If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We're In Trouble - <AUTHOR> http://thestockmarketwatch.com/news/news.aspx?articleid=611106 <comment><USER3> I think if you just discount all modern innovations then it's easy to say nothing has changed of note. My TV looks better than ever. Should I just discount that as progress because it's still a picture displayed in my living room? If you suggest the iPhone 5 which allows me to get anywhere without planning with turn by turn directions, communicate with family on the road, make dinner reservations, and answer a work related question via email is not advancing anything just because the science behind it was settled in the 1970s? The amount of wealth and coordination in society to make that happen at such a low price is difficult to get your head around. It wasn't innovation policy that lead to these things though it was the result of the market providing services to people who want thme and individuals working very hard to make it happen.

Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior periods. It should surprise no one that these have negative effects on growth. Combine that with taking on a lot of debt that cannot be repaid and you have a recipe for low growth. I'm afraid that any innovation policy that isn't just will just end up as gifts to those who are well connected.

Part of the problem is that some of the things we have now are totally amazing and we just don't care to notice.

<comment><USER4> The reasons your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations are the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy. I know that most people under 30 directly credit Steve Jobs for everything that they do on their phones. But it took a massive national investment to set up the basics of the internet, which provided the iphone with enough relevant functionality to make it to a 5th version.

It sounds like you're equating the leap from "radio to tv" with the leap from "tv to 1080p". There's almost no doubt that the pace of innovation is slowing. Businesses will be more than happy to make billions of dollars by taking us to iphone9 and 2160p, because that's much easier than introducing an entirely new way to interact with the world.

I'm not sure if the free markets are the best solution to this particular problem. Thiel and Kasparov kind of have a point. The internet emerged from government funded DARPA research. Our communication infrastructure was built by a government granted monopoly. The moon landing, one of our species greatest achievements, was the result of a national innovation policy pissing contest with the soviets. Maybe everything would _really_ be amazing today if we'd focused more on innovation over the last several decades.

<comment><USER5> "The reason your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations is the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy."

And on you go in that vein, but that's massively reductionistic. For one thing, if that is so true, then why did the iPhone 5 not exist 30 years ago, which is still many years after those advances?

The Internet and TCP, as important as they may be, are still vanishingly small components in the huge collection of things we call the iPhone 5, with all of its huge stack of software, the huge stack of hardware and work to miniaturize it, the hardware necessary to feed it wireless signals, the huge software stack _that_ requires, and on and on it goes. The reason the iPhone 5 didn't exist 30 years ago is quite simply that the society of 1982 simply couldn't afford it, and it took decades to put together everything that was necessary so it was affordable. Dozens of iterations on dozens of technologies, consistently improved over decades by a crew of tens of thousands of people. Nobody could even conceive of what it would take to centrally manage this massive set of resources.

If you could graph the amount of work put in to make things like the iPhone, if you could even define such a thing halfway sensibly, you'd have a hard time finding the sliver that represents the government work done on TCP/IP. It's an insult to the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done so much for you to pretend that that tiny little sliver was so much more important than everything they did.

The government has a huge role in providing the stable environment necessary to safely do that work and the fair playing ground to compete on, but the government's _direct involvement_ in the creation of the iPhone is negligible. And if we account for patent shenanigans, possibly negative. (One massive stupid patent lawsuit can pay for an awful lot of research, after all.)

<comment><USER6> Commercial use of GPS wasn't allowed until 1996, and there has been some refinement of use in the last decade. Without GPS, there are no turn by turn directions, and there is no GPS without the space program. There is no GPS without the government funding of military technology, and allowing commercial use.

There is no iPhone without Silicon Valley. There is no Silicon Valley without the massive amount of defense work that was done in the area in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. (See: Steve Blank's stories as but one evidence.) Much of the work on smaller electronics was originally military funded - no one else had the R&D funding to do so.

Without the government, it is likely the development of something like ARPANET would have been delayed a decade, perhaps more. I'm not saying the internet wouldn't exist, but it would have been delayed and certainly would have looked a lot more like AOL and Compuserve than the integrated system we have now.

I'd say that there is a lot of government involvement that we're talking about.

<comment><USER5> There's a lot of government involvement. There's a stonking amazing overwhelmingly lot of private involvement. There's no Silicon Valley without, you know, _Silicon Valley_. Not the place, the people, the companies, the innovation. Government has better PR, the people have the vast, vast bulk of the actual time and wealth poured in to these innovations.

<comment><USER7> Government and PR? I'm taking that with a grain of salt. First, lots of those programs were originally 'secret' so they would not publish information about them. The only PR-sy thing is perhaps some of the outward space-race stuff.

Government can do propaganda (sometimes), but they do not do good PR, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think they're both right: because there is more than one problem facing us.

The press like to focus on one issue at a time. Europe last week, US elections yesterday, fiscal cliff today and China tomorrow.

The reality is that there are many major problems.

Off the top of my head:

\--

* People these days have everything they need. There are very few must-have items to spur sales

* The inventions so far cover a lot of what we need to live long in absolute safety and comfort. This is what Kasparov is noticing.

* Western Economies are 66% or more based on consumer spending ; any belt tightening has major impact

* People are still in too much debt, they're spending less

* Companies still have borrowed too much in the past: expecting boom years to continue 2050+

* Banks insolvent without support

* All governments bar Norway,Oz,Cananda? are in deficit

* Pensions are barely worth the contributions you put in over your lifetime. There has been no 5-8% increase as forecast

* Some countries have demographic problems where a lot of people will leave the income earning age

* It looks difficult for Democracies to reduce government spending. 'Pain-now', both real or perceived, is always deferred

[Edit for formatting, spelling]

<comment><USER9> off-topic: you should edit your comment to get rid of the three spaces before your bullet point.

The three spaces indicates pre-formatted text, so it won't line wrap.

It creates scrollbars on your comment, so less people will be able to read your points.

<comment><USER8> I do it deliberately, as I have very poor vision and find it impossible to read block text these days.

Please excuse my preference for commenting this way.

<comment><USER10> It seems that you have some good points, but please fix the formatting. I can't read it at all on my mobile. You can copy and paste from another editor if you need a more comfortable way to view it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the article: "There are certainly those who believe that the wellsprings of science are running dry..."

What a load of horse shit! We're just getting started here, the "Internet Revolution" just discovered non-computer devices! And biology is just getting tapped...

And those thinking along the lines "most people already have everything they need": well, duh, it's always that way. It's the unreasonable, the uncomfortable, and the restless who create and self actualize. The majority of human nature looks around themselves, takes care of their "necessities" and lives and dies with what is given to them. We, as those hard ass freaks that can't be satisfied, will always push against our limitations, our "gifts", to self actualize, to grow beyond our capabilities, and create something unheard of, unexpected, wonderful and disruptive.

Now, sure Mr. Thiel is a wealthy entrepreneur, but his wealth and fame derives from creating PayPal - a translation of existing credit card transactions to an online environment. I have no doubet it took great effort, but PayPal is hardly innovative, and hence his dark view of real innovation. Plus he's now a VC, so he sees all kinds of half baked startups failing...

As far as Mr Kasparov, I don't consider him an authority on anything. May as well be a super model, considering Kasparov's involvement in invention, new technology and start ups. He's merely famous for chess and writing essays. Not exactly developing science or new ideas at all...

<comment><USER12> I can't agree more. As the article points out, we're seeing huge advances in plenty of scientific fields. We're talking about storing terabytes on a cube on DNA no larger than a drop of water, we're synthesizing drugs that travel to tumors, activating only on arrival, we're gearing up to put people on mars... Really? No progress? No innovation?

Why are we even listening to a chess champion espousing crap about scientific progress? And Pieter Thiel might have entrepreneurship credentials, but he's no scientist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We live in, presumably, a consumer-spending driven economy. The problem I see is that in the efforts of businesses to become more efficient and to outsource, they're creating a tragedy of the commons effect - if no one is willing to stay in the US and pay US workers highly, US consumers won't have anything to spend.

I think this is fairly evident due to the continuing list of articles about jobs that make the front page here - the "skills gap" that's not a skills gap, but a problem with hiring practices; the one a few weeks ago about the manufacturer that wants to pay skilled math and science students $10 an hour and wonders why they go work in service jobs; the service jobs that are now carefully managed to the minute by software so no one is idle on the job and are 90% part-time to extract the best work from their employees at the lowest cost.

Startups aren't a fix for this, they make the problems worse - how many Saas startups have a business proposition of making something more efficient (Salesforce, Workday as the biggest and most obvious) which results in a need for less people to do that work? How many people does a place like Facebook employ compared to Google, or Google to Microsoft, or MS to GE or Chevron?

<comment><USER14> This might make economists cringe, but here's how I see it:

In the past, increasing efficiency was beneficial, because the people no longer needed for one thing could go and do something else, increasing the total amount of things being made and services provided. Most obviously, as agriculture was mechanised, people went to work in the factories (of course, early factories were nasty places to work, but that's another story).

Today, we're still increasing efficiency, but - as I see it - we're running out of things we need people to do, so freeing people up increases un- or underemployment. At best, people are employed to do ever more 'luxury' things that can easily be dropped when money runs tight.

I think we've reached a point where the sum of human happiness is increased not by churning out ever more stuff, and finding ever more services to provide, but by increasing our leisure time. When I was young, I imagined that robots would one day do most of the work, leaving humans to relax and pursue their hobbies. But economics locks us out of that, because having a lot of leisure time (i.e. unemployment) is something to be avoided. I wish I knew how to fix it.

