You shouldn't use a spreadsheet for important work - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2014/05/23/you-shouldnt-use-a-spreadsheet-for-important-work-i-mean-it/ <comment><USER3> Felienne Hermans has done some very interesting work examining how to refactor spreadsheets. ([http://www.felienne.com/publications](http://www.felienne.com/publications))

Her PhD dissertation on the subject "Analyzing and Visualizing Spreadsheets" ([http://www.felienne.com/archives/2534](http://www.felienne.com/archives/2534)) is particularly detailed.

Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely to change. Better to figure out how to improve the tooling, rather than undertake the quixotic quest to get business people to abandon their perfectly viable programming tool.

There is an excellent video with her on InfoQ, explaining her spreadsheet formula refactoring tool Bumblebee (and the F# code behind it): [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/spreadsheet- refactoring](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/spreadsheet-refactoring)

<comment><USER4> > Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious > work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely to change. > Better to figure out how to improve the tooling, rather than undertake the > quixotic quest to get business people to abandon their perfectly viable > programming tool.

Its largely used by business people because they (1) have inadequate IT support to have things developed using proper tooling, and (2) have been forbidden from using better tooling themselves by IT. Since both of these are direct products of IT policy, I don't think its a quixotic quest to fix it -- however, trying to fix it by trying to convince them to just give it up is the wrong approach. The people who need to be convinced to change the situation are CIOs.

<comment><USER5> A lot of people who have access to Excel also have access to Access - and a lot of what they do would be better served in database than a spreadsheet. Yet they don't use one - there must be a reason for that, and I don't think it's IT restrictions.

<comment><USER6> This little tidbit from Chris Granger seems relevant:

"Excel is inherently observable since it doesn't have any hidden state and all values are there for you to see and manipulate. It's also direct. You change values in the grid, drag drop things, do calculations on selections, and so on. And it manages to sidestep a lot of incidental complexity; spreadsheets are timeless, without setup, and don't even have a notion of being run."

[http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/03/27/toward-a-better- prog...](http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/03/27/toward-a-better-programming)

<comment><USER7> Saying Excel doesn't have any hidden state is stretching things a bit--your formulas don't show up until you are directly on them, so mistakes (formula results that got turned into static data, for example) are hidden until you put your cursor directly onto them.

<comment><USER8> "formula results that got turned into static data"

This hints at one of the sources of problems with Excel. One good approach to using Excel is to always be in one of two modes: changing the structure (equivalent to coding) and entering values (equivalent to using software). Of course, at the early stages of designing something you will be entering lots of dummy values (e.g. ARPU) to check that your formulae work.

However, many people don't distinguish between collections (rows, columns or other contiguous areas) of cells which _should_ contain values, and those which should contain formulae. I, like many, prefer to indicate input cells with a yellow or orange background, so that I know everything else is a formula.

You can do even better:

\- If you're done designing a spreadsheet, and expect to use it for a production process, then mark the input cells as unlocked, and protect all the sheets. Then the end user won't be able to mess up the formulae.

\- Always write formulae in a way that they can be copied across or down whilst pointing to the right places. This can be achieved through use of one or more $ signs to fix a reference. I've seen a fair number of spreadsheets where there are a large number of similar formulae, but they have been entered/adjusted manually. This is fine only if you never make mistakes, and if no one else needs to change the formulae later or verify they are correct.

My point is that "formula results that got turned into static data" can be avoided with just a few easy rules. However, most people aren't taught these rules :(

<comment><USER4> > Always write formulae in a way that they can be copied across or down whilst > pointing to the right places. This can be achieved through use of one or > more $ signs to fix a reference.

Except if you are using modern version of Excel, don't general use $ references for this, go one step further and use names (for fixed individual datapoints where you would use two $s) or named tables with named columns (for the most common use of single $ references.) This is more self-explanatory and less error-prone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very often Excel is a "programmer in a hostile environment" last hope. By programmer I mean someone who works in sales, bussiness analysis, finances, etc. but knows how to write programs.

In a typical non-IT company someone who needs to automate something has to wait for IT department to purchase software which would do the task. And very often it turns out that in software purchase process the purpose of that software is lost, requirments are comming from a wrong person and at the end that software is pretty useless.

It is not that someone can just download Python or Ruby or Java and start coding. No, no, company IT would never allow for this because they fear about security, patents, licences, etc. (and it does not matter that these doubts are not justified, very often it is just forbidden and that's all).

But chances are that such company has MS Office. Excel is just an interface to a better or worst programming languge. That's just better then nothing.

</comment><comment><USER10> JP Morgan's $6.2 billion "London Whale" trading loss:

      An unnamed overworked staffer in London copied and pasted the
      wrong figures into an Excel spreadsheet, throwing the firm's
      risk models out of whack.

[http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/18/jpmorgan-london- wh...](http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/18/jpmorgan-london-whale- investigation/)

Spreadsheet errors are reaching epidemic proportions globally. What we need is a transnational organization to contain the threat with research, best practices and conferences!

[http://www.eusprig.org/](http://www.eusprig.org/)

Love their compendium of horror stories. Did you know the US Securities and Exchange Commission has weak accounting because they rely on spreadsheets?

[http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm](http://www.eusprig.org/horror- stories.htm)

      As we have reported in prior audits, SEC's general ledger system
      and certain software applications and configurations are not
      designed to provide the accurate, complete, and timely
      transaction-level data needed to accumulate and readily report
      reliable financial information...

      Many of the agency's financial reporting processes are still
      manual in nature and reliant on spreadsheets and databases to both
      initiate transactions and perform key control functions.

<comment><USER11> I used to work for Deutsche Bank. All financially modeling ran through Excel, though admittedly a massive C++ library that is a big Excel macro plugin. These sheets get massive and there are a few clusters of blades that do nothing but run Excel macros day and night.

But why is this madness? It _works for them_. The iBanking world is the madness. You can put in place effective change controls and auditing with any system. However, if people just _want it done_ and don't care how, regardless of whether these calculations were in Python, Mathematica or Fortran, garbage in will still be garbage out. So, let's not wantonly scapegoat Excel for a process problem here.

<comment><USER12> There is actually a business reason why this is the case. The general assumption in most investment banks is that either the market or the regulations will change so quickly that by the time you've written software the "right" way, either the market or the government has already moved on. Excel lets you move fast, and make changes quickly, even if it results in a bloated mess later on. Like you say, Excel isn't the issue, it's the nature of the business.

<comment><USER13> I would still expect that with their profit margins they would all have come up with custom solutions by now.

<comment><USER14> They all do in varying degrees - e.g. Goldman's Slang/SecDB -and are investing in well-engineered valuation/risk systems that work across various trading units due to regulatory pressures as well as to reduce manpower/maintenance costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> (Since the blog's website is not responding, I had to read the article from google's cache[1])

The author has well-intentioned advice about avoiding MS Excel but it's misguided. The criticism fails to accommodate _the reason why_ MS Excel was used. MS Excel is the lingua franca of _non-programmers_. Thomas Piketty is a trained economist, not a programmer. It's not realistic to expect Mr. Piketty to set aside months (years) of his time to master C++/Python/Scala/Fortran/etc to avoid using Excel. It's more realistic for an economist to use MS Excel to back his thesis than for a Python programmer to write a bestselling book about economics.

If we then tweak the advice to be, " _if Piketty is not a programmer, he should have hired a compsci graduate student as a programmer_ ", well... you've only shifted the (human source of) errors somewhere else. Plenty of examples where software _not written in Excel_ had fatal errors: Therac-25[2], Mars Climate Orbiter[3]

Lastly, some of Piketty's errors were _transcription errors_. In other words, GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out). Therefore, using Python while there were GIGO issues isn't going to solve the data problem.

[1][http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1r99Ioj...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1r99Iojv98gJ:lemire.me/blog/archives/2014/05/23/you- shouldnt-use-a-spreadsheet-for-important-work-i-mean- it/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)

[3][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure)

<comment><USER16> Economists are expected to know how to program, and they do. They just have a tendency to reserve writing programs for complex models and prefer spreadsheets for what they consider "simple" data analysis.

On the point about transcription errors: Using python _could_ have avoided some transcription errors. If the error was in copying a single constant from a source into the program, then in python it might be buried as an unlabeled magic number deep in the source tree, but it also might be labeled as a top level constant identifier. In the former case it would have the same problem as in a spreadsheet, but in the latter, a typo would likely be caught by someone reading over the code at some point. Or if some of the data came in a file format that excel couldn't automatically import, maybe he could have used a python library instead of manually transcribing 50 data points. It's hard to think of a situation where using python would have lead to _more_ transcription errors.

<comment><USER15> I don't know where this sentiment that economists (who are not trained as programmers) are expected to know computer programming languages comes from.

