a badly needed basic function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> No one cares. People with capital looking to make profit see employees as interchangeable machines and as a cost center. They don't want to pay for training, i.e. 2 years experience for a junior position. They don't even want to employ people, i.e. contract work forever. They don't care if there is a loss of skills in the local market, they only care about what they have to pay now to get where they are going in the next 6-12 months. After that is anyone's guess. Don't expect them to do anything but increase their own well- being at the cost of everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER53> Truly an inspiring man.

Jobs for the uneducated are disappearing and saying "well lets just educate everyone" is not enough. I'm racking my brain trying to come up with ways that tech can solve that problem but it seems like an upward battle (e.g. Uber makes anyone a cab driver, but in a few years, will fire all those people when automated cabs hit the road).

<comment><USER54> In my mind, this isn't a problem requiring a complicated tech-based solution, but one that requires a mindset change. Community colleges have long offered the sort of "job-ready" technical skills related to using machine tools, auto and home repair, electric, HVAC, aka the types of services that cannot be offshored.

But at least in America, public consciousness is still fixated around this Cold War illusion of the American Dream that necessitates a 4-year college education. America seems to prize entrepreneurialism, only when it's the white-collar, Mark Zuckerberg variety because of the promise of fantastic wealth; people running their own businesses in plumbing, home repairs etc. don't get anywhere close to that level of respect.

To some extent, technology-based solutions are already in play, with hundreds of thousands of people using online resources to learn web development and other skills. The vast majority however are learning these skills to simply keep up with the needs of their job or the job market, as with shorter average job stints these days, employers won't find it worth their while to provide or pay for that type of training.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Manufacturing isn't coming back. Do you think your average American would put up with the conditions in a Chinese iPhone factory?

<comment><USER56> That's the wrong question. Would they put up with the conditions in a _US_ factory?

It's common to see negative opinions of manufacturing jobs here and on other tech sites. I've worked in one the UK, doing 12 hour long day and night shifts (as a lab tech; I now have a PhD). It was long and hard work, being on your feet around a huge complex collecting samples from all the stages in production and then analysing them to strict deadlines. But you know what, I had greater job satisfaction from doing that than any other job to date, including the position I have now at a university. When I left the factory gates at the end of a shift, I was done, and could head home and relax in the knowledge that I'd done a good job, done my bit to keep the site and production running, and made a small but net positive contribution to the world. And got paid a decent wage for it. And working on a site with a big workforce can be very friendly environment with a lots of camaraderie with everyone working to the same goal to keep production running. You can have a lot of fun while on the job, while also working hard. As a software developer in acadaemia, and I suspect for many software developers in general, work never ends. When I leave work, the unfinished problems and backlog of untackled problems don't go away, which when coupled with deadlines and team communication, admin etc., can lead to significant amounts of stress and unhappiness and depression which I never encountered before. I suspect the lack of physical activity also contributes. And working in an open plan office with everyone plugged into headphones and on IM all day is much less social; at times I think it's like working with zombies!

In the UK, factory workers have strong legal requirements for safe working conditions, limits on hours, union representation if desired, and a host of other protections. The US has less strong employment protections, but I understand health and safety rules and maximum work hours etc. are decent. But would people want to work in a modern purpose-built manufacturing facility in the US? Hell, yes. Working on something like that can give real meaning and purpose to one's life, to be doing something real that actually contributes something physical to the world. Even if you're a small cog in a giant machine. As you head out of the factory gates and see the stream of lorries heading out loaded with product, you know that without your work that shift, they wouldn't be going, and that can give you genuine satisfaction. Ask the millions of people who lost their factory jobs to offshoring if they would go back for an answer with real meaning. I strongly suspect you'd have a majority vote yes.

I know this might not be a popular opinion, but I'll say it anyway. Manufacturing is what made the UK and the US into industrial powerhouses, which lead directly to the prosperity and quality of life we have enjoyed for decades, and its rapid decline has lead to a steep decline of both for many people, and a whole host of social problems. While the idea that a service economy will take over has been strongly pushed on both sides of the pond, it's obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that this isn't self sustaining; these are not wealth-creating industries since unlike manufacturing, they only transfer existing wealth around.

<comment><USER57> Well said. I wish I could give you more than one upvote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Make America great again.</comment>


The Top Five Reasons Entrepreneurs Should Learn About IP Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.iplawforstartups.com/the-top-five-reasons-entrepreneurs-should-learn-about-ip-law/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IPLawForStartups+%28IP+Law+For+Startups+by+Jill+Hubbard+Bowman%29 <comment><USER2> Here's the problem: the law of quickly diminishing returns.

Recently I've tried to "learn more" about one specific IP issue: what are the rules for Intellectual Property developed while being employed by someone but outside of work and not using employer's equipment?

I've read very informative discussion on <http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/19422>, including authoritative- sounding response from Joel Spolsky and frankly, I don't think that in terms of knowledge I can act on with confidence about what the final outcome will be, I'm any smarter than I was before I've read it.

The bottom line seems to be: technically the company that employs me owns any IP I do during employment but if you're lucky you're not going to be sued.

And that seems to apply more generically: in most cases you can use your common sense (don't use other people's trademarks, don't write code for your future company at your current workplace etc.) but when things get contentious, it's anyone's guess what the final outcome will be.

I've got code to write and the time spent reading books on IP law (which is part of the advice that this article gives) is time not spent writing software.