Looked at another way: we can produce the stuff we need without needing all the people to work. But the people who do work resent non-workers enjoying the fruits of their labour, so we almost have to keep people busy for the sake of fairness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am always amazed by these sorts of articles, in part because it is always nominally 'successful' people who have these sorts of doubts and in part because Toffler's "Future Shock" can express itself in ways that look like the medical condition.

The changes they aren't ready for are the biological ones. You see the whole '10 years of trials from monkeys to humans' thing which limits the application of biological agents is going to change once we understand how the machine, we call a human, really works. We are getting closer. Once we're there you won't have to 'test to see the effect' you will 'design for this particular effect.' That will make things very different.

We're starting to see the leading edge of the carbon age. I pointed out once that if you name the human "ages" by the primary material of their tools, we had stone, bronze, iron, steel, and now silicon. Next up, carbon.

We're about to expand into space. Unlike Apollo which was like a program written to do one thing, SpaceX and others are building space flight capabilities that will mix and match to create space access as a function of money, not expertise.

I've always enjoyed stories where authors imagined the transition from 'now' to 'star trek' like universes. We are in a transition, of that there is no doubt. the next level will be interesting, of that I have no doubt.

</comment><comment><USER16> Several economists write about the Great Stagnation a lot at www.marginalrevolution.com.

A couple things to think about:

\- There have been a lot of very smart people who have thought growth can't solve the world's problems. They've been wrong. For example.... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus>

\- This seems to have hit the great middle... The one downside of people getting hyper-productive with technology is the masses who can't keep up do get left behind. This is more a problem for the customers of YC than HN's readers.

<comment><USER17> I am surprised that this article is not referencing Tyler Cowen's book: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525952713/ref=as_li_tf_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525952713/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=marginalrevol-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=0525952713)

or at least his blog. It is a pretty interesting analysis that deserves serious consideration. He does point out that communications and the internet are a bright spot of hope in our otherwise slowly growing economy.

<comment><USER16> Yes - same authors. Thank you for the more precise link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have one word for Thiel and Kasparov: Biology.

There are many known-unknowns in the sphere of biology, and by extension, medicine right now. We may be approaching the top of the s-curve for computational and industrial technology, but we are at the bottom left of the biology curve, and now we have the tools to start exploring that space systematically.

<comment><USER19> The entire time I'm reading the article and the comments, I'm just mentally jaw-dropped by these comments. We are no where near the top of the 's-curve' for computational or industrial technology.

The entire argument is a straw man by Kasparov. Name a single science which has not been dramatically changed in the last 20 years by the application of computation. Its just boggling to me how Kasparov's argument holds any sway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "In a forthcoming book, they argue that the collapse of advanced-country growth is not merely a result of the financial crisis; at its root, they argue, these countries' weakness reflects secular stagnation in technology and innovation."

I'd argue it's a result of artificially low interest rates which effectively increased societal time preference. In short, we spent the last 40 years or so eating our future. We've run out of future to borrow from.

I'm glad to see Thiel is kind of in agreement. :)

</comment><comment><USER21> I feel like most of the comments are reading the title and not the article.

The author is actually suggesting that Thiel and Kasparov are probably wrong, and the current economic situation could be explained by simpler means (results of a financial meltdown as opposed to running out of things to invent).

I'm inclined to put more faith in the economist pushing the simple and previously observed cause than the big names pushing a doomsday scenario.

</comment><comment><USER22> The main problem of the 21st century is and will continue to be energy.

We have the science to do amazing things, but we can't afford the power requirements. We wont be able to advance as a civilization without something radically different in the way of generating power.

<comment> at-fates-hands Amen brother.

This is essentially what it all comes back to right? The thing which drives me insane is so many presidents and administrations have been unable to grasp this. I still think back to Jimmy Carter's speech in 1978 warning about the need for affordable, sustainable energy.

What have we done in the past 30+ years to address this imminent crossroads? Next to nothing.

<comment><USER22> Not because we don't want to. There are about ten different ways we could do it, and none of them look incredibly promising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I continue to be surprised at how little attention economists are paying to the role of tight oil supplies in dragging the economy. The 2008 crash was triggered by an oil price that spiked to nearly $150 a barrel in response to strong growth in demand against a flat supply. Since then, every time the economy tries to pick up, the oil price drifts back up to $100/barrel and GDP stagnates.

</comment><comment><USER24> Whenever my father uses Skype, he still can't grasp the fact that we can make long distance video(!) calls for free. He keeps reminding me that when he had to walk 3 km by foot to a Public Call Office and book a call for a max. 3 minutes to talk to my grand mother. That was only 35 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER25> Alarmist, but I cannot object to manifestos that aim to improve the rate of innovation!

Perhaps the real problem: 1. The human mind or a team w/ communications between members can only handle so much information. 2. The toolboxes available to innovators working different stripes of the tech spectrum become riddled with complexity over time.

The solution: 1. As tools are aggregated and abstracted, this reduces information needing to be understood, allowing indies/teams to get a handle and get creative with their work. 2. As thinking/psychology approaches improve and as communication systems improve, the ability for the same people to process the relevant information also improves.

The internet has done a very good job with increasing information processing (by humans!), and other fields are being influenced by this success.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think the article is correct to say that technological innovation has slowed down and will likely continue to slow down over the next period of time. However, I disagree with the diagnosis that this slowdown is due to bad public policy.

Rather, the Internet is such a vast step forward that we are still struggling to build infrastructure. We will be tied up building this infrastructure until we expand the portion of our workforce capable of building technology for the Internet.

Since this is an infrastructure problem, let's compare building pieces of the Internet to building roadways for another great technology - the car. The differences between building roadway and Internet infrastructure are the following:

1) The building blocks of the Internet are not steel, but software and hardware.

If you look at things this way, the iPhone is not its own innovation, but Internet infrastructure. It's a mobile connection to the Internet that serves up other connections through apps. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Yelp - they're all infrastructure. And we've only touched the tip of the iceberg.

2) Unlike building roads, the Internet requires highly skilled workers and doesn't have a 'completion date'.

We still have a lot of opportunities to build out businesses on the Internet, and a large percentage of people who are capable of building these businesses out are doing just that. They're not innovating, but executing.

Until our workforce becomes more educated, the rate of overall change will be stagnant.

</comment><comment><USER27> The global megatrend is still the developing world developing. There are so many people who don't have clean water, don't get good food, don't have electricity or automobiles so that things can "get better" for the median person on Earth for a long time.

If we apply human ingenuity to it, it's challenging but believable to can support this in terms of food and energy for the next 50 years at least, and beyond that time frame it's likely that the world population stabilizes.

You might find many signs of decline such as the crude humor on TV sitcoms, the disappearance of defined benefit pensions, or Facebook and Zynga as "tittytainment" for the masses. You could say we'll never have another Einstein or Feynman, that we'll never have a satisfying paradigm for deterministic chaos with more than three degrees of freedom, etc. You might also point out very real problems we'll face dealing with global warming, terrorism, cybercrime, unemployment.

However there are so many exciting things I see going on today. The space program is more exciting today than it was in the 1960s. When I go to the west coast I see cool new restaurants that start in Hollywood, set up another location in L.A., then San Diego and the next thing you know it's a national chain with 50 locations. I think of all the cool little handmade things you can buy on Etsy.

I think there's still going to be a rapprochement between the FIRE (Financial, Insurance and Real Estate) industry and the real of the economy, but I think lots of people are doing big and little things that make life better and more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER28> The thesis that innovation has stopped because the major foundations of today's technology were laid in the 70's is utter nonsense. Most breakthrough innovations take 15 to 20 years to go from the initial discovery to widespread adoption. Examples penicillin, ARPANET, GPS, television, unix, and on an on. So it is no surprise that the Internet and GPS took off in the 1990's. If you want to know what is going to drive the 2020's and the 2030's look at what's in the labs now. Of course 99% of it wont amount to much, but the core innovations are there somewhere.

The author has a point about the problems inherent in unregulated financial manipulation and monopolies in general. But unless there are huge restrictions on small business development and a suppression of the universities, innovation will continue.

</comment><comment><USER29> This article misses some huge innovations that have taken place in manufacturing and other heavy industrial areas.

Take just one example in 3D printing. When this technology matures, the result will be no less profound than the invention of spare parts (hard to believe, but the idea of standardized parts that could be replaced when worn out is relatively new - few hundred years). Imagine a house that builds (or prints) itself?

Today that technology is already getting a lot of adoption in aerospace, where the waste produced by machining is so expensive, it makes the costs of new technologies look like a bargain.

Another good example is our ability to process data. The old saying goes: "Knowledge is power". Well, today we can process petabytes of data and extract knowledge out of it as routinely as flying from SF to NY...

</comment><comment><USER30> Not that I'm an acolyte of Kurzweil, but he does make a pretty convincing case that humans have a tendency to locally linearize things that really aren't linear, and then extrapolate linearly out into the future. This seems as if this may be one more example of that.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if a slow-down or plateau-ing of technological advancement would make us focus more on cultural/philosophical advancements that improve: average happiness per-person per-"day lived".

That would be an interesting paradigm shift...

...assuming there are such advancements to be made.