Both Harvard and Stanford economics degrees _do not_ list Computer Science 101 as a core requirement to graduate.

Compare Stanford's requirements for Economics[1] with Electrical Engineering[2]. The engineering major has core classes including computing and programming. The economics major does not. (Whether or not economics studies _should_ include it (and therefore Stanford is "wrong" in leaving it out) is a separate conversation.)

Since Thomas Piketty is from France, is there a tradition of European schools requiring computer programming language courses in their training?

As for the Python vs Excel comparisons, I say people are _overestimating_ Python's syntax to avoid errors and _underestimating_ Excel's visual spatial grid of cells & near-universal collaboration to also avoid certain classes of errors. For non-programmers, the rows-columns grid displayed _visually at all times_ is almost a perfect 1-to-1 correspondence to their mental model. For Python loops, it takes programmer training to mentally "unroll" loops and see how data is munged. This visual "blindness" in programming languages ends up creating its own class of errors.

I've done programming in MS Excel + Excel macros/VBA, MS Access, Oracle PL/SQL, MS Transact-SQL, C++ Qt, C# ADO.NET/LINQ, Python,etc and I'm not convinced the syntax of programming languages leads to reduced errors. It's just a different class of errors.

[1][http://economics.stanford.edu/undergraduate/economics- major-...](http://economics.stanford.edu/undergraduate/economics-major- requirements)

[2][http://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/schoolofengineering/elect...](http://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/schoolofengineering/electricalengineering/#bachelorstext)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Spreadsheets ARE software, anyone arguing differently has insufficient experience in at least one of the fields to have an informed opinion. I've worked professionally in both, and the argument in this article is bunk.

Spreadsheets are a different kind of software with advantages and disadvantages compared to compiled/scripted languages.

How do you treat a spreadsheet as real software:

* One operation per cell

* Inputs, processing, and display separated into distinct sheets

* Every formula checked twice (or three times)

* Write row and column check sums

* Treat row and column locking ($F4 or F$4) as the footguns they are.

* Name constants

Testing spreadsheets requires a different set of tools and behaviors, but to say that "quick and dirty" spreadsheets are less durable than "well engineered software" is really to say that "quick and dirty analysis" is less durable than "well engineered analysis."

Spreadsheets are remarkably easy to learn to use and to use correctly compared to scripted/compiled software. Not the least benefit being that they force abstraction in a way that is extremely intuitive to most people -- spacial context with the labels and state simultaneously displayed leads to much much lower context loading cost (for the human brain) than keeping all the abstract variables in your head when writing code.

Mr. Lemire seems to treat the tool as a toy then claim it is only good as a toy. Flub and not Flub languages alike can be run quite easily without unit tests, in which case they are no more durable to errors than excel (and arguably less as they don't display intermediate state).

<comment><USER4> > Spreadsheets are remarkably easy to learn to use and to use correctly > compared to scripted/compiled software.

I don't think this is true. IME, people who aren't primarily programmers/developers and have been using Excel for years tend to have worse practices developing Excel tools than the same people have with much less time learning, e.g., Python. Excel is much easier to learn to use to get some kind of result, perhaps, but not easier to learn to use _correctly_. (Part of it, I think, is because the cost of incorrect use is somewhat more deferred, which is also part of what makes it more attractive to use initially in many cases.)

<comment><USER17> I largely agree with you.

Perhaps it is a difference in semantics.

It is very easy to learn to use correctly, but if you aren't taught by someone who uses it correctly (either self taught or otherwise) you're not likely to discover the best practices.

Easy to learn correctly != obvious way is correct != commonly learned correctly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Billions are made in the finance industry from Excel spreadsheets. Whole funds have been run from a single spreadsheet making buy / sell calculations, with a whole IT infrastructure designed to automate the execution of that single spreadsheet file.

Sure, it may be stupid, but it's democratized programming. That's why spreadsheets work.

<comment><USER19> I remember working on a system at an investment bank in London before the GFC that valued exotic derivative portfolios on a grid of machines all running an instance of Excel; each trade was represented as a separate spreadsheet with well known locations for market data to be inserted.... madness!

<comment><USER20> Wow. That's...I'm not even mad. Excel as an actor framework?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There have been a number of efforts to build a better spreadsheet. One that I was quite familiar with (I bought a license!) was Resolver One [1] that was trying to build a spreadsheet with support for Python at the cell-level. Unfortunately it didn't take off, and the team moved onto Python Anywhere [2]. Excel clearly has strong network effects!

I loved this article [3] from 2008, that argues that Excel and VBA were responsible for the credit crunch, that later possibly lead to Reinhart/Rogoff's flawed research using Excel... its spreadsheets all the way down!

[1] [http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver- one/](http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver-one/) (but link appears to be dead [2] [https://www.pythonanywhere.com](https://www.pythonanywhere.com) [3] [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/21/vba_office_victory/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/21/vba_office_victory/)

<comment><USER21> _I loved this article [3] from 2008, that argues that Excel and VBA were responsible for the credit crunch_

That's a rather aggressive phrasing of what the article says, that many of the calculations involved in the credit crunch were done in Excel/VBA.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I agree its a bit aggressive. Ultimately it was human nature... spreadsheets don't cause apocalyptic financial crises, overzealous capitalists with spreadsheets cause apocalyptic financial crises!

The author was (is?) a recruiter for quants and financial developers so he certainly had a unique perspective.

<comment><USER22> Is it just me, or does the financial system seem to be designed in precisely the opposite way of how we try to design good software? One huge intertwined web, where one small thing indirectly affects thousands of other things. Its seems to be the equivalent of a "big ball of mud" type piece of software.

<comment><USER23> You are making the mistake of thinking the financial system was designed in any meaningful way!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The beauty of Excel is its ability to do many things 'well enough' in a way that is accessible to a lot of people.

My dad put together his architectural plans for a new house in Excel because it is a tool with which he felt comfortable. Some people do calendars in Excel while others try and recreate a full General Ledger system. Because it works well enough, people don't see the need to invest the time in learning a new application and instead invest their time in pushing the limits of the tool.

As someone who builds financial models and who audits those built by others (and is a competent programmer by night), I think that the key source of risk in Excel models is that the tool has no knowledge of intentions. What I mean by this is that if I'm building a cash flow model or if I'm doing a pixel drawing, Excel doesn't care; as users, we are forced to create our own structure and build in our own checks and balances. If I make a balance sheet in Excel that doesn't balance, Clippy won't show up and let me know that things are broken.

I've often thought that it would be really amazing if a semantic layer could be built that uses Excel as the calculation backend. This sort of tool could understand the sorts of concepts of financial statements, projections, time- series and other concepts that often show up in financial models. It would have a built-in understanding of the domain-specific models that would let it leverage that understanding to reduce risk in the building of financial models. If I told it that I wanted to add a revenue stream that is tied to the output of production, the tool would connect the dots between the production schedule, any inflation and/or foreign exchange assumptions and would feed changes in working capital according to the associated collection terms, etc...

Before I get too carried away, the point is that this type of semantic layer would be much better at preventing and detecting anomalies and potential errors in the development of a high-risk financial model. Does anyone have experience with any such tools?

<comment><USER25> That's why I always thought it'd be a good idea for Microsoft to expose such a semantic layer via a .NET API. When you can program an Excel sheet using the .NET languages and have access to the broader .NET libraries then all kinds of interesting possibilities start to open up. The fact is business users _love_ Excel and a great number of CRUD applications could be easily built on top of Excel if only we had a reasonable programming environment (keep the VBA, you could create a VBA implementation on top of .NET). That would be win/win for everyone!

<comment><USER26> I always got the feeling the Office team and .NET team never got along well considering the completely lack of cohesion between _any_ of their respective products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In my experience most civil engineering organisations use spreadsheets for the majority of design calculations. Some large organisations even still insist on engineers writing out calcs by hand. For example, a calculation that determines whether or not a retaining wall is of sufficient size more often than not will be completed in excel. Ditto with the calculation that checks the weight bearing capability of a column or beam in a large building.

Bespoke tools will be bought for tasks too complex or important for excel - finite element analysis, problems involving non-linear springs etc. Some time- consuming, repetitive tasks may also be deemed worthy of more automated tools, but on the whole the engineering industry is very much in the dark ages when it comes to modern software approaches. I often wonder what you'd end up with if you introduced a team of computer scientists into a civil/structural engineering company and told them to assist with analysis. I imagine you'd get some pretty innovative approaches to concept screening/design/cost-optimising etc.

<comment><USER28> This is what I'm hoping to do with a software background going to more traditional engineering.

It's just a little offputting when people talk about the tools they (have) to use -- When I first started, I would never have expected Excel to be so prominent, and Matlab so absent.