What I need is not a book or 50 blog posts but a "1 day guide" to the most important issues which provides bottom-line advice and not only "this is what theoretically might happen" but "this is how it usually works out" (e.g. in the context of "who owns the IP developed during employment" the theoretical advice is "employer, so don't even think about bootstrapping your startup in your free time" but practical advice is "technically employer, but it's virtually unheard of employers suing ex-employees and many do it, so keep things quiet and bootstrap anyway").

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't remember where, but I believe I heard a Linus Torvald quote to the effect that open source developers should _not_ research potential patent infringement for applications they're developing.

I would boldly extend this to the claim that no should 'learn about ip' while they are developing. IP is essentially protection racket. Sure you can learn a little bit of the dance but it won't unless you're on of the 'big boys'. In the end, there's no great difference between between a patent troll and a corporation seen as having 'legitimate ip'. IP rackets resemble _states_ in the sense that they are gangs trying to suck the fattest t __t they can find.

The best strategy isn't to "know what's legal" but to _avoid attention_ `till you're big enough to kick the snot out of these bandits.

IP mavens are [INSERT SOCIALLY DIMINISHING ADJECTIVE HERE].

</comment><comment><USER4> I realize I'm a bit biased with my comment, but frankly, I think law school is great for any entrepreneur. In fact, I attended law school specifically because I wanted to return to startup world. The analysis methods taught in law school are invaluable to life as an entrepreneur. That I now have an understanding of the law is a pretty cool bonus.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very important. As a lawyer and startup founder I find it really interesting that IP law isn't mentioned more on blogs/hacker sites/ etc because it is very important, especially the TM aspect. Perhaps it's because most startups fail or never get big enough to run in to these issues?

<comment><USER6> As someone who has tried to educate new entrepreneurs about IP, I can tell you it's really hard to get the message across. By default, new founders just have no idea that IP matters at all. They understand moral principles like "stealing is bad", but they are clueless about licenses, patents, copyright and trademarks. It takes at least 2 hours of a pretty intense discussion to get them to even remotely open their eyes.

And in practice, does it really matter? Look at YouTube, they cheated to get started, and no one seems to care. Better cheat and win than play by the rules.

<comment><USER7> The new entrepreneurs you deal with, have they worked in other startups before or are they really young?

The first thing I did with my company was hire a lawyer. This is the first company I've personally started, but not my first startup. So my question above has to do with the experience level of the folks to whom you are preaching. To me, getting incorporated correctly, trademark searches, etc. was extremely important and well worth the money I paid.</comment></comment></comment>


Disney+ streaming service hits 50M users - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2020-04-disney-streaming-million-users.html <comment><USER2> per the end of article and confirmed by [https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly- number-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-of- netflix-streaming-subscribers-worldwide/) in the final quarter of 2019, Netflix had over 167 million paying streaming subscribers worldwide, 61.04 million in the US.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but one cannot deny the explosive growth of Disney+ (´・ω・`)</comment></comment>


Cherry Audio giving away Voltage modular synthesis suite for free - <AUTHOR> https://cherryaudio.com/free <comment><USER2> Another tool to add to my always increasing music production toolbox!</comment>


Ask HN: If you can port libc, you can pretty much run on anything right? - <AUTHOR>

I've been having a look around the world of bizarre operating systems over the last day or so - particularly L4 and it's variants. It strikes me that if you can port libc to one's environment of choice then you've pretty much got it nailed in terms of running ... well ... anything.<p>Is this really the case or is there rather more to it than that? <comment><USER2> well, libc relies on many syscalls provided by the operating system, which probably aren't implemented on some exotic platform.

If all you want is printf and friends then you can probably get started that way.</comment>


Peer2Peer group video chat with WebRTC - <AUTHOR> http://multiwebrtc.nodejitsu.com

<comment><USER2> check out the source: <https://github.com/cavedweller/webRTC.io>

Try using our library, feel free to give us feedback!

We'd like to eventually have a library that abstracts out the nasty parts of webRTC. Similar to how socket.io does.</comment>


A Benchmark for Streaming Anomaly Detection - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dominodatalab.com/numenta-anomaly-benchmark/?r=1 <comment><USER2> I highly recommend Jeff Hawkins' (the founder of Numenta) book _On Intelligence_ to anyone interested in anomaly detection and AI in general. Although HTMs haven't been as successful as neural networks, his concept of what intelligence _is_ is very lucid and well-reasoned. Even if he turns out to be wrong about the technology side of things, I'm happy to have learned a thing or two about the neocortex.

</comment><comment><USER3> Okay, I used to work in _anomaly detection_ , right, for more important server farms and networks, in particular for real-time, _zero day_ detection, that is, detecting problems, _anomalies_ , never seen before.

The OP has 6 "ideal characteristics of a real-time anomaly detection algorithm". My work seems to do relatively well on the criteria.

A challenging criterion is the 6th one:

"The algorithm should minimize false positives and false negatives."

So, no false positives and no false negatives would be a _perfect_ detector, and in practice they are rarely possible.

A more realistic formulation of the criterion is that for a given rate of false positives (false alarms) achieve the lowest rate possible for false negatives (missed detections of actual anomalies).

How to do this is in the now classic Neyman-Pearson result. Right, in some cases the computations are a knapsack problem where that problem is, IIRC, in NP-complete.

Really, another important criterion is to have the false alarm rate adjustable, that is, can set the false alarm rate in advance and get that rate exactly in practice.