</comment><comment><USER32> I consider our now constant and affordable access to enormous amounts of information (fast and mobile internet) as a massive innovation. It's built on top of lots of other incremental innovations and inventions, but that doesn't lessen it's impact on our fundamental behaviour.

It all boils down to your classification between invention, innovation, and improvement. According to my own subjective classification, there's been a lot of innovation since the 70s. More than I can keep up with anyways.

I think AR is going to be pretty significant too, and a huge enabler of new tech as it matures.

This is just the way to sell a book these days though right? Make extreme claims you don't actually agree with in order to stir up interest.

</comment><comment><USER33> What has Peter Thiel built that is so earth-changing? (And don't say Paypal.) He sure likes to talk a lot, but I'm waiting for him to come up with the next game-changing, once-a-millennium innovation. It isn't hedge funds or other financial trickery.

<comment><USER34> Isn't that his point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's like saying that there will be no more exciting music and it all pretty much ended with Mozart and Beethoven. And one thing that is very consistent for human kind (with few very bright exceptions, of course), is the poor ability to predict future innovations and technologies. If you look at 100 year old drawings of year 2000, you will see flying steam engines, coal powered robotic maids and biplanes used for public transportation. So.. let's just wait and see what happens. A cure for cancer may be just as exciting breakthrough as electricity was in its time, and it may as well be just around the corner :)

</comment><comment><USER36> The phrase 'diminishing marginal returns' is missing from this article. The essence of diminishing marginal returns is something like, "low-hanging fruit gets picked first"; problems that have a good ratio of effort in to reward out are preferentially attacked and so, over time, the average problem is harder to solve or has lower yields.

One could argue that 'stagnation' is occurring not because absolute innovation (however you make up a way to measure it) is down but because the average real-economy impact of a unit innovation (in made up measure) is getting smaller.

</comment><comment><USER37> You can innovate all you want, but if people don't want or need it they aren't going to buy it.

Moving from a farming/subsistence economy where most people had something to do with food production to survive, to our present post-farming/industrial whatever-this-age-is was a huge leap, and there was a lot of peripheral infrastructure to build up.

Now we're there, and yes there's more room for innovation, but there's no existential leap forward in front of us.

We have enough. We're not fundamentally changing the way of the world (not in developed countries). That doesn't generate a lot of peripheral work.

</comment><comment><USER38> The underlying science of computers and science might have been discovered in the 1970's, but back then, use the internet and computers were in no way in mainstream society.

How do they know that innovations 30 years from now won't be based on the science we discover today, in "nanotechnology, neuroscience, and energy, among other cutting-edge fields"?

</comment><comment><USER39> Rather than saying what is descriptively and historically accurate, I believe Thiel and Kasparov are merely issuing a challenge, if stated in a somewhat hyperbolic way, to today's innovators/entrepreneurs. If read in this light, they are cheerleaders not historians.

</comment><comment><USER40> They're falling to an intrinsic bias - the technological advances we see are the ones that have already been made. Future advances haven't been made yet; effectively comparing sum(past_technological_advances) with sum(future_technological_advances)

</comment><comment><USER41> You can argue that the pace of innovative growth is slowing because of whatever reason, but I would like to post a few things worth thinking about, given that I was thinking about this the other day.

Firstly lets look at things such as manned flight, radio transmissions and other innovations in the late 19th century that are now critical today. These eureka moments in science and engineering were traditionally brought about by a few people and their relative complexity is low. Look at the innovations we're seeing in physics today and you're talking about teams of people across multiple generations attempting to solve problems our ancestors couldn't even imagine. Electricity producing fusion reactors like ITER (and later DEMO)? Not a chance. They were too busy trying to get manned flight to work. Breaking the speed of sound in air? No way. Putting men on the moon? Not a chance.

Here's the thing, we (as a planet) _could_ put men on the moon. Granted we're not as ready as the USA in 1969, but given the need it could be achieved. Putting a man on mars? Well that's a lot further away much further than the moon is with a whole new raft of unsolved problems.

I can immediately think of two areas where growth is as great and immediate in the field now as it was in physics in the early 20th century - <USER2> and biotechnology. If you look at how much of Physics we understand, and our understanding of what we can and can't manipulate versus biology you can see that there's plenty of space for innovation.

I would also make a case for disruptive versus iterative innovation. The automobile has come a long way in 100 years but is essentially the same thing, a horseless carriage that takes the driver and passengers from point A to point B. We have however had massive amounts of iterative innovation in speed, fuel management, safety and so on. The same with air travel with demands and needs changing and planes changing to accomodate. Sure, it may look like a plane but the insides of an A380 are very different to a DC-3.

If the 20th century was the century of physics, I'd say the 21st is the century of nanochemistry and biomechanics. I suspect (although have no real proof) that we don't see the changes on the same scale because our quality of life, education and so on has been brought up by such a level already that improvements have less of a social impact in the west. There's no need for a cure for smallpox anymore. Disabilities from Polio have been down in the west for decades. Diseases like SARS and H5N1 that could've wiped us out in the early 20th century like the Spanish Flu have so far been contained.

</comment><comment><USER42> Kasparov kills his argument by pooh-poohing the iPhone. I'm sorry, but holding the internet in your hand is simply amazing. Maybe it was inevitable, but it is at least the culmination of many very impressive innovations.

</comment><comment><USER43> <http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/1403>

Page to the actual debate that occured. There's a link on the right to the recording of it.

You know, just in case biases hid something

</comment><comment><USER44> I think real innovation is most likely to come from China. For example, they plan to build a 220 story tall sky scraper in 90 days: ([http://gizmodo.com/5962070/china-will-build-the-tallest- buil...](http://gizmodo.com/5962070/china-will-build-the-tallest-building-in- the-world-in-just-90-days)). They've also been building a massive high speed rail network over vast distances throughout China.

I think with these feats they want to establish themselves as a super power that can take on the U.S, as well as to improve their infrastructure. I think it's a good thing, as peaceful competition between nations has always lead to benefits for the world in general.

</comment><comment><USER45> What if they are wrong as in completely wrong? Then I dare say we are also in trouble. The only road not littered with trouble is if the current state and pace can be kept.

</comment><comment><USER46> Or we burned through all the easy to get materials....</comment>


How No-Flush Toilets Can Help Make a Healthier World - <AUTHOR> http://e360.yale.edu/feature/how_no-flush_toilets_can_help_make_a_healthier_world/2581/

<comment><USER2> This is my thought on the modern flush toilette:

[http://makeameme.org/media/created/skeptical-third-world- kid...](http://makeameme.org/media/created/skeptical-third-world-kid-so-you- have.jpg)

I lived in what was essentially a rural cabin for 5 years. We had no indoor plumbing and stored water for cooking and bathing in barrels. We used a composting toilette (see "The Humanuer Handbook"). After moving back to a "real" modern house in the city, I am daily reminded of the tragic waste of potable water that modern plumbing endorses.

<comment><USER3> There is not a global shortage of potable water, in most areas flushing a toilet uses well under 1 cent of water and if it was not flushed it would simply end up in the ocean anyway. There are regional shortages, but in the vast majority of cases that's a corruption and infrastructure problem.

PS: Now sewage treatment is often far more expensive than the water it's self, but that's really a separate issue.

<comment><USER4> > There are regional shortages, but in the vast majority of cases that's a > corruption and infrastructure problem.

This can also be said for most things which the globe has major problems with: Food, Education, Electricity etc...

Don't forget, that 1C of potable water also took quite a bit of electricity and infrastructure to make clean (assuming we are discussing most modern western water systems based on water treatment and not pure well water).

It is worthwhile, to examine how necessary aspects of our consumption are, in order to be more efficient and use fewer resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of my professors, the late David Crane, FAIA, had a rule of thumb for determining the suitability of sanitary systems for poor communities on a global scale - suitability is inversely proportional to pipes.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://img.nux.ro/3rF-refilling_bowls_of_water.png> !

</comment><comment><USER7> The conventional flush toilet requires a massive water treatment system with pumps every few miles to push the wastewater through the pipe. But the costs are hidden from the payer, which makes everyone happy.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like the way the world (seems) to be turning - towards putting effort into solving the worlds problems based on evidence and rational thought as opposed to bureaucratic incentives or popular votes.

One can hope

</comment><comment><USER9> The only problem I have with these things is it teaches me that I don't need to flush. I've stepped away from many flush toilets only to be reminded moments later that I need to depress the handle.

Outfitting flush toilets with automatic flush devices is a decent stopgap ... unless the one on the sit toilet is misaligned and causes flushing every time I lean a little - then my butt cheeks get wet :-(

</comment><comment><USER10> I would like to point out the subtle but present contradiction between the two statements endorsed by the article, namely _Everyone needs a toilet!_ and _Decentralized waste treatment is superior!_

In addition, this article didn't mention the long-recognized composting principle that separating urine and feces largely removes any bad smell.

</comment><comment><USER11> Who would have thought? The human mind seems to unbounded in both directions!</comment>


Ask HN: Are one-page résumés passé?  How long is your résumé? - <AUTHOR> This came up last night at Hackers and Founders Meetup that iamelgringo hosts.
How long should your résumé be?  I've always believed that one page was the de facto length limit though last night there was largely a consensus that multi-page résumés were perfectly acceptable and even better than single-page résumés.  The rational was largely that 1) short résumés are, well, short and you have to cut information that could otherwise land you an interview and 2) everything is thrown into a database and searched so length doesn't matter.
Sample size was small last night (approximately 6 of us discussing it) so I wanted to hear the rest of the HN community's thoughts on résumé length.
I'm interested in hearing from job seekers and employers alike.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> The best application I saw in a recent round of hiring was in four parts:

\- Short cover letter in e-mail.