<comment><USER29> Because not every engineer is a programmer. Especially not every non-CS/EE engineer. _Especially_ not every non-CS/EE engineer over ~30.

Yes, they've been exposed to programming at some level, but they are not _programmers_. Even as a late-20s mech engineer, I am far above most of my peers when it comes to slinging code and I'm a rank amateur. Many wouldn't even want to touch it.

You're mistakingly assuming that the path of least resistance is "teach non- CS/EE engineer to program because they are technically minded and can easily pick it up" rather than "adapt mathematical process to suit excel".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Also, you shouldn't use an unstable-at-load web server for important writing.

<comment><USER31> Ironically, it's Spreadsheet Server 2014.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Site seems to be offline: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2014/05/23/you- shouldnt-use-a-spreadsheet-for-important-work-i-mean-it/&es_sm=91&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER33> _Yet spreadsheets do not allow testing._

This is an absurd claim. Any good spreadsheet will contain multiple self- tests, either in live formulas or via macros.

<comment><USER34> "good spreadsheet"

I think the biggest problem is the small crossection of these two terms.

<comment><USER35> there is a cross section who knew :-)

In the past a company y that I worked for went down and one of the factors was some wacky spreadsheet in our finance workflow :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Honestly, I don't have a problem with the fact that Excel is used in so many cases - programming for non-programmers is important.

My problem is that Excel is _terrible_. Its formula system is painful and the formulas are invisible.

It's not that a light user DB/spreadsheet program is a bad idea, it's that Excel made a lot of terrible decisions 20 years ago and now they're married to them.

<comment><USER37> > Excel made a lot of terrible decisions 20 years ago and now they're married > to them

I can't really think of any off the top of my head, would be interested if you could share one or two that they're permanently married to.

However, I could make a very long list of easy to implement fixes & features they could add that would offer different ways of doing things than the braindead way you have to do things now, while still maintaining backwards compatibility. My conspiratorial theory is that MS is very well aware of all these things, and they will be released only if a legitimate competitor appeared on the scene, or slowly over time to encourage upgrades.

<comment><USER36> Little things like how terrible and confusing their formula language is. Anything beyond simple arithmetic requires two Googles per cell.

Now, replacing it with Python isn't better - any language that uses double- equals-signs is not fit for a layman-programming-platform.

<comment><USER38> Your confidence in the layman is inspiring. Why is == more difficult to understand than parentheses for function calls, for example?

<comment><USER36> Because highschool math acquainted them with the notion that a function call looks like

      afunctioncall(argument)

thanks to sin(x) and cos(x) and log(x). Some people will even have vague notions of functions with multiple variable inputs like f(x,y).

Basically, highschool math introduced a lot of syntax that users will be familiar with - we're universally okay with the typical +-/* operators, for example, and ^ isn't a stretch, neither is f(). AND/OR/NOT are introductory Boolean algebra and while they're not universally taught in high-school, I find many scientists are acquainted with them (although languages using || && ! syntax are a good way to lose them). Excel's lack of boolean operators (booleans operators are functions in excel) is disappointing.

I've always found that SQL gives a good minimal arithmetic/boolean-logic toolkit for laymen. It's a good model to follow.

<comment><USER39> If you think it's normal to write sin(x), cos(x), or log(x), you've been away from math for too long. Those would nearly always be written much more conveniently as sin x, cos x, and log x. You see parentheses when you have complicated arguments, but using parens in sin(3x+4) doesn't really differ conceptually from using them in 5 · (3x+4), and nobody thinks you need parens for multiplication -- compare 5 · 3x or just a simple statement like 15 · 4 = 60.

f(x) is different; you're right about that one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Let me get this straight. It is hard to review, test and maintain code in Excel workbooks, so we should instead _write custom software_ for these tasks?!

Custom software is, to a non-hacker, the _definition_ of "difficult to review, test, and maintain." You may as well suggest they input their data into a mystery box with some pixies inside who will crunch the numbers for them. :)

Remember, Excel (and spreadsheets in general) ARE custom software, written for this exact need, and with decades of polish and bug-fixing so that even non- wizards can use them.

I agree that we should not fly the space shuttle from an Excel macro. But I feel that suggesting economists should write software instead of use spreadsheets is not only throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but also throwing out the bathtub and the whole bathroom too. Specialty tools exist for this very use case. Let's discuss how to improve them instead of indulging our hacker instinct and reinventing a hammer every time we need to drive a nail.

<comment><USER41> > It is hard to review, test and maintain code in Excel workbooks, so we > should instead write custom software for these tasks?!

Well, maybe before we attempt to send men with guns to further deprive people of their property and liberty (which is, of course, the end goal of Piketty's work and advocacy of a global wealth task) we should determine whether or not his results are, y'know, _true_?

I know, I know, truth is such an old-fashioned concept.

<comment><USER42> What a stunningly off-topic, irrelevant comment.

<comment><USER41> Ummm, my comment was on-topic, since if Piketty's arguments for wealth- confiscation depend upon his research; if his research is wrong, then his conclusions are likewise unsupported.

And yes, when writing software we should use the appropriate tools for the task. If we're about to advocate the confiscation under force of a significant proportion of the world's wealth, then maybe--just maybe--we should use more complex, more expensive but more complex software development methods than 'bing into Excel and fiddle with the formulæ until they feel right.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm pretty sure patio11 says on one of his blogs that anywhere anyone is using an excel file for important work is a SaaS waiting to be born.

edit: found it:

"My favorite symptom of an unmet need for software is any Excel spreadsheet which is ever updated by one employee, sent to a second employee, updated, and then sent back. Every time that happens a SaaS angel gets its wings."

[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/validatin...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/validating_product_ideas)

</comment><comment><USER44> It makes programmers' heads spin, but the business world is totally used to doing all its stuff in Excel.

If Excel code is hard to audit, that's means someone could write a tool to show all the calculations being performed to get to a result. I'm giving this idea away for free because I'm pretty sure someone has already done it.

Writing a new program from scratch has issues, too.

<comment><USER45> I used to work in business modelling and a part of that was creating and auditing spreadsheets so complex they fell into the "this should never be a spreadsheet" category. There are several proprietary excel addons which are designed to do exactly this. Unhelpfully I can't remember the name of the ones I used but if you Google "Excel Auditing Tools" you get quite a few.

<comment><USER24> A popular addon is the ACE toolkit. I'm sure that there are many more that may simply not be available for public consumption.

I do financial modelling and our firm as developed its own formula auditing (and Excel Swiss Army knife) tool. For example, we can analyze a block of cells and have a visual overlay of which cells contain the same formulas, which cells contain formulas of different types (external file, external sheet, embedded constant, constant, etc..).

This lets us really optimize our time while giving is more confidence that we have properly reviewed an entire spreadsheet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Biggest issue I've had with excel and spreadsheets in general has been "put this on the web". People spend hours/days/weeks building a spreadsheet tool that does all their calculations, then say "put this on the web" to me, and I can't do it. Not in their budget. To them, it should just be some sort of magic, but... I don't know of tools to just 'put' something like that on the web. They want people to be able to interact with it, but 'not download it'. They won't use Google spreadsheets or any office365 online stuff.

Maybe there are some tools that can take an xlsx file and make it secure, interactive and loggable and are also free (or nearly so?) Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER47> Maybe the problem with Excel is that errors are more likely to stay under the radar. You can refer to the wrong cell, extend formulas with relative reference where it should be absolute (or the opposite) whithout noticing. When programming logical errors will more often lead to fatal errors upon running the program.

If anything, it's more a matter of using Excel correctly. Tools like slate for excel make it easier to audit spreadsheet especially other people's.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'll buy that - the fact that the pretty essential vlookup function _defaults_ to guessing when it can't find a value, rather than defaulting to "Couldn't find the value you were looking to" \- has been the source of endless errors.

Explicit really reduces the number of errors you run into - there's a lot of implicit going on in a spreadsheet.

<comment><USER24> I think you'll find that VLOOKUP is not used that much by people deeply invested in the modelling field. It is dangerous in the same way as referring to cell addresses in macros. (This is where named ranges are particularly useful)

As soon as the structure of your lookup table changes, your VLOOKUP formulas risk being invalidated. After being burned a bunch of times, I've switched to INDEX or a INDEX/MATCH to accomplish the same sort of thing. With INDEX/MATCH, you are required to be explicit in selecting both the range of the data and of the key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The errors are not produced by using excel, according at lest to the financial times. But to manipulation of data.

[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabdc0.html)

Other people have praised the statistical work done on the book:

\- [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/opinion/krugman-wealth- ove...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/opinion/krugman-wealth-over- work.html?_r=1) \- [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/1081616...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10816161/Capital- in-the-Twenty-First-Century-by-Thomas-Piketty-review.html)

So given the controversial nature of the subject, I wonder if we could point to an objective analysis of the work.