Yup, that's possible.

Why? Really, anomaly detection is nearly necessarily some continuously (continually) applied statistical hypothesis tests where the _null hypothesis_ is that the system being monitored, that is, the source of the data, is _healthy_ and the data _normal_ and not an anomaly or a symptom of a problem.

So, we are into statistical hypothesis testing, and that is the context of the classic Neyman-Pearson result.

The literature on statistical hypothesis testing goes back to at least the Neyman-Pearson result before 1950; the field is old with a lot known.

In that field, it is usual to be able to set the rate of false alarms ( _type I error_ ) in advance and get that rate exactly in practice.

For monitoring server farms and networks, there are two additional criteria that are just crucial -- right, in particular for getting a low rate of missed detections (false negatives, _type II errors_ ) for a given rate of false positives:

(1) Distribution-free.

The easy way to be able to do the calculations of an hypothesis test is to assume that know the probability distribution of the input data when the null hypothesis holds. There, sure, the most common distribution assumed is the Gaussian.

But there are also statistical hypothesis tests that are _distribution-free_ (also _non-parametric_ , e.g., not using the _parameters_ of the Gaussian distribution) that is, that make no assumptions about the probability distribution of the data when the null hypothesis holds.

For monitoring server farms and networks, too often should be using distribution-free tests.

(2) Multi-dimensional

The data readily available from monitoring server farms and networks is horrendously large, like flowing oceans of data.

So, it's easy to get data on each of dozens of variables at rates from one _point_ each few seconds up to hundreds of points a second.

Treating such _jointly_ multi-dimensional data one variable at a time must typically throw away a huge fraction of the relevant information. So, the data should be handled _jointly_. So, need statistical hypothesis tests that are multi-dimensional, and those are not so easy to find in the literature.

So, the work I did for detecting zero-day problems in server farms and networks was to create a large collection of statistical hypothesis tests that are both distribution-free and multi-dimensional.

E.g., if the data consists of a time series of points on a checkerboard and _normal_ data is on the red squares, then my work will detect, with known and adjustable false alarm rate achieved exactly in practice, points on black squares. In this case, treating the data on each of two perpendicular edges (axes) of the checkerboard separately yields exactly nothing. So, this example illustrates the extra _power_ of being multi-dimensional. Also the distribution of the data when the null hypothesis holds is just the red squares, that is, far from anything common in statistics.

Moreover, can argue that there are some good _qualitative_ reasons to believe that, really, a good detector for zero-day problems in server farms and networks should be able to _know_ when it is in a fractal such as the Mandelbrot set and when not. Yes my work does that.

But, I have to say, I did my work -- at IBM's Watson lab to improve on our approaches via AI -- and published it decades ago, and since then I've seen essentially no interest at all in the work.

For more, for years I jerked the chains of a huge fraction of all the venture capital firms in the US with essentially no interest.

My conclusion is good work in anomaly detection and a dime won't cover a ten cent cup of coffee.

But, if by now anyone really is interested, then the remarks here should help.

<comment><USER4> I would be really interested to read the publication you did on this. We are trying to do anomaly detection from a large stream of traceroutes coming on from approx. 10,000 locations continuously over the internet.

<comment><USER5> I would also like to read this.

<comment><USER3> As in my

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=graycat](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=graycat)

here, somehow let me have an e-mail address.

<comment><USER4> I left my email address in the `about` field of my hn profile.

<comment><USER3> Now you should have both the reference to the paper and a PDF of the paper.

Thanks for your interest. Hope the paper is useful.

My posts in this thread should help in reading the paper.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reasons startups move to Silicon Valley And Things Boston can do to keep them  - <AUTHOR> http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/10/18/daily38-5-reasons-startups-move-to-Silicon-Valleyand-5-things-Boston-can-do-to-keep-them.html <comment><USER2> Here's a suggestion: have Boston develop a culture in which people have actual friends (as opposed to colleagues) and discuss things other than their careers.

Boston is a weird place. In some ways it is incredibly liberal and progressive, but in other ways it is unbelievably conservative and stuffy.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a Bostonian since 2005, November, December, January, February, and March are pretty compelling reasons to move.

<comment><USER4> Also June, July, August, and about half of September.

Really, Boston is only tolerable for that one glorious week each in the spring and fall.

I do miss Boston. But not the weather. It'd be nice if we got an occasional thunder storm out here, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cambridge is basically a micro-silicon valley. Although I think Boston will continue to remain a strong contender for the #2 spot in tech, I don't think it will eclipse the Valley.

Boston does however already eclipse the Valley in terms of academics.

Simply put, schools are what Boston does best. Startup activity is and will always continue to be a side effect of the strong academic presence here. In the Bay area, it seems to be the other way around.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this resonates at different levels for different communities. most important to me: Dollars/(Control+Speed) Ratio

A close second is also the number of deals an angel has done. It signals two things to me: a) they are comfortable/know how to do this b) they have an extensive network of other people they have done deals with. 20 different deals with an average of 4-5 investors in each, means a network of 80-100 investors they've coinvested with. will obvi be some overlap. You can disregard this for newer angels and use a gut instinct to see if this is something they really want to do. I know you just started doing investments as an angel, but it's very clear out there that this is something you plan on doing, enjoyit, and know the way it works.

</comment><comment><USER6> Honestly, I think non-competes are really the lynch-pin and belong on that list. Non-competes last 2-5 years.