\- Longer cover letter signed and scanned as PDF.

\- 1 page concise CV.

\- 4 page detailed employment history.

HR handed out the right bits to the right people and everyone was happy with the level of detail they got.

All the worst CVs I saw came from agencies - not for content, just for layout. They can start off with a perfectly sane PDF and reformat it in to some god forsaken docx with broken layout and graphics, while adding spelling mistakes and removing qualifications. It's downright infuriating - any time in future I have to apply via an agency I will try and send a copy of my CV through directly as well.

<comment><USER3> I do hiring these days (I haven't used a resume since the 90s), and this is excellent advice.

All of these points are great ways to show your attention to details.

I'm sure you used to be able to get away without cover letters, but today there will be many more applicants than jobs; and I honestly won't even look at a resume without a cover letter now.

Of course, it's much better to do something so that you don't need a resume any more; then you don't have to do the song and dance. Network well, write a blog or release some code; all are great ways to get known.

<comment><USER4> What do you look for in a cover letter? I'm not too lazy to make one I've just never understood the purpose. I think you might be able to provide some insight for me.

<comment><USER3> Well, before all else, I'm a software guy; not an HR person, so you will want to take this with a grain of salt.

That being said, it doesn't have to be some kind of formal thing; the best cover letters I've read just let me know that someone has actually read and comprehends our requirements and their cover letter should tell me a few things that sets them apart from the other torrent of resumes that I'll see.

In other words, it's obvious that you're applying for _this_ position, and not just every position you see. Just like an employee wants to think that an employer has hand selected them to work there, instead of just saying "you'll do"; an employer likes to think that the person actually cares about what they do and where they work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People in general spend about 30 seconds looking at your resume. One page or not, it has to be skimmable. Use bullet points and bold to bring out the important stuff. Use lots of white space.

Lots of detail doesn't impress me. Your place for that is in the cover letter where you write about the one or two things most relevant from your background that are specifically appropriate to the open position.

I think one page is a good goal to have, even if you don't make it; it forces you to trim and focus on the important stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have a 10meg PDF resume (4 pages with lots of pictures, hyperlinks, and partial nudity). It has gotten positive responses about 60% of the time, but they are generally very positive. Having a resume that doesn't please everybody, and stands out from the pack, is valuable. Even the 40% who didn't like it will remember it.

<comment><USER7> ...I don't even want to know.

<comment><USER8> Impossible is the Opposite of Possible

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been many times on both sides of the desk.

What I found as a resume presenter is that the readers, many times technical folk, (at least once you get through the gatekeepers) always want detail. Lots of detail. Except when they don't.

So I gave up on one page resumes. Instead, page one has a bullet list of benefits I bring to the job that nobody else does -- sales points. The rest of the pages list jobs, technologies, and roles. Being somebody who gets around a lot, this section runs on for several pages.

I haven't heard any complaints. Usually the wordy part of the resume generates enough keywords to hit on database searches, which is step 1. The bullet list scores the initial interview which is step 2. The initial interview is just a technical "smoke test" and an attitude/availability check, then we're on to the tech interview, which is step three. During the tech interview, it's usually technologies and industries, with me quoting from the wordy part of my resume as the reviewer pages along.

I haven't been in the market for many years (it's all word of mouth after a while), but this format, along with the right experiences, put me in the top few slots at most places I competed.

</comment><comment><USER10> One of the Booz & Co. partners I recently talked to said he has two piles of resumes: 1 page and 2+ pages. He reviews the 1 page resumes for good candidates and puts the longer resumes in the garbage without looking at them. A resume's purpose is to get you an interview- not describe your life's story.

</comment><comment><USER11> Been doing a few interviews lately. Here's my take:

The following things values are logarithmic or exponential (depending on the case), not linear:

1) Page count -- One page isn't a hard limit anymore. Your resume has to go through keyword systems and spends most of its HR/recruitment life as a .doc file. The computer doesn't care and you're not getting graded on making it an appropriate length.

2) The value of the words on each page -- Make your first page count. I try pretty hard to read the first page or so but start to lose interest as things progress. If the resume reads like a monotonous diary of your activity over the last two decades, nobody's going to be able to tell which words they should read and important stuff will be glossed over.

3) The age of the experience -- If you did something really excellent more than five years ago, definitely include it, but you should allocate more space to more recent experiences. If you have three bullets each from your last three jobs and eighteen bullets from the fourth most recent, you're going to look like you have no career inertia or that you're just looking to park. If you have ten years of experience you can skip the details of what your college jobs were -- if they're in field include enough information to show how your career arc builds, but recruiters won't care about individual accomplishments.

4) Accomplishments, not tasks -- Your most recent job or two should show a few tasks but an overwhelming bias toward things that you _actually did_. A list of tasks you were charged with just shows what you didn't like doing enough to continue doing it. The balance should shift as the experience ages -- maybe 20/80% tasks/accomplishments in the first job, 10/90% over the next few, but blending back to 50/50% or even lower as the experience ages. Again, the older or extra-field ones should be especially short.

Personally I try to walk the walk on these points, and I also maintain a couple different versions of my resume. The version that I put into the job sites has a "products used" section near each job to pander to lazy recruiters who put "solaris" into the search box when they need a UNIX system administrator. I generally do not prefer to use these resumes after making contact with the recruiters, because no human cares what versions of SQL server I touched at a job five years ago.

</comment><comment><USER12> Paper resumes are fading. Most employers now read them on a screen, either through an online job service, LinkedIn, or an email attachment.

As someone who is in the process of hiring two people, I think the on-screen equivalent of one page is too short. I can handle scrolling down for another page or two, but any more than that makes me suspect that it's a data dump, and will require extra effort to glean the important points. Often I receive resumes in batches (20 at a time, delivered by email), so opening a bunch of excessively long resumes would start to drag on my time.

</comment><comment><USER13> 2 pages is fine. Just don't try to puff it up with irrelevant crap to inflate the page count.

Awards:

\- Math genius prize at University

\- ...

\- 8th grade spelling bee champion <\- FAIL

</comment><comment><USER14> As both someone who has been hired, and someone who has hired, I have no problem with resumes that are 1+ pages, provided there is relevant content. Nobody else I know would expect everything to be on a single page.

This is especially true in IT, where I want you to explain the projects you worked on, your role, and the eventual outcome. That means a paragraph in written form, and two or three of those take space.

This all being said, I'm not going to read any novels. Let me scan your history easily, but then get details if need be.

</comment><comment><USER15> Mine is plaintext, and probably 1-2 pages when printed. Anything that doesn't make the cut for the first page or so goes in the cover letter, or is already somewhere on my blog or in Google, so I don't sweat it.

I actually used the layout of a UNIX 'man' page for a while, which got lots of chuckles, but no offers, so now it's just simple Markdown-like text.

</comment><comment><USER16> How long _should_ it be? The premise of the question is flawed -- nobody is going to shoot you if you don't submit a one-page resume. There's no law against it.

But if a resume is little more than a marketing tool, then brevity is your friend. One page is _better_ than four, even if your career can fill ten.

(One notable exception: if you're in academics, long CVs are considered better than short. Academia is not the real world.)

<comment><USER13> >(One notable exception: if you're in academics, long CVs are considered better than short. Academia is not the real world.)

Actually, that isn't strictly true. A short academic CV can stand out. As one interviewer said to me, "your CV had no BS on it."

A CV should only be long if your list of publications is (though of course, it will be longer than a resume, since it must include this list).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mine's two pages and seems to be generating interest at the places I've sent it to.

My sister does recruiting for ConocoPhillips (admittedly, a very different industry) and also ran a resume-writing workshop when she was in grad school. She was adamant about not going over 2 pages. The reason is that your resume will likely be printed out, handed to other people in the department, thumbed through, and taken to your interview. If it's on 1 or 2 pages, it'll fit on one sheet (single or double sided), but if it's on 3 or more, you need a stapler, and that's really inconvenient for people whose daily responsibilities don't include shuffling paper (i.e. anyone in scientific or engineering departments that'll actually be making the hiring decision).

When I looked over resumes at my last employer, I had the same opinion: 1 or 2 pages is fine because we've got an industrial-strength printer that can do double-sided printing, any more than that's a pain.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pages? What are those?

My CV is 214 lines long, and each line is up to 78 ASCII characters. (Before anyone asks, yes, my CV is nicely formatted with clear sections and bullet points within each section.)

<comment><USER19> A page is "58 lines followed by a form feed". For RFCs anyway.

<comment><USER4> snap!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This thread is yet another proof that the current recruitment process (in any and all companies) is flawed (and yes, mine have been rejected before).

The reason is it is 'still' a personal taste process. No matter what you do, how you sell, what you write, how you think, it's still up to the personal taste of some person whether to give a green light or not. That taste is subject to then need, experience, skill-level, mood, coffee, <anything u like to add> of the decision-making person.

It's not that I'm bitter, it's that, being a person who's passionate about what he does (as many others here), I 'know' it can be better.

Resumes are the first wrong step in the process. Why do we still rely on them? Because other alternatives aren't as easy/available.