</comment><comment><USER50> Error prone? I haven't found an IDE yet with syntax highlighting as nice as Excel's when I am punching in a formula that references a few cells.

</comment><comment><USER51> People here don't seem to inderstand wuite why people use spreadsheets.

I knew someone who ised the spreadsheet supplied with MS Works (a truly _hateful_ piece of software) to create fax cover sheets and notice signs and printed letters.

The spreadsheet was also used to creat Bills of material for electronic subcontracting. These would be printed out and then only the paper copy was relevant. (This worked better than you might think - that paperwork system had been refined over years and all the kinks ironed out. Everyone knew if a part had been ordered, arrived, booked in, kitted, issued to the shop floor, paid for by us and paid for as a final product by the customer. Moving from that paperwork system to sage line 100 was painful and produced a lot of confusion and kludges.

So, people like spreadsheets because they can get stuff done. To you it might seem like they're hammering in nails with the handle of a screwdriver, but the answer is to make better documentation and better software.

(Also I see people using screwdrivers and other handtools and I wonder why noone ever told them how to do it properly.)

</comment><comment><USER52> The problem with spreadsheets to counter was Chris Granger is saying, is that they are NOT observable from a software maintenance perspective, the code is invisible but the entire heap and the intermediate values are visible.

I cannot easily swap out one set of data for another, making it hard to confirm my models are running correctly.

How do I diff a spreadsheet?

How do I refactor a spreadsheet?

</comment><comment><USER53> Just a default note that the whole "he got stuff wrong" claim itself might not stand up to scrutiny.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/is-piketty- all-w...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/is-piketty-all- wrong/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0)

Edit: Also regarding the Rogoff data. Sure, those findings really were crap but surprise, surprise, it was crap that policy makers were oh so eager to hear. One might blame the falsity on the dumb use of spreadsheet but it seems more likely it was a case of "let's fudge data in a crap fashion till we come up with what people want to hear". Then when someone points out how it's crap, we always blame the spreadsheets.

<comment><USER54> > it seems more likely it was a case of "let's fudge data in a crap fashion > till we come up with what people want to hear"

That is a pretty bold claim.

<comment><USER53> Rogoff has a pretty long history of publishing what well-heeled people apparently want to hear, it's amazing that he was able to hide behind the "this was just a spreadsheet error" point.

The problem is I've mostly observed his chameleon act in radio interviews pre and post crisis. The pre-crisis interview, he claimed their was no problem and the post-crisis interview, he talked about how angry he was against the folks who claimed there was no problem, so unfortunately I can't provide a link (the files probably wouldn't be online anymore even if I took the trouble to find the link - smart shills do things by voice, it seems).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> having worked for Investment Banking clients I can see what the author intended to address.

I have seen a lot of abuse/ over use of excel/VBA

I once had to write CRUD front-end with Excel/VBA activeX components retrieving data from Sybase / SQL Server databases.

Which could have been easily engineered as a simple web-app. "But NO .. IT HAD TO BE A FUCKING SPREADSHEET"

<comment><USER22> Welcome to my world. We are using excel for everything here, because basically it means the user doesn't have to think. That means there are countless errors, and I get to be a data entry clerk rather than a software developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I wrote an answer to this on my blog [http://www.felienne.com/archives/3355](http://www.felienne.com/archives/3355)

and @seansickle Thanks for linking to my stuff!

</comment><comment><USER57> I've observed disasters created in spreadsheets. I've also observed -- and occasionally created -- robust models and calculations.

One flipside is that, if you know what you're doing, it's very easy to created orthogonal calculations and comparisons in order to check your work. And, if something doesn't compare or look right, to track back step by step and through all the precedents to find the fault(s).

Databases can also create and hide problems, particularly if they are not understood and/or designed and set up properly. And some problems thusly created can be rather opaque, particularly to those without a good understanding of or access to the underlying design and the principles upon which it rests.

As with many things, ultimately I found that the problems lay not with spreadsheets, per se, but with the people using them and with the organizations that tasked those people without consideration for their capabilities (and limits thereof) and without adequate resources to do the job right.

Personally, there has been a time or three where -- in significant measure due to such resource constraints -- I would have been sunk without the flexibility that a spreadsheet -- often in combination with some programming and database work -- provided me. For example, I could quickly and programmatically deal with the 95% that was clean enough, and then manually go through and figure out and adjust the crap.

Ideal? Perhaps not. But then, "business" seldom is. (Nor "life", for that matter.)

</comment><comment><USER58> Meh, use the right tool for the right job. Sometimes that tool is a spreadsheet. My biggest complaint about Excel is that it fails gracefully when I would prefer that it pitch a fit.

</comment><comment><USER59> This is all fine, but he doesn't suggest an alternative. Which, of course, there aren't any. Which is the reason it's a problem.

<comment><USER60> Don't social scientists and economists spend a huge amount of time learning statistical software such as SPSS or Stata or Gauss? Why bother with Excel?

<comment><USER61> Not in my experience (economics). An econometric class used Stata and I know a couple of statistics classes used SPSS, but beyond that it was use whatever you want, just get the job done. And for most people "whatever you want" was Excel, with a few people using Matlab. I never saw anyone using Stata when they didn't have to.

Admittedly one reason for this was that all student machines throughout the university had Excel installed and all the students had Excel on their laptops, while Stata was only available in a couple computer labs. And it's pretty much the same once you get out to the working world. No matter where go in the world or what office you walk into, if you sit down in front on windows machine, it will have Excel. Convincing your boss to buy you Stata or SPSS just so you can do a couple of quick statistical tests that you are perfectly capable of doing in Excel is just too much of a hassle most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> "The fact that they use spreadsheets suggests that they spend very little time worrying about accuracy." I don't get it. Why does the fact that a person uses a particular piece of software suggest that they don't care about accuracy? Does this mean that just because I use R or Python I worry more about accuracy? Really? I think it has more to do with loss of control - <USER2> developers hate Excel because it gives _business_ people something they can work with straight away. Every time there's a bug which could remotely be related to spreadsheets, people start another wave of Excel-hate. As if this was entirely impossible in a _real_ programming language. Don't get me wrong, spreadsheets are not perfect by any means. But neither is anything else in this world. It purely comes down to choosing the most suited tool for a given problem. And in Piketty's case there's nothing wrong with choosing Excel.

<comment><USER63> Did you read the article? The author spends most of it attempting to justify that exact point. You may or may not agree with their arguments, but saying "I don't get it" without addressing any of those arguments isn't a useful response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> The problem with spreadsheets is not a simple issue of good vs. bad. Spreadsheets have an extremely flexible and well accepted if not intuitive interface. The problem is that they do not provide visibility into what processing is occurring, require a lot of error-prone manual manipulation, and are difficult to audit. As such, they are not really designed for testing and disciplined business processes that ensure accuracy and data integrity. You can't have complete flexibility as well as rigid controls.

One solution is to recognize when a given spreadsheets usage has increased to a point where it - or some portion of its functionality - would be better embedded in an application. Another is to have some users adopt a environment/language like R which addresses the short-comings listed above at the expense of being more complicated and less user-friendly. But there is no simple solution that is going to result in spreadsheets disappearing from use.

</comment><comment><USER65> We use a spreadsheet to do gantt charts at work. Although Microsoft project is available, not everyone has installed it or knows how to use it. Everyone knows how to do basic Microsoft Excel. These schedules are only to a week granularity so we use one column for each week and each row becomes a task.

</comment><comment><USER66> "… but I will not use Microsoft Excel to run a bank "

obviously you never worked in a big bank. Most traders use Excel a lot, if not in every moment of their work. It depends on the bank of course but in some banks even the trades are made from Excel spreadsheets.

</comment><comment><USER67> Pretty much nobody will be getting _right onto_ fixing this one, you can rest assured.

Those millions and billions of pounds and dollars and euros swishing back and forth in the financial centres? Yeah, Excel macros. BE AFRAID.

</comment><comment><USER68> Same problem for any graphical programming environment which doesn't provide proper software tools, like diff's for updates, tests, coverage, debugging. But nevertheless they are used and recommended very successfully.

Matlab Simulink is a very similar environment used professionally to a much higher degree. There are extensions in some toolbox for graphical diffs, but who uses it? Who can review the diffs in a version control system?

And those systems are pretty hard to debug also. In a 10Khz loop you cannot step through or set breakpoints and hardly do printf debugging.

</comment><comment><USER69> Data in arrays, exports to CSV, facile API... what's not to love?

<comment><USER70> I remember on job where I wrote a lot of tools to load a database by reading an excel spreadsheet from perl[1]. It was amazingly fun.

1) perl does have some good libraries to read Excel files without exporting

<comment><USER71> Perl also has nice libraries for creating Excel files. Used that at my last job to generate reports from MySQL.