2 _years_? A startup thats just, uh, starting up may not know if they're going to be around in 6 _months_ , never mind being able to wait 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER7> All this reasons have to do with raising money and valuations. I will concede that this is important but I think the problem that any other area runs into when trying to take something back from Silicon Valley isn't the money, but the community.

The Boston tech community, like the Chicago, Austin, or NYC ones, have a few technological superstars. Yet, Silicon Valley has more. A ton more. It's had decades of a headstart.

That, imho, is the biggest asset that Silicon Valley has. Part of that has to do with money (all the reasons the article mentions) but a lot of it just has to do with the fact that the Silicon Valley network and community is just so damn good.

<comment><USER8> He gets into that in point five:

>To paraphrase Terminator II, the Valley is an order of magnitude closer to being self-aware, and evolving at a rapid pace as an innovation ecosystem. ...Whether it's Y Combinator's special access to Facebook's latest private- beta APIs; ... or sharing secret tips over beers on what viral or SEO or marketing technique worked for Quora, Mint or Tagged, there is a big knowledge-sharing and access advantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> But its a self-fulfilling prophecy - if we don't do everything to keep companies where they are founded (which requires VCs and Angels to be more forgiving), it will only continue to improve the SV area and hurt the other tech communities, like Boston. I think if you are a founder, you should really focus on grabbing money in your local ecosystems and STRESSING to VCs/Angels that this is an investment in the local economy, and strengthening our presence in the entrepreneurial community.

<comment><USER10> But as a founder, what are your priorities? Strengthening the local economy, or making your business work? I don't think most founders have the luxury to insist that they get funded in their hometown.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, it's a tough problem. I think Boston investors want to support Boston startups, but because of their structure/individual limitations (mentioned in the article) they can't necessarily "take one for the team" if it's investing 20% of their 'dry powder' for the year.

That said I do think startups can play the "fund us locally" card a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> however, once a consumer web start-up in boston does get some initial traction and raise money, it has incredible access to talent. gemvara.com and SCVNGR are two great examples. they've been able to use the dearth of consumer web investments in boston to their advantage and recruit all this great young talent, and not needing to fight with 10 hot competitors to retain them.

<comment><USER13> The problem here is that if you really want to work in a company like that and you're young, you probably still are going to try to move out West (at least this is what I did).

It's possible there is somewhat of a brain drain occurring due to the lack of startups from East to West, I don't really know of a lot of people that have moved the reverse.

I went to Northeastern University and the coop program is great, but it always seemed like established companies (I worked for 1 startup which was an amazing experience, and 2 defense contractors) were a lot more aggressive about hitting them up for talent instead of startups (which could have taken advantage of young, cheap, aggressive engineers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Naive Optimism.

</comment><comment><USER15> "...the Valley is an order of magnitude closer to being self-aware." LOL.

<comment><USER15> I don't know why I'm getting downvoted. That quote from the article was funny.

I should preface this next statement by saying, I'm not trolling, this doesn't apply to the Valley in particular and this is serious food for thought:

Does anyone worry that all the sharing of tips about what worked for company X and what new thing company Y is doing actually stifles innovation by creating an echo chamber of sorts?

Do these tips and tricks become "rules" that keep a person's thinking inside a box? Are the innovations just re-applications of existing ideas?

Not in every case, but certainly in many. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but let's look at Posterous. It's an email gateway for a blog. It's simple and elegant to use (I use it and love it), and they obviously rock at the biz/dev/marketing aspect of the business --- but is it really that innovative? How much does Posterous further the evolution of the Internet?

How about Quora? Again, great site --- but it's a question and answer app. It's been done at least a dozen times before. Does Quora increase the pace at which the Internet evolves?

I remember reading something from PG about music startups (paraphrased), that "the music industry is a just a vacuum to suck your VC dollars." Hence, he's not super stoked on investing in music startups.

He's obviously seen his share of failed music startups and has talked to others in the Valley who also have first hand experience with failed music startups.

But, is it possible that the Valley isn't thinking creatively enough about music startups? That maybe the Valley can't think creatively enough because it innovates between the lines?

It's also crucial to recognize that most disruptive businesses don't start in the Valley. They move there so their VC can keep an eye on them.

I don't know. I'll probably get banned from HN for thinking a little dangerously and questioning the established thinking so openly.

<comment><USER16> You got downvoted not because you're critical of Silicon Valley but because your comment was a useless 3-character "LOL" that adds nothing to the conversation. As soon as you explained why you thought it was laughable you got upvoted.

<comment><USER15> Adding LOL next to a pretentious statement like, "the Valley is an order of magnitude closer to being self-aware" adds to the conversation that I think it's a silly statement. I didn't think more words needed to be written to get that point across.

But, you're clearly in the majority, so point made. No more LOLs from me. I'll explain myself fully from now on.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 18-year-old who landed a Cessna in Soviet-era Moscow's Red Square - <AUTHOR> http://www.ginandtacos.com/2011/06/03/npf-infiltration/ <comment><USER2> it happened on the day which was back then (and still is) the official celebration day of the Soviet Union (now Russian) border and airspace defense forces.