Note: wrong step does not always mean wrong outcome.

</comment><comment><USER21> The goal of a resume / cover letter are to land an interview. It's not an autobiography.

I can say from personal experience that one does not completely read hundreds of resumes. When I was hiring I would get just as much info from a short resume as I would from a long resume. The key difference is that with a shorter more focused resume you have more control over _what_ I actually take away from your resume.

So for that reason I use a one page resume that's tightly focused on _what I want to do_ , not everything I've ever been capable of doing.

But I don't want my resume in some HR or recruiter database, either. A long resume make work better if you prefer the shotgun approach to finding work...

</comment><comment><USER22> I had lots of interest with a 2 page resume but found restricting myself to 1 page forced me to hit the high notes and focus on what message I want to send.

I found this necessary when an employer put me through a 5 hour interview for a web developer position. I thought I was applying for a research position but someone saw web experience in my ancient history and lined up the interviewers to steer things that way. Granted I was offered the research position later, still... the interview would have benefited by skipping the web stuff.

Also there is something to be said for making them want more.

</comment><comment><USER23> Brevity is the soul of wit.

I think a 1 page resume is essential. Even Gates or Jobs could have a kick-ass 1 pager.

Exceptions include a need to list technical details like published papers/books, patents, etc.

<comment><USER24> <http://homepage.mac.com/steve/Resume.html>

<comment><USER25> He included "References available upon request". That's a waste of space (either more content, or more whitespace), because it's assumed you'll produce references when requested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> one page, with major points extremely visible (larger, bold, etc). well- designed and easy on the eyes. and you should modify your resume to each specific job you apply for.

why? two reasons (this is information i've obtained from HR personnel that i personally know, it isn't simply heresay):

most resumes go through non-technical HR people. they aren't involved in the department doing the hiring -- they're just there to screen the resumes. if a resume _appears_ irrelevent, they will trash it. if they have to read it in full to effectively screen it, they will trash it. some HR reps will trash multi-page resumes just in principle. the point is, they will spend less than 30 seconds per resume and any obstacles to that time limit will get your resume screened out.

second, you don't want to tell your whole story in novel form on your resume. your resume is your hook and you want to reel in employers to get you on the phone or in person. that is where you get to talk to them in detail about what you do, what you've done, and get to impress them.

</comment><comment><USER27> A general rule that I've read is that two (maybe three page) resumes are OK but the most important information MUST be on the first page.

In essence, if I were to take a multi-page resume and the last pages were ripped off/somehow went missing, the first page would still be strong enough to make the applicant's case.

</comment><comment><USER28> In general, 1 page is still the norm, for several reasons, not the least of which when you print it out (for any reason) you don't have to staple or keep multiple pages together.

Secondly, there is very little reason that your resume (not the totality of your experience) can't fit on one page _if_ you tailor it specifically for the position you are applying for. In fact, the best candidates are the ones that are most prepared because they thought critically about the position, its requirements, "good to haves" and any related experience that pertains being able to contribute in that role and thus customized their resume specifically for that position.

So, net effect is you should tailor your resume specifically and customized for every single position you apply for, anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER29> If you're applying for a specific position, a one page resume highlighting your specific skills and past projects pertaining to the job is a good idea. The time to elaborate on a past project or experience that is not directly relevant is the interview.

Remember how your resume is going to be treated (at least at a larger company). It is first going to go through a screener (a recruiter or even a keyword search), then it will go to someone technical on a team.

Always remember that the main point is to get the interview, that's it.

Also, please please proof read your resumes. I actually had a QA engineer with a spelling error on his resume.

</comment><comment><USER30> I have hired more forty people--a mix of employees and contractors--as a manager in technology companies. One page and a cover letter/section (perhaps 100 lines total) is the most that will get read before a hiring manager decides to give you a call.

Or not.

Tailor your experience to the position you are applying for in a cover letter/section and in what you highlight in the resume. It's a sales pitch not an autobiography that should be designed to get a phone screen or an invite to an interview.

I would focus on getting it into the hiring manager's hands with an endorsement from someone they trust.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm surprised no one has put a link to [http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/02/25/a_glimpse_a...](http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/02/25/a_glimpse_and_a_hook.html) in yet.

I've been the technical reviewer on a lot of hires and found Rand's process fairly similar to mine. I think it's good that he views the document as having 2 purposes: the first being to get through all the recruiters/HR to get it into the tech reviewer's hands, the second being grabbing the reviewer's attention enough that you get an interview.

</comment><comment><USER32>
      dfranke@feanor:~$ wc resume.txt
        99  620 4016 resume.txt

</comment><comment><USER33> I can say that in my experience interviewing potential candidates, everyone I worked with generally hated lengthy resumes, but I was the only one who cared enough to dock people for them.

It's not _that_ important, but ultimately, a concise resume reflects on your communication skills. Being able to summarize the most relevant information is an important skill, even in the software industry.

</comment><comment><USER34> It depends on a lot of factors like duration and type of experience. I would say that people are moving toward a _don't cut out important details_ school of thought. One approach I have seen and enjoyed is compiling a common single page resume and then having a second/third page as deeper explanations of past positions.

</comment><comment><USER35> I have submitted a 2 page CV with a 1 page personalized cover letter in the past. I have signed reference letters as well, which are handy to bring to an interview. That being said, with all of the jobs that I've received offers for, the employer knew who I was and had a good idea of my background before ever receiving my CV.

</comment><comment><USER36> One interesting idea is to format your resume as a mind map[1]. You're likely to get either very positive or very negative responses, but I'd be curious to know if anyone's tried it.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map>

</comment><comment><USER37> The number of pages will depend on your experience. If you are just out of school one page is fine. I have almost 20 years (ouch!) so it is hard to make it fit in three pages.

</comment><comment><USER38> ZERO

resumes never win me any job offers, neither does schooling; however, past projects and works do

on topic, my 5? years old lost resume was 1 page long

</comment><comment><USER39> 3 pages

</comment><comment><USER40> 1 page.

Simple.

Eye-catching.</comment>


New Chrome 3 beta with 30% improvement - <AUTHOR> http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-beta-why-slow-down-when-you-can.html <comment><USER2> The headline is missing 22%!

(For those curious but not curious enough to read the article, it's a 30% improvement in the V8 and Sunspider javascript benchmark scores.)

Also: windows only, no OS X or Linux binary for this beta. Sigh. I want to think they're serious about being cross platform, but stuff like this tells me that "everyone" in the developer group is on windows and the other platforms are still just sometimes-updated ports.

<comment><USER3> Not everyone, just the vast majority of chrome developers are on Window and develop in Visual Studio. There are a few people working hard on the Linux and Windows ports, but Windows is the important port.

<comment><USER2> Right, that's why I put "everyone" in quotes. Obviously there are people on the team tasked with maintaining the secondary platforms, and they're no doubt working hard.

But the point was more architectural: clearly Chrome is a windows program. With a little porting work, you can make it run elsewhere. So that's the development model they've picked. Do the work on windows, then hand it off. There's no simultaneous work going on, and features travel in only one direction. If a windows developer commits something that breaks Linux or OS X, it's "someone else's" problem to fix during porting.

Contrast this to Firefox, for example, where (the occasional glitch notwithstanding) the assumption is that every build works on every platform. People on Linux care about regressions on windows, etc... The model is that the software is portable first, and not "a port".

<comment><USER3> A nice example of this is the recent Face as the close button bug report.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm just waiting for a more stable OS X version. Preferably with flash support.. :)

Side note: I'm using Safari 4 and anytime I am viewing a gif my browser beachballs and crashes. Does this happen for anyone else?

<comment><USER5> "Preferably with flash support.. "

Same for Ubuntu. I find it funny that I use a Google browser to view a Google site (YouTube) but can't see the videos.

<comment><USER6> Run it with --enable-plugins and it will pick up the plugins you have installed for Firefox. I assume the same works on the Mac build.

<comment><USER5> Very cool. Thanks, I'll try that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Switzerland Offers Counterpoint on Deflation's Ills - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/switzerland-offers-counterpoint-on-deflations-ills-1445189695?alg=y <comment><USER2> A complexity here is that Switzerland is a small country heavily integrated with the Eurozone, but with its own currency that has recently risen strongly in value. In CHF terms, yes, Swiss prices are currently deflating. But this isn't really a domestic deflation phenomenon in the sense that a similar decline in prices would be in a bigger economy like the USA: the role of CHF in Switzerland isn't nearly as canonical/exclusive as the role of USD in the USA, since so much Swiss business, even individual business, takes place in EUR-priced marketplaces.

As the article briefly mentions, the Swiss Franc is now worth about 10% more vis-a-vis the Euro than it was a year ago. Many things in Switzerland are actually inflating if you care about EUR value, which many Swiss people and businesses do: prices and wages have decreased 2% in nominal CHF values, _while the CHF has simultaneously appreciated 10%_. Many Swiss employees therefore in practice have a salary that represents more European buying power than it did a year ago. That could be expected to have some effects more similar to inflation rather than deflation, in this context.

I think the same would probably happen with any small European country. If Denmark broke the DKK/EUR peg and let the DKK appreciate by ~10%, many things would deflate in DKK terms to compensate.

<comment><USER3> The theory that deflation is bad for an economy doesn't say "but only when that economy is over a certain size". It is an absolute theory that claims to apply everywhere.