<comment><USER70> Yep, it is amazing how much b_tching about crappy reports ends when you just give the raw data to a customer and let them pivot table to their heart's desire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> What's scary here is how much of Finance is based on Excel. Tons and tons of spreadsheets. Pretty much every bank's risk measurements go through a spreadsheet at some point. So do most trades. High frequency may get executed in C++, but somewhere along the way it gets aggregated in Excel.

The only thing worse than being able to see all these convoluted spreadsheets, is not being able to see the code behind non-spreadsheet systems.

</comment><comment><USER73> I think tools like MATLAB could bridge the gap between spreadsheets and general-purpose programming/data analysis. It has the huge standard library Excel users want, a REPL for prototyping, visual data inspection, and the ability to very quickly create charts and figures. The scripts are also easy to share and it doesn't involve use of the command line unless you want it to.

Anyone want to teach "MATLAB for Bankers"?

</comment><comment><USER74> Bahaha. I know of multi-million complex international 3-party deals in the oil and gas business that were worked out on a spreadsheet. Insurance actuaries I know of refuse to move away from their spreadsheets that do business-critical risk table calculations.

It's idiocy, but I've seen the poor spreadsheet program warped into even worse uses, but not for business-critical stuff.

</comment><comment><USER75> While spreadsheets are sub-optimal, the work was OPEN so people could find those bugs. We need to stop beating scientists who share their data because currently there is little incentive for them to do so.

Most scientists do not make their code and resources easily available. I'd prefer an open excel sheet to a closed python analysis which is only slightly less likely to be wrong.

<comment><USER76> Some groups however do share their code [1] (I am not really aware of similar sites for fields other than astrophysics, although there is plenty of code out there).

[1] [http://asterisk.apod.com/wp/?page_id=12](http://asterisk.apod.com/wp/?page_id=12)

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Excel can only handle a certain amount of records. I've personally found it hard to deal with more than 100,000 rows in Excel.

<comment><USER78> The limit went up considerably with the introduction of 64-bit Excel. Also, there is a plugin called "Power Query" that allows the actual data to be stored in MSSQL. I have seen this work on tables with 100s of millions of records without a hitch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I've done a bit of work building a complex Excel spreadsheet, because that was the job - and what I wanted afterwards was an automated way to turn it into a Python script. Collaborating in Excel is tricky - it was a large enough spreadsheet that 32-bit Excel would sometimes crash, and version tracking was entirely manual.

</comment><comment><USER80> I've worked for many large financial institutions as a quant and am intimately familiar with use of spreadsheets in critical functions. I believe this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity. If someone is interested in start-up ventures in this space, I would be very interested in discussing further.

<comment><USER81> How would you overcome the very large inertial barrier that exists in that world to using something new and untested? The world of finance and investment banking is a world of networking and extreme resistance to change. There's a reason Bloomberg's suite of products sits as pretty as it does, and unless some great upheaval occurs will continue to do so for many years (it's not because the products are easy to use, developer friendly, or even good tools necessarily).

Also, you should put some contact info in your profile, or provide it in your comment, if you want to be contacted for further discussion.

<comment><USER80> > How would you overcome the very large inertial barrier that exists in that > world to using something new and untested?

I've already successfully done this. The sales cycle can admittedly be long, but it's not impossible.

You have to create a product that addresses pain points for business users. It has to be a compelling product and it has to solve problems for business decision makers. Initially, you want to sell to the business, not to the IT department. It turns out that spreadsheets are mainly used by business users and subject matter experts, instead of IT.

The next issue is price. If you are trying to sell something for (say) $1 million to a big corporation, then it is quite a a long sales cycle (but still achievable). My personal take on this is you do want to eventually be charging several million dollars per corporate client, but you also should have a low cost "entry level" version of the product. The cost has to be low enough that a business power user could charge it to his Corporate American Express without being noticed (say $1,000) and download and install your application (he will need admin rights, which he might in fact have).

> The world of finance and investment banking is a world of networking and > extreme resistance to change.

Yes there is a lot of networking that goes on. This can really work in your favor, because there is a sort of herd mentality. Once people start talking to each other about your product, customers will want to talk to you. If you close a large deal, news will quickly spread and other large deals can follow.

I would not agree that there is "extreme resistance to change." In my experience, banks, hedge funds, etc, are often early adopters and one of the largest users of high technology.

> There's a reason Bloomberg's suite of products sits as pretty as it does

I have Bloomberg in my cross-hairs, next to Excel.

> and unless some great upheaval occurs will continue to do so for many years

You are correct that change often requires a catalyst. But I think that great upheavals are happening everyday, but they are hidden behind closed doors, occurring deep inside of companies and departments. In my experience, it is precisely during those times of upheaval that you have the best chance of introducing a new, disruptive technology into an organization. There are many kinds of upheavals that happen. (mergers, divestitures, running into Excel's maximum row limit, etc) and they can all be catalysts for change.

I've put my email address in profile now, thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> The process NOT the tool.

Yes spreadsheets have errors, but the only method I know of that is able to get error rates down to near zero is due process. There are good processes that reduce error rates to near zero, but there are no tools that reduce error rates to near zero. The problem is the process, not the tool.

<comment><USER4> > The process NOT the tool.

But the tool constrains the process, which is why you should choose tools by appropriateness to the process they are going to be used in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Although I agree with the author, using Piketty as the example seems counter to his argument: the FT found the errors in the spreadsheet in a few weeks. They were obviously not very difficult to find. Sounds like Piketty's problem was a lack of peer-review, not the tools he used.

</comment><comment><USER84> Interesting that the article on wealth concentration (linked from the article), doesn't mention Piketty (yet). It needs some work.

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

</comment><comment><USER85> A thought experiment: is it advisable to save mission critical, structured information as a loose collection of schemaless text files?

If it is not advisable, why is it accepted for software engineering professionals to manage their source code this way?

<comment><USER86> well a programming language with a specification has a pretty well-defined schema.

The E?-BNF provides a syntactical schema for the code and the rest of specification provides the semantic schema.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> I look forward to the day when F# is a first class citizen in Excel. That will make my life much easier.

</comment><comment><USER88> TLDR: Use the right tool for the right job.

</comment><comment><USER89> Wrong end of the correlation/causation pattern.

Human beings make mistakes.

A lot of humans use Excel.

Hence a lot of errors in Excel.

Would all those humans program their logic in Python - we'd have a lot of wrong calculations in Python code and an article stating to not use Python.

<comment><USER90> I am human, therefore there is no difference between coding in C and coding in Rust/Cyclone?

I don't think it works that way. The surface area where you are permitted to make mistakes is completely different in language X compared to excel. In Excel, `="a"+4` is a cell error but a valid spreadsheet. In python it is an invalid program, throwing a runtime error. In haskell, it doesn't even compile.

<comment><USER15> It's an oversimplification to assume the hypothetical Python implementation would have less errors. We don't know that. Some type of math errors would overlap between Excel and Python. Some types of errors would be easier to stumble into in Python than Excel.

For example, an inexperienced programmer in Python might use floating point instead of Decimal data type to add currency amounts. His programming loop to sum the amounts would be _incorrect_. In MS Excel, adding currency in cells correctly down to the penny is a no brainer. Sure, the Python programmer can be taught "best practices" to avoid this type of error but the point is that while Python helps eliminates some errors, it also creates new ones.

Another example is data munging. A programmer might write some Python to slurp a data file (exported from mainframe or whatever) and do some financial calculation on it. Load the values into an array some other memory structure. The problem is that the memory contents are "hidden" from sight unless the programmer uses a visual debugger or prints out all the values to inspect. The Python programmer may not notice that some values are misaligned or garbage. With Excel, the non-programmer imports the data file and he immediately scrolls through the worksheet as a sanity check. His eyeballs notice that the source data is dirty. Again, the Python "problem" can be corrected with best practices but the point still remains: different tools create different problems.

Lastly, Excel spreadsheets are easily emailed among dozens of people. You can't send ???.py programs to everyone because you can't expect all the Windows users to have the Python runtime. Spreadsheets are even sent to iPhones and tablets and you definitely can't expect easy Python deployment there. With less coworkers examining the ???.py file, it has potential for _more errors_ compared to a scenario where everybody can participate in questioning the spreadsheet's numbers.

Our intuition says that _on balance_ , the hypothetical Python/Haskell solution should have less errors than MS Excel but I can't confidently say I've seen any definitive proof of that.

<comment><USER22> >The problem is that the memory contents are "hidden" from sight unless the programmer uses a visual debugger or prints out all the values to inspect.

I think that's what most people do when they are programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> We've done business with pen and paper for thousands of years.

I think we can handle spreadsheets. While I'm a programmer and often find it easy to whip up a program to do what many would do in a spreadsheet, I don't have the arrogance to tell people to not use spreadsheets for serious work.