Everybody who knows Russia and its military easily understands why nobody was able to take a decision, why the plane was several times lost from the radars, mistaken for something else, the target tracking codes assigned inside the airspace defense system to the plane matched and mismatched with other airborne targets / objects in the airspace.... It is a very good luck (which God sends to drunks and children :) that that day in that chaos no other planes were shot down ... :) (google for "Ukrainian missile Sibur Tu-154 2001" - how it happens when luck is missing)

<comment><USER3> funny when I google for that your comment is now the top result. I presume this article is the event that you're referring to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some nerd corrections:

He flew a Cessna 172, which is an all-aluminum four-seat aircraft. It's not fabric-covered as the article describes, nor is it the size of a Ford Fiesta. And 172's cruise speed is ~120 kph, which is considerably faster than a Fiesta as well.

<comment><USER5> > ~120kph

(a typo?) ~120mph, about 200kph. Cruise is supposedly 110 knots, although I've yet to fly one that was happy at that; more often about 105 knots IME.

<comment><USER6> It's not a pleasant experience, but a Ford Fiesta can reach 200kph. (And it would've been legal for Rust, at least at home).

<comment><USER7> This is actually not quite true, unless you have a very long downhill slope or a Fiesta at the upper end of the bell curve - I was driving a Ford Fiesta in Germany at the very same time Rust was flying his plane to Red Square. Top speed, and I mean, pedal to the metal on a straight stretch of empty Autobahn, was maybe 180 kph. At 200 kph I'm pretty sure you'd get something like the opening sequence of Serenity. That last 20 kph is like the sound barrier on those things.

My Fiesta was special, though; I had broken a key off in the starter switch, so I had to remove the switch entirely (fortunately the theft-proof bolts had vibrated loose, probably at 180 kph). Crossing the Swiss border once while starting the engine with a screwdriver caused a very, very unamused reaction.

The outside rearview mirror had also rusted off. I was stopped by the Polizei once and he sternly informed me that I needed a rearview mirror - I told him I did: it was in the back seat. He laughed, but said that unless it was mounted on the car, the car didn't conform with its definition. (No, really, that's the way German law works.) I promised him I'd buy a new one the next day, and he waved me on. And I did, too.

All in all, the adventures of a redneck in Europe can be fun to recount.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And later in life he stabbed a nurse, did some shoplifting and (IIRC) is now a professional poker player. It's hard when you reach your zenith that early.

</comment><comment><USER8> Do you guys know Soviets' answer to the Rust incident?

[http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/05/world/pilotless-soviet- jet...](http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/05/world/pilotless-soviet-jet-crosses- europe-before-crashing.html)

They never did mention it explicitly, but the official Soviet news back then were full of thinly veiled innuendos that it was "for Rust".

<comment><USER9> You read too much into that. Here's a bit of an inside view.

My father was a Soviet tank forces officer at the time. When they were given a brief of the incident in the morning, he remarked "this surely must be zampolit at work" (a deputy political officer, CPSU hand in the army). Dad got reprimanded for that right in place, by, well, another zampolit.

So some days after, the pilot was identified as deputy political officer to the airforce division commander. He forgot to turn out afterburn after the take off, misread that as engine failure, shat his pants and ejected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want to be famous it helps to be crazy.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of war nerds writing about the use of such planes against "advanced" airforces in Africa by a Swedish guy. And that simpsons episode where Bob steals the write flyer.

"Bogey is too slow to intercept, permission to get out and walk?"

<comment><USER12> This was the Biafran civil war. The Swedish guy smuggled the planes in by buying them for some (IIRC) Moroccan flight school. They were mostly used for bombing runs.

<comment><USER13> I think this is the article : [http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7490&...](http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7490&IBLOCK_ID=35)

<comment><USER12> Yep, though they were some small Saab planes, not Cessnas

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the reason he was able to succeed was because he was using such a small, non-militaristic plane. I'm sure an invasion force would've been met with much stiffer resistance.

</comment><comment><USER15> The headline from the Guardian was one of their masterstrokes:

"Rust tarnishes Soviet ring of steel"

</comment><comment><USER16> This was completely new to me, thanks!</comment>


Feedback on Pushboard.net - <AUTHOR> I've created a site that is a competitor for AngelList and CofoundersLab. Neither of these sites were adequate for what I wanted: a way to discover and connect with great technical or business cofounders. AngelList because very few people are using their matchmaking feature and CofoundersLab because it is plagued with inactive users, business people trying to scam developers for free labor, and too many "wantrepreneurs" who don't really put in the effort to make their projects work (idea people).<p>My take on this idea was to connect people over the projects they are actually doing. I'm going to change the project form to require people to have an MVP. However, I think something's missing because although I've got a good number of signups from talented people, there is not much user engagement (posting new projects, people joining projects). My question is, Why? Isn't finding great cofounders a really difficult, unsolved problem? What do I need to change about my website/service to solve that problem? <comment><USER2> 1\. In a sense, finding cofounders seems like the wrong problem. I mean the goal is to have customers and finding a cofounder is often more like checking off a box on a Ycombinator application than actually doing the hard work of building a product that someone might look at and want to team up on.

2\. That's not to say that having cofounders isn't a really good idea. Running any business, nevermind a startup, is often a rollercoaster and doing it alone is going to be harder for many people to the point that it vastly increases the odds of not succeeding.

3\. I don't know about Cofounderslab, but Angellist is a social network and therefore more about connecting people who are already connected in the graph with other people in the graph than about creating lots of connections for newcomers. Or to put it another way, if technical person A is connected on Angellist to investor B and investor B is connected to investor C and technical person B is connected to investor C, then Angellist facilitates hooking up A and D. And if business guy E is connected to D, then maybe D's in the mix too. But if I join and don't know anyone, Angellist is not a lonely hearts club.