I've been saying this theory is bunk for years, so it's nice to finally see the view start to surface in mainstream publications. You only have to review the data to discover that there's no empirical link between deflation and depression. For instance, take this paper, written by economists at the Minneapolis Fed:

[https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr331.pdf](https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr331.pdf)

Abstract:

 _Are deflation and depression empirically linked? No, concludes a broad historical study of inflation and real output growth rates. Deflation and depression do seem to have been linked during the 1930s. But in the rest of the data for 17 countries and more than 100 years, there is virtually no evidence of such a link._

But you don't really need data to convince yourself that the 2%-inflation-is- best theory is nonsense. Basic common sense should be good enough. The entire thing rests on the assumption that there's a class of investments that people would refuse to invest in if left to their own devices, but which suddenly become attractive only if their savings are shrivelled by a few percent a year. Such a class of investments certainly does exist: they're called bad investments!

<comment><USER4> So, how do we explain Japan? It's been deflationary for decades and the economy hasn't improved in real or relative terms.

Is their deflation different, to borrow a phrase, or is CH's deflation a bit unique?

I'd love to see a contrast btwn CH and JP in this regard. Or, how could Japan stop worrying and love deflation, Swiss style.

<comment><USER5> At its peak of the Japanese Asset Bubble, the Imperial Palace of Japan was valued higher than _the sum of all real estate in the state of California_. Simply put, the Japanese Asset Bubble was the worst asset bubble in the history of asset bubbles.

In order to stabilize the collapse of the asset bubble, they have been playing loosey-goosey with interest rates for two decades now. But in order to stabilize the fall in asset prices using monetary policy (a blunt instrument if there ever was one), they essentially have been inflating everything else. So while they have nominally had deflation in aggregate, they have had inflation levels in consumables (which is about 70% of the cost of living) that are bordering, if not surpassed, what most economists would call HyperInflation.

<comment><USER4> But how can they have wage deflation while their cost of living, not counting housing, has experienced, as you put it, hyperinflation?

<comment><USER5> Meh, I should probably clarify that I'm not an expert and I'm just regurgitating an explanation given to me by a (Japanese) econ professor a few years ago. I don't know how to answer your question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> non-paywall link: [http://on.wsj.com/1i9IjuB](http://on.wsj.com/1i9IjuB)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it is great to be an employee in Switzerland, because it is the only place where net-salaries are comparable to the Bay Area or NYC.

I live in Zurich, read my story here: "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland (to work in IT)": [https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons- why-i-moved-t...](https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved- to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90)

If you are interested in coming to Switzerland, just shoot me a mail.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Although wage growth has slowed in Switzerland, it was 0.6% on an annual > basis in the second quarter

A big part of the reason that economists think that deflation is bad is that people are very resistant to cuts in their nominal wages (much more than to cuts in _real_ wages, like getting no raise with positive inflation). If the price of everything else suddenly dropped 10%, then cutting everyone's wages 10% would make them exactly as well off as they were previously, but the more likely outcome is that wages would drop by less than 10% and unemployment would increase.

If nominal wages are still increasing in Switzerland, maybe that's part of the reason there haven't been many adverse consequences.

<comment><USER9> It is possible to find an infinite number of differences between Switzerland and any other country. It is very tempting to look for reasons not to update your beliefs in response to new data, but we must not give in to this temptation. Bayesian logic would dictate that events in Switzerland should cause us to be more skeptical of arguments in favor of inflation.

<comment><USER10> > Bayesian logic would dictate that events in Switzerland should cause us to > be more skeptical of arguments in favor of inflation.

Depends on prior evidence. Current thinking on inflation/deflation did not drop into economists' heads from space yesterday. It was developed by analyzing hundreds of years of real experience in real economies. Before we alter our beliefs too much today, we should at least be aware of the full scope of evidence on the topic.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately it wasn't, nice though it'd be if that were true.

Current thinking is almost entirely based on extrapolating the Great Depression out to all economies everywhere, even when actual empirical studies show that the extrapolation isn't valid (see the paper I posted above).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Many companies in Switzerland force their workers to work longer (between 5 and 10 %) to compensate the so called "Franken Schock". As they don't have strong regulations on working time (compared to Germany for example) this is not a problem. They also started to pay some of their workforce in EUR instead of CHF (this happens to new employees and especially for people crossing boards to work there).

<comment><USER12> Do you have any references on this? Would love to learn more.

<comment><USER11> Most of the articles are in German:

[https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/schweiz- mehrarbeit-101....](https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/schweiz- mehrarbeit-101.html)

[http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/strong-franc-woes_workers-to- be-...](http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/strong-franc-woes_workers-to-be-paid-in- euros-due-to-strong-franc/41245550)

Its hard to get real data at this time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Everyone is scared of deflation, but is completely comfortable with the rapid drop in the price of electronic goods over the last few decades.

I'm simplifying a bit. The traditional theories that warn against deflation are concerned about consumers delaying spending in the hope of waiting for even cheaper prices. This delay theoretically forces the economy to grind to a halt. I think most people accept now that this is an unlikely outcome.

Now when Central Banks worry about deflation they are concerned that it might trigger a fall in real incomes, while debt remains at the same level, meaning people aren't able to pay back their debts. In our debt addicted economies, this is a real risk.

<comment><USER14> > Everyone is scared of deflation, but is completely comfortable with the > rapid drop in the price of electronic goods over the last few decades.

Those are two absolutely different things. One stems from production, transportation, and financial improvements across the board, the other comes because fewer people want to buy anything.

> The traditional theories that warn against deflation are concerned about > consumers delaying spending in the hope of waiting for even cheaper prices. > This delay theoretically forces the economy to grind to a halt.

It's not so much about consumers delaying spending. It's what happens further up the chain. If the holders of wealth that seed the economy figure out that it's better for them to hold on to their assets rather than invest them, then people lose jobs. We need them to keep investing their money.

Deflation also penalizes debt holders. The dollars you spend to pay back your mortgage are worth more than the dollars you make now. Since most Americans hold more debt than assets, deflation hurts common people more than it helps.

<comment><USER15> >If the holders of wealth that seed the economy figure out that it's better for them to hold on to their assets rather than invest them, then people lose jobs.

That's the theory, but I'm skeptical. If the economy is healthy they'll have investment opportunities that compensate adequately for risk and they'll still invest.

Conversely, in an inflationary environment people with savings may invest their money, but they may also buy fixed assets like gold or real estate. That doesn't help the economy very much.

>Deflation also penalizes debt holders.

And inflation hurts savers. I don't see a benefit to prioritizing the interests of debtors over savers.

<comment><USER14> > If the economy is healthy they'll have investment opportunities that > compensate adequately for risk and they'll still invest.

A healthy economy will, in most cases, exhibit inflation. For most economies, it would take a concerted act by a central bank to force deflation in a normal, growing economy. People are making more, spending more. The government has to print more money to keep up, otherwise it will fall short of people's needs. Only in special circumstances does this not hold up.

> I don't see a benefit to prioritizing the interests of debtors over savers.

There's a huge benefit. We want to encourage economic activity over inactivity. Money in circulation is the very definition of economic activity. Money saved is the very definition of economic inactivity. Nobody borrows money unless they want to spend it, it makes no sense to borrow it just so you can keep it in the bank or under a mattress. Money borrowed is money invested.

<comment><USER15> >A healthy economy will, in most cases, exhibit inflation.

A healthy economy will exhibit _monetary_ inflation as it grows. But there's no reason for it to exhibit price inflation.

>The government has to print more money to keep up, otherwise it will fall short of people's needs.

That's a circular argument. It's not like people in a deflationary environment don't have any money - they have less money, but that money is worth more.

>There's a huge benefit. We want to encourage economic activity over inactivity.

Sure. I'm just not convinced getting people to go into debt really does that. Oh, it does in the short run. But once your debts start to pile up not only do you have to pay for the things you've already purchased, but you have to pay interest. If, instead of borrowing money, you'd just bought things as you could afford them, you would end up spending more.

>Money borrowed is money invested.

No, money borrowed is money _spent_. Sometimes that's investment. Sometimes it's not. If I borrow money to buy a bed made in China, that's not helping the US economy very much.

The idea deflation is bad for an economy doesn't hold up to historical scrutiny. The US grew strongly in the 19th century (far more strongly than today), and during that time it experienced long periods of growth accompanied by low deflation. People still have to buy food, pay the rent, buy clothes, etc even when the currency is deflating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a question of what's causing the deflation. If prices fall because spending has collapsed, people lose their jobs, businesses go bust. This is what happened in the 1930s depression and it's bad. If prices fall because the currency is strong making imports cheaper as in the Swiss case then that's not such a problem.

</comment><comment><USER17> Deflation is a largely misunderstood bogeyman in economics. Ultimately, central banks are scared of deflation because they lose power over conventional stimulus tools once the interest rates, and consequently inflation, reach zero, or move into negative territory due to market forces outside of the central bank's control.

Why does the Fed see a 2% yearly inflation target as good?