On the contrary, I encourage it. It's a wonderful tool, and, in the end, superior to pen and paper.</comment>


Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc

<comment><USER2> This has been on news.yc before, but it's new to me. Even if you don't watch the full hour, the first 15 minutes or so makes an interesting point about our lack of knowledge of the pioneers of the field of computer science.</comment>


Satellite killed by trajectory patent - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC-14#Launch_anomaly <comment><USER2> The patent in this case is simply getting the blame for a failed launch, as an excuse to collect insurance. This is like blaming a smoke detector patent on a building being burned to the ground to collect insurance. "We couldn't afford smoke detectors because they're patented, and we're in a lawsuit with a manufacturer"

It has nothing to do with the patent and everything to do with collecting insurance.

<comment><USER3> The fact that trajectories are being patented at all is what I took away from this. That's astounding in it's ridiculousness. I assumed that was why this was posted.

Your analogy makes no sense, the failed launch has nothing to do with the patent, the patent just stopped an attempt at saving the satellite. So more like the factory caught on fire and no firetrucks could come because a competing factory had patented the route from the firehouse.

<comment><USER4> _That's astounding in it's ridiculousness_

Indeed, which is why it's not what happened. Repeat after me: you cannot patent an idea, only a mechanism for implementing an idea.

<comment><USER5> <http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6116545>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In case you're wondering about patents in space like I was...

35 U.S.C. 105 Inventions in outer space.

(a) Any invention made, used, or sold in outer space on a space object or component thereof under the jurisdiction or control of the United States shall be considered to be made, used or sold within the United States for the purposes of this title, except with respect to any space object or component thereof that is specifically identified and otherwise provided for by an international agreement to which the United States is a party, or with respect to any space object or component thereof that is carried on the registry of a foreign state in accordance with the Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space.

(b) Any invention made, used, or sold in outer space on a space object or component thereof that is carried on the registry of a foreign state in accordance with the Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space, shall be considered to be made, used, or sold within the United States for the purposes of this title if specifically so agreed in an international agreement between the United States and the state of registry.

<comment><USER7> Could somebody that speaks legalese phrase that in standard English?

<comment><USER8> Basically, if the US can claim jurisdiction either by virtue of launch or nationality of components or by international jurisdiction, then the patents are enforcible in the US.

<comment><USER9> Not _exactly_ related, but...

As more and more Americans realize that there is a life after the USA, I have a feeling that we're going to see more and more jurisdictional straw-grasping by the US government.

Maybe I'm searching for a pattern where there isn't one, but this comes on the heels of them requiring tax payments of people who've expatriated, as well as seizing .com domains registered by foreign nationals at foreign registrars...

<comment><USER3> I've noticed that pattern as well and took the same thing from it as you did.

It does align with my natural bias however, so gotta be careful about confirmation bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's obviously invalid to patent orbital trajectories. It's also obvious it would cost millions and take decades in court to fight it, and if you won the satellite would long since have ceased to be relevant.

<comment><USER11> Why?

I don't mean that sarcastically. The patent is not on the existence of a particular trajectory, nor on a basic law of physics. It's a patent on a process to move a spacecraft from one orbit to another by firing rockets at precise times.

I can't think of a reason why this would be more invalid than a "composition of matter" patent that is just a list of particular alloys of steel with special properties: after all, it's a law of physics that 18-8 steel has special properties, which was patented [1]. The patent was issued just on listing a mix of iron, 18% chromium, and 8% nickel. Many other special steel blends have been patented [2], even though their specialness is a function of natural properties of materials.

I'm not saying it's a good thing that this is patentable, but it's very far from "obvious" that it's not.

[1] <http://www.estainlesssteel.com/historyofstainlesssteel.shtml> [2] At random: [http://www.google.com/patents?id=L0YhAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=L0YhAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false)

<comment><USER12> > It's a patent on a process to move a spacecraft from one orbit to another by > firing rockets at precise times.

What else would you suggest?

<comment><USER11> Well, the GSM patents [1] are a series of patents on particular ways to send wireless signals between handsets and base stations. I'm pretty sure that wireless radio is the only way to send signals from a cell phone, but that hasn't invalidated patents on particular methods of doing so.

Again, I'm not saying it's a good thing that this is patentable, but it's not "obvious" that it's not patentable if it's possible to patent (several times over) various ways of sending wireless signals from cell phones, or particular blends of nickel, chromium and iron.

[1] <http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=9667>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the patent abstract:

       A method is provided for using a lunar flyby
       maneuver to transfer a satellite from a
       quasi-geosynchronous transfer orbit having a
       high inclination to a final geosynchronous orbit
       having a low inclination. The invention may be
       used to take the inclination of a final geosynchronous
       orbit of a satellite to zero, resulting in a
       geostationary orbit, provided that the satellite
       is launched in March or September.

That part about March or September is surprising to me. What is special about those months?

Note that this patent is about a technique involving a lunar flyby for setting up an orbit around Earth. The period of the Moon doesn't fit evenly into the year, and so things that depend on the position of the Moon relative to the Earth tend to occur at intervals that cause them to drift through the calendar year.

What would be happening here that is tied to the year?

<comment><USER14> Well March is the Spring Equinox, and September is the Fall Equinox and that would be my educated guess as to why those two months are special.

<comment><USER15> Serious question: Why would day and night on earth being equal length impact orbital mechanics?

Edit: I realized this might sound sarcastic. It isn't meant to be.

<comment><USER16> It's not the day/night length.

It's the angle of the earth relative to the orbit of the moon. It's a geosynchronous orbit, so it must match the equator, including the angle.

Presumably in other months the angle of the moon's orbit (relative to the equator) is wrong for using this maneuver.

<comment><USER17> There are 3 bodies here, the Earth, the Moon and the Sun.

During the equinox the equator of the Earth lines up with the Sun-Earth axis. I can see that being significant in all sorts of ways. At other times of year, in a complicated maneuver, the Sun is going to pull the satellite off of that plane of orbit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I get the gist of the submission, but "Satellite killed..." is a bit sensational. The AMC-14 is alive, albeit under DOD ownership:

<http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/amc-14.htm>

<comment><USER19> I think the use of the word "killed" here doesn't mean "not alive", but rather "no longer useful", which is a common usage. Considering it was declared a complete loss and sold off, I'd say it was killed in the sense of "this project has been killed".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is often better to ask forgiveness rather than permission. Why not move the satellite first, litigate about the patent later?

What this really sounds like is a case of somebody taking their lawyers much, much too seriously. Courts have the right to tell you what to do or not do. Lawyers, however (unless they are judges) do not have that right; people unfortunately overlook that point all the time.

<comment><USER21> Whether or not this is the case here, the sentiment you make about lawyers is so correct in my area (marketing). I often see people looking for lawyers to make yea/nay decisions whereas I believe business is better run when lawyers inform you of the level of risk and possible outcomes of a decision. Then you make the call. Otherwise it seems you will be stuck on the overly safe route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A link to the patent: <http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6116545>

</comment><comment><USER23> If you check out the patent, US6116545 and see what citations they have, it seems like there's a whole lot of different patents on various orbital maneuvers.

</comment><comment><USER24> I can feel the innovation stimulation happening all around us!

</comment><comment><USER25> > While it is expected that the patent would not stand up to legal challenge, > SES intend to de-orbit the spacecraft in order to collect the insurance > payout.[7] If this attempt had been successful, the extra use of fuel needed > to correct the orbital error would have significantly reduced AMC-14's > originally expected service life of 15 years to just four.

Am I reading this wrong, or is it saying they would have killed the satellite anyway, even if there was no patents?

<comment><USER26> It's called 'An excuse'

They probably wouldn't have killed if it was in the correct orbit all along, but they probably considered "risk of fixing" vs insurance payout

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What next, planes which can only fly south because Boeing have a patent on North?

<comment><USER28> how about a a patent for parallel parking

<comment><USER29> You kid. But with driverless cars emerging, I suspect we may well see just that.

<comment><USER30> You can already buy a Lexus which parallel parks for you. Don't know which, if any, elements are patented though.

<comment><USER29> That thought occurred to me moments after I posted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I just have to ask, how did you find this?

<comment><AUTHOR> @leashless mentioned it on Twitter, and it shocked me! He's worth following for quite unusual stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Uh... that's beyond stupid if it's true Maybe the patent is on equipment/method used to calculate the trajectory?

If not, I'll patent my trajectory to work and make a few bucks on the side.

<comment><USER2> It's not true, ideas are never patentable, they have to pass the machine- transformation test. When the trajectory is applied to a machine it becomes patentable.

It's the application that is patented not the idea. The trajectory alone is not patentable as it fails to meet the machine-transformation test.