4\. How often does anyone look for a cofounder? Once every...how many years? That's why something like Angellist is investor driven: investors are looking for deals with a high frequency and participate in multiple deals in parallel. Investors are also where the money is and where the money is is where people who need money will tend to go.

In the end, finding cofounders is a real problem for some people, but it's not one that a website dedicated to solving it is likely to solve. Mainly because it's not a problem at a large scale, partly because it is a problem that is only solved one person at a time.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you are right that is is a small market. However I think the "recurring" usage of the site involves business opportunities and connections beyond just finding cofounders. Sure, LinkedIn sort of does this, but the problem is akin to your description of Angellist as only connecting people who are already somehow connected. There must be some way to create connections out of the blue, and more importantly target your connections better (you don't know which people on LinkedIn are interested in founding a startup at the present time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know that this is not the feedback you want to hear, but my first impression was meh. Below average graphic design, a dated feel, clunky ui/ux, a real dull banner and call to action. I don't want to have to sign up to see more. Show me more so I am encouraged to sign up.

And that was just with a 1 minute look over. Was a little scared to go deeper. Probably some tough love feedback, but feedback none-the-less.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mentioned a few things about the design that I agree with but "clunky ui" doesn't make sense to me as I think as the site UI and functionality itself is very simple.

Assuming the UI is minimally usable, the main thing I'm concerned about is if the functionality of the site is what cofounders want. For example, are the questions on the "New Project" form what people care about when looking at projects. Are people too scared others will steal their ideas to create their own projects. Does the current user profile information not give enough information that users "trust" other users enough to reach out and discuss projects.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any ideas what code this is? - <AUTHOR>

    $_='^#(/||/@!@[{@:^[-['^";@@@\\>])@.".
    "{)/];)^{";$,+=(++$,);$_.=">&$,";`$_`;
 Saw it in a colleague's email signature. Seemed like Perl to me but I don't know Perl at all, certainly not at this level. So any ideas? <comment><USER2> Original Code

      $_='^#(/||/@!@[{@:^[-['^";@@@\\>])@.".
      "{)/];)^{";$,+=(++$,);$_.=">&$,";`$_`;

$ man perlop

= Assignment Operator.

. Concatenation Operator.

.= Concatenate and Assign.

^ Binary XOR. The binary "^" and "|" operators have lower precedence than relational operators like concatenate.

' Text between single quotes is an uninterpreted string.

" Text between double quotes is an interpreted string.

; Statement terminator, just like C, java, javascript, ...

$ man perlvar

$_ The default input and pattern-searching space. A lot of perl code operates on this variable by default.

$, The output field separator for the print operator. If defined, this value is printed between each of print's arguments. The default is "undef".

The first statement is:

$_='^#(/||/@!@[{@:^[-['^";@@@\\\>])@."."{)/];)^{";

String1: '^#(/||/@!@[{@:^[-['

String2: ";@@@\\\>])@."

String3: "{)/];)^{"

So we get:

Result = String1 XOR String2 CONCAT String3

Since XOR has a lower precedence than Concatenate, we Concatenate first and then do the XOR.

      # First String:
      $_='^#(/||/@!@[{@:^[-[';
      printf "HEX1: %*v2.2X\n", ' ', $_;
      print  "STR1: " . $_ . "\n";
      $str1 = $_;
      # OUTPUT:
      # HEX1: 5E 23 28 2F 7C 7C 2F 40 21 40 5B 7B 40 3A 5E 5B 2D 5B
      # STR1: ^#(/||/@!@[{@:^[-[

      # Second String:
      $_=";@@@\\>])@.";
      printf "HEX2: %*v2.2X\n", ' ', $_;
      print  "STR2: " . $_ . "\n";
      $str2 = $_;
      # OUTPUT:
      # HEX2: 3B 40 40 40 5C 3E 5D 29 40 2E
      # STR2: ;@@@\>])@.

      # Third String:
      $_="{)/];)^{";
      printf "HEX3: %*v2.2X\n", ' ', $_;
      print  "STR3: " . $_ . "\n";
      $str3 = $_;
      # OUTPUT:
      # HEX3: 7B 29 2F 5D 3B 29 5E 7B
      # STR3: {)/];)^{

      # Since the "^" binary XOR operator has lower precedence
      # than the "." concatenation operator, XOR str2 and str3 to
      # get the Fourth String:
      $_ = $str2 . $str3;
      printf "HEX4: %*v2.2X\n", ' ', $_;
      print  "STR4: " . $_ . "\n";
      $str4 = $_;
      # OUTPUT:
      # HEX4: 3B 40 40 40 5C 3E 5D 29 40 2E 7B 29 2F 5D 3B 29 5E 7B
      # STR4: ;@@@\>])@.{)/];)^{

      # Now we can do a binary XOR on Sring #1 and String #4 to
      # get Fifth String:
      $_ = $str1 ^ $str4;
      printf "HEX5: %*v2.2X\n", ' ', $_;
      print  "STR5: " . $_ . "\n";
      $str5 = $_;
      # OUTPUT:
      # HEX5: 65 63 68 6F 20 42 72 69 61 6E 20 52 6F 67 65 72 73 20
      # STR5: echo Brian Rogers