 _The Committee judges that inflation at the rate of 2 percent, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, is most consistent over the longer run with the Federal Reserve 's statutory mandate. Communicating this inflation goal clearly to the public helps keep longer-term inflation expectations firmly anchored, thereby fostering price stability and moderate long-term interest rates and enhancing the Committee's ability to promote maximum employment in the face of significant economic disturbances._

Very vague and hand-wavey, but basically just saying that they like to have a 2% cushion between expected inflation and the traditional 0% floor, beyond which lies the spooooooky land of deflation. This 2% gives them room to raise and lower the federal funds rate (short term interest rate) to their heart's content without setting off any deflationary fire alarms in the economy. If you're really interested, here's a good overview from Bernanke (2003) on how and why the practice got started in the 1970s. [2]

Ok, let's see what our favorite Austrian economist, Friedrich von Hayek has to say about inflation targeting: "any form of inflation, even mild inflations, ultimately produce the recurring depressions and unemployment which have been a justified grievance against the free enterprise system and must be prevented if a free society is to survive." [1]

He argues that inflation distorts signals such as price and profit. This leads to the misallocation of resources to firms that look good on paper, but that could actually be failing to produce meaningful and sustainable economic returns:

 _The initial general stimulus which an increase of the quantity of money provides is chiefly due to the fact that prices and therefore profits turn out to be higher than expected. Every venture succeeds, including even some which ought to fail. But this can last only so long as the continuous rise of prices is not generally expected. Once people learn to count on it, even a continued rise of prices at the same rate will no longer exert the stimulus that it gave at first._

One might argue that we are seeing QE inflation, not in the direct economy, but in the investment market - property, stocks, bonds, anything traded not for short-term consumption, but for capital gains. I don't have the data, so I don't know.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if we have small amounts of inflation or deflation, or if we have no change in the money supply at all. _Expectations_ are what matters - if the markets know that inflation will be 10% next year with 100% certainty, they will plan accordingly and prices/wages will rise accordingly (not perfectly as there will be some friction/lag, but better than if nobody knows what to expect inflation-wise). The problem occurs when nobody knows what the hell is going on in the market, and they keep waiting for the Fed to raise interest rates to get back to 2%, but are losing faith because the Fed has kept rates at 0% for 6 years (!) now. It's all about unexpected shocks and how quickly the economy can adjust to new information.

Deflation is not to be feared if it is expected, announced, and executed by a central bank. It _is_ to be feared when the central bank is fighting valiantly to bring about a favorable economic background in which they can raise interest rates without slowing down the recovery/growth of the economy. That's when you know they've lost control, that everything is not ok in the financial markets, and when panic takes over.

[1] [https://mises.org/library/denationalisation-money- argument-r...](https://mises.org/library/denationalisation-money-argument- refined)

[2] [http://www.federalreserve.gov/Boarddocs/speeches/2003/200303...](http://www.federalreserve.gov/Boarddocs/speeches/2003/20030325/default.htm)

<comment><USER8> Here is another quote from Hayek: "I agree with Milton Friedman that once the Crash had occurred, the Federal Reserve System pursued a silly deflationary policy. I am not only against inflation but I am also against deflation. So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression."

<comment><USER9> Eugene Fama once countered Freidman by pointing out the fact that (according to Friedman's data) the US banks had massive free reserves during the great depression, but they were not making loans, thus it is not clear that the Federal Reserve had anything to do with the deflation (or could have done anything about it). According to Fama (as the conversation was in private), Friedman neither refuted the argument, nor did he admit he was wrong.[1]

[1] [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/01/fama_on_finance.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/01/fama_on_finance.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article is behind a paywall, unless you access it via a Google search.

<comment><USER19> Yep, always wonder why folks post these at all, here...

<comment><USER20> Because it's an interesting article which is trivially easy to access.

<comment><USER21> trivially easy to access == clicking a link and reading expected article.

hyperbole == most things which contain the word 'trivially'.

I'd bet a dollar most of us have better things to do than find a way around a paywall.

<comment><USER20> It takes about 3 seconds to Google the article title, far less than it takes to write incessant complaints about people charging for content.

<comment><USER6> I think the nuance is that the WSJ offers a non-paywall link in its interface -- which the WSJ encourages folks to use. Not all paywall sites offer this functionality.

These comments help make the poster aware. If the poster is aware and still doesn't use the non-paywall link, then that's wasting everyone's time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Deflation death spiral" "Hoarding"

Any else notice how harsh the language is yet there is not one actual case of it occurring in the wild?

Looks to me like the powerful are doing a good job at keeping inflation above 0%

Even 0.1% (tenth of a percent) is disastrous for a currency over 500 years.

You know why we're told ( and we are told, since there are no actual experiments performed on this matter)... it's because the system of extracting value from the unsuspecting consumer/middle-class/non-investor is based on the assumption that having money means you should automatically get more of it in the form of interest.

People still have to eat, cloth their children and get a roof over their heads. Many people are not in a situation to "hoard": they are struggling to merely stay afloat.

The target should be 0% ( or very close to 0% like 0.01%) inflation. But that would mean investors would actually have to provide greater and greater value to the world.

<comment><USER8> > Looks to me like the powerful are doing a good job at keeping inflation > above 0%

I've seen the opposite argument much more often: the rich and powerful are pressuring central banks to keep inflation too low to help with unemployment, because higher inflation hurts savers and helps borrowers. I don't buy the conspiracy theory in either direction, but the pro-inflation direction especially doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER15> What you're missing is people with first access to new money are the ones who benefit the most in an inflationary environment. In a fractional reserve system that's the banks. Banks generally benefit from higher inflation up until the point where it's high enough to damage the economy.

It should come as no surprise that banks spend so much to influence public opinion and the political process.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't make very much sense to me. It's not as if the "new dollars" are worth $1.02, while the "old dollars" are worth $1.00. Some people talk about "Cantillon Effects" in the context of QE, but it's a pretty fringe idea. The first-order effect is: banks are owed an amount of money denominated in nominal terms, and inflation will decrease the value of those debts. And even if this theory _was_ true, inflation has been historically low (and below central-bank targets) for quite a few years, so whoever is pushing for higher inflation isn't very good at it.

<comment><USER15> >That doesn't make very much sense to me. It's not as if the "new dollars" are worth $1.02, while the "old dollars" are worth $1.00.

It's very much like that, actually, except it's more like the new dollars are worth $1.00 and the old ones are now worth $0.98. The important factor is time. Suppose we live on an island and have a currency we'll call a "foo". There are 100 foos in circulation. Tax collection isn't what it should be, so the president of the island borrows ten foos from the central bank (which, like the fed, just updates the computer to create them) and uses them to pay the presidential guard.

When he spends those ten extra foos, the president is getting the current purchasing power of the foo. It will take some time for the value of each foo to adjust down to take into account there are now 110 foos instead of just 100. Two weeks from now everything priced in foos will have risen 10%, but since the economy didn't "know" about the extra foos the president was able to spend them at full value.

>The first-order effect is: banks are owed an amount of money denominated in nominal terms, and inflation will decrease the value of those debts.

That's true, but the bank isn't going to loan you money without taking inflation into account. That's why loan interest rates go up when inflation goes up.

Also, the bank is borrowing the money they're loaning to you, and after they make the loan they're going to sell it off to a GSE or market investors. So someone else is ultimately holding the bag if there's inflation.

>And even if this theory was true, inflation has been historically low (and below central-bank targets) for quite a few years, so whoever is pushing for higher inflation isn't very good at it.

Well, yes. The problem is two-fold. The first part is in a fractional reserve system the money supply depends on qualified candidates willing to borrow. In the midst of a recession there just aren't as many of them - people without jobs aren't buying houses, and businesses aren't expanding. So less new money is created.

The second part is loan defaults destroy money. If you get enough defaults you're going to get deflation.

It's not like the banks didn't get their money's worth, though, as the government used every trick in the book to add money to the economy. At one point in time the government was borrowing forty cents of every dollar it spent, and the Fed was injecting more directly though QE.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


State of the art C compiler optimization tricks - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3674 <comment><USER2> This was posted here not too long ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925847></comment>


Samsung responds to Apple's FoundationDB acquisition by purchasing OrientDB - <AUTHOR> http://www.orientechnologies.com/samsung-acquires-orient-technologies-ltd-company-behind-orientdb/

<comment><USER2> April Fool's Day needs to be cancelled.

<comment><USER3> aah... maybe a little too subtle, especially for the TL;DR folks like me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I only realized this was an April Fools' day joke when they actually said "Samsung responds to Apple" in their press release.

Good job but yeah I'm already tired of April Fools day jokes. The idea is to get hit by one or two. But the internet's made it so you get hit by 50 of them.</comment>


The US military is trying to read minds - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614495/us-military-super-soldiers-control-drones-brain-computer-interfaces/ <comment><USER2> Ed Boyden's work is fascinating. He has been involved with many things I'd expect to directly impact the future of the brain on a consumer level. [https://mcgovern.mit.edu/profile/ed- boyden/](https://mcgovern.mit.edu/profile/ed-boyden/)</comment>


SEO for Assholes - <AUTHOR> http://startupdispatch.com/opinion/seo-for-dicks/

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Front page of Hacker News.

I can tell you from personal experience that it has become far harder to game Google after the Panda update. The SEO rats are coming out of the woodwork screaming for a solution.

True, there is still a massive amount of spam on the internet, but Google is learning how to filter it down.

The ubiquity of Facebook comments, Disqus, etc. is cutting down on the amount of comment spam. Not to mention that Akismet is becoming really good at its job.

Spamming forum profile links gets you nowhere these days. And Google can somehow sniff shit content from a mile off.