<comment><USER32> I don't follow you. Of what use is it to say that "ideas are never patentable," and then hedge the statement by pointing out that trivial application of the idea to any given concrete object renders it, in effect, patentable?

Why _couldn't_ the grandparent poster file for a patent on a particular sequence of turns and braking/acceleration maneuvers needed to drive from one place to another in the least amount of time? Under your reasoning, all he has to do is add "with an automobile" to the abstract series of instructions, in order to be granted ownership of those instructions with respect to their execution with an automobile.

How in the world can anyone think this is OK?

<comment><USER33> So GPS makers can not only have patents on how a route is created, but on the actual routes?

<comment><USER2> If the route is non-obvious and doesn't have prior art probably.

If you invented a warp drive that could get you from New York to London in 3 minutes you could probably file a patent for folding space in a manner that gets you from New York to London in three minutes with out smushing the earth into bits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Every now and then, I read a piece of news that makes me think if extraterrestrials are watching us, they must be shaking their heads in some combination of amusement, disgust, and despair.</comment>


IPv4 to IPv6 transition - optimistic plans & what is unfortunately happening now - <AUTHOR> http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2012-08/EndPt2.html

<comment><USER2> unfortunately tl;dr (which funnily enough is the reason why the ipv6 transition is going so slowly)</comment>


How I Use Mithril: Pat Cavit - <AUTHOR> https://carlmungazi.github.io/sourcecodeadventures/posts/pat-interview <comment><USER2> A JS Framework not talked enough!! Keep them coming!</comment>


Open lunar foundation (private lunar outpost) - <AUTHOR> http://openluna.org/ <comment><USER2> I think the link you have this pointed to is incorrect - it should be openlunar.org</comment>


Ask HN: Any HN stats analysis been done? - <AUTHOR>

I was just thinking of some questions about HN discussions - things like what does the average discussion look like? How long between replies is common / polite  (I seem to let the other end hang for hours)<p>I don't particularly care about best time to post (that's defined by me as when I am struck by something) but there are many interesting questions one could ask the corpus<p>(Which leads to the other question - is there a good way to get hold of the corpus?) <comment><USER2> There's the main HackerNews API [1] via firebase.com, and there's also the Algolia HN Search API [2]. Over the years I've seen quite a few collections of data [3, 4, 5, 6], but how complete they are and whether or not they've been maintained is unknown.

[1] [https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

[2] [https://github.com/algolia/hn-search](https://github.com/algolia/hn- search)

[3] [https://archive.org/details/HackerNewsStoriesAndCommentsDump](https://archive.org/details/HackerNewsStoriesAndCommentsDump)

[4] [https://ia902503.us.archive.org/33/items/HackerNewsStoriesAn...](https://ia902503.us.archive.org/33/items/HackerNewsStoriesAndCommentsDump/)

[5] [http://shitalshah.com/p/downloading-all-of-hacker-news- posts...](http://shitalshah.com/p/downloading-all-of-hacker-news-posts-and- comments/)

[6] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835605)

</comment><comment><USER3> There was this last week: a dump of the 10M comments and posts so far: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791)

</comment><comment><USER4> I particularly like Andrej Karpathy's analysis: [https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/hn_analysis.html](https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/hn_analysis.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a repository of scripts for downloading all Hacker News data using Python and storing in PostgreSQL: [https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all- hacker-news-submissions...](https://github.com/minimaxir/get-all-hacker-news- submissions-comments)

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's a list of relevant links I've compiled over the past year or two:

\- [http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on- hacker...](http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker-news- a-comprehensive-answer/) \- [http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker- news/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/) \- [http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about- comments/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/) \- [http://karpathy.ca/myblog/2013/11/27/quantifying-hacker- news...](http://karpathy.ca/myblog/2013/11/27/quantifying-hacker-news- with-50-days-of-data/) [https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/hn_analysis.html](https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/hn_analysis.html) \- [http://metamarkets.com/2011/hacking-hacker-news- headlines/](http://metamarkets.com/2011/hacking-hacker-news-headlines/) \- [http://danluu.com/randomize-hn/](http://danluu.com/randomize-hn/) \- [http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_r...](http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_randomized_algorithms.html) \- [http://camdp.com/blogs/multi-armed-bandits](http://camdp.com/blogs/multi- armed-bandits) \- [http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news- mathem...](http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathematical- approach.html) \- [http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/10/17/surprising-hacker- news-...](http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/10/17/surprising-hacker-news-data- analysis/) \- [http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/10/24/how-to-get-on-the- front...](http://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/10/24/how-to-get-on-the-front-page- of-hacker-news/) \- [http://blog.datadive.net/which-topics-get-the-upvote-on- hack...](http://blog.datadive.net/which-topics-get-the-upvote-on-hacker-news/) \- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134) \- [https://porter.io/blog/hackernews-cheaters-catch-me-if- you-c...](https://porter.io/blog/hackernews-cheaters-catch-me-if-you-can/) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332889) \- [http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking- really...](http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really- works.html) \- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9336759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9336759) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333611) \- [http://www.almostinfinite.com/other/hacker-news-new-page- scr...](http://www.almostinfinite.com/other/hacker-news-new-page-scroll-of- death.html)?</comment>


Minecraft crosses 1,000,000 units sold mark  - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/notch/status/25304319339274240 <comment><USER2> See also <http://www.minecraft.net/stats.jsp>

About 850K units was the alpha sold for about 10 Euro, the remaining 150K were the beta for 15 Euro. This works out to a revenue of about 10,750,000 Euro (US$ 14m roughly). Not too shabby, considering that the game isn't even out of beta yet!

<comment><USER3> Sure, but once you split that amongst all the employees, it's not very much.

<comment><USER4> You mean, 7?

<http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Mojang_Specifications>

That sounds like a nice payout to me...</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Reports First Quarter 2020 Results - <AUTHOR> https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2020/Facebook-Reports-First-Quarter-2020-Results/default.aspx <comment><USER2> > Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.73 billion on average for > March 2020, an increase of 11% year-over-year.

So despite all the hate and rumors that less and less people use FB, the numbers tell a different story

<comment><USER3> Yep - it's easy to look back at all of the bad HN predictions from two years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16683278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16683278)

General HN anti-FB sentiment has been wrong on this issue for a long time.

<comment><USER4> It would be interesting to see the demographic changes that come with Facebook.

I have a feeling younger users are leaving and older users (especially now that they're more isolated than before) are joining.

<comment><USER5> But that's what the theory has been for years. At some point if it's actually become only for older people like we all keep saying, you'd see that in the growth numbers, and that keeps not happening. Which is what the parent meant about how we've been wrong on this for a long time.

<comment><USER4> The data doesn't really talk about the demographics of the users from what I've seen. Maybe I'm wrong.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but this narrative about it being for older people and hemmorhaging younger people has been going on for so long that if it were true, there is no way the growth could have been what it's been, because they would have run out of people in that demographic. The more plausible explanation is that young people are still joining, even if perhaps begrudgingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just saw TikTok cracked 2Billion downloads and had the thought that it's confirmation that the best way to "beat" any of the major tech companies is to build a great product that people enjoy. I'm sure Zuck is feeling the heat, and personally I've noticed I'm receiving mostly tiktok links now from friends.

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/29/tiktok-tops-2-billion- down...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/29/tiktok-tops-2-billion-downloads/)

<comment><USER7> As someone who has not used Tiktok what does Tiktok do differently from existing products like Instagram? Wouldn't videos in Instagram stories/posts already cover Tiktok's usecase?

Also, I guess give Zuck time. He weathered the Snapchat storm and left them far behind.

<comment><USER8> TikTok is winning at making random people famous. It's not really about friends and celebrities as much as Instagram. It's also picking up from Vine on surfacing short videos that are super addicting to watch. Twitter really killed a golden goose with Vine.

<comment><USER6> btw the creator of Vine launched a new TikTok competitor called Byte recently.. it's basically the same thing but clips are limited to 8 seconds and less press...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Their effective tax rate is only half what it was the previous year. Any ideas what changed?

<comment><USER10> The $3B FTC fine was deducted from Q1 2019's income, substantially increasing the effective tax rate for that quarter. The fine was not a tax-deductible expense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It has been interesting to see the different approaches to future planning in the wake of Covid-19 by the two big ad players.

While Google is looking to scale back on things like hiring, FB looks to be going all in on this opportunity and doesn't seem to be slowing down with future plans specially wrt hiring(though they have pushed back joining dates to the later half of the year). They even considered it wise to do an all cash deal for $6 billion for a minor stake in a telecom provider in India.

<comment><USER11> FB to the win. Younger company. PIP culture. Hot products. They will collect nice talent during current recession. Bad for Google.

<comment><USER7> Don't all companies have PIPs? Does Facebook have disproportionately high percentage of PIPs compared to their peers in FAANG, even Amazon?