      # This is wickedly bad juju. The "(++$,)" portion increments an
      # undefined variable and would normally be an error, but with errors and
      # warnings shut off, it increments an undefined variable to 1, then adds
      # it to itself with "+=" to get 2.
      $,+=(++$,);

      # Here we concatenate shell redirection to stderr, which is file
      # descriptor 2, with the usual ">&2" since "$," now equals 2.
      $_.=">&$,";
      print  "\n";
      printf "HEX-: %*v2.2X\n", ' ', $_;
      print  "STR-: " . $_ . "\n";
      # OUTPUT:
      # HEX-: 65 63 68 6F 20 42 72 69 61 6E 20 52 6F 67 65 72 73 20 3E 26 32
      # STR-: echo Brian Rogers >&2

      # Finally, the statement is evaluated in the shell:
      `$_`;

Note: You should ask your friend Brian Rodgers if he always writes his name to Standard ERROR! ;)

</comment><comment><USER3>
        $_ = 'somestring';
        `$_`;     // backticks are shell or exec(), $_ is the previous string.

type echo "'^#(/||/@!@[{@:^[-['^";@@@\\\>])@."."{)/];)^{";$,+=(++$,);$_.=">&$," to see what it does

;$,+=(++$,); looks like a for loop

looks like php to me - backticks work in perl, bash and php

</comment><comment><USER4> The $ vars lead me to either Shell, Perl or PHP.

$_ is a special var in Bash and Perl.

The '.' char is for string concat in Perl and PHP

So, I think this is perl.

The first statement evaluates to: "echo Brian Rogers >&2" The second statement `$_` runs that command.

The end result is that this line of code prints:

Brian Rogers

</comment><comment><USER5> It's Perl. The last `$_`; evals what's in $_, so change it to just print the variable:

      $_='^#(/||/@!@[{@:^[-['^";@@@\\>])@.".
      "{)/];)^{";$,+=(++$,);$_.=">&$,";
      print "$_";

The output is:

      echo Brian Rogers >&2

</comment><comment><USER6> Look like a regular expression.</comment>


From student to spy, and back again - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-informant-20130318,0,1337073.story

<comment><USER2> Great story.

Wonder why there aren't many community efforts like the military has to help treat PSTD for Govt agents.</comment>


The best Hacker News redesigns - <AUTHOR> http://hello.trackduck.com/post/103569567526/top-10-hacker-news-redesigns-trackduck

<comment><USER2> Call me old fashioned, but I do not think Hacker News needs to be redesigned at all. I love how simple it is, I love the orange colour and layout. The site as it currently stands loads really fast and is mobile data friendly because it doesn't need to load a thousand Javascript files, large images and stylesheets or do anything overly fancy.

Some things just do not need to be redesigned or made better, Hacker News is one of those things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe "redesign" is too strong of the word - we're not advocating complete redesign (I'm one of the guys who collected these examples because I love HN), but HN could certainly use some improvements. Even a post "Why HN doesn't need a redesign" [http://jgthms.com/why-hn-doesnt-need-a- redesign.html](http://jgthms.com/why-hn-doesnt-need-a-redesign.html) features a point that "the HN Wishlist appeared on HN's front page. It unsurprisingly spawned some discussion about HN's design. The 3rd most upvoted wish is Refresh the visual design."

Redesigns are great thought exercises, each of these has something interesting, that can be taken away as an inspiration if HN will start looking to change (especially some repeating UI elements). Btw the share amount of redesigns for HN online and comments on them clearly show that people are at least very interested in this subject. And it may prove the point that HN doesn't need a redesign, since so many designers see HN redesign as a major challenge to test their skill. Anyways, I enjoyed compiling this list :)</comment></comment>


Django REST framework 2.3 released: ViewSets and Routers - <AUTHOR> http://django-rest-framework.org/topics/2.3-announcement.html

<comment><USER2> Anyone care to weigh in about using this vs., say, TastyPie?

<comment><USER3> Last I tried this (2.1?) it took a hell of a lot more boilerplate than TastyPie, and I had a few problems that necessitated changing the source a bit. But maybe I was using it wrong (didn't spend a huge amount of time with it).

The auto generated web interface is nice though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here...

The boilerplate comment is definitely valid, and is pretty much what this release was intended to address.

We've now introduced ViewSets (an extension of class based views that is similar to Rail's controllers) and Routers, which make it super quick and easy to get your API up and running.

The updated README should give you a good idea how simple the APIs can be now:

<https://github.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework>

I get the impression that what TastyPie does really well is convention-over- configuration - making a bunch of really sensible design decisions on your behalf. What (I hope) REST framework does really well is staying close to Django's conventions, and being easy to customize all the way through, plus of course the browseable API. Either way, there's certainly plenty of folks happy with both frameworks.

<comment><USER4> I'll take boilerplate over magic any day. The thing that irked me the most about TastyPie was the magic and lack of obvious understanding of what was happening under the hood (without source diving).

The Zen of Python has something to say about this.

<comment><USER5> I'd be curious to know what magic is in tastypie? It's some of the most straightforward python code I've ever read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's with the nav box completely blocking the document? <http://cl.ly/OnPN>

Running Chrome 28.0.1496.0 dev

<comment><AUTHOR> Note sure. I seem to be able to replicate that if the browser window is exactly 727 pixels wide, but otherwise everything displays just fine for me on Chrome 26.0.1410.65. Will look into it later.