There will always be spam on the internet, but as long as it stays hidden beneath the carpet, Google is doing a good enough job.

<comment><AUTHOR> P.S.: How ironic is it that a blog post about spam comments invites tons of spam comments? I've already deleted 10 from my Akismet queue!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The article is supposedly about SEO, but the author spends half of it talking about fraud and implying that that is what blackhat SEO is about? lol

Blackhat SEO is using programs like Xrumer and Scrapebox to build backlinks en masse, hiding content from search engine spiders by inspecting user agents, and building low-quality content farms of keyword-laden articles. Phishing and credit card fraud are totally separate.

<comment><USER3> Xrumer spams peoples websites. As I understand it this is the main strategy employed by blackhates.

Email spam is illegal (CAN-SPAM Act). I hope that one day spamming peoples websites is also illegal.

So it's not criminal to use Xrumer but in my opinion people who use it are on the same moral footing as common email spammers.

<comment><USER4> Legal solutions don't work online, technical ones do.

CAN-SPAM didn't stop spam. Bayesian spam filtering did.

Every little annoyance in life shouldn't be subject to federal regulation.

<comment><USER5> > _Bayesian spam filtering did._

Really? Not taking out some big botnets? Not a move away from email and onto social networks? This article suggests that email spam, at a three year low, is still at 70% of all email.

([http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222447/Symantec_says...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222447/Symantec_says_spam_levels_fall_to_lowest_in_three_years))

<comment><USER4> My broader point is that CAN-SPAM did nothing to reduce spam. <http://www.cybercrimejournal.com/alexdec2009.htm> I believe anti-SEO legislation would be just as ineffective.

<comment><USER6> Most laws have little effect on the outcome of any "lucrative business practice".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The last paragraph made me laugh because it reminded me of when Google started to discount the power of link directories years ago. All the cutting edge SEOs just moved to new techniques and the exact same thing will happen again. It's a cat/mouse game and the people who continue to win are the ones who continue to innovate new ways of gaming the system.

The guys who were really successful were the ones who were doing forum and comment spamming before someone decided to write a program that allowed absolutely anyone to do it. You can be sure none of them are lamenting Google Panda ... they'd moved on to new techniques long ago. Stuff like this is just one very basic example - [http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-truth-about- infographic...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-truth-about- infographics).

</comment><comment><USER8> Be careful what you say.

Eli Aliosi had a great blog where he talked about the kind of stuff that you're talking about... bluehatseo.com

He went a little too far and got done in by Russian Hackers, the FBI and a delusional hacker who couldn't tell the difference between anime and reality. His server became the most burned server in the world.

<comment><USER9> lol Eli's doing fine nowadays he didn't really get burned that bad. Plus his SEO tactics still blow away anyone else in the industry, and he doesn't even do much SEO anymore

<comment><USER10> that's good to know, bluehatseo.com was an incredible blog, got so many ideas from reading it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From my own experiences (viewing SEO as a "hobby"), I do think the type of semi-blackhat SEO that's most prevalent - the 20k blog comment blasts and automated WhoIs reports - is righteously dying out. It may take a while since a lot of people still believe that's the easy way to rank highly (and I think a lot of the SEO world fuels that notion to a degree), but I'm at least hopeful.

But I also think it's hard not to use a majority of greyhat methods and, because of that, current greyhat methods shouldn't be totally discredited. It's really time consuming do to a lot of things without using blackhat tools like ScrapeBox and SEnuke X. However, recognize that these tools can be used for more than just spamming. Many popular tools are great for finding a few really targeted sites to, for example, actually post legitimate blog comments to. And I doubt methods and tools that are used by so many blackhats will die out soon. They can still be a vital asset to people who do take into account the health of the Internet and use greyhat methods responsibly.

</comment><comment><USER12> Who's to blame for the necessity of such methods?

Is it Google? Is it the spammers themselves? Is it the software makers or the SEO specialists? Maybe it's even us.

The fact is, if you want to eat, you need to know SEO, most of which exists only to please Google. Why does an ecommerce site selling socks need 200 blog posts and an empty, keyword filled forum? because it works.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a little difficult to assign blame here. Blackhat SEO works, that's why it is so popular. Google's algorithm is far from perfect. There is little reason for an eCommerce site to market itself with blog posts, but the imperfect algorithm and the sheer scale of the competition makes it imperative to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The best techniques make it hard for any human to detect whether any blackhat was involved. Such as scraping content that is NOT already indexed and putting it on your own site.</comment>


.engineering domains considered harmful - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jesperht/engineering-domains-considered-harmful-ac41bc8c95fa <comment><USER2> > Until then, I would advise against using this TLD.

Conclusion is absurd, I'd advise against using LinkedIn.

<comment><AUTHOR> In an ideal world, yes - that would be the right move. However, LinkedIn is such a critical tool in the context of business, that it simply cannot be ignored/avoided.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Egeria, a collaborative multidimensional web-based spreadsheet - <AUTHOR> http://egeria.rocks/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand it. When you said "multidimensional" I thought of it as a database that could be displayed as different spreadsheets from different viewpoints, but in the examples I cannot see the multidimensionality, nor where is the data coming from on each calculation, I don't see formulas anywhere also; and I can edit the values manually.

I am probably missing something.

<comment><USER3> Multidimensional in this case refers to OLAP cubes. In other words, it's a relational database with a star schema.

The formulas in this case are built in the "metadata editor". The expectation is that a data scientist would build the tables, and then pass it off as an analysis tool to the MBA types. It can be really unintuitive if you've never seen these types of dashboards before.

<comment><AUTHOR> Multidimensional means every cell of a worksheet is associated with multiple dimensions like year, month, company, currency and so on. This implementation is not really a ROLAP. Instead of a relational database I use a document database for storing metadata. You can access formulas via context menu on cells (grey cells have formulas on them, white are input). The whole thing has become a bit complex. Some information is in the docs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        You can also use Egeria as a free and easy-to-use
        alternative to expansive commercial budgeting and
        planning software.

I assume you meant "expensive", but in this case "expansive" works fine if you consider that a disadvantage and your product is more focused.

Check it out :)

EDIT: I see there are a handful of typos and incorrect/unclear wording. I'm writing you an email with the corrections I would make.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Just fixed it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I launch the demo, it asks for a login and password. Obviously, I don't have a login and password for this site.

<comment><USER6> Same here, but considering we (I, at least) found the "launch demo" via a dedicated demo-page it was quite obvious to me that there would be passwords on that page, and there were.

I did get turned off from it though, so I guess the UI comment stands.

<comment><USER5> I didn't read. It's fair to blame me for that, but a lot of potential customers or users won't read. If I had a specific suggestion, I'd say to move the Launch Demo button to right above the Login info subheading. So it's hard to click it without noticing the login section.

<comment><USER6> I didn't read at first either, and I was burned just like you. So I totally agree with the suggestion, in case my reply indicated something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> "There are several similar solutions offered by very large companies."

What? Where? How similar? (I'm not critizing the copy, I'm just asking for more explanation, since I don't know anything about very large companies).

<comment><USER7> Oracle (Hyperion stack), IBM (Cognos TM1 and maybe Controller), SAP (BPC), Infor (PM) are the big ones. Also, SQL Server Analytic Services is in a similar space but mostly from a BI, read-only perspective. Smaller include Jedox Palo (GPL but with a weird openness history) and many other vendors (e.g. Anaplan etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for a complete list. I was not sure I could legally use the names on my website.

<comment><USER7> No worries. I played around a little, given that I have done implementations with all the systems I mentioned above, and it looks interesting at first sight. I would have to look into it in more detail. By the way, I tried to create a new spreadsheet and it creates it (test) but when I try to view it, it gives me an error. It looks pretty easy for someone who knows what they are looking for, but others would be confused.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for testing. There are some misleading error messages. I will look into it. The problem was you did not "apply metadata" (from the tools menu) after creating a spreadsheet. If you have any ideas I would really like to simplify the UI. A spreadsheet gets much more complex with multidimensional data model. My idea was that people who are familiar with tools like TM1 or BPC would use the system to create planning solutions for their small and mid-size clients.

<comment><USER7> Just one piece of advise. Do not sacrifice usability for elegance. I can see you consistently apply a model that builds on metadata abstractions. Nevertheless, it is not conceptual consistency but expectations that should drive interactions. A difficult balance, given that consistency also improves accuracy of expectations but if you take big vendors, that consistency approach was taken to the limits by BPC. This is why everything feels like 10 extra steps. When someone creates artefacts they should be immediately available. The only thing that should necessitate a metadata application from a user perspective should be metadata (as in dimensions changes, not even member additions) and logic changes (if you need to optimise your calculations graph.) The rest should be transparent and separated at least visually from metadata. You can keep security in metadata, but calculation is a separate concept and you will most probably have to separate it when, as per your roadmap, you look into workflows. Do not get confused by the consistency. Look at the concepts from a user perspective and hide elegance in implementation if you can. I hope this helps. I will send you an email and we can discuss in more detail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This may be something the world is needing for a long time.

Who made it? Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. This is my "side project".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it open source and can it be self hosted?

<comment><USER9> Says here: [http://egeria.rocks/downloads](http://egeria.rocks/downloads)

<comment><USER8> Ah, I see so no, it's not open source - [http://egeria.rocks/LICENSE.TXT](http://egeria.rocks/LICENSE.TXT)</comment></comment></comment>