<comment><USER8> The original post was about Google and generally I'd say FB is indeed faster to hire and also faster to pip/fire than Google. Compared to Amazon and Netflix, probably not.

<comment> nappy-doo I was a manager at FB for a couple of years. Basically, my first official act as a manager was firing someone. From there, it was pretty much, "find one person on your team per year to fire."

It was an extremely high performing team, and even the less talented engineers were still very good.

I quit rather than live in the culture.

<comment><USER7> Was this similar to MS's infamous stack ranking system where some teammates will be always rated bad even if everyone is doing well?

<comment><USER12> Yes, FB has a similar system.

<comment><USER8> That's bullshit. FB does not stack rank.

<comment><USER13> There is stack ranking at the org level. It's all a bit hush hush but it's there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Stock appears to be soaring after hours.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wonder if Amazon will beat numbers too.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not great results</comment>


Lessons That Startup Founders Can Learn from Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://bechimp.com/steve-jobs-lessons/

<comment><USER2> A good article with some challenging points, though perhaps a little too positive about Jobs.

For example, his "reality distortion field" wasn't always a good thing - especially since he had enough ideas that were simply stupid (alongside all his brilliant ones). Eventually his employees developed a system of surreptitiously warning others in meetings if they felt they were in danger of being persuaded by another crackpot suggestion from Jobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx! Mh ... yeah, maybe. But he's my biggest role model. So I need to be positive about it :)

Yes, I know what you mean. There was a downside to that!</comment></comment>


Jeffrey Epstein set Elon Musk's brother up with girlfriend to connect with Musk - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-ex-girlfriend-dated-kimbal-musk-brother-of-tesla-founder-elon-musk-2020-1 <comment><AUTHOR> Most egregious detail in the linked article: Epstein and his entourage were given a private tour of SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne in 2012, well after his conviction for sex trafficking of minors.

</comment><comment><USER2> Jesus, is there anyone famous who wasn't connected to this guy? This is the worst game of 7 degrees of Bacon ever

<comment><USER3> Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous will start ending episodes in prison cells.</comment></comment>


Delphi's self-driving car - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/03/covered-wagon-upgraded-delphi-will-go-cross-country-in-a-self-driving-car/ <comment><USER2> When there is a talk about Apple going into self-driving car, there are hundreds of comments. When Musk mentions that Tesla will have self-driving car almost everyone here has an orgasm, but when a company that's well established in automotive industry drives their car from SF to NYC, we can't get even 30 comments in 12 hours?

<comment><USER3> They didn't do the drive yet, this is just a piece of fluff to fill the time between their initial announcement and the drive (which will start next week).

<comment><USER2> Actually they are already on the road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Poor car companies. Between the possibility of this technology available as retrofits for old cars, the common use case for this as a taxi without the need to own it(and the efficiencies that come with it) ,the possibility of car sharing using this tech(like uber-pool) , and the long life of many current cars - the future of car companies seems hard(maybe after some brief period of big demand).

<comment><USER5> You're assuming there will be mass movement towards self-driving car pools. I don't think that's the case. I think personal car ownership will persist for quite some time, even with self-driving cars. Having a car in your driveway whenever you want is pretty convenient for just about everyone living in a suburb. Even assuming good cost-reductions from pooling, I'm not sure you can completely make the value proposition to offset convenience.

<comment><USER6> US cars are on average idle 23 hours a day. Sharing a car between two means roughly halving the fixed costs of ownership, and the more sharing the more reduction in fixed costs. Additionally running a fleet is cheaper because of economies of scale such as maintenance, insurance, charging/fueling. AAA has an infographic showing the biggest costs being depreciation and insurance: [http://publicaffairsresources.aaa.biz/wp- content/uploads/201...](http://publicaffairsresources.aaa.biz/wp- content/uploads/2014/05/Your-Driving-Costs-infographic.png)

A pool also allows other things, such as pricing based on demand - ie being cheaper outside commute hours, spontaneous pooling (eg for a $5 discount can the car go 2 minutes out of its way to pick someone else up?) and being able to bring the right vehicle for each situation (eg a small efficient two seater for a commute, something larger for a family trip to Ikea etc).

Sure some people will continue to outright own their cars, but for most the pooled economics will be compelling, and companies will be able to instantly adjust pricing and convenience. Or to put this another way, how many thousands of dollars a year cheaper do you think it will take for the majority of car ownership to change to on demand usage?

<comment><USER7> It may also refactor distribution. People may not go to the grocery store, the store will come to them, or not. Just like in the old days, you'd get a morning delivery, and weekly/monthly too for different kind of products. Stores, if they stay 'material based' will look like IKEA, where you walk inside scenes and pick what you want, while something is loading an SDCar (npi) from a factory not too far away.

Damn I feel like a guy in the 60s drawing this [http://imgur.com/vmOYZAl](http://imgur.com/vmOYZAl)

<comment><USER6> I can't see many ways in which much of anything stays the same. For distribution my guess is that delivery companies will spring up (quite probably the same as the car pool companies during off hours) and deliver for anybody. By that I mean that my favourite Chinese restaurant currently has its own delivery vehicles and personnel, but I am expecting generic delivery companies for any/all business.

They just need lockboxes in the vehicle which the end user unlocks with their phone/pin/whatever. You could even do things like share your location with the service so that deliveries arrive as you get home, whenever that is.

The "city of the future" drawing is interesting. I'm expecting that commercial space will cluster together, optimised around foot traffic, and without vast swathes of asphalt between them, not too different than malls. Residential space is a bit harder to guess - decreasing density will be more manageable, but come at the expense of travel times and delivery fees.

What I like most about the driverless future is just how locally mobile it will let everyone be. No more licenses, no more having to have good vision, no more having to worry about age, intoxication, and even time of day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They've reached El Paso, TX, having started in San Francisco:

[https://twitter.com/AmyMessano](https://twitter.com/AmyMessano)

(Amy Messano is their PR person)

Apparently they racked up a speeding ticket in Arizona. :-)

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of drivers grunting when their GPS warns of speed limits (I actually checked, my father's one reacted under 1 second from the moment our car passed the sign on a highway).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They share the parking lot of my company, and the cars look pretty cool.

What I don't understand: cars are not encrusted with sensors like Google's self driving cars.

Would love an explaination of their tech to hide sensors.

<comment><USER10> Didn't Google just bolt a ton of sensors on top of an existing car and called it a day? Also, it seems that only they are using LIDARs - apparently Tesla is doing self-driving cars without them (look at the Model S - do you see _any_ sensor?), and so are some major car manufacturers.

<comment><USER11> > Tesla is doing self-driving cars

Tesla is absolutely not doing self-driving cars at the moment, they're doing limited autopilot (which IIRC already exists to an extant on other high-end sedans e.g. auto-steering using lane detection on highways)

<comment><USER10> [http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/self...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that- think/transportation/self-driving/tesla-model-s-to-combine-safety-sensors-to- go-autonomous)

Current Teslas apparently have enough hardware to drive themselves around, but this year they plan to enable only a limited set of features because of safety reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was hoping with this title that it was about a self-driving car written in Delphi / Pascal. Turns out I was disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER13> Completely agree about the prejudice against the well established. I am not affiliated with the Delphi project, but work in this space. Not having knowledge of the effectiveness of the Delphi autonomous system, can't speak to that. But, with regards to their mechanical design, this team has demonstrated autonomous capability with a familiar and covert form factor: obscured GPS antennas, LIDAR and cameras. And computing. Not visible in either the rear seat or trunk [1, 2].

Also important to mention that this product is a partnership between Delphi and Ottomatika [3]. Ottomatika is the company that won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge from CMU and provides the SLAM and software expertise.

Admittedly, the Google's of the world help with the lobbying and regulatory efforts which eventually expedite the technology transfer to the market for the Delphi's and smaller startups in this space [4].

[1] [https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/578624426079494145...](https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/578624426079494145/)

[2] [https://twitter.com/DelphiAuto/status/580388500291342338](https://twitter.com/DelphiAuto/status/580388500291342338)

[3] [http://ottomatika.com/blog.html](http://ottomatika.com/blog.html)

[4] [http://www.getcruise.com](http://www.getcruise.com)

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks like, similarly to the Google car, this is also heavily dependent on detailed maps of roads. The advanced radar-based sensors are pretty slick, but I'm curious about their limitations in terms of the size of the objects they can detect, and how far away.

My car uses some similar technology for automatic cruise control and crash avoidance, but either the hardware or software is primitive, since it occasionally tries to protect me from rear-ending a car in the other lane.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm interested in finding out what kind of inter-car communication these companies are considering; direct reports from cars on the scene as well as official beacons that cars can subscribe to along highways and in cities.</comment>