 __Edit __: Are you seeing this for all browser widths, or just specific ranges?

<comment><USER7> I took a quick video of it on my machine: OSX 10.8.3, Chrome Canary Version 28.0.1499.0 canary. It doesn't happen on any other browser on my machine (Vanilla Chrome, Firefox, FirefoxNightly)

<http://screencast.com/t/2DOssUNcJrGt>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, appreciated.

<comment><USER8> While you're in there, there's a conflict in the content of the tutorial, at the end of the URLs section: <http://django-rest- framework.org/tutorial/quickstart.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooops. Fixed now - thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel very comfortable with Tastypie, and have pretty well internalized its API. I've got most custom code down to muscle memory. Because of this I don't feel constrained by Tastypie at all.

That said it is very "Django"-y, meaning it's got a high level of abstraction, very opinionated but provides hooks for everything. It's also pays a huge amount of attention to testing.

All that aside I did evaluate DRF for my last project. Tastypie's Django 1.5 support didn't exist, it had some weird interaction issues with our database setup, and it has a huge amount of outstanding issues & pull requests. I spent like 2 days working with DRF and it felt clumsy _for me_ (read: not objectively clumsy, I was just used to thinking about exposing data to a hypermedia API in a particular way). Honestly I just got annoyed by the CBV part. I know some people love them and I'm sure they're great and all, just wasn't for me.

edit: frankly they're doing the same thing, they're both well-written and -maintained. It's just about which API you prefer to work with.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Honestly I just got annoyed by the CBV part.

There's a bunch of things in 2.3 that should make working with the CBVs a _much_ more pleasant experience.

* There's no longer any inheritance from Django's GCBV machinery, specifically SingleObjectMixin, and MultipleObjectMixin. The base class was simple enough that it wasn't really necessary. That means no more browsing across multiple codebases, and less class hierarchy to think about.

* Previously there were three base classes, now there's just a single simplified GenericAPIView.

* Several attributes and methods have been moved to pending deprecation or refactored and simplified.

* Using ViewSets means less verbose, repeated view code and easier URL configuration.

Additionally, all the changes are covered by the deprecation policy, so upgrading from 2.2 should be seamless, despite the tweaks to the GCBV implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am fairly fluent with django class based views and tastypie, but i can't help but feel this sort of OO design has a painful learning curve. you basically need to dig through the stack of classes, mixins, etc pretty comprehensively to get a sense of how everything fits together. once you understand the flow, it's fine. But I find myself wishing there was a map (and one embodied in the code, not external documentation). Does anyone recognize this feeling and if so do you have any thoughts?

<comment><USER11> <http://ccbv.co.uk/>

That site helped a lot when I was first getting the gist of CBVs. Browsing Django's source for the views was surprisingly unpainful, and doing that was aided by iPython's introspection capabilities (typing ?? after an object will show you the source of the class).

<comment><USER10> wow, thanks for posting this! Very impressive resource. I was trying to speak more to the general challenge of learning this sort of OO system (I pretty much learned class based views by reading the code already), but I'm happy that you shared this, I will pass it on to others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I found this for <http://www.socialocale.com> it was a godsend! It made the weird database operations a breeze when working with third-party libs like Userena. It also gave me a concise, modular way to get/put information.

If your project is complex, I feel like the Django Rest Framework will be by your side the whole way. It's very well thought out and nicely documented.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can anyone comment on DRF's relationship to GeoDjango and whether it's pretty seamless to work with GeoJSON vs. WKT?

<comment><AUTHOR> You might want to take a look at this: <https://github.com/mjumbewu/django- rest-framework-gis>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Using 2.1 of this framework and an HBase database, we've been able to reduce load times for data in one of our applications from about 30 seconds down to less than 1. Arguably, this had a lot to do with HBase, but rest-framework is actually really nice and seems to work well in regards to performance.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is great stuff. The viewsets are about to save me lots of repeated code!

</comment><comment><USER16> awesome thanks :)</comment>


"I know how to program, but I don't know what to program" - <AUTHOR> http://www.devdungeon.com/content/i-know-how-program-i-dont-know-what-program <comment><USER2> Don't loose your creativity! It's very hard to recover it (if at all is possible)

<comment><USER3> It is simpler than that: use it or lose it.

Programming is much like writing, it takes both good ideas and a lot of hard industry. The world is littered with good ideas poorly executed. Software more than other branches it seems.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Graphql2chartjs: Realtime Charts Made Easy with GraphQL and ChartJS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/tree/master/community/tools/graphql2chartjs <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

We built this tool so that we could build charts using GraphQL as a data- source. This is a super neat fit especially with creating tables and views in Postgres and getting charts easily.

Hope you find it useful.

<comment><USER2> That seems interesting, if I get it right it needs Hasura and by extension Postgres, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really. You can use it with any GraphQL server that returns a list of records :)

The Hasura and Postgres combo is ideal because you can have complicated aggregations over the Postgres data in the form of views and Hasura can help you query them realtime over GraphQL. Also Postgres has nice community tools around it like PostGIS and Timescale which help you handle geolocation and timeseries type of data that is often used for visualisations.

PS: Co-author here. And I am an engineer at Hasura.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great!

</comment><comment><USER4> How does it deal with streaming? Can you use a sliding window? For large enough datasets e.g. having datapoints continuously ran is a memory leak.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't have to deal with streaming. You stream your data, use whatever algorithm and pass the final output to this. It is just going to transform it into the API that ChartJS expects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice work</comment>